Wow! Second Life Mesh Support

Second Life
New Mesh Skirt

Update 2010-09-15after fold Update 2010-09-15 11:28 PM – Update 2010-09-16 – Details from Nyx Office Hours – 2010-09-17 – Update 2010-09-23 – Link to new Mesh Wiki Page

Wow! Oh wow! I thought this was a feature that was almost dead. I did not expect to hear another word on the subject this year. Here is whasup.

The current news out is the closed beta testers that have been under NDA, are now released from the NDA as part of the Lab’s new open door policy. They have started talking and posting videos. The Lab has a page up on their YouTube.com channel. See Second Life Channel Meshes – This is a play list, so you can see a bunch of videos.

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Second Life Grid Updates

Updated 2010-09-14 – scoll to end of article

Oskar Linden updated part of the Beta Server Wiki to announce the Blue Steel Release Channel changes are coming to 10% of the grid 9/14. If those changes hold up, they will spread to the rest of the grid on 9/21.

What’s changing? This is an example of one of the first rollouts using the new three channel process. So, the number of changes is small compared to previous updates as current changes are split up for testing. If these changes hold for 6 days, they will go to the rest of the main grid and into the other two release channels with the items being tested in them.

These changes are mostly exploits and SIM crasher fixes. Since these are ‘holes’ still active on the rest of the grid, Oskar is not publishing steps to reproduce the problems (a normal part of the testing process) for obvious reasons.

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Phoenix Viewer 1.5.1.225 Released

Phoenix Viewer
Phoenix Viewer

Updated: 8:00 PM

A new release of the Phoenix Viewer is out. This release fixes lots of problems. It takes some time for a new team to get things together and get organized. This release says much about the team coming together and stabilizing the viewer.

Jessica Lyon has published a blog article that contains the release notes and a new features list. See: Some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is a couple of team members are leaving. Seems there is a disagreement about how the team is to be run. That is not an ideal way to start off. But, this may just be a new team shaking out and people learning who they want to work beside. As time passes we’ll learn if this is just a startup issue or a more pathological issue.

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Snowstorm UI Thoughts

Snowstorm
Snowstorm Logo
Snowstorm Project
Floating Panel

In Esbee Linden’s Thursday meeting User Interface (UI) changes were being discussed. The item currently being worked on is detachable sidebar panels and how to open multiple copies of them. The latest Second_Life_2-1-2-209322_Development Viewer has a test version of the change.

Imagine being able to arrange the panels for building or scripting and save the panel layout. Or save several different layouts. The idea is that there could be a newbie setup, photographers, scripter’s, explorers, builders, and more. Some of these would be default layouts that come with the viewer. Users would be able to create their own.

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Phoenix LSL Preprocessor Info

LSL is the Linden Scripting Language. This is the scripting language used to program everything in Second Life. Advanced programmers are used to having libraries of code that can be used in several programs. No provision is made in Linden viewers to provide this feature. Emerald had a Preprocessor that provided programmers the feature. Phoenix … Read more

Second Life Viewer: Ascent 1.4.3.2 Review

Ascent Viewer
Ascent Logo

Update: This article constantly pulls lots of people. I’m not sure why. In February of 2011 the Ascent Viewer’s development was discontinued. I wrote 2 articles about the Ascent Viewer; this review (Sept 11, 2009) and the one about its being discontinued (linked in this paragraph).

The Singularity Viewer is the descendant of the Ascent Viewer. Or in more geeky terms, Singularity is a branch of the Ascent Viewer code. — End update.

Finding a new viewer has become the new quest for many Second Life residents. In general most have made the safe and simple choice and are using the Imprudence Viewer. A number of residents have abandoned Third Party Viewers (TPV). They have started to use the official SL viewers either SLV1 (Second Life Viewer version 1) or SLV2. A few of us are using Second Life Development Viewers (SLDV), which come out daily as part of the Snowstorm team’s work. Others are exploring and testing other viewers. This is about the Ascent Viewer for those exploring TPV’s.

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