#SL Scripting UG News Week 9

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Last week’s Monday was a holiday and there was no User Group meeting. This week Kelly Linden held his regular meeting.  The recent policy changes for Third Party Viewers affect the LSL function llRequestAgentData(). So, this was a big topic of discussion.

Kelly's Scripting UG

The function currently returns your online status. It does not bother with permissions. So, you can check the online status of anyone. It is how stalkers find out if their prey is online. Obviously it gets used for griefing. The complication comes from legitimate uses of the function.

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Dolphin Viewer Update 3.2.8.23163

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There is a new version of the Dolphin 3 Viewer out. Dolphin Viewer Download.

This version of the viewer removes Qarl’s Mesh Deformer.  You probably know that Mesh Deformer 0.2 is out and is included in some viewers. Nirans ran into some problems getting it to work. It seem Lance did too. With some question about the new viewer policies it seems Lance decided to leave it out of this version. He plans to put it back in when the Deformer is further refined.

There is a WebKit upgrade in the Linux version… I doubt Linux users follow this blog, so I seldom have much about Linux here. But, this is one of the noted changes in the release annuncement.

One nice feature added to the Dolphin Viewer is the ability to use all of the keys on your keyboard for gestures. If you have made gestures, you know that in the SL Viewer and several others you are restricted in which keys you can assign to a gesture.

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#SL Viewer Policy Change Meeting

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An audio recording of the Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers’ meeting where the Viewer Policy Changes were announced prior to the blog posting of them has made it to the net. The audio is about 2 hours long. The following is my summary of it. I was mostly interesting in the policy changes. I’ve tried to convey the meaning of statements accurately. I don’t quote but paraphrase.

You can use the time marks to find the related items. I’m not sure how well the Windows Media Player handed the time marks. Once I started moving back and forth through the recording, I think they messed up. But, I’m not going to spend two hours checking them. Also toward the end I was burning out and the discussion was less interesting for me.

You can find the original recording here: TPV Dev’s Meeting 2012-02-24.

I know the main speaker is a Linden. I’m just not sure which one. I am guessing  Oz Linden. He leads the Open Source group and some references within the recording suggest it is Oz. But, I’m not certain. So, I’ve used (? Linden) as the name in the following text. Whoever it is, they do an excellent job of facilitating the meeting.

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#SL Viewer Policy Follow Up

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A part of the Server/Sim/Scripting User Group meeting was taken up with discussion of the viewer policy changes. It seems some of the changes have been in the works for some time. Now that they are on the verge of being implemented the Lab made the public announcement.

Viewer Identification Tags

Tankmaster Finesmith said, “So, as one of the [Firestorm] TPV devs, we’ve know for a few months now that LL has wanted to brake the viewer tags. Today [Friday] we got word that LL will be braking them next week.”

So, Jessica is right, the viewer type ID tags will be turned off next Tuesday and Wednesday. Presumably the code to do that has already made it through QA process.

Simon Linden was the meeting chairperson or facilitor and I’ll quote him several times so I think this statement is important as a framework. He said, “…I’d like to preemptively explain that I’m a coder working on the server, so I’ve mostly been out of this loop. I’m not a lawyer, from marketing or product, etc. etc.” I suppose that means we need to keep what he says in some sort of perspective.

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#SL Open Source Viewer News Week 8

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Some interesting news is out regarding the SL Viewers. We’ve seen the ATI-AMD users run into the Pink Prim problems and many nVidia users have run into Video Memory problems. The recent update to the nVidia drivers seems to have increased the crash rate. It is not only the SL Viewers, 3rd party and the Lab’s, that are having problems with OpenGL. Other games are having problems too, but that is all unclear and poorly defined. However, we do know there are some problems in Second Life.

Open Source Group

Oz Linden is back from vacation so things in viewer development are moving again… or may be more accurately the communication about viewer development is flowing again.

Development Viewer

I got my last update to the Development Viewer Feb. 6th. As I write this there have been no new releases of the Dev Viewer. It is still on 3-3-0-248913. Oz says, “…[Dev Viewer] gets built whenever anything is pushed into it, but there hasn’t been anything for a bit over a week now. There are many things queued up, but because there are some bugs in the current beta that we want to fix before confusing things further, everything is on hold.”

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#SL Viewer Shock Wave

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I saw today that Linden Lab has announced revisions to their Third Party Viewer policy. The Firestorm/Phoenix tema has already posted a reaction. They are also planning to discuss the changes at their next Phoenix Hour, planned for Feb. 28 at 2 PM SLT/PST.

I think Jessica phrases their take on the meaning of the changes in a pessimistic take. However, she may well be right. It is hard to know. You can read her take on the changes on the Firestorm/Phoenix blog. See: New additions to the Third Party Viewer Policy.

You can see the policy change announcement here: Third Party Viewer Policy Changes.

These changes, if intended as Jessica takes them, will be explosive. I see the changes impacting Firestorm and other viewer negatively. Exodus and Nirans viewers may become ineligible to connect to the grid. If so, I’m sure this will create a massive amount of blow back.

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