Viewers

General Viewer Information

Second Life News 2014-24

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Server Main Channel

There is no roll to the main channel this week. Last week the channel was re-rolled to fix a security issue that slipped through. But, there are no feature additions or changes.

RC Server Channels

Blue Steel was rolled to the same software as the main channel last Wednesday to fix the security issue mentioned above. This week the channel will get an updated version of the Inventory Update package. This is the AISv3 updated made as part of the Sunshine server side avatar baking project.

Le Tigre will get the Group Ban project with the security updates. 

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Second Life News 2014-23 #3

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We did get some news from the Third Party Viewer meeting.

RC & Main Viewers

The Memshine RC Viewer is the one the Lindens are hoping they can promote next. But, of the four current RC Viewers it is a tossup as to which will actually be promoted. By next week they will have enough data to decide which viewer can be promoted.

Classic Starting Avatars - 3rd of 3 sets

If the Memshine RC can be promoted that will open three RC slots as the Memory, Sunshine, and Memshine would all be considered as complete.

As of this morning (Saturday) the 3.7.8 version is still the main stable release. 

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Second Life News 2014-23 #2

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ADITI Grid Fixed?

For weeks… well months… we have had problems with the Preview/Beta Grid (ADITI). Logins and inventory updates were not happening. A password change would show up everywhere in the SL except the Preview grid. Which mean all of a sudden people could not login, unless they tried their old password.

Also, inventory updates were not happening. In the recent couple of weeks fixes were made. The Lindens did get the password problem resolved. But, the Lindens tell us an unrelated prevented the inventory updates from happening.

Those are now thought to be fixed. I plan to give it a few days before changing my password and trying for an update.

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Second Life Bits 2014-23 #2

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Groups

Ciaran Laval has an article up that covers the history of Second Life™ groups and his suggestion that things change to break a pattern present in SL since it started. See: Second Life Group System Still Needs An Overhaul.

SL users always want more groups. We are limited to 42 now. Originally it was 10, before my time. I started with the 25 limit.

MOLiCHiNO - Fifty Linden Friday
MOLiCHiNO – Fifty Linden Friday

A major part of groups is chat. Adding more groups increases the server load exponentially. Chat lag and not being able to post to a group are common problems we all deal with now as we use groups. I have no idea how many times I have had to send an IM to someone in the group because I could not get a comment into a group chat, connection fail…

Ciaran is suggesting that we shift from the chat we have now to something web based. I suppose something more like IRC, but with more persistence.

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Second Life Interesting Bits 2014-23

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SL Go 7 Days

This past week the SL blogosphere has been talking about OnLive’s announcement that they now offer a 7 DAY trial period of their SL GO product. If you don’t know what SL Go is, OMG! Well, see #SecondLife Gets a Mobile App (early March 2014). Prior to this the trial period was far too short for anyone to get an idea of whether this was a useful service. This longer trail should allow one to use SL Go long enough to learn the basics and actually use it to gain a sense of what it is like.

OnLive 2014-10 Games Page
OnLive 2014-10 Games Page

The last few days I have been experimenting a bit with viewers, something I used to do frequently in my quest for the best viewer. Those were the days when viewers were each very different and had very different feature sets. To some extent that is still true, but I think much less so than in the past.

What I have found is that where FS and SL Viewer get 6 to 20 FPS in a crowd of avatars SL Go runs a pretty steady 40 to 50 FPS on the desktop and my S4 in the same crowds. Impressive.

You might want to give it a try. 

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Second Life Viewer 2014-23

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There is a new RC Viewer out: MemShine Viewer version 3.7.9.290582. This viewer is a combination of versions; MemPlugs Viewer version 3.7.9.290405 and Sunshine Viewer version 3.7.9.290131, I have been writing about for 3 weeks or so. I think this version has new fixes for each of the parent versions.

Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo
SL Viewer
SL Viewer

This combining of RC versions appears to be an attempt to speed up the release of changes made to the viewer. It seems once again viewer release speed is holding things up. Limiting viewer releases to two per month is a basic guideline the Lab adopted to avoid annoying users with too frequent updates. It would seem the result is things are backing up. 

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