Cartoon of the Day

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

Taken at the Relay for Life opening ceremonies, there were close to a hundred avatars there packed in a small area in two sims. The result for my computer, even though it's less than a year old, was lots of grey avatars that took a long time to rezz, or in this case, a prim hairpiece.

By Bixyl Shuftan

Firestorm Team Blocking Older Viewers, Under Pressure From Linden Lab

About a week ago, the Firestorm Viewer team began blocking older versions of it's Second Life viewer. These particular viewers "do not support the current rendering code," seeing other avatars as colorless and grey, and are considered obsolete. Jessica Lyon, the team manager, stated that they were also under pressure from Linden Lab to block these older viewers, "and we can either do it ourselves or adopt LL’s update system which allows them to do it instead. Either we update you or LL does, but either way, folks, updating is quite inevitable. The LL viewer enforces updates, as do most all software applications with a fair grace period. Our grace period will be three versions behind."

Jessica defended the Lab's position that the blocks were necessary to improve the user's inworld experience, "Second Life is not immersive if we see things drastically differently from one another. This is going to sound harsh, but in some respects if you are using versions that can only render avatars gray and/or versions without mesh, you might as well be—and perhaps should be—using a text based viewer."

The comments following Jessica's post were overall supportive, some thanking her and her team for their continued work. One did note these older viewers were still good for building things in private.

The following versions of the Firestorm viewer were blocked, with the number of users and dates they were discontinued. Note 4.3.1 still had over 40 thousand users.

3.2.1.24179 release – 166 users (Blocked Nov 18, 2013)
3.2.2.24336 release – 881 users(Blocked Nov 19, 2013)
3.3.0.24880 hotfix release – 571 users(Blocked Nov 20, 2013)
3.3.0.24882 maintenance release – 606 users(Blocked Nov 20, 2013)
4.0.1.27000 Beta – 4585 users(Blocked Nov 21, 2013)
4.1.1.28744 – 3334 users (Blocked Nov 22, 2013)
4.2.1.29803 – 60 users(Blocked Nov 22, 2013)
4.2.2.29837 – 14,120 users(Blocked Nov 23, 2013)
4.3.1.31155 – 40,451 users(Blocked Nov 24, 2013)

For Jessica's complete post: Click Here

"Server Side" Blues

Well, yours truly is down to one working viewer. With Linden Lab's "Project Sunshine" and it's "server side" baking, the result was my Singularity viewer, which hadn't offered an upgrade since May, starting to get buggy. It was freezing up frequently, rezzing slower, and crashing more often. And finally, it's starting to become unusable, freezing up when starting then crashing. So that leaves a year old version of Cool VL. More recent upgrades of this viewer for some reason won't work. And neither will Firestorm or the official viewers.

The result is well, some avatars looking like the one above. Exploring my options on what to do.