Viewers

General Viewer Information

Kokua Viewer Update

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Maria Korolov has an update on the Kokua Viewer at Hypergrid Business: Kokua viewer to support Imprudence exports. The Kokua/Imprudence developers have been on a bit of a holiday, taking some well deserved time. This January they were planning the development path and asking for user feedback. The general plan is now to stop development of Imprudence and move forward with the Kokua Viewer development.

Kokua/Imprudence Viewers

Important Feature

One of the features of Imprudence is import/export of objects in OpenSim worlds and Second Life. Many build in OpenSim worlds and then move final projects to SL for use or sale. Some also move things from SL to OpenSim. So, the import/export is an important feature for many. Maria spoke with the Kokua developers about the feature.

The news is while the viewer will not initially have the feature it will eventually be added. While there are things with higher priorities to be addressed before import/export the feature is on the to-be-included list.

There seems to be some challenge making the future Kokua import/export compatible with Imprudence’s. The developers plan to make it compatible, if possible. Remember. The viewer and server must cooperate for the feature to work. So, it is not solely a viewer side thing.

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#SecondLife and Anti-Virus

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The Firestorm/Phoenix Wiki has a load of handy information for solving Second Life technical problems. I noticed today that they updated their wiki page on Anti-virus programs.  See: Whitelisting the Viewer in Anti Virus Software.

Image by: SarahCartwright - Flickr

They tell you how to handle; Avast, AVG, Kaspersky, McAFee, Norton, and PC Tools Spyware Doctor.

They don’t say anything about speed gains or risk.

Anti-virus software can place a heavy load on your computer. The result is you lose Frames per Second (FPS). Not all anti-virus programs are the same. PC Magazine did a review of anti-virus programs for 2012: The Best Antivirus for 2012.

PC Magazine doesn’t say anything about performance. Most reviewers seem to consider the only performance criteria to be whether a program can find the virus. While that is important, it seems some anti-virus programmers have taken the approach that all the computer ever needs to do is defend against viruses.

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#SL Firestorm 3.3.0 (24880) Release Review

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I heard there is a new Phoenix Hour out. I suppose someday it will change to a Firestorm Hour. At about the same time the Phoenix Hours restart the next release of Firestorm is released.

This release has a load of features. As best I can tell all the Phoenix features have made it over to Firestorm.  In addition to those features new ones have been added. A good example is the Particle Editor. The code for the Particle Editor was written by Zi Ree. I understand it was written for Firestorm and shared with the community. I first saw the editor in Dolphin Viewer-3 in mid December last year. It has been popping up in other TPV’s ever since.

Particle Editor

Finding the Particle Editor is a bit trick. It is not part of the standard build panel as I expected it would be. After all one is editing a prim’s attributes, so it seems to me that is where it would be. The number of controls in the panel would be difficult to put in a build panel tab.

The Particle Editor

To use the Particle Editor create or edit a prim. Then in the top menu open Build -> Objects -> Edit Particles. Not overly intuitive. It would seem a button in the Build panel to open the editor would be more intuitive. The Features tab seems like an obvious place to put a button.

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#SL Viewer 3.2.9 Review Update Wk5

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It is hard to keep up with the Linden Lab viewer. We do not see lots of changes in the user interface nor are there lots of new features being added. But, there is lots of stuff happening behind the User Interface.

It is not like there is any place where the Lindens are talking about the viewer. Esbee disappeared long ago. While still at the Lab, I never hear a peep out of her. I hear far more from Runitai Linden that leads the Shining Development Branch. He attends various groups and we get information from him. But, it is mixed with the context of the meeting.

The Lab has a number of development repositories where they publish code as they develop the viewer. One of these is the Viewer Development Branch. It is in BitBucket. If you code in large projects, you have some familiarity with code repositories, repo’s. For those of us that work with small short term projects repo’s are mostly over kill.

If you don’t write code/scripts, the whole thing probably seems rather geeky and mostly Greek. It is. Understand that the repo’s are typically where those writing code pass on notes, information, and their code to people that know what’s going on. The notes and descriptions they write are very much like notes we intend to only ever be read by our self. They are not overly explanatory.

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#SL Viewer Comparison Sheet

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Inara at Living in a Modem World and I, here, review viewers as do several others. There are more viewers than any of us can keep up with. I get to viewers as my curiosity moves me and as time is available. There is no single viewer that provides for all my needs. But, knowing which viewer has what features and being able to make a quick selection is a near impossibility. One has to read a load of reviews to decide. There is some help for that problem.

Atrebor Zenovka or Beach, as he is generally called, has made a comparison sheet. You can find it here: Viewer Comparison. It takes a little figuring out. You can find Beach’s Lake Bottom Lab blog here. (Note: the background on the blog is an image taken in Myst Online Uru Live.)

Best Viewer

The best viewer is a mythical creature like a unicorn. Also, the viewers are changing so fast, one can’t keep up. A chart like Beach’s becomes a major effort.

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Zen Viewer Released Review

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Reading Daniel Voyager’s blog I see a new viewer is out. Oh yay! Something else to play with. My first check is to go looking at the viewer’s web site. In this case that is mostly BitBucket, a programmer’s code repository tool. So, don’t expect the typical blog, wiki, and forum.

Zen Viewer
Zen Viewer in near default setup

There is an instructions page in the “wiki”. I personally think every viewer should have install instructions and explain the basics of how the viewer sets itself up. In this case they tell me the viewer will install in its own folder and use its own settings and cache. Good to know.

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