Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Third Party Viewer Directory was updated. The viewers are listed in order of stability from most stable to least stable. The links lead to my viewer reviews of the respective viewer.
I seldom cover this viewer because I don’t use RLV to play in Second Life™. Marine Kelley makes the viewer. This is the type of viewer we used to have when I first came to Second Life. I started using the Nicholaz Edition because it had more bug fixes and crashed less often. Nicholaz was all about making things work. In this release that is what Marine seems to be doing, making it work.
RLV is currently in last place in the list of Third Party Viewers. They are ordered from the most stable to the least stable. So, with any luck this release will start to change those numbers.
I found Marine’s discussion of the problems and crash sources interesting. Again it is the open source JPEG2000 library that is to blame for most of the problems. Marine has been working to make the viewer and its use of the JPG2000 library more robust.
Nyx Linden considers the new Materials System a topic for discussion in this user group. Geenz Spad was there so we had someone to answer Materials System questions.
Check the thread: Normal & Specular Maps. A good question came up. How will Full Bright affect the Specular Map light effect?
With the inclusion of Havok code in the viewer to handle Pathfinding’s Navigation Mesh (Navmesh) things had to change. The Havok license restricts its use to the Second Life™ grid. This means the Lab is removing support for the command line options: –loginpage, –loginuri, and –helperuri.
That effectively prevents the Linden Lab™ viewer from being used with any grid other than the Lab’s.
Now the Dolphin 3 viewer is dropping support for OpenSim. You can read the announcement on the Dolphin 3 blog: Dolphin Viewer and support for OpenSim.
Basically it is too much work for a one-man team to maintain two versions of the viewer. So, version 3.3.19 will be the last version usable on OpenSim.
I’m bummed as Dolphin was my viewer of choice for OSGrid. But, I can understand Lance’s challenge.
This is a catch up article from last week. I had serious RL partying to attend to this weekend. So, hopefully this will get me caught up. I am bummed there is no new Metareality poscast in week 33.
In Week 22, 2012 Phase I of the Multi-Threaded Crossing Project rolled out. See: #SL News Week 22. Today Oskar tipped us off that Phase II is moving through the QA process and close to reaching Release Channel Candidate status.
I take that to mean that in the next couple of weeks we might see it on a release channel. This is a complex process that is taking a load of work. So many parts of the SL system are touched there are a load of places for things to go wrong. We saw that with Phase I. It took months to make it to roll out. Phase I was in and out of the release channels for months. Hopefully that will not be the case this time.
We got a bit more information on the Materials system this morning in the Open Source meeting.
Oz Linden created a JIRA for the development process and bug reporting. See: STORM-1905 – Add support for Normal & Specular Maps.
The STORM Project is closed to creation of new items except by Lindens. Residents can add to existing items. If you are wanting to create a new item, like a feature request, create it in the VWR or VIEWER project.
Oz says feature requests will probably do better in the Building & Texturing section of the Creation section of the forum. It is unlikely that any features will be considered for Phase I or the first pass at the Materials System. The Third Party Developers (TPD) and Lab have their hands full getting Materials implemented and working out coordination between TPD’s and the Lab.