second-life-viewer
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Mad Patcher provides megaprims
Over the course of the weekend, two patches have appeared to allow the creation of megaprims in 1.19 series Second Life viewers (Able Whitman), and 1.20 series viewers (Jacek Antonelli). This all predicates on Linden Lab continuing support for the creation of megaprims. Nicholaz Beresford apparently has been working on another edition of both his Bleeding Edge and Eye-Candy releases. As a part of the patch-set, an option to create megaprims has been included, as well as increased-height building. Bleeding Edge has reached revision W, while Eye-Candy is at revision F.
A look at METAbolt -- a non-graphical Second Life viewer
Ever log in to Second Life, run around awhile, and then shake your head and think, "this place is nothing but a glorified chat room! And that's what I like! I don't care about all this graphics stuff!" Well, frustrated, graphics-hating Second Life user, METAbolt has what you crave. When we heard someone had written a text-based Second Life client for computers that just couldn't hack the graphics, we were sort of expecting something like a regular graphical client, except where all the images were made of tiny little text characters... like the picture above, which is not from METAbolt, alas. (It's Second Life on Linux run through the aalib graphics-to-text library)As a chat room, though, METAbolt has some good points and some not so good points. For one, every time you log in, you are placed in the Welcome area. While this may be the fastest way to put you with potential chat-mates, it's not really the sort of thing you expect. Gone were all saved landmarks as well. You will arrive in the Welcome Area, and you will enjoy your time there.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC6)
Linden Lab has released the seventh 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. This is accompanied by a new download page for all versions which appears to be designed to make Mac and Linux users feel like poor cousins. Mighty Mouse users, while we were told that your problem was fixed in the last release candidate, it appears to be an open issue again. Perhaps it wasn't fixed at all. The nasty message from the smartheap library are supposed to be gone, and the way property lines have been glowing through objects has been changed. (There doesn't seem to be any indication that the vanishing skirt issue has been fixed -- April Fools' Day is long past, boys)
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC5)
Linden Lab has released the sixth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. Mighty Mouse users, rejoice. We're told that this release fixes your problems using this release with the device. As for everyone else, 8 specific crash fixes and a fixed problem that caused serious problems with some nVidia drivers -- well, that should raise a few smiles!
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC4)
Linden Lab has released the fifth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. This is a rush-release, as you might notice that the previous RC3 was released only yesterday (Wednesday). Apparently attempting to enter the appearance editor caused an instant crash. Oops. So much for QA. There isn't a lot else new to speak of in this viewer, except a known issue with terrain textures on MacBook Air notebooks, and that llLoadURL opens in the external web-browser by default, instead of the internal web-browser.
Studio Shiny's Q2 viewer roadmap
Steve Linden, director of Linden Lab's 'Studio Shiny' development group has weighed in with the plans for the Second Life viewer for Q2 2008. Everything planned focuses on one (or both) of two goals: Making the viewer more stable, and making the viewer more usable. Most Second Life users can agree that these two goals are quite laudable.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC3)
Linden Lab has released the fourth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. Apparently we're back onto one-release-candidate-per-week, which will no-doubt please some and irritate others. Each new release candidate is a mandatory update from the previous release candidate. Most of the fixes in this look relatively minor, though apparently there might be some issues with the voice component. Issues with UI window sizes after startup appear to have been fixes, and some lossless texture-compression bugs, among others.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC2)
Linden Lab has released the third 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. This release candidate fixes the instant crash for most Linux users, but it is still very crashy for all platforms if the graphic settings are turned up. Likewise a crash bug has been fixed that was specific to German, Korean and Japanese viewers. We're not noticing skirts vanishing so frequently in this version (hooray!), but this still feels more like an early beta-candidate than a release candidate. Unless you're feeling particularly adventurous, you might want to give this series of release-candidates a miss for the time being.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC1)
Linden Lab has released the second 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. This release candidate restores the Friends dropdown on the map, disables avatar imposters -- as they're a suspected cause of crashes on nVidia hardware/drivers, fixes SLURLs which were bollixed up, fixes two crash bugs and adds a crash-on-startup bug for Linux users. Linux users should NOT get this version. To avoid getting a forced upgrade, add --channel skipRC1 to your viewer startup parameters.
Mad Patcher's final fling
Nicholaz Beresford has released one final viewer. The EC-e "Eye candy" release is designed to run against 1.19.1(4). This version plugs a key memory and changes the viewer icon. As one happy user said to us today, "The worst edition of the Nicholaz viewer is better than the best viewer Linden Lab has ever released." -- Many would find that hard to disagree with, including a few Linden Lab employees.
1.20: Changing your mind about avatar lag
One of the things that the new Second Life 1.20 release candidate viewer sports is a nifty new feature that busts some serious myths about avatar related lag. In short, by enabling the option, every avatar gets a number displayed over their heads showing how much work your PC needs to go through to render the avatar. This is the avatar rendering cost. So far we have seen green numbers (low numbers, which are good), and red ones (high numbers, which are not so good). The amount of work that goes into rendering an avatar (now that we can easily measure it) isn't quite affected by things the way we thought it was.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC0)
Linden Lab has released the first 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. The numbering scheme is changing - the least significant digits groupis being dropped from version numbering, so the next release will be 1.21. This release candidate contains Windlight, Dazzle, the default Dazzle skin (which we don't care for so much) and the Tools menu handily only appears when the edit floater is open (this is one change we heartily approve of!). There's improved joystick/3D mouse support in this release, and support for high altitude building.
Linden Lab cuts support for 1.18 viewers
Now that multiple versions of the Second Life viewer are available (since message liberation was implemented, last June in 1.18.0), Linden Lab is choosing to support two production releases of the viewer at a time. In this case, 1.19.1 and 1.19.0. Users who are still using any of the 1.18.x series viewers will have to update from today to either the current 1.19.1(4) release from the download page or get 1.19.0(5) [links after the fold for those that need them].
Windlight in full release
As we predicted the Second Life 1.19.1 release candidates have been finalized and have now been released as the official viewer. Admittedly a day later than we predicted. We're going to have to send out for some crystal ball polish. With the new release Windlight becomes a standard. Windlight was a rendering engine developed for high-performance gaming and graphically realistic environments. It was a whole lot faster and more relaible than Linden Lab's own rendering pipeline and had the advantage of some nifty eye-candy almost for free.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.19.1(RC4)
Linden Lab has released a new 1.19.1 Second Life release candidate viewer, 1.19.1(RC4), fifth in the 1.19.1 series (release candidates start counting from zero, rather than from one). Released on a Saturday. We know. Looks like someone's pushing for an official release early next week. In fact, Linden Lab says they're hoping this is the last release candidate for this series.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.19.1(RC3)
Linden Lab has released a new 1.19.1 Second Life release candidate viewer, 1.19.1(RC3), fourth in the 1.19.1 series (release candidates start counting from zero, rather than from one). Almost all the changes for this release-candidate are essentially cosmetic items. Either those are the low-hanging fruit, or we're getting very close to 1.19.1 (and Windlight) rolling out as the official viewer. With our prognosticating hats on, we predict an official release of 1.19.1/Windlight on Monday or Tuesday (though we're prepared to be wrong, we think it is likely).
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.19.1(RC2)
Linden Lab has released a new 1.19.1 Second Life release candidate viewer, 1.19.1(RC2), third in the 1.19.1 series (release candidates start counting from zero, rather than from one). Changes this time include alterations in the length of search terms (user names can be searched for with as few as two characters, and place names with only one); some notecard crashes; fixes to SVG-on-a-prim; crash bugs, build and installer glitches and more.
RealXtend viewer now on Sourceforge
Sourceforge - billed as the largest open source website in the world -- is now host to the source code project for the RealXTend viewer (rexviewer) for Second Life. RealXtend claims to have replaced all of the license encumbered portions of the viewer with GPL-friendly alternatives, though they are still having some issues decoupling FMOD from their VoIP solution. The project website remains at rexviewer.org, while the project page and source code (available via subversion) is now on Sourceforge. Rexviewer is only in alpha at present, but has a number of distinctly interesting technological features, and more planned.
New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.19.1(RC1)
Linden Lab has released a new 1.19.1 Second Life release candidate viewer, 1.19.1(RC1), second in the 1.19.1 series (release candidates start counting from zero, rather than from one). According to the new Linden Lab crash reporter, 1.19.1 is expected "to be the most stable viewer so far". This release fixes attachments ignoring users telling them where to go, boosts defective particle systems, makes the new search honor the user's selected language, removes the mess with sculptie previews, and builds strong bodies five ways. Specifics are after the fold.
New Release Candidate - html on a prim phase 1 is the big news!
Over on the official Linden Blog, news of the Second Life Release Candidate 1.19.1(RC0) was released a few minutes ago. This combines Windlight into the main RC line, and thus soon into the main stream. It also, in a rather more exciting move to many, includes a change to the media streaming system to let you see web pages IN Second Life. The system is still in an early stage - there are no interactions, no flash and the like as yet (although interacting with web pages and shared browsing will be along sometime in the future), but it works. Look closely at the picture - that's not a mock up, within seconds of being in Second Life with the new RC, I had Massively's website on a prim. That simple.[UPDATE: there are a couple of twiddles too - the "debug" menus (from Cntl-alt-shift-D) have been compressed into a single "Advanced" menu, same keystrokes though]
