Second Life and Virtual Worlds
At the Third Party Developers’ meeting Ed Merry man said that the Firestorm Development Team is planning to the next version of Firestorm in 10 days (from Friday’s TPD meeting)… May 3rd.
This release is about 6 months after the last release. The normal release schedule is a new version every 3 months. The way things have worked out, that hasn’t been possible for the Firestorm Team.
As of Friday Jessica was planning to put a release out to their current preview group. She was writing an invitation to ask more people into the preview group or maybe she meant she is inviting more people to a larger secondary preview group. It sounds like they will stage testing, so multiple groups may help. So, the viewer will soon go out to the first with the current preview group then, if things go well, a week later with the larger group.
You can see the invitation here: WANTED: Brave Early Adopters and Testers… This request makes it clear this will be a second group different than their beta testers.
We seldom get stats on how many are using which viewer. But, there is a post over on Gaming World about the Imprudence Viewer and they include the most stats I’ve seen in a long time. Or so I thought. This page just popped up in my reader, but it is dated 2/23/2015… and the data seems to be much older.
See: Gaming World Imprudence Viewer. (read on before you click) If you are clicking to the page, WARNING: be careful where you click. The page is full of ads and most clicks will speed you to someone’s ad site.
From the Second Life™ Third Party Developers User Group meeting we have some news this week. Mostly update stuff.
Brooke Linen says testing is going well and performance is good. There is a persistent problem with viewer, sim, marketplace communication. They are working on that. Brooke is thinking a couple of weeks to solve the problem.
Jessica Lyon is deciding whether to try an include VMM or release FS without it. Being pressed Brooke pointed out they need to get two server updates through testing and rolled to the grid. Then they will start pushing the viewer. So, the road to VVM could be a couple of months long.
The release date is getting pushed back… again… So, they are looking at a beta release then quickly (?) followed by a main release. So, we will probably see a beta viewer released in April. When will the main release appear? No one knows. I am guessing May…
While the FS Viewer has caught up with the SL Viewer code-wise, they can’t release the viewer yet as they are still fighting problems. Some FS testers are finding many more problems with the internal FS QA release than with the SL Viewer. The basic complaints are slow rez, some objects never rez, and there are more attachments dropped on teleport problems.
Jessica Lyons was planning on releasing a new version toward the end of March. But, some of the things the Lab is releasing, she wants to get in this coming viewer release. The only way to do that is to delay the release. So, expect the release to slide back 2 to 4 weeks, mid to end of April.
Oz Linden says the viewer side of Hover and Experience Tools are viewer side stable. So, the FS Team could start building those into FS. They have been holding off, busy with other stuff too, waiting for these to finalize. Oz is saying they pretty much have stabilized and the hold up is on the server side.