Second Life Third-Party Dev’s UG Meeting 2017 w34

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Oz Linden starts off the Third-Party Dev UG meeting by saying there isn’t much new to talk about. ‘New’ is obviously a relative-subjective term in Oz’s use of the word. See if you learn something new about what is going on. I did.

Viewer Status

Alex Ivy, the 64-bit viewer, failed its recent QA. A fix and retest is expected to happen early next week with an update to appear then.

Cape San Blas Beach 2
Cape San Blas Beach 2 (URL)

Errors came from refactoring the launcher code. Just a couple of new bugs held back the release as the Lindens wanted to fix them before release. One problem holding back Alex is the unreliable crash reporting. Sometimes crashes report and sometimes not. Oz says they are working full time to get that sorted.

The Voice RC has gotten an update which is still in QA. When it passes QA we will see the new version out.

A new Maintenance branch will appear in RC about the middle of week 35.

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Second Life Photography Tutorials

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Flickr has a ton of Second Life™ images. Today: 2,901,249 images. Some are pretty bad, others REALLY kinky, and some amazingly gorgeous. For the people interested in SL Photography William Weaver has made 12 video tutorials. They are about using the Firestorm Viewer’s Photo and Camera Tools and controlling Windlight.

There is a well thought out design for these tools. The tutorial shown here shows how to take advantage of the tools and use them efficiently. Subsequent tutorials show how to use the various aspects of SL lighting to create great images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6XiUkyPQ-w

Phototools Tutorial: 01 – Interface Introduction

This is a 4-year old starting tutorial giving an overview of the Photo Tools. The tutorials advance over those 4-years to the 12th tutorial streamed live a week ago.

Note: 2020-05 – Some of these tutorials were taken down then later put back, and now some are ‘private’. It seems to be changing. I can’t predict which will appear and which will disappear. Good luck.

I’ve covered some of these as individual tutorials over the years.

William Weaver also has a Flickr channel plus, a marketplace store, and additional art is on Issuu. Numerous SL bloggers have covered his art at various times.

Second Life News 2017 w34

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Servers

Today is a rough day for the operations crew. A roll to the main channels and log on issues that started shortly after the roll started, 5:30 AM PT and has continued past 11:30 AM PT.

Connections - Cica Ghost
Connections – Cica Ghost

Also, Shoutcast apps are breaking. See Oz Linden’s post in Scripting: MIME Type changes for HTTP with LSL. Expect more screams when the RC channels roll.

The main channel updates to #17.08.11.328159. Changes:

  • BUG-5398 Feature Request: llGetObjectDetails() constants OBJECT_SELECTED & OBJECT_SAT_UPON
  • BUG-9666 Feature Request: llGetObjectDetails() constants OBJECT_REZ_TIME, OBJECT_CREATION_TIME and OBJECT_RETURN_TIME
  • BUG-134057 OBJECT_CREATION_TIME output precision possibly clamped.
  • Internal Fixes

From the Server-Scripting meeting, we know all RC channels are getting the same package. The deploys thread didn’t provide a version number or release notes this week.

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HTC Vive Price Drop

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This morning I see the Vive has dropped in price. The retail price of a new Vive is now a mere US$600. That is better than the previous $800. But still expensive. Vive headsets have been going on eBay for about $500 for some time. Gear VR units are going for $65 on eBay.

HTC Vive – Aug 2017

Sansar is supporting Oculus and Vive. I have neither. So, how well they are supported and how easy they are to setup with Sansar, I don’t know. I have yet to get my Gear VR working with Sansar. So, I know that is difficult. I think I am down to a ‘controller’ problem. I have an Xbox 1708 controller on order (US$20-30±).

If you Google on Vive and SL, you may get the idea Vive and SL will work for VR. That isn’t the case. The information is almost all 2016 stuff written before the Lab dropped their SL VR project and CtrlAltStudio stopped VR Viewer development. I have been able to get SL into 3D, not VR, with my Gear VR. Not really worth the effort. It’s a nice novelty.

I have used the old CtrlAltStudio Viewer to see SL in VR. There is no Bento support. Until someone decides to merge the CtrlAltStudio code and an updated Firestorm there is essentially no ‘native’ VR support for SL. There is some third-party software for various games to get them into VR. Most of those are for DirectX games, not OpenGL.

SL users are second-class VR citizens…