Category: News-Opinion

Lab issues important update on Second Life viewer evolution

Posted on by Inara Pey

Linden Lab have issued a blog post on upcoming changes / evolutions in the Second Life viewer, most of which will hopefully be familiar with readers of these pages – particularly my project updates and viewer notes.

In Important Viewer Evolution Update, the Lab outline three developments coming to the official viewer, and also indicate the ending of support for some versions of Windows and Mac OSX. The three developments are:

  • The Project Bento avatar skeleton extensions. For those needing an introduction to Bento, which adds enormous new capabilities to the SL avatar skeleton when working with mesh bodies and attachments, please refer to my Project Bento updates.
  • 64-bit viewer support. The Lab is working on 64-bit versions of the viewer for Windows and Mac. A project viewer is expected “real soon now”, and should offer much improved memory handling and reduced crash rates for 64-bit OS users. The 32-bit Windows version of the viewer will continue once the 64-bit arrive, and the Lab’s advice is that for those who can, to switch to 64-bit when available (or with a TPV, most of whom offer 64-bit versions).
  • Introduction of VLC for better media support. In April, Apple announced they were immediately ceasing support for QuickTime on Windows, leaving some potential security vulnerabilities unpatched (see my article here). As a result, the Lab has implemented media support using  LibVLC for Windows. A release candidate viewer is currently available via the Alternate Viewers wiki page. A Mac switch to VLC is anticipated when the 64-bit versions of the official viewer arrive

OS Support Changes

In the post, the Lab also announce that from this week (week #38 2016 at the time of writing) discontinuing support for the following operating system versions:

  • Windows Vista
  • Mac OS X versions less than 10.9.

The Lab note that the viewer may continue to operate on those OS versions which are no longer supported, but they won’t be testing against them or attempting to fix any compatibility issues related to them.

With this part of the announcement, the Lab note that Apple has released OSX 10.12 Sierra, which has caused some Mac users issues. They therefore offer this advice:

We do have reports that installing this upgrade will clear your Second Life inventory cache. Normally, that should only cause some performance impact as the cache is reloaded, but in some cases at least in current viewers it causes your avatar to appear as a cloud (see BUG-37653). The workaround is to open your Inventory, find an outfit folder, and drag the outfit folder onto your avatar; after this, you can modify your appearance using any of the usual methods.

Required Viewer Update

Finally, and as a result of recent and upcoming changes to the viewer, the Lab note that they will be making upgrades from any Viewer version older than 4.0.5 a required update, and in line with the ending of support for Vista and Mac OSX versions below 10.9, they have updated the SL system requirements.

Lab seeks Halloween photos for Second Life campaign

Posted on by Inara Pey

Second Life Community Manager Xiola Linden has blogged about an opportunity for residents to have their photographs featured in an upcoming Halloween e-mail and selected banner campaign.

In the post, Xiola notes:

Share your pic on our Official Flickr Page with the tag “SLHalloween2016” so that we can see all of your amazing work. You may submit as many as you like between now and October 5, 2016. Please include your avatar name in the image description so that we know who to credit!

We’ll showcase the chosen image(s) in an email to Residents, as well as in some banner campaigns. We’ll let the chosen image creators know via Flickr.

Images should be taken in-world and be Halloween themed in order to qualify. They should also be appropriate for all audiences.  Xiola also offers some submission tips:

  • Layout:
    • The main content of your image should be near the center and to the right of the image – similar to the images you’d see on the Second Life login page.
    • Horizontal images work best.
  • Show your avatar or avatars in a scene in-world – an image that tells a story is going to make an impression.
  • Keep your image free of additional text/logos.
  • Higher resolution images work best.

 

The official blog post includes a couple of example images to help visualise finished banners / headers.

So, if you fancy having a go – snap away, and good luck!

Ladyslipper Constantine: celebrating a life in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

ladyslipperAs many of us are aware, long-time Second Life resident Ladyslipper Constantine passed away on Saturday, September 17th, 2016.

Having joined Second Life in May 2008 and deaf, Ladyslipper (or L.S., as she liked to be known, having taken her name from the flower of the US state she lived in for many year: Minnesota) quickly became involved with Virtual Ability  (you can read more about her on the VAI website), and also joined Burn 2, becoming a leading member of DRUM, as well as being a Burn2 Ranger.

In addition to these activities, Ladyslipper was very involved in Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education events, many Second Life Birthday celebrations, and more recently, with One Billion Rising.

Ladyslipper lost her life to cancer, passing away peacefully on the 17th, surrounded by loved ones. For all those who knew her, I’ve received notice from Gentle Heron of Virtual Ability that, VAI will be hosting a Celebration of Ladyslipper’s life on Saturday, October 1st, starting at 11:00am SLT on the north-east lawn of Virtual Ability island.

“The celebration will begin with some of her friends offering memories in text and voice,” Gentle says of the event, “because LS was part of the deaf community in SL. There will be a slide show of the many events LS participated in. And there will be music and dancing. LS loved a good party.”

To help with the celebration of Ladyslipper’s life, VAI are asking that if anyone does have  images of Ladyslipper at SL events which might be included in the slide show, to please consider passing them to iSkye Silverweb.

Further details can be obtained in-world from Gentle Heron, Eme Capalini, or Treasure Ballinger.

My condolences to Ladyslipper’s loved ones, and all who knew and worked with her.

VOB viewer reaches release status in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeOn Thursday, September 15th, the Lab promoted the Visual Outfits Browser (VOB) as the de facto release viewer, version: 4.0.8.319463.

For those who missed my coverage of this viewer when it reached RC status, and simply put, the VOB viewer allows you to use the Appearance floater to capture / upload / select images of your outfits and save them against the outfits in a new Outfit Gallery tab within the floater.

The new Outfits Gallery tab (right-click your avatar > select My Appearance > Outfits Gallery) displays all of your created outfits as a series of folder icons, each one displaying the name of the outfit beneath it. You can replace these icons with an image of the outfit quickly and easily in one of three ways:

  • You can wear the outfit, then right-click on its associated folder icon and select Take a Snapshot (shown above left). This will open the snapshot floater with save to inventory selected by default, allowing you to photograph yourself wearing the outfit and upload the image to SL, where it automatically replaces the folder icon for the outfit
  • You can use Upload Photo to upload an image of the outfit your previously saved to your hard drive, and have it replace the folder icon
  • You can use Select Photo to select any image previously saved to your inventory (including any image supplied with the outfit in question, if appropriate), and use that to replace the folder icon for the outfit.
The Visual Outfits Browser viewer is another of the forthcoming updates mentioned in the official blog post, and you can read my overview as well
The new Outfit Gallery tab in the Visual Outfit Browser allows you to create photos of any outfits saved to My Outfits as thumbnails. You can then use the Appearance floater to scan your outfits to decide what to wear, and use the context menu to wear the one you want

When using the capability there are a number of points to keep in mind:

  • Both the Take a Snapshot and the Upload Photo options will incur the L$10 upload fee, with the images themselves saved in your Textures folder
  • In all three cases, link to the original images are placed in the outfit folder
  • This approach only works for outfits you’ve created using the Appearance floater / the Outfits tab. It doesn’t work for any other folders where you might have outfits – such is the Clothing folder.

Overall, it would seem that the VOB viewer has received favourable feedback by many of those who have used it during its time as a release candidate viewer. I confess, I cannot offer any real feedback, as I actually don’t used the Outfits folder that much. However, with its arrival as the de facto release viewer, expect to be seeing it in more TPVs (those which haven’t already adopted the code) as they continue to update.

Related Links

Bento project reaches RC status in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Bento: extending the avatar skeleton
Bento: extending the avatar skeleton

OK, I admit I wasn’t expect this until next week, but on Wednesday, September 14th, the Lab  announced that Project Bento is now officially available as a release candidate viewer – version 5.0.0.319688 – which can be obtained through the Alternate Viewers wiki page.

And just in case anyone has missed all the Project Bento news, the best way is to catch-up through the official video. In short, Bento adds a wealth of new bones to the basic avatar skeleton (30+ to heads / faces and to hands alone!), making a wealth of new avatars (humans and non-human) and mesh wearables possible.

The reason I wasn’t expecting the viewer to get promoted just year is that the Lab also has a proof-of-concept viewer being tested, so I assumed any push to RC would come after a decision had been made on incorporating those changes (if they are to be adopted). So, not for the first time, I’m been wrong 🙂 .

The move to release candidate status doesn’t mean the project is at an end. There is still further work to be done as remaining bugs are fixed, etc  (so updates such as the slider locking in the proof-of-concept might yet arrive in the viewer). What it does do is three things:

  • Makes the viewer available to a wider audience through the Lab’s RC distribution mechanism, thus allowing any unforeseen issues in merging the Bento code into the current release viewer code (and which may be outside of direct Bento testing) to be identified and fixed
  • Potentially makes the viewer more widely available to content creators who may not have so far tried the viewer
  • Means that TPVs can now officially start incorporating the Bento code into their viewers (in fact, Cool VL Viewer has had Bento in its Experimental branch from some time, and Firestorm have also been working to merge the Bento code as well – but this shouldn’t be taken to mean there will be a new release of the latter in  the near future).

In keeping with the status of the Bento code, the Lab do ask people – particularly avatar content creators – to give the viewer a go,  and to file a JIRA against any issues found.

As noted above, Bento offers a range of opportunities for mesh wearable and avatar creators – you can see a couple of video exploring the AK and Catwa preview Bento mesh heads in my SL project update. Also, back in August, Vista Animations produced a video illustrating the potential of finger animations:

Then, of course, there is a huge range of non-human avatars: centaurs, “rideables”, winged creatures – all of which can be achieved a lot more efficiently through Bento than has previously been the case.

Teager's Bento Raptor using Bento bones
Teager’s Bento Raptor using Bento bones

So – get ready for the Bento Revolution!

Additional Links

Windows 10 OpenGL issue affecting some Second Life users

Posted on by Inara Pey

win10-logoUpdated, October 7th: AMD and Nividia have released drivers which should hopefully address this issue. See the comment from Lee McKay (below), and my article here.

In August, Microsoft issued their Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which result in some problems for users around the world, notable with the operating system locking-up or freezing (see this Reddit thread as an example).

As a result of the issues, Microsoft issued a series of hotfixes and updates, culminating in a Cumulative Update KB3176938.

However, since its release on August 31st, 2016, KB3176938 has given rise to renewed Windows 10 / OpenGL issues  which are impacting a number of games – and also impacting Second Life.

Whirly Fizzle has raised a JIRA on the problems – BUG-37795 (based on a Firestorm filing by Vicky Aura (FIRE-20034). The issue is intermittent, but when encountered, results in exceptionally low FPS rates (on the order of 1 or 2 fps). The issue tended to occur when moving focus away from Second Life to another running application, and then switching back. Whirly reports that on some systems this problem is intermittent but on other systems it will reproduce after the viewer has lost focus for the first time in a session.

The issue has also been raised on the Microsoft forums by Firestorm developer Ansariel Hiller – but do note, the issues is not related just to the use of Firestorm, other SL viewers can be affected.

Currently, if you are a Windows 10 user and being hampered by this issue, the only known workaround is to uninstall KB3176938. Again, as Whirly points out in the JIRA, How To Geek provides instructions on how to do this – and please refer to the comment from Torric below, when doing so.

Again, please note this is not a Second Life problem, it is an issue within Windows 10 affecting assorted applications and games using OpenGL.

With thanks to Whirly Fizzle.