second-life-viewer
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Linden Lab to alter third-party Second Life viewer policies
Yesterday, Linden Lab made an announcement regarding third-party (or after-market, if you prefer) viewers that has so far elicited a vociferous response from some of the more outspoken Second Life users, and those involved in after-market viewer-development. The announcement largely revolves around upcoming policies that have yet to be decided. This is compounded partly by there being two announcements. One directly emailed out and one on the blog, both of which carry somewhat different information. The announcement is a lead-up to a series of "brown bag" sessions which are advertised to determine the details of the scheme.
Looking forward to Second Life 2.0
While it has been called Viewer 2009 once or twice, almost every Linden Lab staffer who mentions it calls it Second Life 2. Once on the drawing-board as a major overhaul of Second Life both at the server and at the viewer (client), the idea of a huge developmental jump was abandoned some years ago, and all of the features slated for Second Life 2 were added to Second Life 1, incrementally. Well, except for the last item on the list, the user-interface. Essentially Second Life seems to now everything SL2 was originally planned to be, sans the new interface.
Imprudence 1.2 beta2 viewer for Second Life
The Imprudence project has released the next beta in this release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers (and just about the only one whose licensing status we've been able to verify with confidence). The new beta has some changes to the pie menu (which often makes people just a little tense), updates Kitty Barnett's RLVa support, fixes 24 bugs including some search and appearance problems, two crashes and some assorted UI weirdness that crept into the last build. The first round of Windows binaries in this beta release had a minor installation issue, but fresh installers were issued quickly and have sorted that out.
Linden Lab rounds up and ejects a bunch of copyright infringers
Now, we must admit that we find this one both amusing and appropriate. In short, Linden Lab has sent 50 or more Second Life users who were using the after-market NeilLife viewer on the spank-bus to ban-town. Not just for using the viewer, but for copying content that they shouldn't ought to have. What's clever is how Linden Lab caught and detected them.
New: Imprudence 1.2 beta viewer for Second Life
The Imprudence project has started a new release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and the new 1.2 beta contains a number of delicious treats. The new beta features a grid manager, new minimap radar with some useful features, optional support for Restrained Life (using RLVa), a selection of Emerald viewer features, object backups (for your own creations only), and a heap more. Our personal favorite is the option to have a draw-distance slider on-screen, as it is perhaps our single most-commonly used UI feature.
Linden Lab chases new logo for Second Life Snowglobe viewer
Linden Lab has launched a contest on 99designs to obtain a new logo for their Snowglobe Second Life viewer. The prize has been prepaid to 99designs and the chosen winner will be paid the sum of US$295 by them. Of course, a logo to these requirements would normally cost quite a bit more through normal channels. We can't help thinking that if Linden Lab were truly thinking of this as community-sourcing, that they'd be offering commercial rates to the winner. As it is, the proffered prize is much closer to the bottom of the range of logo-design prizes on 99designs than it is to the top.
Dodgy Second Life viewer doing the rounds
We'd like to caution our Second Life readers about a dodgy Second Life viewer that's currently doing the rounds under rather dubious circumstances. The viewer is calling itself Neil Life, and purports to include some content-ripping features over and above those normally available to users. One particular feature of the viewer, apparently related to a permissions exploit, appears to have triggered Linden Lab to perform an emergency update to Second Life to close the exploit last week. The viewer was widely advertised last week with distributed notecard advertisements in-world which purported to have been created by famed resident, Gwyneth Llewelyn. In actual fact, a copy of one of her existing notecards had simply had the text replaced so that it appeared that she had authored it. (This is one of the main reasons we don't generally accept the provenance of notecards in Second Life)
Snowglobe viewer 1.1 released for Second Life
Snowglobe, Linden Lab's community-developed after-market Second Life viewer has hit another milestone with a 1.1 release. This version mostly focuses on bug-fixes, but has a few additional enhancements. A nasty race condition in texture-fetching has (hopefully) been resolved, reducing viewer crash-rates, bump-mapping has been corrected, the minimap has gotten some tweaking and tuning, and more. Read on for the complete list.
Linden Lab warns Second Life users to avoid bulk permissions feature
Linden Lab recently warned Second Life users to avoid the use of the new bulk permissions editor, a feature which was added in the 1.23 viewer. There's a lot of confused conversation and observations about the matter, some of which are contradictory, because what is happening is confusing. Some claim that the bug makes content fully-permissive. That's not entirely the case. The essential problem that is at the heart of JIRA issue SVC-4444 is that the bulk permissions feature fails to correctly and completely communicate with internal grid systems at some level and under some circumstances. All the while appearing as if it has actually done what it is supposed to have done..
A sneak peek at the unreleased Second Life setup tool
During the first part of the year, Linden Lab spent some time working on a new installer for Second Life. Development seemed to halt in April, but it is still a rather interesting little tool. Weighing in at a measly 350KB under Windows, the application downloads, installs, then runs the much larger Second Life viewer, and does so quite quickly and painlessly while displaying an assortment of positive marketing messages. The whole process takes a couple of minutes, depending on your network connection.
Linden Lab releases Snowglobe 1.0 for Second Life
A while back, Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale announced a new Second Life viewer development project. That project ultimately grew along lines similar to that of third-party viewer project, Imprudence, breaking down many barriers to user contributions, and adopting a more agile methodology. After only a couple of release-candidates, the result is already available. One of the biggest developments you might see in the Snowglobe viewer is that the map is now an order of magnitude faster to load, rather than taking several fractions of forever, as is traditional. This is the start of a new texture-transfer pipeline, which we can reasonably expect to become standard in future viewers, and to encompass more kinds of textures, however there's a new caching architecture which should benefit all textures.
Second Life moves to 1.23, opens adult continent, allows more content
Linden Lab has released the new viewer, bringing Second Life up to 1.23 a few days earlier than expected, off the back of a very short release-candidate cycle. The new viewer brings three things with it: The new Adults-only continent (formerly Ursula and now Zindra), user-verification by documents or payment-status, and a new Adults-only content rating that opens up Second Life to more extreme sexual and violent content.
Second Life 1.23 (RC4) now available
Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC4 is the fifth release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). It's looking increasingly like the objective is to release before the Second Life sixth anniversary (23 June). Barely any changes this time around, so either Linden Lab isn't really aware of any showstoppers or doesn't perceive them as such. The context menus have had one small reversion, there are updates to the Mac crash reporter, and a fix relating to object updates that affected poseball visibility.
Imprudence 1.1.0 for Second Life
The Imprudence project has reached the end of the second release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is now in official release. Imprudence is one of our favorite Second Life viewers. Context (pie) menus have been reorganized again, there's improved support for sound and streaming media through gstreamer, some backported fixes from the official 1.22 viewer, and confirmation popups have been added for a number of operations. There's also a Mac version, which last year's 1.0 release lacked due to hardware and development constraints (though only for Intel-based Macs, unless there's significant demand for a universal binary.
Second Life 1.23 (RC3) now available
Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC3 is the fourth release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). The 1.23 series is being fast-tracked, as it is scheduled to go live by the end of June. We're expecting this one or the next one to be the last before official release -- because frankly, there's not a lot of time-left before the Lab's self-imposed deadline. Probably the biggest reason you'd want to try this one out, is that it fixes a bug introduced in an earlier official viewer where cached information was discarded too aggressively, leading to things that should have been cached having to be redownloaded. Oh, there's a bunch of good bug-fixes besides that, but that's really the one you want. Read on for the rest.
Second Life adult content updates: Viewers, namechanges, grannies and grade-schoolers
The 1.23 Second Life viewer with the necessary support for Adult content is still being rushed to meet a June deadline, the exact reason for which seems a little unclear. There's some outstanding issues with the viewer release-candidates, but it seems fairly low on actual showstoppers and looks likely to make an official release in the roughly one fortnight remaining. Definitions for the content ratings have been finalized, though they show little noticeable deviation from Linden Lab's originally proposed drafts. It appears that all the changes have been simple explanatory wording changes. The PG rating holds a couple of surprises, though.
Second Life 1.23 (RC2) now available
Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC2 is the third release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). The 1.23 series is being fast-tracked, as it is scheduled to go live by the end of June. This release features six crash-fixes, problems with window-sizing, and issues with trees. Restore-to-last-position has been disabled, to prevent potential inventory-loss. There are some more pie-menu changes, but some of the changes in the previous candidates have been reverted.
Second Life 1.23 (RC1) now available
Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC1 is the second release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). The 1.23 series is being fast-tracked, as it is scheduled to go live by the end of June. The last RC's propensity to false-trigger at least one anti-virus program has been sorted out, along with several fixed to appearance updates (though if you try a strip-tease, you'll likely crash the viewer), along with a bunch of bug-fixes that include some crashes and a failure to startup.
Second Life 1.23 (RC0) now available [updated]
Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC0 is the start of a new series of release candidates, apparently scheduled to complete by the end of June. This release features a number of changes, including the promised Shadow code (which is more than a little experimental), and the new support features for Adult content. While it has only been out for a day, there's quite a bit of controversy over a reordering of texture layers on the avatar head, which reportedly breaks a lot of skin content and makes avatar faces that use them appear 'clownish'. Certain European locale settings may cause this release to crash on startup, and the viewer itself may be unusually slow to start up.
Upcoming viewer changes for Second Life adult content
Thanks to a piping-hot, fresh build of the Second Life viewer, we've been able to get a better look at the upcoming content controls that are due in the next major release of the Second Life viewer. As expected, there are now three content ratings available (though it is uncertain as to what their final names will actually be. Using "PG" as a content rating, for example, has legal issues): PG content, Mature content and Adult content. While it hasn't yet been determined exactly what content will fit into each category (actually, we barely have any idea about the existing content categorizations half the time), the actual usage and integration looks pretty straightforward.