second-life-viewer
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Second Life 1.21 release candidate now gold
The 1.21 series of Second Life viewer release candidates has come to an end and has "gone gold" as they say. The 1.21.6 viewer today replaces the 1.20 viewer as the official Second Life viewer. As yet, Linden Lab has not announced the update, nor provided release notes for the new viewer, but that's alright, because we've got that information for you. The list of changes from 1.20 is quite a long one. Seriously. Hang on to your hats, because nearly every part of the viewer got some loving from the Lab engineers. Everything from group chat moderation to some long standing cleanups of text that was literally years out of date. Check after the fold for the the full release notes (as nearly as we were able to assemble them, in the absence of a final set from the Lab), and download links to the new viewer. Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
Second Life security updates. New viewers
Well, at last we know what all the fuss was about with all the sudden software updates over the last week for the Second Life servers that caused so much disruption during the last few days. It appears we were on the money with security fixes, and exploitable vulnerabilities have received urgent attention. As a result a new Second Life viewer is available for download now -- that's 1.20.17(98669) -- and you can expect a new Release Candidate viewer (RC5) very very soon. Both are likely to be mandatory updates. So, what's all the fuss about? Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
Kingdon's Second Life updates: What's missing?
New Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon is still making irregular postings to the official Second Life blog. It's all heady and exciting stuff, to be sure. Growth, focus on improvement of the new user experience, simplified registration, and so on. Yet something seems to be missing. What's missing is anything that excites you if you're already a Second Life user. There's plenty here to entice those who aren't already users, but if you're already one, there doesn't seem to be anything much in them for you to get excited about. Put together with some other pieces, however, it certainly creates an interesting picture about future direction for Second Life. Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
Production Second Life viewer 1.20.16 available now [updated]
A new Second Life viewer is available. Not a release candidate, but an update to the 1.20 series -- what's generally referred to as an 'official' or production viewer. The version number for this release is 1.20.16 (97603), and only contains one listed change over 1.20.15. The lone change appears to be security-related. The text of the change (not yet available in Wiki release notes) is "Discard messages sent over UDP that should not be trusted." It isn't clear exactly which messages those are, precisely, and whether they might be sent from servers or spoofed from other hosts (or if they should simply be being carried on another transport protocol) -- however if it was important enough to release a fresh production viewer with just this one change, it is likely to be an important upgrade for users. The new viewer is available for download now for Linux, Windows, or Mac (universal binary). We assume that if you've had problems running the 1.20.15 viewer, 1.20.16 will not work any better for you. Linden Lab has not yet announced this release on any of its blogs. Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
Second Life 1.21(RC2) available. SLS-1.24.5 rolled out
Linden Lab have been working very hard to attempt to bug-fix and stabilize the SLS-1.24 Mono-enabled Second Life simulator server software (try saying that three times, fast). Since Monday, the 8th of September, we've counted no less than 19 distinct versions of 1.24.5 that got far enough along to test. Right now, the top candidate (and the version that has been rolling out onto the Second Life grid) is build 96115. A test rollout of build 96378 was attempted, but was somewhat crashier than 96115, so it was replaced with the slightly earlier build. There are several later builds already being tested and assessed as candidates for the next rollout, the latest being build 96505. There's quite a list of fixes, almost (but not entirely all scripting related). Notes for builds up to 96378 are available, however it isn't yet clear what any more recent builds might contain. While all this is going on, the viewer team has managed to crank out a new release-candidate (1.21-RC2), which runs on the Mac PPC, and for those of you who were having that nasty crash-or-freeze-every-minute-or-six problem, or issues with sculpt textures, there's a fix for those too. Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC14)
Linden Lab has released the fifteenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. This release looks like the final release in this cycle, unless something quite nasty appears. Mono is expected in viewer 1.21, and SLS1.24 (SLS1.23 is deploying this week) -- thus, there is nothing particularly earth-shattering in this release.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC13)
Linden Lab has released the fourteenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. If an overall 50% lower crash rate, measured across-the-board doesn't appeal to you, or improved quality texture decoding, how about the fact that the silver skin can now be disabled and replaced with an original recipe UI schema. Okay, so there's still a couple little glitches with that, but you can do it. Also it defaults to the familiar blue UI, which will please a lot of users. Linden Lab are watching your choices as well. The viewer now reports which skin you have loaded so that information can be pulled out of log-files (or, so a web-site or web-service used by the viewer can offer you HTML skinned in a compatible set of colors) -- We think it's more the latter than the former, but it'd be silly not to gather usage data on skins.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC12)
Linden Lab has released the thirteenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. We're not sure if this is the RC with the least number of changes or not, exactly. Aside from a localization fix where the viewer was still talking about First Land, the remaining three items all seem to constitute code reversions -- essentially undoing what has been done. User-Interface skin switching isn't in this release. We're going to go out on a limb and suggest that you won't see that for a couple weeks at least.
Lab's teasing 'placeholer': Xbox, PS3, iPhone?
Dusan Writer has spotted an HTML comment in the source for search.secondlife.com which says "<!-- placeholer page for XBOX, PS3, and iPhone versions of client when they launch next real soon now -->" Definitely quite the tease. Certainly, Second Life can be made to run on a PS3 (and there's at least one enterprising user who has had some success on that front); the Xbox 360 would present a much more considerable technical challenge; and as for the iPhone, well, Linden Lab has been making noises about lighter-weight clients/viewers for some months. We're not sure quite how much credence to put to the message, however, as "real soon now" is a piece of engineer slang/sarcasm generally taken to mean "Whenever, when it's ready, maybe never". However this could neatly dovetail with Kapor's "very important announcement" coming up in seven days.
RealXtend 0.3 released
The RealXtend team has released the latest version of their extended, viewer and opensim-based system code. This brings realXtend up to version 0.3. The viewer sports new basic avatars (three), attachments direct to the avatar (rather than to a bone-based attachment point), prim sizes increased to 128 metres in any dimension, fixed assorted crash bugs and more. The server code handles the support for these features, along with a bunch of bug-fixes, Skype support, inverse kinematics and variable avatar walk-speeds.
1.20(RC11): Extended RC cycle, skinning moved up
Linden Lab has released the twelfth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. Linden Lab says this release candidate cycle will be extended, and some of the skinning project that was slated to come after 1.20 is being moved up, so that users will be able to switch the UI skin before this becomes the official viewer, rather than in some unspecified future release. So, there will be a couple more release candidates before 1.20 becomes official, and it is pitched to take a bit longer between them. This edition fixes some more crashes and freezes, but still has that nasty buffer-rendering offset glitch that afflicts snapshots, among other things.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC10)
Linden Lab has released the eleventh 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. Linden Lab says that it is aiming for 1.20 to go live by the end of June, which suggests only two more release-candidate iterations -- so what you're seeing is very close to what the official viewer will be in a couple of weeks. Release notes are not included in the installer. This version apparently fixes the crash-on-startup with the Mac PPC, and fixes some of the snapshot problems: The UI is no longer silently included in the snapshot when written to disk, but the black bar (and occasional random pixel garbage) down the left-hand side is still there. The thread-watchdog has been disabled for the rest of this series of RCs, the first-login-fails-with-Vista also appears to have been corrected, and pixel-garbage around avatar imposters has been fixed. There are an additional six crash fixes.
Contest for newbie viewer UI
Dusan Writer has decided to put his money where his mouth is and hold a competition for UI designs for a newbie-viewer, offering a total L$800,000 prize-money for the top three designs. You don't need to be a coder to participate. This is about designs, so mock-up images are what's required. If you've been foaming at the mouth about how Linden Lab can't make a decent newbie-friendly UI, this is your chance to demonstrate that you're not just full of smoke and wind. The first prize of L$500,000 doesn't exactly sour the pot, either. We're already itching to see the results, so check out the competition rules and conditions.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC9)
Linden Lab has released the tenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. Release notes are not included in the installer. More fixups with the thread-watchdog, fixes to flexi-prims to make them work more like existing viewers, a bunch of crash-fixes. However this version will not work on Mac PPC at all. Maybe the next RC will do so. That puts us at least one more RC out from a full-release.
Avatar puppeteering code has strings attached
Avatar puppeteering has unexpectedly turned up as a source-code branch in the Second Life viewer source repository. This is still a largely abandoned feature, but the code is being put in front of open-source developers to see if they can actually do anything with it. It is important to stress that the code is far from complete or fully-tested. There is a simulator on the Aditi (preview) grid which has some matching code written for it (the simulator is called Puppeteering - and may only be accessible by logging directly into the sim). The simulator code is also unfinished, insufficiently tested, and likely not stable. If none of that dissuades you, and you'd like to play with this code, then good luck! Learn more about Avatar Puppeteering.
High-end graphics features planned for Second Life
Linden Lab is tinkering with a set of Second Life graphical improvements for high-end graphics hardware. Dave Parks, software engineer at Linden Lab has been working on a set of features tailored to the Geforce 8 set of GPUs. Users without the required hardware would not suffer any performance reductions as a result of the new features. The featureset (which is available as an experimental branch called shadow-draft in the viewer source repository, for the curious), includes hard Sun-shadows, per-pixel lighting, support for an uncapped number of point-lights, and lighting costs based on screen coverage.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC8)
Linden Lab has released the ninth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. Release notes are missing again. Maybe they've chosen to stop including them with the installer. Changes primarily involve emasculation of the thread-monitoring system to solve a lot of situations where the viewer was intentionally crashing itself, fixing purchases via the Linden, and fixing up tooltips.
1.20 RC7: Unexpected issues
Three particular issues have turned up with the new Second Life 1.20(RC7) release candidate that you should know about. Two are relatively pedestrian, but the third is quite serious and appears to be an intentional feature. While the RC7 candidate has been withdrawn, those of you who are using channel gimmicks to use it anyway need to know about these. One is the crash on login/connection (also on taking snapshots - or any other intensive activity that can take some time). Particularly for those of you that are either on slower hardware or who are further away from the Second Life servers in network terms. You'll need to disable the thread watchdog to work around this, as described here.
Dazzle: The slippery eye
While there were many complaints that the new communication window in the Second Life viewer obscured and drew the eye away from the 3D scene which represented the virtual world and its contents, Dazzle seems to fix that particular sore point in unexpected ways. Specifically, the eye is more sensitive to blue than to any other color, but capable of discerning less actual detail of blue things, particularly the brighter blues. For most of us, the eye tends to slide off and away from brighter blues and blues that are closer to gray and sliver.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC7)
Linden Lab has released the eighth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. For those of you worried about the Dazzle UI being hard on the eyes (around two thirds of you), 'We plan to release Skinning Phase 1 (which will allow residents to install custom skins and switch between them, e.g. switch to a "classic" skin) before we make 1.20 mandatory,' says Steve Linden, '(hopefully well before-- we are trying to keep mandatory updates to a minimum), so we will support switching skins before imposing this release on everyone. However, this is the look we are planning to support going forward.' Note that that does not mean that Viewer 1.20 will contain it (skin switching) at release, or necessarily that it will appear in viewer 1.21 or 1.22 -- we're only promised that it will appear before support for 1.19 is dropped. This release-candidate (which is not intended to be final, so really, there should be a less confusing name for it) contains 46 assorted fixes, plus other changes -- and a few known bugs. There's also user-contributed lip-synching for voice, and what appears to be the new Ruth in there. Bonus: The vanishing skirts problem finally seems to be fixed, and users are automatically unmuted if you interact with them (pay them or their objects, send an IM or inventory to them). If you use a Mighty Mouse or 3DConnexion Space Navigator, apparently 1.20 will continue to make your life unpleasant.