It appears that Viewer 3.0 is about to arrive on our doorsteps.
Now, before you all start jumping up and down, it’s not another new version of the Viewer – well, not exactly – nor is it in any way an admission that Viewer 2 has “failed”.
Rather, it is all part of the arrival of mesh across the Main grid and not indicative of any major overhaul of the Viewer.
Opensource Obscure was the first to notice the change, and his digging got the following comment from Oz Linden, “the transition to the version number of 3 points to support the introduction of ‘import of 3D models’” (i.e. mesh).
Interestingly, the version number is on the latest development Viewer (3.0.1 (238085), dated 9th August) which does not support mesh; whereas the latest mesh project Viewer issued earlier the same day retains a 2.8 release number (2.8.2.(238103)).
Speculation is that the new version number will be officially announced at this weekend’s SLCC, ahead of the planned completion of mesh roll-out, which is due at the end of August.
Addendum
At 14:48 PDT, Linden Lab announced a Beta release of “Viewer 3.0.0” with mesh support was available for download and trial.
As has been widely reported, Linden Lab have updated the Viewer 2 splash / log-in screen with version 2.8.1.
The new screen, available in both Basic and Advanced modes is a completely new, and interactive layout which may well encourage newcomers to SL to explore and take a dip in things – and could well help users who are logging-in specifically to attend an event to get to it from the off, and without having to log-in to home, or somewhere and dig-out a landmark.
The new screen features 5 distinct areas:
The Editor’s Choice: twelve images of locations within Second Life
Use the left / right arrow buttons below and to the right of the images to page through them
Hover the mouse over an image to display further information about it, including an option to set it as your current logging-in point when you click on the log-in button
The What’s Hot Now bar which features eight “pages” of four destinations apiece that are proving popular
Locations apparently selected on the basis of the number of avatars currently in attendance
Page through the list 4 locations at a time using the left /right arrow buttons
Hover the mouse over a location for further information and the option to add it as your Start At point when you log-in this time
The Destinations bar
Multiple pages of destinations in Second Life sorted into categories which can be selected from a drop-down list (see image above)
Page through the list 4 locations at a time using the left /right arrow buttons
Hover the mouse over a location for further information and the option to add it as your Start At point when you log-in this time
To the right of these are two text areas drawn from the same feeds that server your dashboard at http://www.my.secondlife.com:
An Upcoming Events feed which lists the current events listed in your dashboard and which can be paged through using the left / right buttons. Clicking on an event does two things:
Displays a pop-up with further information on the event
Updates your Start At location to deliver you to the venue when you log-in (a warning that this has happened is also displayed in the pop-up)
A Blogs Feed that features all current LL blog entries found on the dasboard, but without any streaming into familiar categories (“Featured News”, “In-world”, etc.). Clicking on a blog title open-up a pop-up window and displays the blog entry in a scrollable format (below).
Overall, the new approach is a nice idea. Were I to pick any issues with it at all, it would be:
The lack of any Grid Status display – that there is none is utterly and completely short-sighted; if there are issues in-world, people have the right to know before money or goods are put at risk through asset server errors and suchlike. Yes, it may spoil the nice shiny hue to SL, but not including such a listing and ensuring it is updated ASAP a problem occurs is a pretty glaring omission – as Rodvik, if you’re reading this and given your promise to get better notification of issues and problems out to users, this oversight needs fixing
The lack of any info relating to current and 60-day logins is also unfortunate, and one has to wonder at the logic behind removing it.
Overall, and interesting approach lacking a couple of features, but one that may encourage people to start exploring more, and help newcomers to seek out places of interest and potentially avoid getting unpleasantly dumped into one of the many (un)welcome areas within SL.
Update
At SLCC 2011, Brett Linden, Managing Editor at the Lab, reviewed the new log-in screen, commenting that it is currently “version 1” and the Linden Lab would like feedback on it in terms of how people are using it, information displayed, etc. Brett and the Editorial Team can be contacted at editor@lindenlab.com.
Some may count this post as premature, but given we’re now into July, and what is coming down the road, I’m getting my goodbyes in early.
Viewer 1 has been with us since Second Life opened its doors. Over the years, it has seen features added, tools moved around, the capability for API elements to be introduced (perhaps the most widely-used being Marine Kelley’s Restrained Love Viewer); the code has been open-sourced, allowing a raft of famous (and not a few infamous) Viewers to come into use: the OnRez Viewer, Cool Viewer, Rainbow Viewer, Meerkat, Imprudence, Phoenix and of course the “Devil incarnate” itself: Emerald (and that’s without mentioning the various “blackhat” Viewers).
Many changes to the Viewer were welcome (remember the introduction of the first skin option? of Windlight?), many were being decried and striking fear in the hearts of some even before they rolled out (remember the hoo-haw in some camps over the arrival of Voice?); others were met with much facepalming and LL’s apparent failure to grasp how people used their viewer (remember the consternation when the chat windows all changed and “communicate” turned up?). Some of the criticism aimed at the Viewer and LL was justified; a lot of it wasn’t. But through it all, Viewer 1.x, in all its many guises has remained a perennial favourite among Second Life users. Not even the demise of the official 1.x series of Viewer did much to put a dent in this: people simply switched over to V1-based TPVs in preference to going over the Viewer 2.
Viewer 1.18 at the Windlight launch (with thanks to Eckhard Jager)
Now all of that is about to change. In truth, the writing has been on the wall for V1-based Viewers for the last 12 months or so: ever since Linden Lab depreciated all versions of their Viewer prior to 1.23.5 and then turned off Snowglobe work in favour of Snowstorm for Viewer 2.x.
Snowglobe showing the silver skin (thanks to SamanthaS Nightfire)
From this month, however, even those using V1 TPVs are going to have to consider where they are going to move to next. As LL remind us (via retweets of this announcement, at least through @SecondLife), mesh commences its roll-out this month, starting with, I understand, the Blue Steel Release Channel prior to the remaining Release Channels & the rest of the main grid being mesh-enabled by the end of August.
Ergo, if people want to see mesh objects, they are going to have to move to a V2-based viewer. What’s more, unless the TPV developers have persuaded LL otherwise, it is possible those wanting to upload mesh imports will be forced to use Viewer 2 for this purpose, given LL were looking to ring-fence this capability (whether this is still the case is unclear – like much else around mesh).
Mesh: heralding the end of the road for Viewer 1 TPVs (model by Timmi Allen)
Nor does the bad news for Viewer 1 end there; Oz Linden is on record as saying that developers of such Viewers are facing an uphill battle: “[A]ny Viewer that isn’t being actively maintained is going to start having fairly serious problems over the next months. We’re making a lot of changes… if viewers don’t keep up, things will break.”
The fact is, it will become harder and harder for TPV devs to try and maintain Viewer 1 code. Kirstenlee Cinquetti saw the writing on the wall over a year ago, and has moved over entirely to the development of the outstanding S21 Viewer. Announcements made at the end of last year concerning the future of the Viewer 1 Search prompted Phoenix and Imprudence to start down the road to developing a V2-based Viewer each. While Imprudence are still putting effort into their V1-based 1.4 Viewer, it is evident that their longer-term aim is not merge this work into their V2 Kokua Viewer, while Phoenix already have the outstanding Firestorm available. Individual TPV developers are also transitioning: Lance Corrimal hasn’t done anything significant with his V1-based Viewer since the end of April, while his V2-based Viewer comes on in leaps and bounds.
It is going to take a while for mesh to really make its presence felt – assuming, again, that the roll-out goes smoothly and without any major updates; it’s also possible that some TPV developers will look to try and backport the Search 2 functionality into their offerings in the hope of keeping things alive. So it’s possible that some may try to cling to Viewer 1 for a little longer; but while it may be seen as an unpopular statement in some quarters, the era of Viewer 1 really is now drawing to a close.
I don’t say that with any sense of superiority (I am an unabashed V2-based Viewer convert – Firestorm and Kirstenlee’s S21); I started out with Viewer 1 (version 1.14 or 1.15), and personally have no problems with it. But, sad to say, we all come to a time where, for better or worse (depending on one’s own feelings), we must move with the tide.
And the tide is now assuredly flowing to Viewer 2’s shore.
Linden Lab are certainly ramping-up Viewer 2. On top of yesterday’s announcement about the inclusion of Windlight settings for sim owners, comes the release of Viewer 2.7.1 with – among other things, “real time” shadows.
Users of many TPVs will already be familiar with the use of Dynamic Shadows, but until now, these haven’t been available in the “official” Viewer 2. This new release changes all that – and what’s more, it does so with less of a performance compromise for many GPUs.
I don’t have a top-end PC or graphics system – I have a 3-year-old Q6600 quad core and a 1Gb nVidia Ge9800. It can render shadows, but the performance hit means that the Viewer is pretty much crippled as far as doing anything else is concerned (although Kirstenlee’s marginally less so that the like of Phoenix).
With Viewer 2.7.1, however, I find the “hit” to be a lot less: fps tumbles to around 18, but that is massively better than the 5-8 fps I get elsewhere. I can actually walk around and do things! Viewer 2 also renders shadows far more crisply than I can get with other Viewers.
Me and my shadows: Phoenix (left) and Viewer 2.7.1 (right). Note how in Phoenix the Alpha Mask fails to hide my feet & the blobby shadow I cast. no such issues in Viewer 2..7.1
Another problem I get with Phoenix and the like when dynamic shadows are enabled is that items of prim clothing can flicker on avatars around me and alpha masks frequently fail (so that people’s feet are visible through there shoes). This is probably an artefact of my graphics card…but Viewer 2 eliminates it completely!
Combine shadows with the depth-of-field option (which creates a natural blurring of objects in accord with distance) and set the occulsion option, and you can get some stunning shadow effects, day and night.
The new release isn’t limited to the shadows option, either. Further improvements have been made to Search – although I’ve not actually tested that, to be honest.
Driving 2.7.1 with shadows enabled left me feeling very happy. My system may not render as well as more recent machines, but the fact that I can finally move around and interact and have smooth camera movement with shadows enabled is a massive plus.
I just hope that whatever LL have done with the code finds its way into Firestorm – while it has the same lighting options – doesn’t appear to have them implemented as yet (at least, they make no difference on my machine). When that happens, I’ll be one very happy little bunny: a much improved user interface and shadows! Bliss!
Linden Lab has released the Windlight Project Viewer for Viewer 2. This is a much-anticipated Viewer that puts Windlight environmental controls directly into the hands of sim owners.
Most of us are familiar with Windlight presets – they allow us to alter the day / night settings and general ambience of the sim we’re in – so you can make it foggy or give it a psychedelic sunrise – but until now, these effects have been restricted to your Viewer – everyone else will see things howsoever they’ve set the time of day / whatever Windlight settings they like.
With the new Windlight Project Viewer all this changes: howsoever the sim owner sets the sim’s Windlight defaults will automatically be reflected in the Viewers of visiting avatars. So, if you have a role-play sim that is set in London of the 1880s, you’ll be able to set the sim’s environment to reflect this: nighttime, foggy, etc., – any everyone entering the sim will see precisely that by default – unless and until you opt to change it for your own personal view.
As the Linden Lab announcement warns, any effects set server-side will initially only be seen by those people using the Windlight Project Viewer – but as the code is incorporated in the main viewer 2 code base, so defaults and settings will be seen by everyone.
This is pretty cool stuff, especially for those with themed sims and role-play sims, and kudos to LL for getting the controls into the server code!
Windlight and me: four views of my home, three using Windlight presets. The ability to set a sim’s environment through Windlight is now available in the Windlight Project Viewer
You can find the Viewer on the Windlight Project Viewer wiki page.
Linden Lab have released a new Viewer Project to sit alongside their exiting Mesh-enabled Alternative Viewer. This is the Search Project Viewer, which is promising to deliver a new and better Search experience in Viewer 2.
Given that Search has long been a contention where Viewer 2 is concerned – where it initially started out as a massive step backwards in so many respects – the fact that LL have moved it to a dedicated Viewer should be welcome news, in that it gives people the opportunity to properly test the new features, provide feedback and for LL to finally ensure that Search is providing what the user community wants and expects.
I’m not going to go into a long review of the new engine – Ciaran Laval has already done that, and I see no reason to repeat the work he’s done. Certainly the new Search looks very promising, although some of the more irritating problems with the engine remain – such as the number of steps you have to go through simply to be able to see the information you want to get to, regardless of the fact that the Search engine can finally now locate it.
What is interesting to note is that Linden Lab state in the blog post that:
New search will soon be available to you in the official SL Viewer and we will not be implementing it for the 1.23 Viewer. To be clear, you can still use the 1.23 Viewer, but search functionality will be impaired once new search is released into general availability, after the test period.
Specifically, searches using the ALL and GROUP tabs of the 1.23.x Search will be impaired. So, where does this leave existing 1.x-based Viewers? Again the blog post provides a part of the answer:
(We cannot speak to which Third-Party Viewers will adopt the new search technology.) All of our development efforts are focused on making SL Viewer with Basic and Advanced modes exceptional for all Residents–new and seasoned.
In other words, as far as the “official” version of Viewer 1, already frozen in development in many respects, this pretty much marks the end of the road, and it will by up to TPV developers themselves to overcome any functional impairments in search by adopting the new “search 2”. How easy / difficult this might be remains to be seen, but it would certainly seem to add to the burden 1.x TPV developers are having to carry in their attempts to keep things going.
Given that many are already producing Viewer 2 alternatives (Dolphin 2, Firestorm, Kokua, Kirstenlee’s S21, to name but four), this might push them towards making a full and final switch to Viewer 2-based development and allowing any 1.x Viewer offerings they have depreciate. This many not be a popular move among the wider user community should it happen, but the fact is – and Oz Linden has pointed out – there is a lot coming down the tracks in terms of new functionality within the Viewer that trying to maintain two code bases, or simply trying to backport functionality into the older code, may simply reach a point where it is no longer viable.
If you wish to try out the Project Search alternative Viewer, you can fins the downloads on the Alternative Viewer wiki page.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 