Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
Updated 2010-10-21
KirstenLee has a new version out; (40) . This version has lots of changes in user controls. It also is up to date with the Snowstorm Project.
It is a little hard to know exactly what ‘up to date’ means. (Kirsten commented below) In Snowstorm there is a stable viewer, a beta viewer, a development viewer and two project viewers. Kirsten says Display Names code is in the viewer. That is from a project viewer. But, nothing is said about mesh.
OSGrid is supporting mesh now. All one has to do is figure out how to get a mesh uploaded. Most of the viewers do not have the feature. Only the SLV2 Mesh Project viewer has the feature. So, one needs to point that viewer to the OSGrid and give it a try.
Updated 2010-11-24
First thing we need is a copy of the Mesh Project Viewer. You can down load it from the Second Life Support Download page*. You’ll find it under Project viewers. Get it installed and try it out. You may see some pretty kewl meshes in ADITI (the preview or beta grid).
Even if you are not an Imprudence user this is an important read.
The Imprudence team has a new release of the Experimental (Imprudence beta) viewer out. The building tools in Imprudence continue to improve. Also the Imprudence site is doing a good job of listing the changes in each new release. Rather than repeat that information here I think I’ll just touch on the changes I find interesting.
The Imprudence Viewer download and information.
KirstenLee has not released a new version. However, a teaser is up for version (40). It shows the new live chat system.
May be I missed something in the Snowstorm meetings. Improving chat has been there, but I don’t remember a new chat and interface coming.
Whatever, check it out here: Kirsten S20(40) Viewer Soon…
The previous Beta Release was Second Life 2.2.0 (210127). The current download is 211499. It is available here: Second Life Beta Viewer Download = direct to download. For the paranoid, this is the download page: Download Second Life Viewer 2.
The main download remains Second Life 2.1.1 (208043).
The changes, release notes, for the new beta version are not up, yet. But, they will appear here: Release Notes/Second Life Release/2.2.0.
The mesh viewer just came up on the download page.
Second Life Mesh Project Viewer Download
9:22 AM – Got the viewer and made it into ADITI. Not many people there. Only 3 or 4 in each mesh area. But, others and I cannot tp into the regions. Long wait and then tp fails.
9:30 AM – Cannot tp into Mesh City locations or Mesh Sandboxes (1 to 35). Some of the sandboxes are empty, no people. Others have some people in them.
10:58 AM – …then I find out my Blender is broken. Remove all Blender installs, all Python installs. Install Python 2.7 and Blender Beta 2.54 (nice shinny interface) and that is working again.
Since there seems to be a tp problem, I typed in the destination at login, Mesh Sandbox 33. You can use any sandbox destination from 1 to 33. I made it to a sandbox. \o/
11:00 AM – Jack Linden posts Open Beta blog article: Mesh Import Open Beta Starts Today. There are a number of links to various mesh related wiki articles. (Second Life Wiki Main Mesh Page) There are links to videos. Lots of good stuff.
Code availability for TPV Developers is planed for the end of the week. They will link to it from the Project Snowstorm wiki pages. This means TPV’s can support it once meshes come to the main grid. It also lets OpenSim get started on compatible mesh support. OpenSim with a module add-on has had meshes for over a year.
11:28 AM – \o/ It works pretty well. It is certainly usable. There are some gotchas and small problems in the user interface. But, those will get fixed.
If you plan to try applying standard texturing, make sure to do an inventory load. If all your textures are not loaded, the texture selection list keeps bouncing to the top as more items are loaded into inventory. Very frustrating.
10:45 PM – 🙁 Blender 2.54 is having problems exporting meshes skinned to AV rigging. It seems Blender 2.49b handles it correctly. So, if you are making things that have to skin to the AV, use the earlier version of Blender.
Machinimatrix is making video tutorials using Blender 2.49 to make the meshes and shows importing them to SL. The first two of a series are up. See: The Meshes Trail (Part I and II)