#SL Content & Mesh News Week 51

Last week Charlar Linden posted an announcement that the Mesh Upload group would be expanding its focus. This week’s meeting was the first week with the expanded focus. At this point I’m not sure everyone has a clear idea what this means. There is much to consider.

Getting My Groove

First the past meetings have been about helping develop mesh. Users get a new tool, go play with it, and provide feedback. The Lindens consider the feedback, work out a fix or change, and restart the cycle. Now that process is changing. Effort on the Lab’s part is no longer toward developing mesh and mesh tools. It is toward stability and performance. Feedback is not as important as system stats provide a quantifiable measure of success or failure.

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#SL Mesh Statistics

At the last Content/Mesh User Group Charlar Linden provided some interesting statistics on mesh in Second Life.

55%

55% of users logging in are running mesh capable viewers. This number is probably mostly the pre-Phoenix mesh release stat. Talking with Jessica, of the Firestorm-Phoenix team, she believes the change to the newest Phoenix viewer will up that percentage to 80%

Mesh Sales

In the past week the sale of mesh objects has doubled (Gross Revenue).

Regions

18% of the regions in Second Life now have mesh objects rezzed in them.

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#SL Scripting News Week 51

Kelly Linden learned that when iTunes locks up the SL Viewer can’t open… Computers are full of complications. The viewer will never get past Initializing VFS, if iTunes freezes. This is Windows. No telling what will happen on a Mac.

Server Roll Out

Kelly says the server maintenance release from Le Tigre seems to be running well. This is the release that got rolled back from the main channel once. It is good it is running well. Because this is the release we will run until next year.

The roll out means both LSL functions llTransferLindenDollars() and llGetParcelMusicURL() are on the main grid.

Region Crossings

The rumor about more region crossing failures came up. Apparently there is no statistical data to tell the Lindens that is the case. So, unless people are filing JIRA’s it would be an invisible problem from the Linden side of the equation.

Kelly says the Lab is currently working on projects to improve region crossings. The Lab is also working on projects to reduce what Kelly called ‘up time bloat’. I suppose that is things like memory leaks and other things that tend to degrade region performance over time.

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The End of Kirsten’s Viewer

Today in world The Official Kirstens Viewer Group got a message from Sylvia and Lee aka Dawny and KirstenLee. The end of the Crowdfunder effort has come to an end and we are about 79% short of the goal. Lee will be closing the group.

Bye Kirsten

There is a farewell message on the blog. And Finally…

There are some interesting and in some ways disturbing statistics in the article. It seems there were 3,000 to 4,000 regular users per month. The average number of downloads were 6,000 to 8,000 per month. But, only a couple hundred of us chipped in to continue the viewer. Sad, imo.

The Niran Viewer is based on Kirsten’s Viewer. It is very different from Kirsten’s and as best I can tell has a different feature set. But, it may work for you.

My best to Sylvia and Lee.

 

 

NiranV Releases a Prerelease

I’m confused about what ‘prerelease’ means. Whatever, another version of the NiranV Viewer is out. This is a short review of it. The download is only 33mb, but the download took 10 minutes. Testing my connection I find it has slowed down. My download speed has dropped from 31mb/sec to 2mb/sec. :/ I’ll have to sort that out.

Niran's Unique Login Screen

Download and Install

Other than being slow there is nothing special about the download. You’ll find it here: Source Forge Nirans Viewer Download.

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Dolphin Viewer 3 Update

Lance has a new release of the Dolphin viewer out: 3.2.1.22181. There isn’t much new in this release. The download is the same. Performance is the same.

Inventory

A fix from Firestorm has been adopted. It has to do with how Tool Tips work in Inventory. Tool Tips are the popup messages we see when hovering the cursor over an item for a few sections. The SL Viewer has an annoying trait of popping up a tip that contains an inventory item’s name and hiding the item below. The colors in SLV are such it can be confusing.

The Firestorm fix limits the popup to long names that do not fit within the inventory window. So, unless an item description runs out the right side of the panel, there is no popup, which is really nice, IMO. Plus the coloring is better.

Languages

Lance has included translations. Lance is fluent in German (native) and English. Those wanting other translations will need to help out. If you want to help, post a note in the Dolphin Viewer Forum.