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Linden Lab's Tom Hale announces Second Life support for media plug-ins
As a part of his keynote presentation today at this year's Second Life Community Convention, Linden Lab's Tom Hale has unveiled a new plug-in framework for the Second Life viewer. The Second Life viewer has hitherto been restricted to rendering media content that was supported either by its browser component or by the use of Apple's Quicktime. Quicktime is certainly quite workable, but only provides a subset of the extensive range of potentially viewable media that's out there. The introduction of the LLMedia API looks to change all that, by allowing a straightforward plug-in system to extend the viewer's ability to render various arbitrary kinds of parcel media.
Imprudence 1.1.0 RC2 available
The Imprudence Project has a release new candidate viewer for Second Life available. Imprudence 1.1 RC2 (unlike Linden Lab, the Imprudence Project counts starting from one, not from zero) features a number of improvements and fixes over RC1. This release candidate has a new storage allocator for Windows which improves frame-rates, reduces memory-usage and is all-around more efficient. Several crash-bugs have been fixed, and support has been improved for Linux systems that use the PulseAudio sound server. A few UI tweaks and inconveniences have also been tidied up. Unfortunately there is still no version for the Mac as the Imprudence Project is starving for a Mac developer to handle that side of the code. Full release notes are after the jump.
Second Life 1.22 (RC8) now available
Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC8 is the ninth release candidate in the unexpectedly elongated 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). RC5 was supposed to have been the last release-candidate in this series, but unfortunately a number of serious issues prompted the release of RC6, and now we have some major changes, which by all rights should mean quite a few more release-candidates before becoming an official release. OpenAL and gstreamer support are the big surprises. We're wondering if Quicktime has been given the flick entirely. This mirrors the work being done with the Imprudence Release Candidate, though the Imprudence Project does not appear to have the same difficulties with sound under Linux. That's a huge change for a release-candidate, especially so late in the series, and we'd be surprised if they released a new official viewer anytime soon on that basis alone.
Imprudence 1.1.0 RC1 available
The Imprudence Project has a release new candidate viewer for Second Life available. Imprudence 1.1 RC1 (unlike Linden Lab, the Imprudence Project counts starting from one, not from zero) features a number of substantial improvements over 1.0, including openAL and Gstreamer support for general sound, as well as audio and video streaming. This release candidate also features updates to the user-interface, arithmetic expressions in the build floater's texture and object tabs, quick-filtering for the inventory and more. Unfortunately there is no version for the Mac as the Imprudence Project is starving for a Mac developer to handle that side of the code. Due to licensing issues, Imprudence cannot ship with voice components, but you can add them yourself very easily. Full release notes are after the jump.
Second Life viewer for Linux goes beta
Yes, we know that technically it's already been beta since 6 February 2006. However, Cory Ondrejka called that a an alpha test, so we're willing to more or less go with that. The Linux Second Life viewer entered closed alpha, and open alpha a mere four days later. Now, just over two years later, the Linux viewer is finally considered to have entered the beta phase. With the introduction of gstreamer support for media, and 3D voice support, the viewer has finally achieved comparable functionality with the viewers for Mac and for Windows -- only it runs faster and smoother. On average about 15% faster on the same hardware than the Windows version based on our tests. Four days from closed alpha to open alpha, then 25 months to open beta. How long until production, we wonder.
