Nirans Viewer 1.32 Review

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NiranV releases lots of iterations of this viewer. There are no massive changes from my perspective as a  user. The changes tend to be in the nature of the user interface and new ways for established controls to work. For instance one of the previous versions change the default camera position. Expect lots of experimentation and innovation with this viewer.

[youtube aBNUpFUITGs]

The video is made by NiranV using the Nirans Viewer.

Start with a Problem

NiranV is using a new compiler (or library – not sure) to build this version of the viewer. I think the hope is the viewer will be faster. Whatever, the package fails to include a component: vcomp100.dll. You can get the component from: Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) 32-bit or Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64) 64-bit version.

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#SL Server News Week 13

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The news is there is no news. :/

This Tuesday the grid will probably get a rolling restart. It has been almost 4 weeks since we had a roll and restart on the main grid. This restart is just to clean up problems and flush out memory leaks.

In general the servers have done very well during this period. We should see a blog post about that this week.

Release Channels

Oskar Linden didn’t say yet what is rolling out to the release channels in the week forum post. However, from Kelly Linden’s scripting group word came that the RC’s will get the Phase I Region Crossing code. This is the maintenance package we have been seeing roll to the RC’s, get revisions, and roll to RC’s again for a few weeks now.

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#SL Fun Things

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Coming from Myst Online MadPea has always fascinated me. If you don’t know who MadPea is, you are missing out on once of Second Life’s creative groups. While skimming through my reader I saw Honour’s quick review of MadPea’s Show and Tell. They do a show and tell thing on Sunday’s at 2 PM SLT. It was just 2 PM so I popped over. It’s in-world at the MadPea Base.

MadPea Show & Tell

I got there and had to change viewers. Sculpties or Mesh was going nuts and filling my screen. A quick change of viewer and all was working as expected.

Show and Tell

This show and tell thing is about people showing things they have built, as Honour describes it, their inventions.

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#SL Server News Week 12

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There haven’t been any rolls to the main grid for a couple of weeks now. Rolls to the Release Channel have also been slow. However, the updated region crossing package is back on all 3 release channel s; Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum.

This is the multi-threaded crossing code. It is still in Phase I.  The Lindens are optimistic about it. As of Friday 3/23 it had been working well. It was looking like it would roll to the main channel Tuesday 3/27.

We are not likely to see any change when this package is rolled out. This code is the foundation for coming changes that will improve performance.

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Extend Your #SL Gesture Keys

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Way back in the Emerald Viewer days, like 2010, when I was only half as old as I am now… o.o  Yeah, my wild and reckless youth…  Emerald allowed gestures to be attached to any key. For my combat games that was a huge advantage. Well, it seems one can easily change which keys gestures can use in any viewer. This article is about how to do that.

Modified Gesture Keys

Read the entire article and pay attention to the warning near the end.

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#SL llListen() Functions

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When I first started learning to write scripts for Second Life I heard how bad LISTEN was for performance. In last Monday’s Scripting UG I learned that a llListen() is not as bad as I was previously told. That will certainly change how I script. If you are curious about how LISTEN affects your scripts, read on.

Frames

Everything in SL seems to be keyed to frames. The meaning of fames in SL basically the images rendered to the viewer. We see that in the Viewer Statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1) as both viewer FPS and server FPS. Both the viewer and server take a fragment of time and do all the calculations to figure out where everything is and draw the picture we see on the screen.

The servers run at 45 FPS, unless they over load and start to slow down. Your viewer runs at whatever it runs. Ideally your viewer runs at 45 FPS. It been some time since I’ve seen my viewer run that fast. But, 45 FPS gives the server and viewer 22.2 milli-seconds to figure out where everything is and draw it.

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