Project SnowStorm Veiwer 2 Nightly Build v.2.4.0.213450

It's Friday again, and the weeks cumulative results from the nightly SnowStorm builds is ready for a drive around the block. I have been attending the teams daily SCRUM meetings several times a week, and am quite impressed with the way they are handling the situation. So my current plans are to take the Friday build out for a spin each weekend. If you are a V2 fan ( user ) already, there is no need for a review of the current stable release, please remember that the nightly ( weekly ) builds, are not considered as stable releases, they are not even in a Beta status yet. If you are comfortable with Alpha software testing, by all means, download one and try it out. If you are not, I hope that my post's will help keep you up to date, with the rapid changes taking place with Viewer 2.

This particular version loaded very quickly, all of my settings remained in tack, from the previous build, I did not have to reload 6 or 7000 items to my inventory upon initial log-in. Frames Per Second ( FPS ) seems to have taken a hit in the performance department from previous versions I have tested, but are still on par with any of the 1.x series viewers. So I took it to one of the more busy Sim's I know of, "Bare Rose of Tokyo" Clothing.

Bandwidth was extremely high and steady, virtually no packet loss. FPS was rock solid, all textures rezzed almost instantaneously. Quite impressive to say the least.

So it seems that the SnowStorm team is very focused on the Fast portion of the "Fast,Easy,Fun" metaphors. Easy, well its getting better, albeit more slowly than I care for, Fun? a definite no in my opinion. I still do not care for the User Interface. One thing that really continues to bother me, is the weird way that V2 treats tear off windows, and that's just it, they are not tear offs. You need to un-dock and re-dock them from and to the sidebar, they have limited re-size control, couple this with a lack of semi-transparency as you move focus from one window to another, while the previous windows remain opaque, is just lousy design, that results in a total pain in the ass while building. And the camera control is still way over sized, and opaque as well.

All in all, I will have to say, this viewer is moving in the right direction, but still has serious UI design flaws that need to be addressed. I keep hearing talk in the meetings that that these issue's will be dealt with soon.

After 2 hours of use, I experienced no odd problems of any sort, and feel that if you are a V2 user this is a stable enough release to use on a daily basis until next weeks Friday night release.

JayR Cela :_)

The Phoenix Veiwer Team Gets Ready to Tackle Viewer 2 / Asking for User Input on Project FireStorm

Well Jessica Lyon ( former LL employee ) and head of the Phoenix Viewer Team, just posted "Your Voice, Your Choice" on the official blog http://www.phoenixviewer.com/

Basically she is saying to us, ( unlike LL ) the Phoenix team actually cares about its users, and would like some input while this new Viewer based on the Labs V2 code, is under development.

I admit that recently Esbee, Merov and Oz Linden of the SnowStorm V2 team, have been much more open to comments and suggestions, I sincerely hope that it's not a case of ~ 2 little 2 late ~ because they are making tremendous progress with the nightly builds.

Personally I am a very big fan of the Phoenix Viewer, and I admit to slowly warming up to actually liking V2 in its test build form. But I can hardly wait to get my hands on this new Project FireStorm from Jessica & Company.

Soon we will get a chance to see what V2 is actually capable of.

So fire up your E-Mail client and put your 2cents worth into the pot.

JayR Cela :_)

Imprudence Virtual Worlds Viewer / Experimental v1.4.0 2010.10.23 / Big Thumbs Down

July 30 this year I reinstated this blogg in order to offer reviews of some of the different viewers available for SecondLife and various other OpenSimm grids. During that time I have wanted to review the Imprudence Viewer, but never felt I could really give it a fair shot, to many bugs, poor performance, wierd feature set.

Well finally, today I decided to load the latest Experimental Build. The only visible improvement I can see is that they made the mini map re-sizable down to an acceptable scale. If you have a very fast high performance rig, and extremely quick internet connection, you may find it adequate for grid hopping. Other than that, there is no way I can recommend this viewer to anyone. I even spent an hour combing through the debug settings trying to coax some extra performance, but to no avail. If you are a TPV Dev. you may want to toy with the source code, but for casual use, total thumbs down.

It is plagued by blurry textures, an almost nonexistent FPS of 1.5 Admittedly this is an experimental build, and a new one is introduced every weekend. I'll give it another try in late November or early December. As it stands right now, they do have a stable 1.3 version available. But for the mean time I intend to spend more time following advancements made to Viewer 2 and the SnowStorm team.

I really do not enjoy having to post such a negative review, of any ones hard work, and devotion, but I am being totally unbiased here. If any readers have experienced different results than myself, I would appreciate comments and an opportunity to offer a rebuttal.

JayR Cela :(

SecondLife (R) Group Chat Broken Again / Do we Really Need to be testing 3 Different Server Versions Live ?

Well here we go again, group chat is seriously on the blink, LL is struggling with a balancing act to deploy 3 different versions of their server software on the back end. Will they ever wake up, I doubt it :(

SecondLife (R) Viewer 2.3 Beta goes Live / Beta 2.4 on the Loose / Display Names Feature is Garbage and should be Sent to the Trash where it Belongs

Wow the Project SnowStorm Team is really kicking some butt, with their release schedule. A lot of improvements have been incorporated, and I can see that quite a bit of functionality from the 1.x series viewers is slowly being incorporated into V2. Some of the new features however are completely worthless, Display Names is one of them. We don't need another worthless feature tacked onto a seriously flawed UI. Who needs it, what is its purpose, teeny bopper hysteria? 


I just came from Jack Lindens meeting today, Lot's of seriously pissed off people,especially from the merchants, search is still messed up beyond belief, magic boxes not working. Jack seems to remind me of the omnipotent Q from ST Next Generation. He just don't get it. At least Esbee, Merov and Oz have a firm grip on things. They are listening to people and incorporating changes as quickly as it is possible for them to do so.

I skipped the 2.3 Beta, and am using 2.4, Its pretty nice, everything loads quickly, the UI is gradually improving, and lets face it 1.25.x is a dead issue. I suspect by years end, all of the TPV's will have started development on V2 code base, albeit with different User Interface enhancements. Keep an eye on the Phoenix team. This viewer is headed up by former LL employee Jessica Lyon. I believe there their will be one more release of Phoenix based on 1.x then a V2 version with a completely revamped UI.

In closing, Jack Linden, why are you admitting openly in your in world meetings that resources are stretched to thinly at LL to tackle significant problems like in world search, a borked Marketplace, and you still want to stroke your pet puppy Display Names? It is a completely worthless piece of crap unnecessary feature.

SecondLife(R) C# to Replace LSL / Mono 2.6 UpGrade / Larger Prims

As I mentioned earlier things are really changeing at LL and with SL in general, I will just pass along a few things being rumored at the various LL meetings.
# 1 C# will soon be the scripting language in SL, the only problem is there are no plans to make it backward compatable with LSL, huge mistake on the labs part.
# 2 I guess that is where Mono 2.6 will come into play, Mono is an interpreted intermediate language. All this stuff is up in the air right now, all I can say is, if the amount of time learning LSL is simply tossed out the window in favor of C#, then the lab has really blown it. Hopefully the Mono 2.6 upgrade will ease the change.
# 3 The real big thing to look for is huge prims, no longer shall we be limited to 10*10m prim maximum size, this seems to be an unexpected side result of the Lab moving to using Mesh for graphics. For me this is a very welcome change, I have been using Mega-Prims for the past year, and they are very tricky to work with, so the ability to use a prim larger than 10meters will be absolutely fantastic.

JayR Cela :_)

SecondLife(R) Fast and Furious Changes Coming Soon / All For The Better

Welcome back to my rambling Blog :_)
Looks as if things are really starting to move forward at LL. The SnowStorm  team is very focused on improving the UI, I believe you will soon see a huge difference in V2, mainly on the preferences setup, easy and advanced.

This is a very welcome change for a lot of new residents. The current V2 is a pain in the rear to deal with when logging in for the first time. So the apparent plan is to group things more logically, this should be a big help for people introducing newcomers into SL with RL disability's.

If you are not involved and keeping up with the  SnowStorm project, I strongly encourage you to do so. This will be the viewer that eventually all of us will be using. There are only so many things that can be back ported into the 1.x series. And even the TPV's are all working on this. The 1.x viewer is pretty much dead, by 2nd quarter next year, everything will be based on Viewer 2

SecondLife(R) Phillip Rosedale of Linden Lab(R) Steps Aside Again ~ Is There a Method to the Madness ?

 For those of us that follow the current state of ongoing affairs at LL and SecondLife. I beleave there is a method here, we certainly have seen some radicalily differnt methods of problem solving taking place on the Labs part during the past 4 months.

1. Phillip Linden cam right out upon his return as CEO, and said that it was going to be temporary, until someone else could be found.
2. The pace of development on both the Server and Client side, would be increasing at a greatly accelerated pace, from the previous approach from doing things.
3. Get rid of some dead weight.
4. Fast, Easy and Fun seemed to be the mantra.

• #1 Phillips Blog Post today : Changing My Role and Searching for a New CEO : He has kept his word on this one.
• http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2010/10/19/changing-my-role-and-searching-for-a-new-ceo?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SecondLife+%28Official+Second+Life+Blogs+-+FEATURED%29 
• #2 The pace of Development to be greatly accelerated. He has also kept his word on this issue as well.
• Examples on the Server Side are 3 different version's of server code currently being deployed. LeTigre, BlueSteel and Magnum.You can read about them here.
• http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta/LeTigre 
• http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta/BlueSteel 
• http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta/Magnum

• Just take a look at the SL Viewer Download  page. There are 6 different versions, 2 of which are considered by the Lab as stable, the reaming 4 are in various Alpha and Beta stages.
• https://secure-web33.secondlife.com/my/support/downloads/?lang=en-US
• This does not even begin to include the number of TPV Viewers being developed, and involved.
• #3 Getting rid of some dead weight. Well the people or persons that headed up and maintained the main SL Web Page, and whom I believe also borked the Search feature, and may have also been responsible for screwing up XStreet and the new SL Market Place, and Viewer 2 are all gone now. Unfortunately a number of other employes that work on their teams were let go as well. Things are in a fix it mode now.
• #4 Fast Easy and Fun, I am not going to make a comment on this issue yet, because I am defiantly not a happy camper. When I have something good to say I will. You cannot expect overnight miracles to happen, when any organization or company makes such drastic changes.

I have been attending a number of the Project SnowStorm meetings as an observer only. I am not a coder, I am a SL user. I am also just beginning to work in the Film Industry as an  Audio Mixer, Production and Post Production, in that profession anything can happen, at any time, and believe me it does. I equate this to the current state of affairs at LL. And for me, it is very easy to be sympathetic. Everyone working on all of these differnt projects are giving it their best effort.

I have been a Sl resident since 2005, and have never seen anything like this happening before.

Phillip clearly stated that it would take at least 2 Quarters before any appreciable results could be seen, perhaps 1 year to work out and solve the mess created by the former CEO M Linden and his team. It has only been 4 months. What can you expect, this is a scramble to fix a number of issues.

I believe that as the SnowStorm Team digs SL out of the Viewer 2 hole, that never should have been dug to begin with. Things by this time next year, I am predicting will be much better. But it is not going to happen without people that truly believe in, and love SL, at least attempt to get involved. Attend LL SL meetings if and when you are able too. Not to rant or bash, and make un-constructive or belligerent comments. Be positive, keep and open mind. All of these people are working very hard and are extremely dedicated. Quite a few of them actually devote their work for free as Open Source developers.

The Project SnowStorm Wiki page is located here
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Snowstorm_Project

The Linden Lab SecondLife Office Hours calendar page here
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Office_hours

JayR Cela   :_)

Mesh Graphics - SecondLife - Blender & SketchUp ~ Free Software ! and a Warning !

So after nearly 4 years, of discussion and a lot of dedicated hard work. SecondLife is about to finally be able to import mesh graphics. Currently it is only available if you log into one of the special Beta Grid Servers with the Correct viewer. At this time that means using a LL modified version of Viewer 2, I have heard that several of the TPV's, are or will be bringing out their own Mesh capable viewers.

Now in RL I am a Audio person, my knowledge of computer graphics, and programs that allow talented people to perform near miracles, visually, is mind boggling to me. So I will not even attempt to sound as if I know what the heck I am talking about. LOL :_)

From what I can tell so far, mesh graphics will either make or break SL. According to several long time SL  friends. Mesh graphics may just bring the LL servers and the client to a screeching halt. I guess it depends on the person that designs the Mesh, and the Grid you are on.


Ya gotta keep in mind that all or most of SL, is user created content. So the amount of information that must be retrieved when your Client makes a request to the server, can either be good or bad, depending upon a number of different variable's. And how this new Mesh Graphics will play out, has yet to be seen. I do believe it is worth embracing the idea. However at this point, for me it is a wait and see situation.


I spent some time the past several days researching the topic. Here are a few links. Sadly I wanted to provide some screen shots, by dropping into the Beta Grid and take a look around. But I was unable for some reason to easily  find a Grid Region Name, until I did some poking around. The SL Mesh Wiki, and the SL Wiki Preview(Beta) Grid pages, should answer all of your questions. I would suggest you read both of these thoroughly!, as you may need to update your account and change your password. Based on my past experiences, I recommend that you use or create an Alternate Avatar ( ALT AVI ) that has very low amount of inventory. This way you do not really care much if it gets partially or worse case scenario, totally trashed out by logging into one of the Beta Servers. I stopped participating, in the Beta Server Grid Program 3 years ago. So things may be different now.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh 
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Preview_Grid

If you are new to the topic of working with Mesh Capable Graphics programs, a few good places to start are here.
Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon_mesh.

The free Blender graphics program,
http://www.blender.org/ 
and Google's free Sketch Up 3D modeling software.
http://sketchup.google.com/


JayR Cela  :_)

Combat Cubed the SecondLife(R) Viewer for RPG Shoot em Ups

I not sure where I stumbled upon this version of the 1.2.x version of the SL viewer. It looks like a very nice choice if you like to go madly on your merry way blasting the heck out of Avatar's.

The opening log in seems to suggest it is Phoenix based.

There are a number of enhancement's that do strongly lean towards Combat Sim usage. And that's cool, if your into that sort of thing.
This viewer may be just what you have been looking for.

Personally I am more of a fashion oriented person in SL.


Its all about fun though. And the Cubed team seem to have accomplished that goal.


Here are a couple of screen shots, and the DL site. Oh yeah BTW it does have very respectable FPS, about 21 on average and rock solid steady. A lil bit on the slow side at loading textures, but that may just be my ISP having a crappy day.

http://merczateers.net/_downloads/

So for all the shoot em up lovers / have fun / enjoy / and please don't gun me down in a dark alley somewhere  :_)

JayR Cela