It is hard to keep up with the Linden Lab viewer. We do not see lots of changes in the user interface nor are there lots of new features being added. But, there is lots of stuff happening behind the User Interface.

It is not like there is any place where the Lindens are talking about the viewer. Esbee disappeared long ago. While still at the Lab, I never hear a peep out of her. I hear far more from Runitai Linden that leads the Shining Development Branch. He attends various groups and we get information from him. But, it is mixed with the context of the meeting.

The Lab has a number of development repositories where they publish code as they develop the viewer. One of these is the Viewer Development Branch. It is in BitBucket. If you code in large projects, you have some familiarity with code repositories, repo’s. For those of us that work with small short term projects repo’s are mostly over kill.

If you don’t write code/scripts, the whole thing probably seems rather geeky and mostly Greek. It is. Understand that the repo’s are typically where those writing code pass on notes, information, and their code to people that know what’s going on. The notes and descriptions they write are very much like notes we intend to only ever be read by our self. They are not overly explanatory.

Now there is an idea… Inventory likely becomes a headache for every user of Second Life. I know I have an ongoing battle with inventory. Now the Lab has come up with a new idea. I suppose it is a spinoff from the SLCC announcement of making SL easier to use.

New Folder View Inventory

ProductTeam Linden posted an announcement in the Second Life Forum about the new project to test the idea of a simplified inventory. See: Simple Inventory Project Viewer. They want feedback on the new inventory. They ask you to give them information on how you think it will affect new users. I guess we can put on our newbie avayar and see how it goes.

The project has a Project Viewer, JIRA Section SINV, and a Simplified Inventory wiki page.

Download and Install

This is the standard download (28mb) and install. The viewer installs in its own folder, so there should be little conflict. It also uses its own settings file (settings_projectviewer-simpleinventory.xml). It does share the cache. While I am a great fan of separate caches for each viewer, I have been allowing all the viewers from the Lab to share the same cache. I don’t recommend allowing the Lab’s 1.23 to share a cache with the new 3.x.x viewers.

Continue reading »

Tateru Nino has an article about a reject response from Linden Lab in the JIRA STORM-468 comments. Charlar wrote the comment.

Thanks for making this effort. Alignment and snapping are an area where there are useful enhancements to be made.
However, we are not able to accept this contribution as it is.

These are the primary issues we found which resulted in that decision:

• The feature should support the same modes as the other manipulation modes.

• It does not work for non-mod permission objects. This functionality should work for all objects that the user can manipulate in-world.
• It only supports World snap mode, not Reference and Local modes, unlike all our other manipulation modes.

It packs and aligns to the face of the object bounding box. If objects are not cubes and do not share the same alignment, or aren’t aligned with the world coordinates (see above), the result of the operation is unexpected. Ideally the operations would use the actual shape of the object for aligning and packing.

There are also some coding implementation style issues that would need to be addressed. These can be covered in more depth after the functionality is dealt with.

In it’s current form, this is usable for purely prim-based builders under specific circumstances. It’s less useful for building with non-cube prims, mesh, sculpties. It’s minimally useful for building when the structure is not facing a global direction (ex: North, South, East, West). It’s not usable by non-building residents who need to place and organize purchased items.

I found many of the comments to Tateru’s articles interesting examples of transference. I always find it odd that people when told why something is rejected speculate on why it’s being rejected. Whatever…

We have all heard about the Lab’s version 1.23 viewer disappearing, no longer available for download. It is no longer just the 1.23. Over the last couple of days several of the older versions were taken off the download server and marked as ‘Not available for download’ in the Old Versions list.

You can find the list in the SL Wiki here.

All versions prior to 3.0.0 have been removed from download availability.

There is information about which viewers can connect to the grid and which cannot. Plus there are instructions for how to get them to connect if you really need to.

For some time I have said that the series 1 viewers are doomed and will eventually stop working. That day is drawing nearer. Several blogs have covered the demise of Linden Lab’s Viewer 1.23.5. Word is that OZ says it will soon lose the ability to deal with some inventory handling aspects. I’ll try to put that in factual perspective.

So far few have found where he said that. Oz doesn’t post meeting transcripts, so one has a hard time knowing whats going on there without attending. However, Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:15:58, Oz Linden sent an email to the Open Source List saying:

We’re going to deploying changes to the inventory backend soon that improve robustness and performance, but in testing those changes we found that existing viewers relied on certain things being strictly ordered.  With the new backend, that assumption does not always hold true.

Changeset d327dcc8ae51

<https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer-development/changeset/d327dcc8ae51>

from viewer-development implements the viewer change needed to avoid race conditions.  It should be straightforward to apply to any viewer, and is safe to release before the changes are deployed (it is compatible with the services as they are now).

You are strongly urged to port this patch and get it deployed.

I found a post by Innula Zenovka on SLUniverse that says Qarl has donated his prim alignment tool code to Linden Lab. I wrote about the tool in October of 2010: Qarl Fizz Prim Alignment Tool. I included Qarl’s video about how the tool works and have copied it to this post too. The original development announcement can be found on Qarl’s blog as: setting things straight. Check out the JIRA links at the end.

You can see Qarl’s blog post about it here: thank you, back. Qarl links to Tateru’s article:  How to send Qarl money. It seems someone sent Qarl some money. As a way of saying thanks to whoever that was, Qarl donated the code to the Lab.

Inara Prey recently wrote an article on Comparative Viewer Frame Rate performance. It is a handy reference. It took lots of effort to collect those numbers, which is why I seldom do rigorous tests.

Somewhat surprisingly it is the Linden Lab’s 3.2.5 viewer that is the fastest in the comparisons. I use the Development viewer 3.2.6, which is a little faster for me than 3.2.5.

The Lab’s viewers have not updated over the holidays. We may see some updates today or tomorrow. I suspect the Lindens are just getting back from the holidays and getting back into things. Also, it is a new year. People are fresh from a break and we may see some things change as they look at things with fresh eyes. Time will tell.

The main viewer is now 3.2.4. The beta version is 3.2.5. And the development viewer is 3.2.6.

The 3.2.6 is said to be the release with most of the Shining branch’s OpenGL fixes and changes for compatibility. I’ve been using a 3.2.6 version since December 12^th (246465) with four updates; 246560, 246813, 246889, and now 246959. Of that series the 246959 version is the fastest, but not by much on my system.

SH-2738 – Texture fetching freezes due to LLcurl. If you have seen textures refuse to download and/or rez completely you may be having a problem described in SH-2738. (There is no link because the JIRA item is one of the Lab’s private items. I should point out the JIRA tends to make items in some topics private, unless the Lindens remember to override it.)

Whatever the reason for privacy, this fix was included in an SL Viewer 3.2.5 build. Presumably it is in the Beta version of the viewer (246559) and later, but I can’t be sure. If you are having texture loading problems you may want to try the Beta version of the viewer.

Remember. The Beta is a beta and there is no guarantee it will work. It is a testing viewer, which means no whining about it. If you have a problem, file a JIRA report and send in your crash logs.

A related texture problem SH-2512 - Some avatar textures in welcome area never load on first visit. Could also be in this Beta release.

SH-1912 - Shiny metal texture characteristics entirely lost when Lighting and Shadows turned on. This fix could also be in the 3.2.5 version. Runitai made this fix in the Shining branch about 2 weeks ago. I see where it made it into the Dev Viewer (branch) about 12/12.