Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
The Viewer Release Candidate pipeline is operational. Get ready for some surprises. Remember. I’m writing as a Windows user. Things may be different on a Mac.
Oz Linden explained some of the thinking about and intended operation of the new pipeline. Part of the explanation was getting my terminology straightened out. Words convey meaning and people have to have the same meanings for the words being used to communicate.
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.
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.
Not much new. The Lindens usually providing us information are either on vacation or tied up getting their projects out.
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.
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.
A blog post on the Kokua/Imprudence blog states the 3.6.1 version of Kokua is out in a test version that includes the Mesh Deformer. See: Kokua 3.6.1 Mesh Deformer Test Viewer.
The download is here: Additional Test Viewer Downloads. The version you want that has the Deformer is at the bottom of the page.
A new release of the Exodus Viewer came out. The previous release was back in August 2012. This release is primarily to catch the Exodus Viewer up to Linden Lab releases. The label is 13.07.09.1. This comes in Windows, Mac, and Linux flavors.
New features I n the viewer are few, but they are the important ones that will extend this viewer’s life.
Katharine Berry, the current lead developer for Exodus, writes that RLVa is just too much for the small team to integrate with changes coming from the Lab. A decision was made to drop RLVa to simplify the task of keeping the viewer up to date with the Linden viewer.
It is sad to see RLVa dropped. For some it will be a serious downer. RLVa is quite fun and about more than just BDSM.