Second Life Viewer

Viewer 2 (Version 2.2.0) has been released today as the main Second Life Viewer! This is an important release for us because it marks the first big release using the Snowstorm process. A few months ago, we formed the Snowstorm Team as a dedicated ... [More] Viewer team who works with the open source community and entirely in the open to make user experience improvements to the Viewer. We've been holding almost all our meetings in public, working with open source developers to integrate their work, sharing our backlog with the community, and releasing daily development Viewers which are available for anyone to download.Over the last few months, we've improved the velocity of our teams and shortened the release cycle. The Version 2.2.0 release today comes after a three-week beta cycle during which we released Betas weekly and focused on stabilization and crash fixes on the Beta Viewer. Your feedback, crash, and bug reports during our beta cycles are crucial - so thank you to all who participated in that process.Version 2.2.0 introduces some new features, usability enhancements, and crash fixes. Here are a few highlights:Sidebar Panels can now be undocked and turned into regular floating windows: Simply click on a Sidebar Tab and drag it away from the Sidebar to undock it. You can also click the undock icon in the top right of a panel. To redock a sidebar panel, click the redock icon in the top right of the panel. Once sidebar panels are undocked, they behave like any other floating window in the Viewer.Buttons on the Bottom Bar can now be reordered: In the last Viewer release, we added a few optional buttons to the Bottom Bar. In the 2.2.0 release, you can now reorder buttons on the Bottom Bar, so they’re arranged just the way you like them.Right-click on your avatar and select “Sit Down” to sit anywhere: A great feature that came to the Viewer, by way of Snowglobe, allows you to right-click on yourself and select “Sit Down” from the context menu to make your avatar sit anywhere. To stand back up, just click the “Stand Up” button or right-click on yourself again and select “Stand Up” from the context menu.Parcel Property Icons are now on by default: Parcel property icons indicate what users can, or can’t, do on a particular parcel. The icons can be found in the Location Bar and are now on by default. If you’d like to turn them off, you can do so by right-clicking the Location Bar and unchecking “Show Parcel Properties” from the context menu.Selection Beams are working again: In Viewer 2, there was a bug that hid selection beams. This made it hard for people to see when you were building or the object you were currently editing. This has been corrected!Language translations in local chat (via Google Translate API): Another great feature that came to the Viewer via Snowglobe is local chat translation. Simply click the “Translate chat” check box in the upper left hand corner of the local chat window. Language preferences can be set at the bottom of the Chat tab in the Preference window.Group permissions now work in Snapshots: This corrected a bug in Snapshots which prevented you from sharing a Snapshot texture with a Group.Turn off scripted particles and lights: This feature allows photographers and machinemists to turn off scripted lights by accessing the Debug Setting, “EffectScriptChatParticles” and setting it to FALSE. To turn scripted particles and lights back on, simply go to the Debug Setting window again and set “EffectScriptChatParticles” to TRUE.Builders can more easily align textures across linked prims using planar mapping: This feature allows builders to align textures across faces so that several prims can look like a single prim. Simply select the faces of a set of linked prims, then open the Textures tab of the Build tool, make sure your Mapping setting is set to “Planar”, then click the checkbox labeled “Align planar faces.”View profile inspectors via the Mini Map: When you hover over the little dots (people indicators) on the Mini-Map, you’ll see the familiar “i” icon pop open with a user’s name. Clicking the inspector allows you to view that user’s Mini Profile.Pan the Mini-Map with shift-drag: If you hold down the <SHIFT> key and then click and drag on the Mini-map, you can now pan the map to view other areas. As I mentioned in the blog post announcing the Version 2.2 beta, many of the features included in this release come directly from Resident contributions - via the Snowstorm process, as well as through past contributions to the Snowglobe project. Thank you to all of you who have contributed code, testing, and commentary. Please keep it up!The Viewer 2 (Version 2.2.0) release is not a mandatory upgrade at this time, but will be the default download for the Second Life Viewer on the downloads page.You can view the full release notes for Viewer 2 (Version 2.2.0) here.Download Viewer 2 (Version 2.2.0) Win | Mac | Linux [Less]

After about four months as interim CEO, working closely with Bob Komin, the management team, and the board, we've decided we are ready to start the search for a new CEO. I'll be leaving day-to-day management of the company and continuing in my role ... [More] on the board, including helping in the search to find a great CEO. I will also be continuing my work with my new company, LoveMachine. Bob will lead Linden Lab while we conduct the search. It's been an intense few months of transition, and we all feel like we are in a better place now, with a clearer sense of direction and more focus, and are ready to bring someone new into the mix as a leader. [Less]

Hi everyone, we've got a busy week ahead. Both the TCMalloc &  MaintServer projects have been running smoothly since last week, and  we've decided to promote the MaintServer to the Release channel. Here's  the breakdown of what the RCs will be ... [More] seeing this week:Second Life Server (the main channel) The MaintServer project will be promoted from the BlueSteel RC to the rest of Agni.2010-10-19, 6:00a: ~75% of Agni Roll (release notes)BlueSteel We're putting out a simple project here that contains a server crash fix, plus some updates to our internal tools.2010-10-20, 9:00a: ~6% Agni (release notes)LeTigre The TCMalloc project is staying here for another week, however it  will be updated with an additional crash fix. The crash wasn't proving  to be a big problem on the LeTigre regions, but we'd decided not to risk  seeing what will happen when it goes to the main grid.2010-10-20, 10:00a: ~6% Agni (release notes)Magnum The Display Names project is going to be enabled on the Magnum regions. This is done without deploying any new code (the Display Names code is already in the  simulator.) We're just changing a configuration option to enable the  service. If it plays nicely on Magnum through the week, it will be  enabled across Agni the following week with whatever other project gets  promoted.2010-10-21, 10:00a: ~10% Agni (info)PS. It's been a couple weeks since we started this new fangled  process. I'd like to get people's feedback on how things are going!  Specifically, are these "Deploys for the Week of..." posts telling you  what you need to know? How about the Release Notes pages? Suggestions  welcome.Join the discussion on the forums! [Less]

Curious about the history of Second Life scripting? This is for you!Preserving our history is essential to understand the progress of earlier generations that in turn, informs our future decisions and prevents us from making the same mistakes they ... [More] worked through, so we don't have to. Hopefully.As one of the lead Lindens working on wiki.secondlife.com, I love seeing exceptional contributions to the help pages, and I wanted to highlight Cerise Sorbet'sOld forum Scripting Library indexContains links to templates, examples, and more you can use in your creations. Shows that one Resident can make such an overarching, positive difference! Not only does it have sortable tables and brief descriptions to quickly summarize what's in each thread, older threads are colorfully catalogued (as "Museum" and "Attic"), making their historical status clear. In turns, this builds upon the previous, venerable curation by Nada Epoch, whose scripting forum moderation was already esteemed when I joined Second Life in 2004.Forums as a tool have their uses for thriving discussion, but the wiki is often a more effective medium for collaboratively upgrading a single source, including the LSL Portal. But I've found using both are quite complementary, since (1) wiki talk pages can be awkward for newcomers to chat in and (2) vibrant forum discussions often lead to wiki help pages, as I've done and seen across 1,000s of edits. Resis who are wiki-shy often team up with the more experienced to learn and communicate changes. Further behind-the-scenes on how I apply this to help you and fellow Residents of Second Life can be found on Rapid Knowledge Iteration.To discuss the Scripting Library index with Cerise and others,jump into the matching forum thread And...Curious about editing the wiki yourself? Learn more!Often, I've found editing the wiki stems from a personal perspective, passion about a topic, where you not only wish something could be better, you act on it — whether it's correcting a typo, adding a key fact, leading all the way up to writing whole guides and indexes. What you spend a few minutes on could save many hours for yourself and others in the future. [Less]

Thank you to everyone who participated in making over Philip's avatar. Philip reviewed all the avatars and is amazed at the creativity that went into the submissions.The winner is Resident creator, Mars Absent. To find more of Mars' work, check out ... [More] The Abyss inworld or the SL Marketplace. We invite you to check out the finalist entries on Flickr.com.Philip is thrilled to have a new look.  Here is the result of his first photoshoot.  Special thank you to Mars Absent!  Your designs are amazing! [Less]

As  we head into the fourth quarter, I wanted to share some of the progress  that we’ve made since we realigned engineering and created our Platform  team. The team is comprised of simulator, services, and viewer  developers and testers (Platform ... [More] Development), as well as our  operations, IT, data warehouse and customer support teams (Platform  Operations). The focus of the teams will be to drive “back to basics”  improvements across the grid and evolve our current architecture into a  scalable set of services and APIs. Let’s take a look at our progress  over the last few months, delivering against the goals that Philip set  at the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC), in August.I’m  happy to report that we have already delivered on a number of those,  and are making good progress toward the rest. A few of them may take  longer than we’d originally anticipated, but we plan on completing all  of them.Below  you’ll find a list of projects and initiatives we’ve delivered on in  the two months since SLCC, as well as some back-up performance data. A  number of these projects will have a major impact on the Second Life  experience, as we currently know it. Expect to see further posts from  some of the Platform team, focused on how we are improving Second Life  in terms of faster performance, increased stability, and a generally  smoother experience for all.Reduced LagHere’s  an interesting factoid: there are about two million teleports in Second  Life every day. Previous to our recent release of Server 1.42, when an avatar teleported or crossed into a new region, everyone on the  destination sim would experience a “lag” event as the simulator stalled  while processing the incoming avatar. This was often experienced as  “jitter” on the sim, especially evident when many avatars arrived at the  same time, such as for a live event. In the new simulation code, this  slow point has been moved to a separate thread. Our simulator  performance profiling tools show that this lag pain point is almost  entirely gone, greatly improving performance for highly trafficked  regions.Faster Texture LoadingIn August, we made some changes that improve the speed with which textures are loaded in a scene. Our release of HTTP Textures changed the way textures are delivered to, and loaded in, Viewer 2,  resulting in less waiting around for the scene in front of you to come  into focus. This change will also serve as the foundation for a series  of bigger improvements, including the deployment of a new asset system,  which will improve texture loading and object rez times even more. For  the real techies, here’s the back story: Last month, we moved away from  the Isilon storage clusters, as our primary storage for assets. Most  assets are now stored on Amazon’s S3 platform, and we have deployed a  “middle-layer” caching service, which is where most asset calls will be  served from. The time to complete asset “puts” and “gets” (the times  that the viewer requests assets and times those assets are delivered)  has improved significantly. We reduced the average PUT latency by over  60%, from 1.3 seconds to 0.6 seconds, and our GET latency by 20%, from  0.25 seconds to 0.20 seconds. What does this really mean? Well, when you  add up the cumulative time saved in asset latency across the millions  of requests a day, there is a net savings of over 4,000 hours of time  shaved off of asset latency per day! That translates into less load on  the simulator processes and better rez times in Viewer 2.The next step here is to get the simulator out of this process,  and that will happen in early 2011. At that point, we’ll have extended  our asset services and can begin enabling a content delivery network  (CDN), bringing latency-sensitive assets (objects and textures) closer  to Residents for even faster rez times.New Chat Service Coming SoonWe’re  finally going to tackle the group chat problem that has been a Resident  complaint for a long time. Group chat can often be confusing, with  “chat lag” causing responses to appear late, or sometimes not at all.  You should start to see real improvements in this early next year. Over  the last few months, we’ve completed a number of development sprints to  prototype an XMPP service and have decided to move forward with an ejabberd deployment.  We’re targeting to have a test deployment of the new group chat service  by the end of this year, and full production deployment in early 2011. Group Limits Will be Raised to 40Another  big pain point for Residents is the current limit that lets you be a  member of only 25 groups. We plan to raise this limit to 40 by the end  of this year. In the past, our biggest concern about raising group  limits was potential performance degradation, with additional stress  placed on our central database. After completing some internal analysis,  we now feel comfortable enough to extend group limits up to 40. I’ll  put a qualifier on the group limits increase, however, and state that if  we see a decrease in performance (i.e., more lag), then we may decide  to roll back to the 25 limit again.Snowstorm Driving Viewer 2 Improvements At SLCC, we announced Project Snowstorm,  our new open development program for Second Life’s Viewer 2 client  software. Snowstorm is already incorporating Resident input,  particularly around a more customizable user interface, has produced a  number of beta releases, and is deploying daily open-source code  releases. You’ll see the first fruits of their efforts in production  very shortly, with the release of Viewer 2.2.New Main Grid Deployment ProcessIt  was pretty clear that if we were going to make velocity improvements,  then we needed to be able to update our server software more than three  to four times per year.  As Lil Linden discussed last month,  we have significantly changed our deploy process and are now deploying  code on a weekly basis to the main grid (Agni). This means that bug  fixes will be deployed faster and new features and functionality don’t  have to pile up and wait for the next major “release train.”  It also  means that if we do encounter problems, then we are able to quickly back  out the changes, without affecting other code that is working properly.  This process also works much better with the agile development  practices that we have formalized internally over the last three months.Display Names and Mesh Public Betas Available TodayWhile  we’re focusing our resources for the moment on platform improvements  designed to make Second Life faster, easier to use, and more fun for all  Residents, we are also testing two new features that had been in  development for some time before SLCC. The new Display Names feature is in public beta, and will enable more freedom of expression in Second Life. We have also just launched the public beta of Mesh Import,  which will revolutionize content creation in Second Life. So I  encourage you to download the Project Viewers and share your feedback.I’ll  share more with you on our “back to basics” technology projects in  coming weeks and months. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to hearing  your thoughts on our recent progress in the comments below. And, as  always, thanks for all of your passion and participation. [Less]

Unfortunately I won't be able to run my usual hour long office hour today. Apologies to those that had planned to attend, I know it's slightly late notice. Normal service should be resumed at the usual time (Thursday 11am PST) next week.All the best, Jack

There's an amazing array of events in Second Life. Many of them have "real world" analogues... with a twist! For example, first life concerts aren't inundated with nearly as many ASCII art audience reactions. Whether you want to attend a crowded ... [More] party that packs the hizzouse or are more into relaxing art shows, all that's missing is HOW TO FIND THOSE EVENTS, ARRRR.Well fear not! I've been compiling aGuide to Finding Eventswhich, as the name apparently suggests, is exactly about that. It covers the default secondlife.com and in-Viewer events search, as well as manual methods, and Resident-created callouts. Try 'em all out and see what's most comfortable for you, because your interests are an extrusion of your unique personality! I happen to enjoy the serendipitous spontaneity of flashmobbing. I used to drop in on gameshows a lot because I'm trivia crazy. And I ♥ seeing many awesome avatars in the same place at once, 'cuz having a remarkable avatar is a key conversation-starter.But I'm sure stuff is missing from this guide, which is where you come in.Let me know your favorite ways to find events in this forum thread,such as... hunting the green dots, those "poker chip stacks"! But do heed this gem from Veritable Quandry in response:I should caution that TP'ing directly to a spot with two dots can have...interesting results.Wise words. And this being Second Life, it's not limited to two dots, either. [Less]

As previously blogged, I’m very excited to announce that the Beta for Mesh Import is now open to all Residents. Mesh Import allows you to bring models into Second Life from the many popular 3D tools such as Blender or Maya(t), using the COLLADA file ... [More] format. We see this as an important step to empower content creators to make the inworld experience an even richer and more creative one than it is today. You can read more about Mesh Import here and in my last blog post.Join the Mesh Import BetaIn order to take part, you will need to first download the Project Viewer for Mesh Import, based on the Viewer 2 code base, available below. This special Mesh viewer will take you to the test grid that we call Aditi. This is a separate grid from the one you normally use for Second Life -- so any changes you make there will not be preserved nor transferred to the main grid. Whilst the Mesh Beta is open to all Residents, it is possible that accounts created within the last few weeks may have trouble logging into the test grid as they won’t have been migrated across yet; so if you have trouble, then here are instructions for updating your account info on Aditi.Getting Started with MeshesSo that you can get started straight away, we have prepared a few simple walkthroughs for you to follow once you’ve logged in. You can find them on the main Mesh wiki page along with various other pieces of information. They should give you a good idea of how the Mesh Import tool works before you import your own meshes. Remember that we are using the COLLADA file format, so you’ll need to use a tool that can create COLLADA files such as the free, cross-platform Blender. Over the coming weeks, we will continue to add information to the Mesh wiki page, so do check back often.Please note, that the Second Life Terms of Service applies on the Aditi test grid, as it does on the main grid. That means that you should not import any content for which you do not have the appropriate rights. But, For more information, see our Intellectual Property Policy and if you’re in doubt over a specific object, then it’s probably best not to import it.What to Expect on the Beta GridAlthough the base technology that drives mesh is in good shape, we still have some way to go before this is production ready. We wanted to get it into your hands sooner, versus later, to get your feedback. You should only take part if you’re comfortable with beta software that may crash or cause content that you’re working on to break in unexpected ways. In addition, the product design piece -- the user interface -- still needs some work so you can expect that the interface for mesh will change and improve over time. The Mesh Project Viewer will auto-update as we ship updated versions, so when there’s a new version, then you’ll be prompted to install it.Another change, that many of you will notice right away for this beta test, is that we have changed the maximum size of a prim, for both normal prims and mesh prims. The maximum for each dimension is up from 10m to 64m. Our hope is that this change will also be available on the main grid as well once Mesh Import ships. But, we need to assess how these larger prims perform during the beta period to ensure that they will integrate seamlessly into the main grid environment.Releasing the Viewer Code for MeshTo give our third party viewer developers as much time as possible to work with the Mesh code base, and so that we can get additional feedback and support from the opensource community, the code base for the Mesh Project Viewer will be released by the end of this week. It will be made available on the Snowstorm wiki page.Giving Feedback on Mesh ImportIf you believe that you’ve found a bug, or have a suggestion for how to improve the feature, then please use our public Jira issue tracker to let us know. Before you file an issue there, please do search to ensure that someone hasn’t already filed the same issue before you. If they have, then by all means add your comments there.Anticipating a Few of Your QuestionsYes, you have questions. Let me anticipate a few. Feel free to ask more in comments and we’ll answer what we can.Q: How will Mesh objects look if you’re viewing them from an older viewer, such as those based on Viewer 1.23?A: They will look like flat shapes and will not resemble the real mesh objects. See the Mesh wiki page for examples. Q: What are the prim costs for importing Meshes?A: Aspects of this are still being worked out, but the latest info is on the Mesh wiki page. Q: Will you be charging upload fee for meshes?A: Yes we will charge an upload fee in L$ when mesh launches into production. For the beta test on the test grid, there will be no fees. Q: Will you have Mesh office hours?A: We are holding Mesh Import office hours tomorrow, October 14, at 3pm PDT (6pm EDT) at the four corners of Mesh Headquarters on Aditi (SLurl: secondlife://Aditi/secondlife/MeshHQ 1/238/238/26). We will have more office hours in the future, so keep checking the Mesh wiki page as they are scheduled.Finally, I’d like to thank you all in advance for taking part. We’re looking forward to seeing the amazing mesh creations and hearing your feedback. Resources:Download the Mesh Import Project Viewer    Windows  |  Mac  |  LinuxRead the last blog post on Mesh ImportRead more at our Mesh Wiki PageShare your thoughts on the Mesh Forum or the Mesh section of SL AnswersLog bugs on the public JiraTwitter your feedback on #slviewer2Please upload pictures of your mesh creations to Flickr with the #slmesh tag. You'll be able to view the resulting collection here. [Less]

Do you want to have Second Life instant messages forwarded to your email address when you're not logged in? Or do you get many IMs and find them spammy? Whatever your choice, you cantoggle offline instant messages (IMs)^ As that help page explains ... [More] , you can do it from Account > Contact Information in your secondlife.com Dashboard, which is handy if you're somewhere you can't login to Second Life, or would rather not bother logging in. (I love convenience, don't you?)While you're at it, you can also change your email address on the same page. [Less]