This summary is published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
Official LL Viewers
Current Release version: 5.0.0.321958, dated December 1, promoted December 5 (no change) – formerly the Project Bento RC viewer download page, release notes.
Note: this is a compressed version of an article which first appeared in Kultivate Magazine’s January 2017 issue, and which here includes some personal feedback on being peripherally involved in the project.
There can now be few – even among those having only joined Second Life in the last few months – who cannot be aware of project Bento, the work to significantly enhance the Second Life avatar skeleton to better support mesh avatar models, how they are animated and how they might be customised. I was able to observe Bento almost throughout its lifespan. As such, I thought more of a look inside the project might be of interest.
Bento’s heart comes in the form of one person: Vir Linden. Despite the avatar skeleton being one of the most fundamental parts of Second Life which could if interfered with, cause all sorts of issues, Vir was convinced things could be done to make the lot of mesh avatar creators and animators much easier, and without putting additional stress on either the simulator or the viewer. So in early 2015, he started looking at what might be achievable.
Vir Linden, Senior Software Engineer at Linden Lab, and technical project lead for Bento
By roughly April 2015 he felt he had enough information to put together a presentation he could put before senior staff at the Lab. Despite the ambitious nature of the project, potentially adding (at that time) 106 new bones to the avatar, the response was enthusiastic and positive. Troy Linden joined Vir from the Product Team, and Bento was born.
Initially, the work was in-house, involving Lab staff and the Moles. However, as the potential for the project grew, it quickly became apparent that wider expertise would be needed to both give input to the project and help steer the development work. And so it was that a core Bento User Group came together, comprising Lab staff with expertise with the viewer, with the server, and – most significantly – content creators noted for their expertise in developing mesh avatars and avatar accessories (human and non-human), and the people behind the most popular tools for avatar creation and animation: Gaia Clary and Matrice Laville (Avastar) and Cathy Foil (Mayastar).
Like, Vir, Cathy, Gaia and Matrice deserve special recognition for their work on Bento. Not only did they embrace the project and work to update their products to support Bento, they also took on a lot of the grunt work involved in updating essential code used by the viewer to make Bento happen – and they were enthusiastic about doing so. If you make use of a Bento head and are adjusting things using the sliders, offer a word of thanks to the three of them: they’re the people who carefully went through the avatar files in the viewer to get as many of the sliders as possible working with the new facial bones for you to be able to do so.
Vir Linden (foreground) and Matrice Laville (in the top hat, left) at one of the closed user group Bento project meetings (note the fellow in the top hat to the right of the picture is Rider Linden)
Bento meetings initially took place at a small desert island on Agni, the Main grid. This sat on its own channel to ensure the necessary tweaks to the simulator end of things could be made to try out ideas and options and generally lay the foundations of the project. This work progressed over a period of just over six months until there was a good level of confidence that the project could be taken to the next stage.
This involved moving things to Aditi, the beta grid, and opening things to the public at large. The use of Aditi meant that more extensive testing of simulator and viewer changes could take place, more space could easily be made available for people to experiment, and more people in general could get involved. In time, these meetings would eventually move back to the main grid. It also marked the start of my ability to publicly report Bento progress on an almost weekly basis.
Bento enables much more flexibility when creating and animating human and non-human mesh avatars
At the start of the public phase of Bento, the skeleton had stabilised with some 92 additional bones – 60 of which were evenly split between hands and head. However, as the work progressed, this number tended to vary for a time as the need for further bones was identified while some of the new bones were found to be redundant and could be removed. As the same time, additional use cases for Bento were proposed, with every effort being made to incorporate as many as practicable. There were even some fundamental shifts made in how Second Life functions so that more could be achieved through Bento.
An example of this lies with bone translations and rotations. In essence the SL animation system had always worked on the assumption that sliders only affect translation and scale whilst animations only affect rotation, allowing both to work cooperatively.As the animation system was not necessarily seen as an intrinsic part of Bento, little thought was initially given to changing it. However, during the public beta phase of the project, a strong case was made for allowing both translation and rotation through animations – and as a result, the necessary updates were made to the animation system to support this without potential conflicts occurring.
The RC channels were re-started on December 28th, 2016, to the consternation of some on the Server thread of the technology forum as there was no accompanying update. A rolling restart of the Main (SLS) occurred on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2017, again with further consternation on the thread.
However, as a quick check through the viewer can reveal, both of these operations were simply restarts to keep things running (reasonably) smoothly, as shown by the server version numbers remaining unchanged when viewed in the viewer (Help > About viewer).
No restart is anticipated for the RC channels on Wednesday, January 4th, given they were restarted at the end of December. The usual run of deployments + restarts are expected to resume in week #2 (week commencing Monday, January 9th) with the three RC channels.
SL Viewer
With the holiday break, there has been no movement with the official viewer, with four currently occupying the various pipelines:
Current Release version: 5.0.0.321958, dated December 1st, promoted December 5th – formerly the Project Bento RC viewer
Maintenance RC viewer, version 5.0.1.322513, dated December 21st – some 42 fixes and improvements + Bento support
360-degree snapshot project viewer, version 4.1.3.321712, dated November 23rd – ability to take 360-degree panoramic images – hands-on review
Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.
It had been indicated that the Lab might get a project version of their 64-bit viewer out prior to the holiday break, but this proved not to be the case.
The end of the year is once more approaching, which is often a time of reflection as we look back over the old before pausing to await the arrival of the new. It’s become something of a tradition in these pages for me to look back over the articles and coverage of the year’s events I’ve managed to write-up, and offer a chance to revisit the ups and downs and the good and the bad the last twelve months have brought us.
To keep things digestible, I’ve broken this year’s review into two parts. This one covers July to December. You can find January to June here.
Linden Lab released an update to the Oculus Rift project viewer. A I subsequently reported (see the article updates), people found it suffered significant issues, and appeared to be a step backwards. The JIRA raised for the viewer quickly grew. With a week, the Lab announced they were suspending work on Oculus Rift support in the viewer. CTRL-ALT-Studio offered to bridge the gap, but only on an interim basis.
Caledonia presented the penultimate part of her series on promoting Second Life events, and Draxtor delved into games in Second Life, through the work of Sergio Delacruz. Meanwhile, I received an invitation to find out more about the Helping Haven Community Gateway, before beaming aboard an avatar-sized replica of the original Starship Enterprise, courtesy of Cathy Foil.
Lumiya 3.0 arrived, with a host of goodies, including a new user interface. Rock Your Rack in support of the US National Breast Cancer Foundation was announced, as was the second fund-raising season for Team Diabetes of SL, while the 5th annual Shivers Unleashed music festival took place. The big news for the month, events-wise, was that PULSE SL, in support of the victims and families of those lost in the Orlando nightclub shooting had raised a staggering L$5.5 million.
Sansar
Ed Baig from USA Today presented a video spot about project Sansar. A little later, and as I reported, he later gave a matching write-up on the platform. Latter in the month, I looked at articles on Sansar from THE and Techcrunch.
Personal
I completed a full redesign of Holly Kai Park, which included the Tiered Garden Wall product by Alex Bader, which was also put to use at home. I finally caught the stunning and award-winning animation The Tyger, by Radheya Jegatheva, son of SL’s own Jayay Zifanwe, on YouTube.
Windlight announced a re-branding to Kultivate, and the Lab blogged about recent SL updates and I added some additional info and links to more in-depth coverage in this blog, which included a look at the new Gaming Islands, designed to introduce users to Skill Gaming in SL.
Firestorm updated with Jelly Dolls (or Avatar Complexity to give the formal name for the capability), and I revisited Hitomi Tiponi’s work producing the Starlight UI Skins and goodies for the official viewer from the Lab. The latter announced the new Marketplace search, so long in beta, was finally live. I also picked up on Strawberry Singh’s request to highlight the issue of SL Marketplace full permissions goods scams.
Thanks to bots discovering it, the SL wiki went into lock-down for the second time in recent years, and while the Lab indicated they hoped to have things sorted “soon”, it remains locked as we reach the end of the year. More woes hit SL in August, and April Linden explained why.
Sansar
I produced the second in my Sansar Summaries, rounding-up all the news and information on the platform I’d been able to cull from the Lab, the media and other sources. August saw the Lab announce the first batch of Sansar Creator Preview invitations had been issued. However, what interested me more was the announcement indicated that “Sansar” was now officially the platform’s title – the “project” having been dropped.
Each week through the year, I try to get to as many in-world and other meetings held by the Lab to keep an eye on technical developments and updates which are in the works for the viewer and the simulator, relaying the notable items via my SL project updates. As such, I thought it might be interesting to look back at some of the technical changes and updates have come our way in 2016.
The Big Ones
There were obviously a number of fairly high-level updates which came our way, notably Project Bento, which gave us a lot of new bones and attachment points specifically for mesh avatars to make them more flexible and easier to animate. There’s a whole story behind that project which perhaps hasn’t been told in full, so expect to read more from me on it in the New Year 🙂 .
Then there was Avatar Complexity, or Jelly Dolls as it has been more popularly dubbed (initially by Whirly Fizzle after it was pointed out the term “Jelly Baby”, as initially used was in fact a trademark). Avatar Complexity is designed to reduce the often high cost of avatar rendering by the viewer, thus lightening the load on computers / graphics cards which might otherwise struggle.
A longer-term hope may have been that perhaps it would encourage people to consider what they are wearing and how it may affect others, and even get content creators to think more conservatively about their creations, and seek to optimise them for rendering. Whether either of these latter points might be / already have come about is nigh-on impossible to judge.
The Viewer
Both Project Bento and Avatar Complexity involved some pretty substantial changes to the viewer – Bento to the degree it warranted a version number boost. But they weren’t the only significant changes. There were also 6 new Maintenance viewers through the year, bringing with them over 250 fixes, updates and improvements. Besides these the following notable viewer releases / updates also appeared through the year.
Graphics Presets
Alongside of Avatar Complexity we gained Graphics Presets, another useful means to help improve viewer performance by allowing users to save different graphics set-ups for the viewer. This means, for example, we can have a preset for taking photographs, with all the more taxing graphics options – shadows, lighting, longer draw distance, etc – can be enabled, then have another for, say, shopping, where all the bells and whistles aren’t required, helping to improve viewer performance – and we can quickly change between them without all that tedious mucking about in Preferences.
Graphics Presets (also in most TPVs) allows you to create and save your own graphics presets to suit different requirements, and which can be quickly loaded and used with just a couple of mouse clicks
If you are on a system which can struggle at times because you have your graphics settings tweaked a little on the high side and you’ve not experimented with Graphics Presets, you might want to give them a try.
Visual Outfits Browser
The Visual Outfits Browser brought with it the ability to have images associated with your Outfits (if you use the Outfits capability). Feedback on this seems to have been mixed. Many like it, while many, equally, ignore it (and I’m among the latter category).
HTTP Updates
The viewer received a lot of new under-the-hood HTTP updates, including the removal of a considerable amount of deprecated and unused code, and a series of improvements for things like image, mesh and animation uploads, inventory manipulation, the Viewer Management Marketplace, LSL script compilation, Experiences management, etc.
Voice Updates
Voice has been worked on throughout 2016, with the Lab working closely with the Voice package provider, Vivox, to improve connectivity, overcome Voice quality issues, and removed many of the known exploits as possible to prevent thinks like a user in one region eavesdropping on a conversation being held in another region.
This work has involved changes to the viewer, changes to the simulator, changes to the Voice binary package supplied by Vivox (SLVoice.exe) and even changes to the Vivox servers (Voice is routed through their own servers).
LibVLC
As Apple dumped QuickTime for Windows with potential security vulnerabilities unpatched, The Lab adopted LibVLC for media handling in the Windows viewer (and will be moving to it win the Mac and Linux viewers when their have released their 64-bit viewers). The move overcomes most issues in trying to play back media in-world, however, licensing around the Advanced Audio Coding and MP3 formats, and the way things are packaged with LibVLC might leave TPVs with a headache or two.
Inventory Handling
Aura Linden worked on removing deprecated and unused UDP inventory messaging mechanisms from the viewer. This work is to be followed by the removal of back-end support for the removed message channels, and further viewer-side work on rationalising and refactoring the code handling inventory operations.
360 Snapshot Viewer
Whilst still only a project viewer, the 360 snapshot viewer is part of a viewer / simulator project to bring 360-dgree photography to Second Life.
Linux
One unpopular move was the announcement concerning Linux development going forward (although the Lab will be building a 64-bit Linux viewer).
The Simulator and Servers
The simulator software continued through its weekly deployments throughout the year, added bug fixes, security updates, feature requests and more each month. Listing everything that happened here would rapidly turn this article into a TL;DR. However, as well as the continued deployment of simulator code updates, 2016 saw the mechanism and tools used to build the simulator undergo update, as was (/is) the underpinning server operating system running the simulators.
Support for larger animation files was introduced, with uploads increased from 120Kb to 250Kb.
Group bans finally got a tweak so that those banned from a group whilst active in group chat would finally get booted from the group chat session as well.
Experiences got a new scripted sit capability, code-named Project Espeon.
Experience scripted sits came our way in 2016 (image courtesy of Linden Lab)
And, of course, we have the increases to Land Capacity (or LI or prims, however you like to think of it).
Aditi Inventory Syncing
A new process for syncing inventory between Agni (the Main grid) and Aditi (the beta grid) was introduced, eliminating the need for users wishing to have their Agni inventory fully replicated on Aditi having to change their SL password and then wait between 24 and 48 hours (sometimes longer) for their Aditi inventory to be synced with Agni. Under the new system, a process automatically merges a copy of users’ Agni inventories with their Aditi inventory based on their last log-in to the beta grid.
There were some teething problems with the new system when first introduced (and some people report there may still be hiccups), but on the whole the new process is a lot smoother than the old.
Web Services: TLS 1.2 and More
The Lab made the switch to TLS 1.2, which had the potential to impact people’s ability to buy L$ via the LindeX / through a browser and / or add payment info to their account if they were not using a suitable viewer or web browser.
There were also numerous changes to various web properties, including updates to the SL Marketplace, the retirement of SLurl.com, various security and infrastructure updates
Grid Status Page
The Grid Status page moved to a new provider and was overhauled to be hopefully more informative, and have a faster means of update.
2017 Expectations
The lab plays their cards close to their chests when talking about upcoming changes / updates / improvements to Second Life, but here’s a (short) list of some of the things we can reasonably expect to see in 2017:
64-bit versions of the official viewer (Windows, Mac and Linux).
Possible changes / tweaks to the avatar / object complexity calculations made by the viewer, such as it being able to more easily determine those avatars in its field of view it should not attempt to fully render (rather than waiting on information from the simulator to make that determination).
Further updates to the viewer build tools (e.g. VS 2015 for Windows).
Progress on the 360 snapshot viewer.
Further work cleaning-up and rationalising the viewer code.
Voice updates for both the server and the viewer.
Continued server deployments and improvements 🙂 .
You can follow my updates on SL technical developments and updates through the likes of my weekly SL project updates and weekly viewer release summaries (which also cover TPV releases).
This summary is published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
Official LL Viewers
Current Release version: 5.0.0.321958, dated December 1, promoted December 5 (no change) – formerly the Project Bento RC viewer download page, release notes.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 