Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates for the week ending Sunday, February 16th
This summary is generally 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.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Current Release version 6.3.6.535003 and dated January 22nd, promoted January 27th, formerly the Xanté RC viewer, – No Change.
Release channel cohorts:
The EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.536347 on February 11th
Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.7.536179 on February 10th.
During the Open-Source development meeting on Wednesday, February 12th, my ears picked up at the mention of Speedlight, a browser-based means of accessing Second Life from different devices and with the need for any downloads. Curious, I trotted off to find out more.
Developed by long-term Second Life resident Glaznah Gassner, who is responsible for the SmartBot group / bot management application, SpeedLight potentially offer users an alternative means of accessing Second Life from the browser of their choice, and which has been optimised for both statics and mobile displays, making it an entirely OS agnostic means of accessing Second Life to carry out various tasks.
At the time of writing, the core functionality offered by Speedlight comprises:
View a map of your current location and list all nearby avatars.
Send and receive local chat and IMs (and view your IM history when off-line).
View your friends list, groups, and avatar profiles.
Search for other avatars.
Use group chat.
View your inventory, and carry out basic inventory tasks.
Send / L$ amounts amounts to others and view your recent transaction history.
Teleport via SLurls.
In addition, Speedlight offers two account types:
Free – all of the above capabilities, but:
Users are limited to 1 hour on-line, after which a re-log is required.
Note that this can be avoided, if preferred, by paying for additional hours at the rate of L$10 per hour from within the service.
Avatars are automatically logged out if the browser is closed.
Note that closing the active Speedlight browser tab will not log you out, only closing the browser as a whole.
Gold monthly subscription: all of the above capabilities plus:
Avatars can remain on-line for an unlimited time.
Avatar can remain on-line even if the browser is closed.
Send “mass” IMs.
Further Gold capabilities as they are added.
The application’s website also notes that capability availability for each account type may change any any time, and also lists planned enhancement to the service. These include, but are not limited to:
Group notices: regular and scheduled Status: alpha, the regular notices.
Group chat moderation.
3D world view in a browser.
The ability to send regular group notices and the 3D world view are both defined as being in an “alpha” state, although the latter doesn’t render avatars at this point.
The rest of this article is designed to provide a general overview of Speedlight and its available functionality at the time this article was written.
Sign-up and Accessing Second Life
Sign-Up
Signing-up to use Speedlight is a two-stage process:
Create a Speedlight Account, requiring a user (avatar) name, e-mail address and acceptance of the Speedlight Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Link an avatar to your Speedlight Account – a step that requires acceptance of the Speedlight Terms once more.
Note that you can link more that one avatar to your Speedlight account if you wish. Click or touch the +panel in the pre-log-in avatar list in order to do so.
Accessing Second Life
Once you have linked one or more avatars to Speedlight, and you have one or more avatars linked to your Speedlight account:
Go to you Speedlight Account page (logging-in to the service if required).
Click / touch on Avatars in the top left of the page to display the avatar panels for all of your linked avatars.
Click /touch the log-in button associated with the avatar you wish to log-in.
Supply you avatar log-in credentials (you can have Speedlight optionally save these).
Confirm you are not a robot (one time only).
Click / touch the Login Now button.
You will be returned to the avatar panel – click / touch Open to access the Speedlight display for that avatar.
When you have linked one or more avatars to your Speedlight Account, you can log into SL using any of them by clicking /touching the Login button on the avatar’s panel (l), then entering your log-in credentials (c), then clicking the Open button when you are returned to the avatar button (r). Note that the button with the gear icon of the avatar panel (outlined in red on the left) accesses the SL settings you’ve set for Speedlight (e.g. your default log-in location, shown in the avatar log-in credentials panel (c)).
The Speedlight Display and Options
When you are logged-in to SL, the Speedlight display can be split into three sections:
The options menu on the left, providing:
Access to all of your available in-world options: avatar search, Friends list, Chat, IM, Groups, Inventory, L$ and transactions.
An option to purchase additional hours for Free account use or to sign-up for a Gold subscription.
An option to access or Speedlight account settings for the avatar (default log-in location, etc.).
An option to log-out of SL.
A central information display. By default this displays the Avatar Summary providing:
Your avatar’s name, account balance and location at the top,
A map of the region showing your avatar’s position and direction of view.
A list of nearby avatars and their distance from your avatar.
Note that clicking / touching an avatar name will open the avatar search display, with the avatar in question selected and their profile displayed.
Two options on the right:
A modal displaying the avatar’s name, on-line status and the current time in SL (closed by clicking / touching the X in the top right of the modal).
A Wish List tab:
When opened, displays a list of user-requested enhancements to Speedlight, which can be voted up or down, and the option to add further ideas for enhancements.
Includes two additional tab – IM and Inventory, which I admit to not experimenting with.
Click / touch the X in the top right of the Wish List panel to close it.
The Speedlight application window, as it should appear in any browser, and with the Avatar Summary option selected
Search
Search allows avatars to be searched via a full or partial name.
A full name search, if valid will display the avatar’s Profile.
A partial name search will return an unsorted scrollable list of potential matches. Clicking / touching a name in the list will open the corresponding profile.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates for the week ending Sunday, February 9th
This summary is generally 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.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Current Release version 6.3.6.535003 and dated January 22nd, promoted January 27th, formerly the Xanté RC viewer, – No Change.
Release channel cohorts:
Yorsh Maintenance RC viewer, released on February 4th, updated to version 6.3.7.535996 on February 7th.
Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.6.535087 on February 6th.
EP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.535668 on February 4th.
The Kokua team released Kokua 6.3.6 on Wednesday, February 5th, 2019. The release brings Kokua up to parity with the Lab’s 6.3.6 code base (to the 6.3.6.535003 release – formerly the Xanté Maintenance RC, promoted on January 27th), and includes a number of Kokua-derived updates and ported TPV options.
The following notes highlight the key aspects of Kokua 6.3.6.46311. For a full list of updates and changes, please refer to the release notes.
This release sees Kokua incorporates the ability to remember username/password combinations for multiple avatars via a drop down menu added to the user name field at login.
The ability to manage saved / remembered user names is via a new Preferences option, found a a button called Remembered Usernames in the Advanced tab.
When clicked, it opens a new floater that lists all user names recorded by the the viewer, together with the grid where they have been used.
To delete an unwanted user name, click on it to highlight it, then click the Forget button at the bottom of the panel. If you want to completed remove all local data for the user name, click the check box below the button first.
The new Preferences button and floater to manage remembered users names
This release of Kokua also includes the ability to set media to Ask before playing. As Kokua already has changes which separate parcel audio and other media playing, for the new Ask feature to work you must have parcel audio set to play automatically as well (via Preferences→Sound).
Text Display Options
Previously Kokua used standard size text on script menu text and slightly smaller for menu buttons.
It is now possible to switch between standard/small text for both using new drop-down menus on Preferences→Kokua→Script. The text size control also governs the text size for the informative text on text entry boxes (llTextBox).
The two text size drop-downs and text size options. Note only one or the other can be displayed at any one time. The above is illustrative only
Other Notable Updates
World Map land sale information: previously, when viewing land for sale on the World Map, the parcel price would only be displayed when clicking the For Sale tag. This has now been revised so that the sale information is displayed when clicking anywhere in a parcel highlighted for sale.
This version of Kokua includes a port of Firestorm’s enhanced World Map region captions
It is now possible to enter a land selling price by entering the desired L$/square metre price as well as the total price.
The date display for Group Notices has been changed to ISO-style YYYY-MM-DD format which avoids a very old bug where group notice sorting would go wrong for the first few days of each new year (because the previous sort started with the month number so 12 of the previous year got sorted ahead of 01 for the current year).
RLV Specific Updates
The mouse pointer in RLV will now only change to a the required icon (hand / sit, etc.), when the action is going to be permitted (adopted from RLVa).
If a user is under RLV IM restrictions, a hint is displayed in in the IM window to inform those trying to contact them that IM communications are going to be suppressed. This allows the message to be abandoned without being sent (if it is still sent, the usual RLV message about IMs being blocked will be displayed). A similar hint is sent to Group chats, etc, ahead of the person under IM restriction trying to message others.
Kokua now offers a hint to warn people when someone is under RLV IM restrictions
Other RLV updates in this release include:
The name anonymising code for @shownames has been further improved to cope better with situations where one name is a sub-string of another.
When ALM is enabled and RLV effects based on changing RenderResolutionDivisor are in effect this used to cause the CPU and/or GPU to sometimes start running at full speed and sometimes could even result in a crash. This is now prevented by automatically temporarily disabling ALM when the RenderResolutionDivisor value gets to a point where ALM would not give any rendering benefits because the whole scene is too “blurred”. This protective code is also in the non-RLV version however RenderResolutionDivisor is less likely to be changed there.
The recent introduction of keyword alerts meant that on some occasions where @recvim should have squashed an incoming IM it would get through unaffected
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates for the week ending Sunday, February 2nd
This summary is generally 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.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Current Release version 6.3.6.535003 and dated January 22nd, promoted January 27th, formerly the Xanté RC viewer, – NEW.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates for the week ending Sunday, January 26th
This summary is generally 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.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Current Release version 6.3.5.533275, formerly the Wassail RC viewer, dated November 5th, 2019 – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Camera Presets RC viewer, version 6.3.6.535138, released on January 24th.
