Viewers

General Viewer Information

Second Life News Week 07

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Servers

As expected, there are no server updates this week, probably next week. My home region has not been restarted since 2/2/2016, two full weeks. The region seems to be working OK. The server stats shown in the Viewer Statistics Panel all look good.

Basilique Lighthouse Party - II
Basilique Lighthouse Party – II

Viewers

Not much visibly happening with viewers. But, we may see a viewer promoted this week.

  • Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 4.0.2.310660
  • Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 4.0.2.310545
  • Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 4.0.2.310127
  • Second Life Project Bento Viewer version 5.0.0.310099
  • Second Life Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296
  • Second Life Obsolete Platforms Viewer version 3.7.28.300847 :/

I’ve been using the Linden, Firestorm, and Catznip (R10) viewers recently. I have less problems and better performance with Catznip. That is not a test result. I haven’t done organized testing. But, my subjective experience is Catznip is behaving better right now.

I do see texture thrashing when using Catznip… less of that with Firestorm. It takes some time to get there, generally over an hour for me.

Firestorm Team Thank You

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Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.

Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.

Firestorm Support Jacket - Link farther down the page
Firestorm Support Jacket – Link farther down the page

You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.

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Catznip Viewer Updates to R10

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I think the Catznip viewer for Second Life™ has been around since about the time I joined SL, early 2008. Inara Pey has been covering viewers since before then. Her earliest article on Catznip, that I found, is September 2011. I suspect there were earlier ones. My earliest is February 2011, back when I was looking for the best viewer and doing reviews.

Royal Flush
Royal Flush

In my 2011 review I was noting that Catznip had not updated for about a year. At the time Catznip was not listed in the Linden’s 3rd Party Viewers list. It is now, as 1 of 8 full feature viewers. 

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Second Life News Week 2 – #2

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This past week a Third Pary Develpoers’ meeting was held. Not much in the way of NEW news, but lots of updates… except for one big block buster.

Cyborg
Cyborg

Viewers

The Maintenance RC got prompted Friday morning and is now the main SL viewer: 4.0.1-310054. If you have been having problems and low FPS this release should help. This version is the second main viewer with the CEF. It also has lots of fixes. 

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