Second Life Maintenance RC viewer: parcel access, trash, and more

Update, May 23rd: version 5.0.5.326444 of this viewer is now the release version of the official viewer.

On Friday, May 12th, 2017, Linden Lab issued a new Maintenance release candidate viewer – now version – 5.0.5.326444 – featuring a number of bug fixes and improvements.

In particular the viewer includes updates to reflect the revised region / parcel access controls now deployed to the main grid. It also includes improvements to inventory management and purging Trash, and a range of other improvements and updates as well as numerous bug fixes.

As per usual, this is not intended to be an in-depth review of the viewer, but rather to highlight some of the new / updated features and an overview based on the release notes.

Region / Parcel Access Controls

The new region / parcel access controls are paired with a server-side update first announced in April, and the first part of which was deployed to the LeTigre server RC  channel on Wednesday, May 17th. Until these server-side updates are deployed grid-wide, this particular set of changes in the view may not function on all regions.

In short, the new controls mean that when a region holder / manager explicitly set a region for open access by visitors (via the Region / Estate floater), parcel holders on the region will no longer be able to override the setting at the parcel level and create ban lines around their parcel. They will, however, still be able to use their parcel ban list or deploy security orbs or similar (assuming the use of the latter is allowed under any covering covenant).

This means that with this viewer, both the Estate tab in the Region / Estate floater has been updated, and the behaviour of the Access tab in the About Land floater has changed.

In the case of the Estate tab in the Region / Estate floater, the check box Allow Public Access has been removed, and a new option, Parcel Owners Can Be More Restrictive, has been added (see below).

By default, Parcel Owners Can Be More Restrictive is checked, which means that as the updated settings are deployed server-side, parcel owners should see no difference in behaviour for their parcels unless an estate holder / manager opts to make changes at the estate level (as shown in the image above).

Should the option be unchecked, the estate holder / manager making the change will receive a model warning that they are about to make a change that could affect parcel settings in the estate.

Should they go ahead and APPLY  the change, two further things will happen:

• Parcel owners will receive a new system notification for every parcel in the region they hold which has been affected by the change (below).

• Any previously active banlines around affected parcel will be removed, and parcel owners will no longer be able to set parcel access restrictions via About Land > Access, as the options to do so will be greyed out (as shown below).

If a region which previously allowed parcel holders to set their own access restrictions is set to public access (by unchecking Parcel Owners Can Be More Restrictive and clicking APPLY), and then is reverted again (by checking Parcel Owners Can Be More Restrictive and clicking APPLY), all parcels on the region will revert to the access settings applied to them before any changes to region access were made at the estate level.

Inventory Improvements

The inventory management improvements include the ability to replace outfit links (e.g. when you receive an update for an item), which has been contributed by Ansariel Hiller from the Firestorm team.

To replace the links used with an object:

• Locate the item in your inventory, right-click on it and select Replace Links.
• A dialogue box will open; note the item name is displayed in the Old field.
• Locate the new item in your inventory and drag it to the New field in the dialogue box, so the name of the item appears in the field.
• Click Start to replace all the links for the original item with links to the new item.
• A problem with missing inventory update on “Save As” in appearance panel should no longer result in multiple skins, shapes, footbases etc..

In addition,  this version of the viewer should see in an improvement in Inventory when search is cancelled, and double-clicking on a folder in the Outfit Gallery will switch to My Outfits.

Trash Behaviour Changes

To try to help with inventory losses through accidental deletion of objects which have mistakenly been moved to Trash, the Maintenance RC viewer has the following Trash related behaviour changes:

• The prompt displayed when you have over 5K items in Trash is amended to show the trash folder when you’re ready to purge it, and before you can purge it.
• Backspace will now only delete on Mac systems (as it’s the only option available), it will no longer delete on windows.
• The purging Trash notification now gives a count of items in Trash, and is unavoidable.

• The “Are you sure you want to delete this thing” warning will be seen at least once per session.

Other Updates, Improvements and Fixes

• The default volume at which media and music is played has been reduced.
• The Build floater has a new Lock Repeat option to lock texture repeats on chosen textures (presets are not affected).
• New highlighting in Block list after an item is blocked.
• Ctrl+W closes windows even when you’re logged out.
• A new Debug setting – ScriptDialogLimitations  lets you show more than one dialogue per object
• A new preference – Preferences > Chat > Auto-complete gestures in nearby chat – for those times you’re doing something else with the “/” trigger.
• Added a debug setting “MaxAttachmentComplexity” to increase per-attachment render limit.
• Uninformative alerts are now more informative.
• New test items in the viewer UI have been localised for other languages.
• Changed menu item to better expose the super useful Region Objects floater.

Fixes:

• Uploads:
  • Bounding box no longer incorrectly defined during upload, which could lead to incorrect LOD and physics mesh stretching
  • Time-out for bulk image uploads has been extended, and additional logging added to find other causes of Image upload failures.
  • Fixed a crash in Upload Model floater.
• Chat & Note cards:
  • The URL for an object’ IM will no longer “eat” some chat.
  • Text chat block now works separately from Voice chat block.
  • Incoming IMs no longer steal focus.
  • A fix to prevent mixed line endings causing problems when pasting into a note card.
  • Chat history layout bugfix.
• Building and such:
  • Build floater correctly displays icons for owner and creator.
  • When deeding to group objects, permissions should now be checked against owning group instead of active one.
  • Spurious “Cancelled Sit” and “Cancelled Autopilot” messages eliminated from the viewer.
  • Fully transparent objects can now be selected.
  • Repeats per Meter now allows the input of negative values and doesn’t reset them in the spinner.
• Miscellaneous:
  • A fix for a remote exploit issue.
  • A fix for Mac crashes due to on-line / off-line notifications.
  • Clean-up of the viewer logs.

Feedback

Beyond testing the access control on Aditi  – my thanks to Whirly for being the estate manager with me 🙂  – I’ve not actually tested this RC viewer at length, so can offer no feedback on stability, etc. However, the revised access controls are straightforward enough to grasp.

The changes to Trash behaviour should hopefully reduce inventory losses that can be attributed to issues in accidentally deleting objects which shouldn’t be in Trash, by encouraging us to check the Trash folder more closely prior to purging, and in keeping better track of what we are deliberately trashing (and thus an eye out for things which may have incorrectly found their way there).

If you want to test  the viewer for yourself, go to the Second Life Alternate Viewer page and download the Maintenance RC viewer (located in the Second Life Release Channel section). Note that the link given at the top of this article is to the version of the viewer relevant at the time this review was written.