Second Life and Virtual Worlds
There are several bits of news out from the Firestorm Development team.
RLV – Jessica Lyon gives us some history on the development of the RLV code. (See: RLVa) Marine Kelly is the author and developer of RLV and RLVa code for all third party viewers. Plus having a RL job she is having health issues making it difficult to sit and develop RLV for new viewer versions.
Daeberethwen Arbenlow has a 20 minute video (3/27/2016) on controlling your Windlight settings for photography in Second Life. She uses the Firestorm Viewer and the Photo Tools feature it has. Those using the basic Linden viewer can accomplish the same changes to Windlight, just not as easily nor will the video help you learn how to use the Linden viewer, just the Firestorm viewer.
Daeberethwen does a good job of explaining all the settings and what they do. Along with the verbal description is the video example allowing you to see the changes.
Firestorm has the best set of features for photographers and machinigraphers (or is that machinamists?).
Firestorm updated sometime after I posted this…
See: Firestorm Update
I was expecting the Firestorm Viewer to update the 16th. That expectation came from a comment at the Third Party Developers’ meeting. Obviously that hasn’t happened.
I am seeing the wiki updating. Lots of new entries for version 4.7.7-48706. This is typical pre-release updating of the wiki. So, release is eminent. I doubt we will see it today or before Monday. The team doesn’t like to release a new viewer before the weekend. If something unforeseen goes wrong and people have to work on the weekend to fix it, that makes for bad juju.
This version of the Firestorm viewer caught up with the Linden Lab viewer 4.0.1. Of course the day Firestorm releases the Lab released and is now pushing 4.0.2 as their main viewer.
If you are thinking FS is behind again… well sort of, but probably not as much as one might think. Some fixes from the Firestorm team go into the Linden viewer, or at least inspire Linden fixes. Of course those FS Team fixes are already in Firestorm. So, it is hard to say who is a head, on par, behind…
Use the viewers and see which ones work best.
Not much new information. But, from the Third Party Developers’ meeting I hear a new version will released March 16. This version will have the update to TLS 1.2, the security upgrade needed to do money stuff in Second Life™.
Usually this close to release I am seeing things about a release in the FS Wiki and other places. But, not this time. But, since the ‘word’ is from Ed Merryman of Firestorm Support, I believe we’ll see the release.
We are to the final stages of a new Firestorm Viewer release. Jessica Lyon, team leader, says they have pushed all new work into a new development branch as the finalize testing on their release candidate. This next release will have TLS 1.2 (Transport Layer Security).
TLS is sort of part of SSL and sort of a replacement. It is enough to know that it is the part of the viewer that secures all the viewer’s money handling communications. I forget the cutoff date, but there is a date coming soon when a viewer MUST have TLS 1.2 or the SL servers will refuse to talk to the the viewer for money things. You can use your viewer and run around SL. But, you won’t be able to buy things.
Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.
Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.
You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.