Viewers

General Viewer Information

Second Life News 2014-28

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Viewers

Currently there is only 1 RC Viewer in the cue. Other viewers are in QA, but have not yet reached RC stage. The Snowstorm RC Viewer is said to be doing well. I’m not sure I agree, but it will likely be the RC Viewer that gets promoted.

Open Source 2014-28
Open Source 2014-28

Group Ban and Oculus are Project Viewers. I expect Group Ban to move to RC status soon. The Oculus Project Viewer is not going to change status any time soon. It has been waiting on the Oculus DK2, which has just started shipping. Once the Lab has DK2 in hand I expect to see some changes in the Oculus Viewer.

There is an Experience Tools Project Viewer. But, it has yet to appear on the RC & Project Viewers page. Experience Tools is still in closed beta. Oz says that he has seen lots of requests to participate in the Beta come in. The Lab is going through them. I know some people that are playing with the Experience Tools (ET) project viewer. It is out there. Oz is going to see if they will put a link on the Project Viewers page. 

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Firestorm Q&A on #SecondLife’s Future

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Wednesday morning at 7AM PDT at the Firestorm Auditorium a Q&A meeting was held. Oz Linden and Peter Gray were answering questions. For most of the meeting Jessica was asking questions I think she took from previously submitted ones and that she or she thought the community was interested in.

And I’ll be proofing this after it is posted… so…

[youtube uO2Ean6Vzxk]

Toward the end they opened it up to audience questions.

The meeting was recorded so you can see it at several places; SLArtists, YouTube, and other places… sound is better on the SLArtists video, but it is hard to jump around in that player.

As always I am paraphrasing and not quoting.

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#SecondLife Viewer Snowstorm

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Today my viewer updated to the Snowstorm RC. I have it set to use RC Viewers. So, I’m using Second Life 3.7.11 (291465) Jun 25. The release notes are here.

Summerfest '14
Summerfest ’14

I went over to Summer Fest 2014 to try it out. First, the cute little pacific island theme used at Summer Fest makes it a really fun build to explore. The foliage is awesome. The buildings have a weak LOD, but if you have your viewer’s LOD setting turned up, they are OK. I don’t I prefer performance in this case.

The viewer runs faster. I was getting 20 to 40 FPS at the Fest. But, rendering is still a problem. Oz Linden said at the Firestorm Q&A that they are working on changing the viewer to allow it to use more of the video RAM you have on your graphics card. I doubt any of that work is in this viewer. But, possibly. So, that may be why we are seeing this problem.

The main viewer and this Snowstorm RC both have the problem of texture thrashing. The textures render sharp then blur and reload, sharpen and repeat. It makes taking pictures a pain.

I think the problem is worse in this viewer than in the main viewer. Again, I don’t see the problem in the Firestorm viewer.

I don’t expect to see texture thrashing in a GTX560Ti with 1GB of VRAM.

Second Life FB, Flickr, Twitter

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Tuesday(?) during the hubbub of SL 2.0 a new viewer rolled out as the main SL Viewer. Version 3.7.10-291134 is the current viewer, which I mentioned on Monday. While I thought there were  no release notes posted for this version, it is the sorting order that fooled me. 3.7.10 sorts out way ahead of 3.7.9. So, it did not click with me that this was the SL Share RC Viewer being promoted, which it was.

You access the feature when taking a picture. The FB, Twitter, and Flickr buttons are at the bottom of the Snapshot Panel. (Ctrl-Shift-S)

 

SL11B
SL11B

If you were using that RC Viewer, you likely did not see an update of your viewer. That is because it was the rest of us that needed an update, not you. 

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Second Life News 2014-26

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Servers

The Deploys thread tells that the main channel is going to update Tuesday to the Sunshine package that has the AISv3 updates. This ran on Blue Steel last week. The main release viewer had the AISv3 updates. With the AIS running on all the grid, this feature will be everywhere and the viewer can take advantage of it.

The Station 2014
The Station 2014

There is also an anti-griefing measure included in this package. Since that is a security issue the Lindens don’t talk about the nature of it.

RC Channels

Blue Steel and Le Tigre will both get the same new maintenance package. The package has the new Linden Scripting Language (LSL) functions for handling materials. To see the effects of the Materials System you must have the Advanced Lighting Model enabled. 

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Second Life News 2014-25 #2

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Friday’s Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developer’s meeting was long, 2 hours. The last hour is covered in Second Life 2.0 Coming. That is the exciting news, SL 2.0 is coming!

Viewers

As of Friday there were two RC Viewers; SL Share and Snowstorm. SL Share has been in the cue for some time. It is the likely candidate for promotion, probably late in week 26 or in week 27. The Snowstorm RC has a bug that is in the process of being fixed. I expect a new version to make it out to RC in week 26.

The Project Viewers haven’t changed since I last wrote about them.

The code for the Group Ban viewer is here: https://bitbucket.org/baker_linden/voorhees_groupban. With the code released to the wild TPV Dev’s are integrating it into their viewers.

Jessica of Firestorm says they are integrating ‘Interesting’ and hopefully SL Share features for their next release. The Sunshine AISv3 changes probably won’t make the next release. Experience Tools may make it. But, the team has not had time to examine the changes needed for Experience Tools.

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