SLV2, 3, 4, 5, 6. & 7 Series

The Linden made series of viewers

New Second Life Viewer Pipeline

by

As reported before, a new viewer pipeline with various release candidates is coming online. It is mostly in place now. I don’t see where any recent announcements have been made by the Lab. Inara over on Living in the Modem World, has written about it. But, I think we are all a bit unsure how things are going to work. I know I am. I’m experimenting with things now.

I’ve updated my machine to use Win 7-64 in a dual boot scenario. This gives me a clean starting place for experimenting with the new viewer pipeline. Until today the only viewer I had installed was the main SL Viewer. I have all the other viewers on the other side of the dual boot in Vista 32. So, I can get to them. But, not from Win7.

I have clean AppData folders as a new Win7 user. Plus caches and log areas are new and fresh. 

Read more

Second Life Graphics Crashers

by

You probably know there is a griefers tool known as a graphics crasher. What you may not know is there is a defense. The blog The Green Lanterns has an article on how to defend against these crashers. See: Debug settings to make graphics crashers obsolete.

I have yet to try these settings. I have not been running into crash problems. So, you are on your own.

The The Green Lanterns site is mostly interested in griefers/anti-grifers and what they and the Lab is doing related to griefing. I have yet to decide if this is another vigilantly group or a responsible activist group. I tend to avoid griefer and anti-griefer discussions considering both sides mentally unhealthy. But, The Green Lanters blog seems oriented towards helping people, at least that’s my first take.

Read more

Second Life News 2013-29 #3

by

Not much new. The Lindens usually providing us information are either on vacation or tied up getting their projects out.

Group Bans

Baker Linden hasn’t been around the meetings lately, at least ot the ones I’ve made it to. Simon says he is working the UI for Group Bans. So, there is progress. It is hard to know if the UI work is at the end of the process or early in the process and needed for testing. So, no ETA.

Viewers

The Linden Lab Official: Viewer Source Repositories page of the wiki has been updated. I see the term ‘default cohort viewer’ appearing now. The page states, “The default cohort viewer here is the default [viewer] provided by the downloads page. The other cohorts are candidates being evaluated to be the next default; all are believed to be stable.”

The current version of the default SL Viewer is 3.6.1-278007.

The current Beta version is: 3.6.2-278602. 

Read more

Viewer Updates 2013-27

by

We seem to be coming to a crunch point in viewers. The Lab is changing things so quickly third party developers have a challenge keeping up. Henri Beauchamp does well with Cool VL Viewer, which is a viewer based on V3 code with a vintage V1 user interface.

Kitty
Image by Kitty Barnett

Niran seems to have leapfrogged the Niran’s Viewer to having all the latest Linden features by jumping to a recent SL Viewer V3 model. Niran’s Viewer is now Nirans Black Dragon viewer. Niran’s features from previous versions are being added to the new SL V3 Viewer code in Black Dragon. Eventually Niran will have Black Dragon on a feature par with his previous versions.

So, both of those viewers have materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 doesn’t and Tonya Souther of the Firestorm Team explains why, in a blog post: Tracking LL’s big changes, and why the 4.4.2… well now that there is an emergency roll out… 4.4.3 version won’t either. 

Read more

Second Life News 2013-27

by

As you know the Materials System has been released by the Lab. The third party viewers are picking up the project and adding it to their viewers. Cool VL Viewer and Niran’s Black Dragon have Materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 does not have Materials yet but, 4.4.2 is nearing release and will have materials.

There are fixes for problems in Materials System that are in the pipeline. One of those has to do with Ambient Occlusion on large objects. That is unlikely to be in Firestorm’s 4.4.2 release.

SSA

Server Side Appearance (SSA baking) is planned for the release the week of July 7-13. The Lab is expecting it may be on the 8th or 9th.

Firestorm and Phoenix users will see a huge notice on the viewer’s splash screen that they need to update. If you have not yet updated to 4.4.1, avoid the rush and do it now.

Read more

Second Life Materials Bugs

by

I’m enjoying the new Materials enabled SL Viewer. But, some people are running into problems. Here is what’s coming up:

Whirly's Example - Notice the red colored area.
Whirly’s Example – Notice the red colored area.

MATBUG-171 – Shiny objects or objects with reflections look shiny white. Description: When I activate the Advanced Lighting model in the viewer for the materials features, all shiny objects and objects appear shiny white as if glow was very high. — ATI Radeon HD 4870 OpenGL Engine 2.1 ATI-1.6.36 

Read more