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

The Linden made series of viewers

Second Life’s Simplified Inventory Project

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Now there is an idea… Inventory likely becomes a headache for every user of Second Life. I know I have an ongoing battle with inventory. Now the Lab has come up with a new idea. I suppose it is a spinoff from the SLCC announcement of making SL easier to use.

New Folder View Inventory

ProductTeam Linden posted an announcement in the Second Life Forum about the new project to test the idea of a simplified inventory. See: Simple Inventory Project Viewer. They want feedback on the new inventory. They ask you to give them information on how you think it will affect new users. I guess we can put on our newbie avayar and see how it goes.

The project has a Project Viewer, JIRA Section SINV, and a Simplified Inventory wiki page.

Download and Install

This is the standard download (28mb) and install. The viewer installs in its own folder, so there should be little conflict. It also uses its own settings file (settings_projectviewer-simpleinventory.xml). It does share the cache. While I am a great fan of separate caches for each viewer, I have been allowing all the viewers from the Lab to share the same cache. I don’t recommend allowing the Lab’s 1.23 to share a cache with the new 3.x.x viewers.

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Qarl Alignment Tool Rejected

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Tateru Nino has an article about a reject response from Linden Lab in the JIRA STORM-468 comments. Charlar wrote the comment.

Thanks for making this effort. Alignment and snapping are an area where there are useful enhancements to be made.
However, we are not able to accept this contribution as it is.

These are the primary issues we found which resulted in that decision:

  • The feature should support the same modes as the other manipulation modes.
  • It does not work for non-mod permission objects. This functionality should work for all objects that the user can manipulate in-world.
  • It only supports World snap mode, not Reference and Local modes, unlike all our other manipulation modes.
  • It packs and aligns to the face of the object bounding box. If objects are not cubes and do not share the same alignment, or aren’t aligned with the world coordinates (see above), the result of the operation is unexpected. Ideally the operations would use the actual shape of the object for aligning and packing.
  • There are also some coding implementation style issues that would need to be addressed. These can be covered in more depth after the functionality is dealt with.

    • In it’s current form, this is usable for purely prim-based builders under specific circumstances. It’s less useful for building with non-cube prims, mesh, sculpties. It’s minimally useful for building when the structure is not facing a global direction (ex: North, South, East, West). It’s not usable by non-building residents who need to place and organize purchased items.

    I found many of the comments to Tateru’s articles interesting examples of transference. I always find it odd that people when told why something is rejected speculate on why it’s being rejected. Whatever…

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    Old #SL Viewers Fading Away

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    We have all heard about the Lab’s version 1.23 viewer disappearing, no longer available for download. It is no longer just the 1.23. Over the last couple of days several of the older versions were taken off the download server and marked as ‘Not available for download’ in the Old Versions list.

    You can find the list in the SL Wiki here.

    All versions prior to 3.0.0 have been removed from download availability.

    There is information about which viewers can connect to the grid and which cannot. Plus there are instructions for how to get them to connect if you really need to.

    #SL Viewer 1.23 Dying

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    For some time I have said that the series 1 viewers are doomed and will eventually stop working. That day is drawing nearer. Several blogs have covered the demise of Linden Lab’s Viewer 1.23.5. Word is that OZ says it will soon lose the ability to deal with some inventory handling aspects. I’ll try to put that in factual perspective.

    So far few have found where he said that. Oz doesn’t post meeting transcripts, so one has a hard time knowing whats going on there without attending. However, Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:15:58, Oz Linden sent an email to the Open Source List saying:

    We’re going to deploying changes to the inventory backend soon that improve robustness and performance, but in testing those changes we found that existing viewers relied on certain things being strictly ordered.  With the new backend, that assumption does not always hold true.

    Changeset d327dcc8ae51

    <https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer-development/changeset/d327dcc8ae51>

    from viewer-development implements the viewer change needed to avoid race conditions.  It should be straightforward to apply to any viewer, and is safe to release before the changes are deployed (it is compatible with the services as they are now).

    You are strongly urged to port this patch and get it deployed.

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    Qarl’s Alignment

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    I found a post by Innula Zenovka on SLUniverse that says Qarl has donated his prim alignment tool code to Linden Lab. I wrote about the tool in October of 2010: Qarl Fizz Prim Alignment Tool. I included Qarl’s video about how the tool works and have copied it to this post too. The original development announcement can be found on Qarl’s blog as: setting things straight. Check out the JIRA links at the end.

    [youtube 7UCeU8ItZGA]

    You can see Qarl’s blog post about it here: thank you, back. Qarl links to Tateru’s article:  How to send Qarl money. It seems someone sent Qarl some money. As a way of saying thanks to whoever that was, Qarl donated the code to the Lab.

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    #SL Viewer Performance

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    Inara Prey recently wrote an article on Comparative Viewer Frame Rate performance. It is a handy reference. It took lots of effort to collect those numbers, which is why I seldom do rigorous tests.

    Somewhat surprisingly it is the Linden Lab’s 3.2.5 viewer that is the fastest in the comparisons. I use the Development viewer 3.2.6, which is a little faster for me than 3.2.5.

    The Lab’s viewers have not updated over the holidays. We may see some updates today or tomorrow. I suspect the Lindens are just getting back from the holidays and getting back into things. Also, it is a new year. People are fresh from a break and we may see some things change as they look at things with fresh eyes. Time will tell.

    The main viewer is now 3.2.4. The beta version is 3.2.5. And the development viewer is 3.2.6.

    The 3.2.6 is said to be the release with most of the Shining branch’s OpenGL fixes and changes for compatibility. I’ve been using a 3.2.6 version since December 12th (246465) with four updates; 246560, 246813, 246889, and now 246959. Of that series the 246959 version is the fastest, but not by much on my system.

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