Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Cypress Rosewood Contemplates New Radio Show

Well, as a result of making it through the great flood of 2010 in Nashville, TN, and recently getting another home and sort of settling down, Cypress Rosewood (the avatar name of composer/performer Tony Gerber) is actively scheduling concerts again in Second Life. After taking some time off a bit to relocate and get settled again in a new studio environment, he looks forward to continuing the collaborative whole sim performances with other Second Life artist/programmers like Kolor Fall, Tyrehl Byk, Earth Primbee, Menubar Memorial and more.

I was of course taken a back last night when the Lindens decided to restart the sim that Tyrehl and I were using for the encore performance of "Catch Yourself by Surprise - Ambient Tonalities and Particalizations." We did the first one of these last Saturday to a sold out sim with people unable to get in, hence the encore performance last night. After about 18 minutes, Lindens restarted the SIM, so basically, I just kind of restarted myself and came back to do a start from scratch, 1 hour show...

As I get resettled, I still have the option of doing another RL/SL radio show like "When World's Collide w/Cypress Rosewood" which had a great run from Jan. 2007 - Aug 2010 at the WRFN fm station here in Nashville. The WRFN studio is actually only 3 minutes from my new house... So perhaps I will come up with a new idea for a show soon. If time will allow....

Thanks JayR for letting me post here...

Welcome Cypress Rosewood Musician Extraordinaire Of SecondLife

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Over the course of my 6 years in SL I have met a lot of wonderful people. One of them just so happens to be the RL radio Talk Show Host, and Musician.

    Cypress Rosewood in SL, RL name ?

    But you can listen to his broadcast's here

http://www.radiofreenashville.org/

    And read his contribution's to this Blog coming soon.
    Enjoy :_)

JayR Cela :_)

SecondLife : Phoenix FireStorm 3.2.x.x : My Settings That Work

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Ok I have spent several days fooling around with various setting's on the newest Phoenix FireStorm V3.2.x.x

    My intention today with this post is not to do a complete review of this truly wonderful SL viewer. I'm just going to show you what works well for me, via a series of screen shots in the Preferences Menu.

































    Well we are almost finished. Let's delve into the advanced menu, and then a Debug setting I have found to be somewhat useful.

Show Radar Mini Map set to True












   

     This setting adds a mini map, which I think is pretty cool.

     There are two other settings in the Advanced Menu that are noteworthy as well, open that and un-check Limit Select Distance, and place a check mark on Disable Camera Constraints, and Show Develop Menu.

     Well that should just about do it. Please keep in mind, that you are dealing with an extremely advanced SL viewer. There are a lot of ways to customize it to suit your needs, some of the changes require a restart. But all in all this is one heck of a great and truly wonderful viewer for SecondLife.

JayR Cela :_)






Tuesday, November 29, 2011

SecondLife : Major Open GL Problems !

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Well it seem's as if the majority of problems lately dealing with things not rezzing properly, have nothing to do with the the SL TPV's  In fact all along it has been a server side issue dealing with Open GL. Hence all the abrupt and un-announced Sim restart's. This is actually a good thing though.

    I think Will Wright and Rod Humble have finally got a grip on the inner working's of the free for all laze-a-fare attitude at the Lab, and are whipping things into shape.

     From what I have heard, Open GL on the server side has been a hush hush major issue delaying numerous project's.

    So I guess we are just going to have to be glad that at least it is being addressed.

JayR Cela

SecondLife : Region Re-Start Mania : Open GL Fix's Causing Major Problems

By Avatar JayR Cela

     This seems to be happening on a regular basis lately, and it is really pissing me off ! The slap happy server team at LL is restarting servers left and right. With and without notice, it would be nice if they would stick with a schedule of some sort.

    Right in the middle of a beautiful concert by Eclectic Musician, Cypress Rosewood's solo show in the LEA Sim. BAMMM!!! / Region Restart :(













    So during this ongoing fantastic concert, and beautiful light show,  we get no notice what soever from the Lab that the sim is about to restart. That is besides the Sim owner who alerted us him self.

    So I teleported back to Cathy & mines home, and several minutes later, guess what ? the same thing, region restart.




























     This just exposes the utter incompetence of the people that did the original development work on Viewer2 and now Viewer3. And I'm talking about replacing the old Viewer 1.x style warnings with these ridiculous Toast's messages that appear briefly in the lower right hand corner of your screen for several seconds and then fade away into small icon's on the bottom work bar.

     What if you walk away from your computer for a bit, miss the message, and see these little tiny annoyances cluttering up the lower right hand corner of your screen. Hell I just usually end up deleting them !

     Don't get me wrong, Oz Linden ( LL ) Hitomi Tiponi ( Starlight ) Niranv.Dean ( Niranv's Viewer)  and Jessica Lyon of Phoenix Firestorm, are all working very hard to restore some sanity to what LL completly botched up.

     In the first place Viewer2 never, ever should have been released.in the first place. I understand that the goal was to attract and retain new potential customers via a simplified User Interface. But for crying out loud, change is not always a good thing. Especially when ya screw it up so badly !

     Henri Beauchamp ( Cool Viewer ) has managed to miraculously  back port just about everything into the V1.x series of SL viewers, except Media on a Prim, and who gives a crap about that worthless feature anyways ?

    Couple this with the inability to read stored Log Files in your history when you are contacting someone using a legacy Viewer V1.x series, that you may not have talked to in several weeks, months, years. And you can not recall the previous history of your last conversation. Well this is due to the insipid User Name, Display Name idiotic idea that literary broke numerous things in SL

    From what I have heard so far, the Lab is quietly rolling back the server software. Another thing I heard is all the Open GL fixes recently introduced are based on extremely outdated OGL standards.

    Do I come off as an extremely agitated person ? Your darn right I do, and I will continue to be fair and honest with expressing my opinion's until my congestive diseased heart gives out.

JayR Cela :(




   


SecondLife : Breaking News : The Niranv Viewer Build 8 Beta 5 Available Now !

By Avatar JayR Cela


    This just came in moments ago, the Niranv Viewer for SL, a continuation of the now defunct Kirsten Viewer has just been made available for download, from the looks of the blog post, it appears to be a major rework. I will be taking a closer look, and a test run tomorrow. You can get your copy of Build 8 Beta 5A here.


http://niranv-sl.blogspot.com/2011/11/nirans-viewer-build-8-beta-5.html


JayR Cela :_)

SecondLife : Setting Up The New Phoenix FireStorm Viewer Part 1 Teaser

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Ok, after lot's of experimentation, I have managed to get the newest FireStorm viewer running just the way I want it. This particular setting of preferences may, or may not suit everyone, but I know it works out well for me. If  you can wait until tomorrow and follow the screen shots of settings I will be posting, you will have the same configuration I am currently using.

    Believe me when I tell you, this viewer is highly customize-able. It may possibly be the best viewer yet available for SL. But I'm gonna tell ya right now it's not a Plug & Play deal. You can plan on spending several hours setting it up.

JayR Cela


SecondLife : Phoenix FireStorm V3.2.1.24179 vs. V3.2.2.24336

By Avatar JayR Cela

    As far as these two versions are concerned, which one should you install ? I am going to express my opinion's, and my opinion's only. I am not an official member of the FS development team, and your experience's may differ from mine.

    During the past week and a half I have been testing the nightly builds leading up to the official release. In that period of time I continually had problems with Anti-Aliasing artifacts on some, but not all horizontal prim edges appearing with jaggies. This same problem, was visible in the final 3.2.1.24179 version as well, but not 3.2.2.24336.

     Here is the problem, 24336 the one with the Open GL extensions was extremely slow with rendering, and I mean really, really slow. I went to a popular night club last night with about 30 avatars present, after 40 minutes I was still seeing grey textures. Extremely frustrated I logged out and fired up the standard Phoenix viewer. Every thing came into sharp focus in less than 1 minute. But .24179 although much faster at rendering had those annoying jaggies.

    So I tried something completely against my usual better judgement. After doing a through cleaning as per the Phoenix Web Page instructions, I installed FS V3.2.2.24336, got everything set as I like in preferences, logged out and installed V3.2.1.24179 on top of 3.2.2.24336.

     I know this is breaking the rules, but dammit it worked ! No more jaggies, and faster rendering. The closest thing I can even guess at is Nvidia video driver problems, as this was happening on two different computers, one with a 7300GT  512mb ram, and a G-Force 210 with 512mb ram as well.

    I think I recall something being mentioned during one of The Phoenix Hour meetings regarding problems with the most recent Nvidia drivers 265.x and up. I was using 275.x and 285.x

    I have not tried rolling back to the 24x.x series yet, and I don't think I am going to either. All I know or care about right now, is this oddball runaround installation procedure solved my problem.

JayR Cela ????????

Phoenix FireStorm : A Clean Install Is Important !

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Well now that the new version 3.2.x.x of FireStorm has been released, you are ready for installation. Please slow down before you rush forward, it is imperative that you do a clean install. There are instructions on the Phoenix web site for this procedure, http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=fs_clean_reinstall , you may want to use your favorite registry cleaner if using a Windows based machine, and while your at it running a disk fragmentation program afterwards is not a bad idea either.

    Actually this should be your standard procedure when updating any SL Viewer ! Just substitute the appropriate viewer name and related folders.

JayR Cela

FireStorm 3.2.x Still Formulating an Opinion

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Well so far, I have spent a good portion of the day exploring all the various setting's available on the new Phoenix FireStorm viewer. At this point in time I will reserve my comment's until I am able to do some further testing.

JayR Cela :(

Monday, November 28, 2011

Phoenix FireStorm Viewer 3.2.x Goes Live

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Well sometime yesterday around 7:00pm SLT the Phoenix FireStorm Viewer for SecondLife, ( and now Open Sim based grids as well ) went live. Although there is some slight confusion as to wither this is a final release or not. Two versions are available V3.2.1.24179 and V3.2.2.24336, the latter having some Open GL related fixes contributed by LL.

     I will be testing both versions later on today, stayed tuned.

JayR Cela :_)

Friday, November 25, 2011

SecondLife : Living With the StarLight Skin For Viewer 3.2.x New Version Due This Weekend !

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I just love fooling around with the newest viewers available for SL, so today I'm revisiting the most recent release of the StarLight skin. I really like this version a lot. I know the screen look's a bit busy, but everything I need, plus some extra's are right there. Easy to get to.

     This is the Nostalgia Blue skin, and of course you can rearrange these buttons pretty much anyway you like.

     At this point in time I am not recommending the automatic StarLight installer for Windows based computers, stick with the manual installation method and you should be kool.











    I think the best thing about this MOD in comparison to the standard version is that it un-taps quite a bit of the hidden potential available in Veiewer3. Now if we could somehow convince LL to consider StarLight as an optional Advanced Mode Log In option, I believe that would be a real winner.

  BTW a new version of StarLight will be ready this weekend.

JayR Cela

Thursday, November 24, 2011

SecondLife : Phoenix FireStorm V3.2.x Prerelease Info

By Avatar JayR Cela

    The past several days I have had the pleasure of using the newest nightly builds of the upcoming much anticipated Phoenix FireStorm viewer for SecondLife , and from the looks of it OS Grid as well.

     Due to a verbal NDA agreement I am unable to offer any specific information until the finished  product is available for public download. I can however offer a few teaser screenshot's, and a brief opinion.This is going to be one heck of a great viewer release.




     One thing that I personally like is the ability to make enough adjustments to various setting's and getting a nearly complete Standard Phoenix 1.5.x viewer look and feel, while retaining and using all of the extended capabilities of the V3 base platform. Even my long time SL partner Cathy, who has been using the standard viewer since V2.2 fell immediately in love with this latest nightly build.

     This will not be the end all bee all viewer for everyone. But in my opinion this is one Kick Ass Piece of Work.

The final release is ( barring any last minute glitches during final Q&A ) right around the corner

JayR Cela :_)

   
   

Monday, November 21, 2011

SecondLife : StarLight + Viewer 3.2.1.xxxx = Very Nice !

By Avatar JayR Cela

     If you are a Viewer 3 user, there is no reason to not be using Hitomi Tiponi's StarLight skin, it takes the standard LL V3 and brings it into the modern world. No changes to the underlying code are involved, simply the addition of some .XML files to bring out the hidden features all ready present in Viewer 3 and make them easily accessible. It is available for Linux, Mac and Windows, and fairly straight forward to set up, just a matter of merging the contents of 2 folders : app_settings and skins : there is also one optional file to change the way IM Tabs are stacked, floater_im_container_xml is in the StarLight Extensions folder. If you are using a Windows based computer, Hitomi has recently added a new automatic installation option, so you wont need to get your hands dirty.


    I am not a big fan of Viewer 3, but that does not mean I do not appreciate, recognize and feel it is important to report on the enormous amount of progress being made with the User Interface. The StarLight skin really makes the new V3 UI really shine.

The Standard LL V3 UI is and always has been rather dreary to look at.


    







 
        With StarLight you have a choice of 6 additional UI color schemes. Original  Orange : Original Teal : Silver Blue : Silver Pink : Mono Teal and Nostalgia Blue. There are 5 extra Tool Bar options too, Translate : Statistics : Grid Status : About Region and Google. Plus a new menu item along the main tool bar, FILM which has a number of very handy features as well.


















 

     But wait there is more, the main Preferences Menu layout has been rearranged  into a more logical system, with some additional items added along the way.

Standard                                                            StarLight



















































































    There are quite a few things to get excited about with StarLight, under the new Film Menu among the numerous very easy to access options are 3 sub menus.

Shader Toggles
































Audio Mute






























Agent Recorder






























    Another thing I really like is the revamped Graphics Menu available in Preferences. These extra options sould be of particular interest to SL photographers.

Hardware
































Rendering






























Shadows & Glow






























Global Illumination






























Depth of Field






























    There are a number of other items and features, but I will leave those for you to discover on your own, while you explore this truly wonderful enhancement to the standard Viewer 3

JayR Cela :_)

P.S. I almost forgot to mention, the newest V3 series has undergone not only a major face lift to the UI, the FPS performance has been kicked up a notch or two as well.

StarLight Download Page


http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_Skins/Starlight