Over the next week or so, we've been expecting a new Second Life viewer release-candidate (1.23), with the usual slew of bug-fixes, and stabilization enhancements (1.22 yielded a 20% drop in overall viewer crash rates), and very likely the first real release of the dynamic shadows code.

Now, it seems that that is not to be. 1.23 is being pushed out to (probably) June, and the focus for this next release-candidate series will be code-support for the new Adults-Only content category. We're not sure how much of the regular fare will make it into 1.23, as just the AO-content support promises to be quite a substantive code-drop, and it's something that needs to 'just work'.

Continue reading Lab rearranges viewer development. Adults-only content trumps other work

Lab rearranges viewer development. Adults-only content trumps other work originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 29 Mar 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The 1.22 series of Second Life viewer release candidates has at last come to an end and has "gone gold" as they say. The 1.22 viewer today replaces the 1.21 viewer as the official Second Life viewer after a series of release candidates stretching back to last November.

There are an enormous number of fixes in this viewer release, though there's some known problems with advanced water presets and isolated reports of voice issues on all platforms. There's also a ton of localization work gone into this release, adding Polish, Hungarian and Danish support, and reworking some of the existing translations. Check after the fold for the full release notes.

Continue reading Second Life viewer 1.22 goes final

Second Life viewer 1.22 goes final originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC10 is the eleventh release candidate in the unexpectedly elongated 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). It seems like the 1.22 series has been going on for ages, doesn't it? RC0 was in November.

Fixes this time around fix saving textures that were embedded in notecards to disk, and some problems relating to voice crashing the viewer or getting generally hung. There's also another minor fix to Japanese text localization and a voice behavioral change. There still seem to be some lingering issues with raycasting.

Continue reading Second Life 1.22 (RC10) now available

Second Life 1.22 (RC10) now available originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

And around we go again. Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC9 is the tenth release candidate in the unexpectedly elongated 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). RC5 was supposed to have been the last release-candidate in this series, but unfortunately a number of serious issues prompted the release of RC6, and now we have some major changes, which by all rights should mean quite a few more release-candidates before becoming an official release.

If you got your hands on RC8, you may have noticed problems with voice, crashing, more raycasting issues and problems with sculpties loading. Well, the good news is that three out of four of those seem to be fixed. Voice seems to have quite a road to apotheosis in 1.22.

Continue reading Second Life 1.22 (RC9) now available

Second Life 1.22 (RC9) now available originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC8 is the ninth release candidate in the unexpectedly elongated 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). RC5 was supposed to have been the last release-candidate in this series, but unfortunately a number of serious issues prompted the release of RC6, and now we have some major changes, which by all rights should mean quite a few more release-candidates before becoming an official release.

OpenAL and gstreamer support are the big surprises. We're wondering if Quicktime has been given the flick entirely. This mirrors the work being done with the Imprudence Release Candidate, though the Imprudence Project does not appear to have the same difficulties with sound under Linux. That's a huge change for a release-candidate, especially so late in the series, and we'd be surprised if they released a new official viewer anytime soon on that basis alone.

Continue reading Second Life 1.22 (RC8) now available

Second Life 1.22 (RC8) now available originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC7 is the eighth release candidate in the unexpectedly elongated 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). RC5 was supposed to have been the last release candidate in this series, but unfortunately a number of serious issues prompted the release of RC6, and now RC7.

Someone over at the Lab is obviously doing something right. It isn't all that long ago that the bugs that were fixed in this release-candidate either would not have been found or would have been passed over on the way to release. There aren't many of them, but particularly the crash in the texture decoder would have made some people sad.

Continue reading Second Life 1.22 (RC7) now available

Second Life 1.22 (RC7) now available originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC6 is the seventh release candidate in the 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). RC5 was supposed to have been the last release candidate in this series, but unfortunately a number of serious issues cropped up.

There are six crash fixes, texture performance was severely degraded, and there were a number of 'raycasting' problems (raycasting maps the position of your mouse pointer to objects in the virtual environment. Problems with this process cause the system to think you're clicking somewhere other than where you actually are). Additional code is included to track driver-based crashes, and there's the usual localization fixes. Full release notes for this version are after the jump.

Continue reading Second Life 1.22 (RC6) now available

Second Life 1.22 (RC6) now available originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC5 is the sixth release in the 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). Barring any showstoppers, this appears to be the last version in the series before the release of 1.22 as the official Second Life viewer.

This edition has four more crash fixes, fixups to the wonky selection algorithms, localization fixes, and and fixes up some defective UI behavior.Full release notes for this version are after the jump.

Continue reading Second Life 1.22 (RC5) now available

Second Life 1.22 (RC5) now available originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC4 is the fifth release in the 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). Mostly this version seems to be about final polish.

This edition has two more crash fixes, assorted tune-ups to defective UI elements, a small bundle of localization fixes and some almost completely impenetrable alterations to the thread watchdog (however it does now default to being off). We're not expecting an RC5 before this goes live - unless something outstandingly broken crops up. Full release notes for this version are after the jump.

Continue reading Second Life 1.22 (RC4) now available

Second Life 1.22 (RC4) now available originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC3 is the fourth release in the 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). As usual, we have a bunch of assorted fixes and crash fixes in this edition.

This edition has five more crash fixes, some tweaks to the watchdog code (because it wasn't crashing when it should) and assorted tweaks. The Planning tab has been removed from Group Information, because it basically just never worked properly.

This looks like it might be the last release before 1.22 becomes the official viewer, unless something is reported that stops the show. Full release notes for this version are after the jump.

Continue reading Second Life 1.22 (RC3) now available

Second Life 1.22 (RC3) now available originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC2 is the third release in the 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). As usual, we have a bunch of assorted fixes and crash fixes in this edition.

This edition has five crash fixes, additional debugging to isolate the causes of graphics driver crashes, some fixes for PPC systems, and some more attempts to get object selection/cursor positioning right for edge-cases. More details after the jump.

Continue reading Second Life 1.22 (RC2) now available

Second Life 1.22 (RC2) now available originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Second Life viewer dev team has been working furiously away for some time now, and you may be forgiven for wondering where the fruits of that labor are. It has, after all, been some time since we've seen a new viewer other than emergency security fixes.

There are lots of little things in this viewer, mostly bug-fixes. What is particularly peculiar is that whispering seems to be back. Whisper was a short-range chat option that was discarded from the Second Life viewer back in 2005 due to it being confusing both conceptually and in the user-interface. Whispering has a 10 metre range and while it has been a deprecated script function for years is still available to scripted objects.

Continue reading Second Life 1.22 (RC0) now available

Second Life 1.22 (RC0) now available originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.