This is a brief round up of the Third Party Viewers for Second Life that I find interesting. Not in any particular order. The popular feature to be adding is: Restore to Last Position. I explain that in the section on RLV.
RLV 2.9.15 Update
Marine has updated the RLViewer she maintains. She is adding in the feature from Firestorm and Kokua: Restore to Last Position. This is a controversial feature the Lindens have omitted from the Linden made viewer. It apparently generates too many support calls.
What’s that sound? [Good facial expression]The controversy centers around a problem the feature creates. Imagine you have a parcel in, say, Fishergate and it is in the northwest corner of the region. You build and rez stuff into that parcel. You then take them into inventory. You go to a different region, say Furball, and get a parcel in its south central area. When you use Restore to Last Position to rez those items they will poof away. You will most likely find them rezzed at the 0,0,0 point in the region.
This week an Alchemy Viewer 3.8.5 update was released. The developers are busy will real life money making. So, updates are coming slowly. It has been almost 3 months since the last update. This update brings Alchemy to a level with the Linden 3.8.5 version. The current Linden version is 3.8.6.
Alchemy 3.8.5 – Oct 2015
This means Alchemy has the 90+ fixes the Lab added with the promotion of the Maintenance RC Viewer. Plus Alchemy fixes. But, it will still lack the new Notifications Handling released in Linden version 3.8.6.
A new Slink body is out. See: A new body @ Slink!! – The official Slink announcement. NSFW Sundays: SLink Hourglass, curvy but not thick – Grazia ‘s take on the new body and a gorgeous picture of the body, semi-NSFW. SLINK PHYSIQUE HOURGLASS – Juicy Bomb’s take. Slink’s new mesh body – Hourglass! – MeshAddicts This new … Read more
The Boston Globe has run an article titled: Second Life shows new promise as virtual forum for diabetes education. The article is about the Boston Medical Center training diabetics how to manage their condition via classes in Second Life™. The Center did a study to see how effective the class was. They assigned half the … Read more
As I have pointed out more people are talking about Jelly Babies and the coming RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.6.305942 movement toward being the main viewer. Of course some know what they are talking about and others don’t.
erratic / ava sweater & meg leggings High or low ACI?
I think – Jelly babies will take over SL soon (AKA how linden lab is planning to break second life) – falls in the ‘doesn’t’ category. utilizator404, the author, believes the Lab is breaking SL by introducing the Avatar Complexity Information (ACI) feature. I disagree, but I can see how some may consider the appearance of Jelly Babies as a problem. The opinion that Jelly Babies breaks SL is as valid an opinion as any. I just don’t agree with it. So, I’ll rebut it.
In the article an assumption is expressed that the Lab is not fixing the root causes of lag; failure to optimize the viewer, not changing how the viewer uses video memory, failure to use all the features of new video cards, and no use of Direct3D (a Windows only graphics render engine).
Most of 2014 and 2015 has been spent optimizing features of the viewer and SL servers. If you follow Inara’s or my blog you already know that. If you have only read the release notes of the Linden and third party viewers as they are released, you know that numerous fixes for how the viewer use memory have been made. From the Third Party Dev’s meeting we know more are in progress.
