Lumiya, the go-to Second Life / Open Sim client for Android by Alina Lyvette has received a further set of updates and bug fixes with the rapid-fire release of version 3.1 and version 3.1.1.
Both updates appeared on Tuesday, September 27th, version 3.1.1 offering several bug-fixes following the initial 3.1 release, while the latter offers fixes, tweaks, improvements and new features.
The major improvement is actually under-the-hood, with the adoption OpenGL ES 3.0 support within Lumiya. For those running the app on a modern smartphone or tablet, this should see much improved rendering of meshes in the 3D world view, including mesh bodies and avatar attachments, and improvements in frame rates. It should also provide much better rendering of translucent mesh clothing, getting much closer to how it should actually look.
Alongside of this comes a number of UI / functional changes and additions, including:
- The ability to edit parts of your Profile & add notes to other profiles
- The ability to take and share snapshots
- Setting your home location
- Mesh body HUDs should now work as expected
- Kemono avatars should now render correctly
- Play sound stream moved to the Action menu (top right of screen) when in the Contacts / chat windows
- Screen corruption in 3D view on certain Adreno 305 and 320 GPUs (e.g. Sony Xperia T3)
- A fix for a crash when saving notecard data.
Some of these updates are looked at in more detail below.
Profile Editing
The Profile editing options comprise: changing your Profile picture, editing your About details and creating / editing personal / private notes on either your own profile or the profile of another avatar (personal / profile notes only).
To do this with your own Profile, go to the menu (top left icon) then My Avatar > My Profile. This will open your profile. Tap Change Picture to open your inventory to select a new picture. To update your About description or personal notes, scroll down to the relevant part of your Profile and tap the Edit option. This will take you to an Edit screen, and open your device’s on-screen keyboard for editing.
Add Notes to another Profile
To add personal notes to the Profile of another avatar, locate the avatar in your Contacts or through the Nearby option. Tap the avatar name, then tap their Profile icon (top right of the window). Their profile will open, and you can scroll down to Personal Notes and tap Edit.
Take and Share Snapshots
Lumiya 3.1 presents users with the ability to create and share snapshots from the 3D view. To take a snapshot, go to the 3D view and position your camera as required. Tap the Action menu (top right of the window) and then tap Share Screenshot…
This will take a picture of your in-world view, and then display your available options for sharing the image. Note that this might include options to save the snapshot to your device which are not supported at this time. You can, however, upload to Google+, Google Photos, etc., or send via e-mail, etc.
Setting Your Home Location
When you wish to set home to the location you are in, open the Action Menu and tap Location Details. A Set Home option should be displayed on the right side of the location title bar.
Feedback
I’ve not had the opportunity to play in-depth with the updates with this release, so this is very much a rapid-fire overview based on the time I’ve had available with Lumiya 3.1. During my 90 minutes (ish) for fiddling, I encountered no problems and happily edited my profile, updated some notes on another profile, and e-mailed a number of snapshots via Gmail. Testing my Maitreya HUD went well, with pinch-zoom I could enlarge it sufficiently to tap the tabs on it, mask / show parts of my body, etc. Understandably, rendering of the HUD was a little fuzzy and made reading labels a little difficult, but anyone with a reasonable degree of familiarity with their HUD shouldn’t find this a major issue.
Alina indicates that further updates are on the way, and what we have here sees Lumiya take a further step to becoming the indispensable option for Android users needing on-the-go access to Second Life and OpenSim (data charges allowing if not on wifi!).
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