Emerald Viewer Alpha Release

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Today I see the Modular team has release an alpha version 1.3.2.1839 of the Emerald Viewer. It sounds like this release is both an advance and a step backwards.

In the advance part MOAP (Media on a Prim) and faster rez’ing have been added. I am one of those seeing slower rez’n with Emerald 1634. But, I like the features and build 1634 is more stable than Kirsten’s latest, so I use Emerald most of the time.

For use on OpenSim grids Emerald 1634 is giving me problems. I have to see if I can find out why it is not allowing me to log onto OSGrid. The error message is SL related…

On the regressive side… several Emerald features have not yet been ported over. I’ll report more on that once I get to use the viewer.

Of the hundreds of thousands that downloaded Emerald, only 40,000+ have downloaded the new 1634 TPVP compliant viewer. Obviously Linden Lab is not blocking earlier version viewers.

On another note, Hippo and Imprudence have released updates to comply with Linden’s Third Party Viewer Policy. In general, for now, that means the export features of the viewers have been crippled until they can be updated to comply with object permissions to restrict what one can export.

Update

Most of the features I use are in the Alpha viewer. It also seems to rez things much faster. I didn’t look hard but the MOAP didn’t work. Probably needs to be turned on somewhere… Help Chat is not working, yet. Menus remain pretty much as in 1634. The new 2.0 menu arrangements have not been adopted, which doesn’t mean they won’t be. I got 35 to 60 fps on my Dual Core 2 with an 8800 nVidia.

Imprudence Viewer Update

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Second Life Viewers
Imprudence Logo

A new Imprudence viewer is out, version 1.2.2. The Imprudence blog in a post by Jacek Antonelli states the only real change is the removal of the ability to download textures from Second Life using export. It seems it does not matter whether you created the texture or not. However, this only affects you while connected to Second Life.

So, if you are only using the viewer on grids other than SL’s, you DO NOT NEED this download. Only if you use the Imprudence Viewer in SL will you want this download. They are looking to enable permissions compliant texture download in the future.

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TR.IM is Gone

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I liked Tr.im. It was may favorite URL shorting tool. The home page now says they have closed and will be completely gone by the end of the year. See: Tr.im R.I.P. The reason? Spammers. Too many companies were using Tr.im to push their advertising and get around various spam blockers.

The ‘Thanks for all the fish.’ page provides a list of services you can use as replacements. Since I’m a Twitter kid I decided on bit.ly.

Law Suite May Touch All in Second Life

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Linden Lab gets sued often enough. A recent one is from the maker of the Rez Tool for use with the Emerald viewer. See Weird in Emerald Viewer Fast Rez Tool.

But this new suit could touch us all. It could go class action. A serious attorney that has made his case before is in action. Over at Massively see: Evans et al vs Linden Lab: The new lawsuit on the block.

If you own or have owned land, currency, things, made products, and essentially in some way had ownership in something within SL, you will want to follow this law suit. The claim is LL has taken properties without due process. The attorney, Jason Archinaco, of Pribanic, Pribanic, and Archinaco LLC of Pittsburgh, has made this point before and LL settled out of court.

Those that have had accounts closed and lost money or other materials of value may recover some of that loss. It will be interesting to see how this progresses.

Emerald Update v1634

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Update 4/24 – Emerald has made it on Linden Lab’s approved viewer list. See: Third-Party Viewer Directory

Yesterday Modular released an updated version of Emerald. This is the TPVP (Third Party Viewer Policy – SL’s TPV Policy) compliant viewer required to connect to Second Life after April 30, 2010.

I am the 23,275th person to download it. I’ll be trying it in a few minutes.

Download Emerald Viewer v1643

Today 4/20, the download is running very slowly. On my fast cable the 40mb is showing 20 minutes to download.

Update

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Myst-Uru Modding

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Uru Modding
3DMax w/Plasma - Uru Modding Tool

As slow as a mountain turning to sand the online version of Myst is going open source. A step forward was taken when Cyan Worlds, Inc., the creators of the Myst series of games, placed the game back online in February, 2010. See: Play Myst Online (Free)

Another step was taken when Cyan released the binary version of their Plasma plug-in for 3DMax (versions 7 only). This allows fans to mod the game. Well to a point, there are complications both technical and license-wise. Those things are to be resolved somewhere along the road to open source.

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