Nirans Viewer Release 1.33 Review

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UPDATE: Be sure you read Niran’s comment at the end of the review. My first impressions make up my article and not all of them are completely accurate. The ATI/AMD Pink Textures problem is a bit confusing. I’ll let you sort it out if you have an ATI/AMD video card. A note added to Niran’s blog says the problem is fixed.

There is lots of news about Niran’s viewer this week. Inara has her experience of using the viewer posted here: Niran’s 1.33: super smooth and totally flexible. She likes the viewer and it is a positive review. Inside the viewer this version is labeled: Nirans Viewer 3.3.5 (1083) Apr 26 2012 23:49:31 (Nirans Viewer).

Image from Nirans Viewer

Third Party Viewer Directory

Niran says the viewer has qualified for the TPVD list. We should see it there in the next week.

It is likely not going to be in the first section of the list where viewers are listed by stability. A viewer version must see 200,000 hours of use in a reporting period to make the rankings. TPV Dev’s get stats the rest of us are not allowed to see. The idea is it helps them with development of their viewer. Apparently those stats or feedback from the Lindens is that more than 200k hours are logged by those using the NiranV Viewer. BUT… that is across all versions of the viewer.

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#SecondLife Land Impact Costs to Change

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Friday Falcon Linden made a late appearance at the Sever/Scripting User Group meeting. He announced with the coming of Pathfinding we will see a change in the costs associated with Land Impact. In no small part the change is being influenced by PATHBUG-69.

The Brain behind Torley?

PATHBUG-69 – llVolumeDetect(TRUE) is broken. According to the wiki:

If detect is TRUE, VolumeDetect is enabled, physical object and avatars can pass through the object. This works much like Phantom, but unlike Phantom, VolumeDetect objects trigger collision_start and  collision_end events when interpenetrating. Collision events will trigger in any script in the object.

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#SL Possible Down Time

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There is a post on the Grid Status page. It gives a bit different spin to Thursday’s down time than what I heard. Whatever, there will more work done to fix some things on Monday and that work may take SL offline for a time Monday morning.

[UPDATED 2:30pm PDT, 27 April 2012] On April 26, 2012, the Second Life engineering team was performing an upgrade to the core network. The upgrade triggered a bug that led to downtime and instability throughout the day. The maintenance described in this post is scheduled for Monday, April 30 at 6am PT in order to correct the bug and may result in additional service interruption. We apologize for the service disruption and appreciate everyone’s patience.

[POSTED 1:00pm PDT, 27 April 2012] We will be performing scheduled maintenance Monday April 30, 2012 beginning at 6:00am until approximately 9:00am. Please save all builds and refrain from rezzing no copy objects or making inworld L$ transactions. Some residents may experience delays logging inworld. Please follow this blog for any updated information.

Emphases mine.

See: Scheduled Maintenance Monday, April 30, 2012

LEA Call for Pose and Animation Creators

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Dream Promenade posted a call for pose and animation creators to participate in a new exhibit titled Intimate Spaces. The Dream Promenade is seeking to explore the  sensual side of art in SL. This exhibit is one of the Linden Endowments of the Arts’ new initiatives.

Dream Promenade

No date for the exhibit start is given. It seems to be a short fuse. So, if you are interested, no waiting, connect the Dream Promenade’s management now.

#SL Server News Update Wk17

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Seems we had a major melt down Thursday morning (USA morning). One of the Linden Lab® data centers had hardware network failures. In systems this size there is usually considerable effort put into load balancing to distribute the workload. So, with the center dropping offline everything went out of balance as the servers remaining online could not carry the load. The Lindens turned off some services until they could get the data center back online. Mostly money related services went offline. It took several hours to correct the problem.

During that time login’s were closed or inaccessible and the main Second Life® web sites went offline.

There is no truth to the rumor that one of the gerbils peed on a router after waking up from a hard night of partying in Zindra.

Main Channel

This week a roll did make it to the main grid. This is the package with the Inventory API’s. So, with luck we will see better inventory and delivery performance. As Thursday the Tuesday roll has not shown any problems.

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#SL Deformer Update Wk17

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Qarl Fizz change his code posting and the missing parts are up. So, presumably Third Party Viewers have the code and are able to compile viewers with the feature.

Henri Beauchamp’s Cool VL is likely going to see a new version release today.

Henri Beauchamp 4.25.12 / 10am

@Qarl

New patch ported to the Cool VL Viewer and working fine (a new release including it will likely be published tomorrow or the day after).

The issue with “jumping meshes” (see my comment for v0.2) is yet still not solved (but I implemented a work around for it in the Cool VL Viewer, that at least doesn’t trigger the “jumping mesh” issue with avatars not wearing deformed meshes).

I was unsure what Henri meant by ‘jumping mesh.’ I have seen mesh winking in and out of existence using Niran’s viewer… whatever, reading the referenced comment:

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