Viewers

General Viewer Information

Imprudence Viewer to Live

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Imprudence Viewer Logo
Logo

The development team building Imprudence started work on a new viewer Kokua. They were attempting to maintain Imprudence and build the new viewer. With limited resources working on both slowed development of both. It also seemed to me to be burning out the developers. Whatever the case, during the last of 2011 and January the team took some time off.

This year the team has been deciding what to do and how to move forward. Open meetings made it clear the community wanted the new viewer, Kokua. Not everyone wants the new viewer. Some remain Imprudence fans and have no desire to change to the new viewer. There are also developers that want to develop Imprudence. Others want to develop the new Kokua.

One per son working with Imprudence development but not part if the Imprudence team is Onefang Rejected. The Kokua-Imprudence team is welcoming him as a member. He will be the lead developer for Imprudence.

This coming Sunday, 2/26, at 12:00 PST/SLT the team will have an open meeting in Hoagie, 3rd Rock Grid. The team is looking for additional volunteers to help with development of Imprudence. Some decisions on how to proceed with Imprudence are likely to be made.

Cool VL Viewer 1.26.2 (17) Released

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There are not many changes in the last two versions. But, the experimental version 1.26.3 has an important change for me, which is the addition of Qarl’s Mesh Defomer 0.2. Henri has done something a bit different in his implementation. In his words from the forum:

Second version of Qarl’s mesh deformer implemented (with a new “Force Mesh Deformer” advanced settings in Advanced -> rendering, to force the same behavior as in the first version, i.e. to apply deformers even to meshes which were not designed for them): the new default/normal behavior of the code is to apply deformers only to meshes which were flagged as deformer-compatible at upload time (with a new “Deform to avatar shape” option added to the “Upload Options” tab of the “Upload Model” preview floater).

This should give us the ability to see how the 0.1 and 0.2 versions of the Deformer differ.

Download

I found the download horribly slow. It basically ran at 150kbps taking 30 minutes to download. My connection will handle 31mbps according to SpeedTest.net. Other downloads were running well, so who knows…

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Pink Prims Bug

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A number of people updating to SL Viewer 3.2.8 are getting pink prims. See the image below.

Image by Blaise Glendevon

There are two fixes. Neither are that great, but they will get you by until the Lab brings out a fix. The fix is thanks to the Firestorm/Phoenix Team, as far as I can tell. See: FIRE-4945 – Pink/Fushia textures when basic shaders enabled on ATI 3000-4000-5000 series cards.

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Nirans Viewer Gets Mesh Def 0.2

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A couple of days ago Qarl release a revision of the Mesh Deformer code. Today Niran got it working in Niran’s Viewer. Niran posted a comment on the Deformer update article. Nirans link leads to this Nirans Viewer Download page. The 1.24 version is still on the Download Button. Find the 1.25 version, which has the Mesh Deformer.

The download is slow this morning, but I’m having network problems.

As soon as I get a copy downloaded and the network retuned, I’ll be checking out the new deformer.

Remember. The Deformer is still alpha code.

Niran’s Viewer Update 1.23.5

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The speed of updates to various viewers is overwhelming. If I reviewed every release, I would never have time to do much else. Fortunately several of the viewers do a good job of blogging what’s changed in their viewer. The problem with those updates is they tend to only tell one the good stuff, which makes sense if you think about it. If they find a problem, they tell the development team so it can be fixed. So, the problems they know about have been fixed.

Give a viewer to a regular user and we’ll do something odd with it that the developers haven’t tried. That is why users always find bugs. As good as the developers and testers are, they can’t think of or do everything that can be done by a user.

So, reviewers always have things they can find. The problem is finding it all.

Version 1.23.5 of Nirans is out and has a load of fixes and additions. As usual the interface has changes. Some you’ll like and some not so much. But we learn from experimenting.

Downloads

Niran’s now has both 32 and 64 bit versions of the viewer for Windows. The 1.23.5 was released in the 64 bit version about 10 AM today. Nirans Viewer download page.

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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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