For those of you who are keen on hands-free avatar expressiveness in the virtual environment of Second Life comes a surprise third-party viewer from vr-wear.com. This beta viewer for Windows or Mac OSX uses a camera to track your head and expressions, and convey that to your avatar.

At present, it is all a little rudimentary, and there isn't any back-end support for sending much in the way of ad-hoc avatar motion through the Second Life servers, so the system is limited to what can be supported. At present, that appears to be lip-sync, nodding and head-shaking, surprise and smiling, and head-tilting to the left or right.

Continue reading Face and head tracking for Second Life avatars

Face and head tracking for Second Life avatars originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The 1.21 series of Second Life viewer release candidates has come to an end and has "gone gold" as they say. The 1.21.6 viewer today replaces the 1.20 viewer as the official Second Life viewer.

As yet, Linden Lab has not announced the update, nor provided release notes for the new viewer, but that's alright, because we've got that information for you. The list of changes from 1.20 is quite a long one. Seriously. Hang on to your hats, because nearly every part of the viewer got some loving from the Lab engineers. Everything from group chat moderation to some long standing cleanups of text that was literally years out of date.

Check after the fold for the the full release notes (as nearly as we were able to assemble them, in the absence of a final set from the Lab), and download links to the new viewer.

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Continue reading Second Life 1.21 release candidate now gold

Second Life 1.21 release candidate now gold originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Well, at last we know what all the fuss was about with all the sudden software updates over the last week for the Second Life servers that caused so much disruption during the last few days. It appears we were on the money with security fixes, and exploitable vulnerabilities have received urgent attention.

As a result a new Second Life viewer is available for download now -- that's 1.20.17(98669) -- and you can expect a new Release Candidate viewer (RC5) very very soon. Both are likely to be mandatory updates.

So, what's all the fuss about?

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Continue reading Second Life security updates. New viewers

Second Life security updates. New viewers originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A new Second Life viewer is available. Not a release candidate, but an update to the 1.20 series -- what's generally referred to as an 'official' or production viewer. The version number for this release is 1.20.16 (97603), and only contains one listed change over 1.20.15.

The lone change appears to be security-related. The text of the change (not yet available in Wiki release notes) is "Discard messages sent over UDP that should not be trusted."

It isn't clear exactly which messages those are, precisely, and whether they might be sent from servers or spoofed from other hosts (or if they should simply be being carried on another transport protocol) -- however if it was important enough to release a fresh production viewer with just this one change, it is likely to be an important upgrade for users.

The new viewer is available for download now for Linux, Windows, or Mac (universal binary). We assume that if you've had problems running the 1.20.15 viewer, 1.20.16 will not work any better for you.

Linden Lab has not yet announced this release on any of its blogs.

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Continue reading Production Second Life viewer 1.20.16 available now [updated]

Production Second Life viewer 1.20.16 available now [updated] originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the fifteenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

This release looks like the final release in this cycle, unless something quite nasty appears. Mono is expected in viewer 1.21, and SLS1.24 (SLS1.23 is deploying this week) -- thus, there is nothing particularly earth-shattering in this release.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC14)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC14) originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the fourteenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

If an overall 50% lower crash rate, measured across-the-board doesn't appeal to you, or improved quality texture decoding, how about the fact that the silver skin can now be disabled and replaced with an original recipe UI schema. Okay, so there's still a couple little glitches with that, but you can do it. Also it defaults to the familiar blue UI, which will please a lot of users.

Linden Lab are watching your choices as well. The viewer now reports which skin you have loaded so that information can be pulled out of log-files (or, so a web-site or web-service used by the viewer can offer you HTML skinned in a compatible set of colors) -- We think it's more the latter than the former, but it'd be silly not to gather usage data on skins.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC13)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC13) originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the thirteenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

We're not sure if this is the RC with the least number of changes or not, exactly. Aside from a localization fix where the viewer was still talking about First Land, the remaining three items all seem to constitute code reversions -- essentially undoing what has been done.

User-Interface skin switching isn't in this release. We're going to go out on a limb and suggest that you won't see that for a couple weeks at least.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC12)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC12) originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the twelfth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Linden Lab says this release candidate cycle will be extended, and some of the skinning project that was slated to come after 1.20 is being moved up, so that users will be able to switch the UI skin before this becomes the official viewer, rather than in some unspecified future release.

So, there will be a couple more release candidates before 1.20 becomes official, and it is pitched to take a bit longer between them.

This edition fixes some more crashes and freezes, but still has that nasty buffer-rendering offset glitch that afflicts snapshots, among other things.

1.20(RC11): Extended RC cycle, skinning moved up originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the eleventh 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Linden Lab says that it is aiming for 1.20 to go live by the end of June, which suggests only two more release-candidate iterations -- so what you're seeing is very close to what the official viewer will be in a couple of weeks. Release notes are not included in the installer. This version apparently fixes the crash-on-startup with the Mac PPC, and fixes some of the snapshot problems: The UI is no longer silently included in the snapshot when written to disk, but the black bar (and occasional random pixel garbage) down the left-hand side is still there.

The thread-watchdog has been disabled for the rest of this series of RCs, the first-login-fails-with-Vista also appears to have been corrected, and pixel-garbage around avatar imposters has been fixed. There are an additional six crash fixes.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC10)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC10) originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the tenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Release notes are not included in the installer. More fixups with the thread-watchdog, fixes to flexi-prims to make them work more like existing viewers, a bunch of crash-fixes. However this version will not work on Mac PPC at all. Maybe the next RC will do so. That puts us at least one more RC out from a full-release.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC9)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC9) originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the ninth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Release notes are missing again. Maybe they've chosen to stop including them with the installer. Changes primarily involve emasculation of the thread-monitoring system to solve a lot of situations where the viewer was intentionally crashing itself, fixing purchases via the Linden, and fixing up tooltips.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC8)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC8) originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 23 May 2008 21:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the eighth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

For those of you worried about the Dazzle UI being hard on the eyes (around two thirds of you), 'We plan to release Skinning Phase 1 (which will allow residents to install custom skins and switch between them, e.g. switch to a "classic" skin) before we make 1.20 mandatory,' says Steve Linden, '(hopefully well before-- we are trying to keep mandatory updates to a minimum), so we will support switching skins before imposing this release on everyone. However, this is the look we are planning to support going forward.'

Note that that does not mean that Viewer 1.20 will contain it (skin switching) at release, or necessarily that it will appear in viewer 1.21 or 1.22 -- we're only promised that it will appear before support for 1.19 is dropped.

This release-candidate (which is not intended to be final, so really, there should be a less confusing name for it) contains 46 assorted fixes, plus other changes -- and a few known bugs. There's also user-contributed lip-synching for voice, and what appears to be the new Ruth in there. Bonus: The vanishing skirts problem finally seems to be fixed, and users are automatically unmuted if you interact with them (pay them or their objects, send an IM or inventory to them).

If you use a Mighty Mouse or 3DConnexion Space Navigator, apparently 1.20 will continue to make your life unpleasant.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC7)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC7) originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 21 May 2008 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the seventh 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. This is accompanied by a new download page for all versions which appears to be designed to make Mac and Linux users feel like poor cousins.

Mighty Mouse users, while we were told that your problem was fixed in the last release candidate, it appears to be an open issue again. Perhaps it wasn't fixed at all. The nasty message from the smartheap library are supposed to be gone, and the way property lines have been glowing through objects has been changed. (There doesn't seem to be any indication that the vanishing skirt issue has been fixed -- April Fools' Day is long past, boys)

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC6)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC6) originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 07 May 2008 20:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the sixth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Mighty Mouse users, rejoice. We're told that this release fixes your problems using this release with the device. As for everyone else, 8 specific crash fixes and a fixed problem that caused serious problems with some nVidia drivers -- well, that should raise a few smiles!

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC5)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC5) originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 01 May 2008 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the fifth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

This is a rush-release, as you might notice that the previous RC3 was released only yesterday (Wednesday). Apparently attempting to enter the appearance editor caused an instant crash. Oops. So much for QA.

There isn't a lot else new to speak of in this viewer, except a known issue with terrain textures on MacBook Air notebooks, and that llLoadURL opens in the external web-browser by default, instead of the internal web-browser.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC4)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC4) originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the fourth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Apparently we're back onto one-release-candidate-per-week, which will no-doubt please some and irritate others. Each new release candidate is a mandatory update from the previous release candidate.

Most of the fixes in this look relatively minor, though apparently there might be some issues with the voice component. Issues with UI window sizes after startup appear to have been fixes, and some lossless texture-compression bugs, among others.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC3)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC3) originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Joshua Linden tells us that the rollout of the new 1.21 simulator code (intended to do a number of things, including supporting the new land store) to one rack of servers has not gone so well (again), after reports came in about attachment failures that were traced back to improper permission checks.

The affected simulators have been rolled back to 1.20.1 pending code fixes that are expected no sooner than tomorrow. We expect Linden Lab is pushing hard at this to get the land store back up and running as soon as possible.

1.21 deployment fails again. On hold originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the third 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

This release candidate fixes the instant crash for most Linux users, but it is still very crashy for all platforms if the graphic settings are turned up. Likewise a crash bug has been fixed that was specific to German, Korean and Japanese viewers.

We're not noticing skirts vanishing so frequently in this version (hooray!), but this still feels more like an early beta-candidate than a release candidate. Unless you're feeling particularly adventurous, you might want to give this series of release-candidates a miss for the time being.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC2)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC2) originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 19 Apr 2008 03:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the second 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

This release candidate restores the Friends dropdown on the map, disables avatar imposters -- as they're a suspected cause of crashes on nVidia hardware/drivers, fixes SLURLs which were bollixed up, fixes two crash bugs and adds a crash-on-startup bug for Linux users.

Linux users should NOT get this version. To avoid getting a forced upgrade, add --channel skipRC1 to your viewer startup parameters.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC1)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC1) originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

One of the things that the new Second Life 1.20 release candidate viewer sports is a nifty new feature that busts some serious myths about avatar related lag. In short, by enabling the option, every avatar gets a number displayed over their heads showing how much work your PC needs to go through to render the avatar. This is the avatar rendering cost.

So far we have seen green numbers (low numbers, which are good), and red ones (high numbers, which are not so good). The amount of work that goes into rendering an avatar (now that we can easily measure it) isn't quite affected by things the way we thought it was.

Continue reading 1.20: Changing your mind about avatar lag

1.20: Changing your mind about avatar lag originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 12 Apr 2008 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the first 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. The numbering scheme is changing - the least significant digits groupis being dropped from version numbering, so the next release will be 1.21.

This release candidate contains Windlight, Dazzle, the default Dazzle skin (which we don't care for so much) and the Tools menu handily only appears when the edit floater is open (this is one change we heartily approve of!). There's improved joystick/3D mouse support in this release, and support for high altitude building.

Continue reading New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC0)

New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC0) originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.