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

The Linden made series of viewers

Second Life Dev Viewer 3.3.2 (252228)

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The link to the latest build of the Development and Integration viewers seem to be wacky. Whatever is going on with them the Dev Viewer link, the Snowstorm Viewer page leads to a new 252228 build today.

If you don’t know about the Dev and Integration viewers, all you really need to know is: the viewers are from the testing pipeline. We expect them to have problems because they have not been completely tested. One resorts to using them only if the main and/or Beta viewers fail to run well on your machine. Of course testers run the Dev or Integration viewers to help with testing the viewers… or because of some kind of insanity.

Speed

With Sun/Moon shadows I get between 5 FPS in malls to 22 FPS in …residential… areas.

Memory

This version has its memory leaks. After may shopping spree memory use had grown to 1.2 mb and was still climbing.

Crash

The last couple of versions have been crashing on exit. This version does too.

Second Life Dev Viewer 3.3.2 (251752)

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The build process’ linking for the Development Viewer is not working correctly. So, the Snowstorm Page is not updating as it should. It is stuck on 3.3.2 (250772). However, there have been a number of builds and improvements in the Dev Viewer. We just can’t get to them.

However, you can get the latest Development Integration Viewer. This is not a daily use viewer. But, the current rumor is it is stable. I find it is only using 650±mb of ram. That is way down from 1.2 to 2.1mb I have seen in previous versions.

Another branch named Viewmaster is the branch the bug chasers are working on. It is said to be very very stable. Now if I can just figure out the link.

#SL Clouds, Grey, and Blurry Avatars

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We seem to be getting another round of poorly rezzing avatars. The particle cloud avatars we know about. That is often a connection issue. I write my fix-it article Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth in September 2010. But, something new is up.

The Problem - Extended Bake Fail

Blurry Avatars

For several weeks I have noticed when changing clothes I get a blurry avatar. My skin and clothes start blurry after a change, then rez nice and crisp once, then go blurry again and never seem to finish rezzing.  They stay blurry.

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#SL Development Viewer Update

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I have been watching for a Development Viewer update since February 6. Yesterday SL Dev Viewer 3.3.1 (250315) became available for download. See: Snowstorm. If you are not closely following viewer development it is hard to know what new features and fixes are in the development viewer. If you read ‘repositoryese’, it is easier. I’m not that good at it.

ADITI Receive Testing Area

Viewer related fixes and features from all the various projects make it into the Development Viewer before moving to the Beta Viewer. The Development Viewer is for those that like to play with the bleeding edge tech from the Lab and do not mind some problems. The purpose of the viewer is to allow SL users that want to help to test the viewer. For most users of the Dev Viewer it is mostly about running and using the viewer and letting it send crash reports. Filing JIRA’s to help explain problems is greatly appreciated the various teams. Bitching about bugs in the viewer is poor form that displays a lack of understanding.

Download & Install

The download is about 28mb and it’s fast.

The install is simple straight forward run and done.

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#SL Open Source Viewer News Week 8

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Some interesting news is out regarding the SL Viewers. We’ve seen the ATI-AMD users run into the Pink Prim problems and many nVidia users have run into Video Memory problems. The recent update to the nVidia drivers seems to have increased the crash rate. It is not only the SL Viewers, 3rd party and the Lab’s, that are having problems with OpenGL. Other games are having problems too, but that is all unclear and poorly defined. However, we do know there are some problems in Second Life.

Open Source Group

Oz Linden is back from vacation so things in viewer development are moving again… or may be more accurately the communication about viewer development is flowing again.

Development Viewer

I got my last update to the Development Viewer Feb. 6th. As I write this there have been no new releases of the Dev Viewer. It is still on 3-3-0-248913. Oz says, “…[Dev Viewer] gets built whenever anything is pushed into it, but there hasn’t been anything for a bit over a week now. There are many things queued up, but because there are some bugs in the current beta that we want to fix before confusing things further, everything is on hold.”

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#SL Animation Changes

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Avastar in Blender - Image by Machinimatrix

In January of this year Laurent Bechir filed a user story in the SL JIRA, STORM-1803. The JIRA item points to Machinimatrix’s post on Second Life’s animation format. The animation format controls what we can upload into SL. In a way this user story is a feature request.

Oddly it is the Biovision Hierarchy (BVH) file format used for uploading that restricts much of what we can do with animations in Second Life. Internally SL uses an .anim type file format that allows more animation controls than BVH.

Some of the things an ANIM file allows are:

  • Different animation priorities per-joint
  • Keyframed animation control of eyes!
  • Variable length joint offsets per frame (allowing cartoon-like “stretchy” bones)
  • Keyframed rotation and repositioning of attachments (which meshes can weight to; to use as new child bones  )
  • Client Side scaling of attachments and default mesh
  • ANIM files are text files

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