So, yesterday’s office hours were attended by over 100 Residents! This marathon session lasted nearly 4 Hours and was a great chance to speak with many of you. I want to run over some of the issues discussed and provide you all with the transcript…

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Six months ago we announced the beta test process of a new Second Life simulator, with the explicit goal of improving simulator stability. The new simulator went through six months of public beta testing, was in service on over 635 Second Life regions throughout the beta process, and during the public beta Early Adopter Program was found to dramatically reduce simulator crashes. (more…)

We’re excited to announce that Second Life 1.20 RC0 is now available for download from the test software page. This Release Candidate viewer brings lots of goodness in the form of fixes, a new UI look and feel (formerly codenamed ‘Dazzle’) and UI improvements, scriptable glow and better support for 3D input devices!

IMPORTANT NOTE: There is a known issue in this Release Candidate on OS X with Apple’s Mighty Mouse. The primary mouse button will toggle the “Flycam” mode. This will cause unusual behavior and we do not suggest using Second Life 1.20 RC0 with a Mighty Mouse at this time. We will fix this bug in the next RC.

[UPDATE 9:48 AM] Tools menu: The Tools menu has not gone missing!  It now displays in the main menu when editing/creating objects.  Click on the Build button or right click and select Create.  Existing short cuts  (CTL + 1, 2, 3) all still work and will also activate the Tools menu.

Reminder: Release Candidate viewers are optional updates that contain the latest round of bug fixes and/or soon-to-be-released new features. Please try the RC viewers only if you want to participate in the bug reporting process and identify issues before they become the default viewer. You can have both a Release Candidate and the primary viewer installed side by side on your computer, so if issues are encountered when testing the RC viewer you can switch back to the production viewer.

Details:

UI: This Release Candidate includes significant updates to the visual design and architecture of the Viewer’s user interface, including:

• A new, lighter color scheme
• Improved UI graphics (icons, buttons, etc)
• Ability to customize text color of Instant Messages
• Enhancements to the UI texture rendering system
• Ability to reference textures by filename
• Support for non-powers-of-two textures
• Support for PNG textures

Some important notes regarding the new UI appearance:

• The new UI appearance is installed by default with 1.20; Residents who wish to continue using the pre-1.20 UI appearance should not update to 1.20.
• Based on feedback from the Dazzle First Look viewer, we are tracking a number of bugs related to the new UI appearance; see PJira for the complete list.
• 1.20 includes a limited capability to create custom UI “skins.” Although this functionality is not officially supported by Linden Lab, a basic overview of the current XML functionality for creating custom skins is available on the Second Life wik
• The new UI appearance was developed in parallel with ongoing initiatives to improve Viewer stability and crash rates, and did not impact those important projects.
• For more information about the new UI appearance, including a list of frequently-asked questions, please see the Dazzle page on the Second Life wiki. For more information about Linden Lab’s longer-term plans to enable Resident-created UI “skins,” please see the User Interface Roadmap.

As always, Residents concerned about user interface and usability issues are welcome to attend Benjamin Linden’s weekly in-world User Experience Office Hour, held every Thursday at 3pm in Beaumont

LSL scripting for object glow!

• Script a prim’s glow attribute, details on the Second Life wiki:
• You may want to try a script such as THIS!
  default
  {
  touch_start(integer total_number)
  {
  list values = llGetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_GLOW, 1]);
  float glow = llList2Float(values, 0);
  llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_GLOW, ALL_SIDES, 1.0 - glow]);
  }
  }

Improved Joystick and 3D input device support

• Integrated a new open source library created by 3Dconnexion designed to integrate multi axis input devices with Second Life
• Joystick devices can now control the Avatar, Edited Objects, or the Flycam (View menu > Joystick Flycam)
• Added a “Joystick Setup” window to the Preferences under “Input & Camera” for adjusting multi axis input devices
• Settings are currently optimized for Logitech’s 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator but should be tunable for any joystic or 3D imput device

Other changes:

• Removed voice setup wizard from Viewer
• Removed “Detecting hardware” from first-use startup to save 10 seconds of start time
• Removed “Critical Message” string from startup community standards dialog
• Removed “Start Gesture” from menu bar
• Removed “do you want streaming audio” dialog
• Removed Friends dropdown on Map
• Display the Camera and Movement controls by default
• Added online offline notification to open IM windows
• One click sit not be available if you’re already sitting
• Replaced “(hippos)” and “(waiting)” with “(Loading…)”
• Print the name of the missing gesture in the error message
• Double-tap forward to run
• Adjusted the right-justified text on the splash screen
• Ctrl-shift-1 now displays Statistics in a floater
• Login progress bar change
• Option available to turn off all group titles to make name tags smaller
• Small UI tweaks made to the “near me” floater for usability

List of fixes:

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Fellow Residents! I want to talk- with YOU!

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As announced nearly a month ago (but postponed until after the 1.19.1 release) we are now requiring that residents upgrade viewers to Second Life 1.19 (1.19.0 or 1.19.1). Earlier versions of the Second Life viewer are no longer supported.

The previous post has full details and rationale, including security, support, performance, and advancing the platform.

Residents using older viewers (1.18.5(3), 1.18.4(3), 1.18.3(5), .18.2(1)) will be prompted to update to Second Life 1.19.1 on login. Should issues be encountered running 1.19.1, Residents should read Pastrami Linden’s post on 1.19.1 which includes troubleshooting steps, how to report issues, and links to the older 1.19.0 viewers if required.

This does not affect:

• Third party viewers that follow the Channel and Version Requirements
• The First Look: Dazzle viewer
• Release Candidate viewers (which are currently 1.19.1 anyway)

Viewers built from older source code may be affected; directions for specifying a channel are on the Get source and compile page of the wiki.

So, since yesterday’s viewer release, we have gotten a flurry of responses- about half seem to want to give us their first born child: “thank you for making this such a wonderful lag free experience now!” “runs better than release” “Great work! Great product!” … and about half want to tear us limb from limb “<expletive deleted>” “<expletive deleted>” “<really expletive expletive deleted>”

So, what *is* a resi to do?… (more…)

Friends. Romans. Residents. After months in First Look and Release Candidate phases, we are pleased to announce that the Second Life 1.19.1 Viewer, featuring WindLight atmospheric lighting and gobs of other stability, performance, and feature enhancements, is now available for download! And so….

Download It Here!!!

But what goodness does it contain?… (more…)

A new 1.19.1 Release Candidate Viewer (RC4) is now available for download from the test software page.

Changes and fixes new in 1.19.1 RC4 since RC3:

• Fixed a bug causing the viewer to update the wrong parcel.
• Revert name of “Local Chat(history)” tab to “Local Chat”
• Removed confusing “Start in Push-to-Talk mode” preference.
• JA, KO, DE localizations are truncated on Preferences>Graphics tab> Run in a window descriptor
• Commit JA,KO,DE localization changes to accommodate truncations
• Updated Mozilla libraries

Barring any showstoppers, we expect this to be the final RC in the 1.19.1 viewer series.
Please continue to report any new issues in the Issue Tracker and be sure to set “Affects Version/s” to “1.19.1 Release Candidate”.

Thanks for your help improving the Second Life viewer!

We will be deploying server version 1.19.2 to the Second Life Grid this week. We have found and fixed the problem that caused us to halt last week’s deploy (described here) and revert to 1.19.1.

As we have been doing, this week’s server deploy will be done via a three-stage rolling restart. At some point this week during the deploy windows given below, each region will be down for 5-10 minutes as the host on which it is running is updated with the new 1.19.2 code.

The schedule is planned as follows:

• Tuesday evening, 8:00PM-9:00PM PDT : we will deploy the new server code to ~500 regions.
• Wednesday morning, 7:00AM-9:00AM PDT : we will deploy the new server code to an additional ~1500 regions.
• Thursday evening, 6:00PM-11:00PM PDT : we will deploy the new server code to all remaining regions running the main Second Life Server.

Regions running the Havok4 Beta Server will not be affected by this deploy.

[Update 2008/03/25 10:15] The deploy to ~1500 regions will occur Wednesday morning rather than Wednesday evening, as originally announced. The schedule above has been updated.

[Update 2008/03/25 20:35] The deploy to 510 regions is done. The version being deployed is 1.19.2.83236.

[Update 2008/03/26 10:24] The deploy to an additional 1133 regions has completed. There are now 1642 regions on version 1.19.2.83236.

[Update 2008/03/26 11:20] Here is the list of regions which have been upgraded to Second Life Server 1.19.2. You can determine which version is running on the current region by looking at Help:About Second Life.

[Update 2008/03/28 00:43] The full rolling restart of Second Life is complete. This restart is upgrading the grid from server version 1.19.1.81992 to version 1.19.2.83236.