TPV’s – Ciaran Laval

January 15, 2012January 15, 2012

Qarl’s Alignment Tool – This Is Why TPV’s Prosper

There’s a bit of a hoo ha about Qarl’s alignment tool being rejected by Linden Lab for implementation in the official viewer, this discussion takes place in Jira Storm 468. I’ve never used this tool, so I can’t comment on how awesome or not it is, I did try to install Firestorm last weekend but Norton 360 threw a wobbly about slplugin.exe, this is a known issue. I’m not a big fan of third party viewers (TPV’s), however this issue highlights why TPV’s are a useful community addition.

Let’s just rewind slightly to try to demonstrate why Charlar Linden isn’t acting like Darth Charlar over this issue. I recently blogged on how Blender may drop COLLADA import/export from the official release. Collada is the export tool to make Mesh items in Blender compatible with Second Life but it creates support issues for Blender as a whole. Blender have as an option thrown this over to the Blender community to fix COLLADA issues, as Sergey Sharibin explained:

“More optimistic targets would be find volunteer to pick up this stuff who will make it usable (maybe rewritting this stuff from scratch..) ”

Linden Lab’s approach to the prim alignment tool is very similar, only of course, it’s not already in the official release viewer.

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September 20, 2011September 20, 2011

Mesh Looks Like It’s Coming To Phoenix Viewer

A thread over at SL Universe, which you can read here, points out that Mesh support looks like it is coming to the extremely popular Phoenix Viewer. This is in many ways a surprise move as most people seemed to be under the impression that the Phoenix viewer was largely at the end of its development and that they were concentrating most of their energies on Firestorm, which already has Mesh support in their beta version. I’d post a link to the Firestorm blog post but there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing that! Weird blogging software they’re using there.

The summary of the changes to Phoenix can be read here apparently a lot of the code to bring Mesh to older style viewers has been carried out by Henri Beauchamp, who releases the Cool VL Viewer, which has a version that unsurprisingly, supports Mesh.

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May 20, 2011May 20, 2011

Pay Some Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain

The battle of the viewers seems to be hotting up, with Oz Linden set in the role of Sauron according to some, but recent comments from Oz have been bang on the money. Tateru Nino reports that Oz said if third party viewers don’t keep up, things will break. This is a perfectly sensible comment and one developers of third party viewers should welcome. There are also quotes of Oz saying that Linden Lab will look into what motivates people to stay with a viewer 1.x experince, again, this is perfectly sensible step, I’m not sure why Oz is getting such a walloping over this.

The back of my thighs are killing me, I had to do some weeding yesterday, this has nothing to do with Oz! This getting old malarkey is no fun, your recovery time nosedives. However getting back to viewers, I think what frustrates people about Oz’s comment on the viewer 1 issue is, it has been going on since viewer 2 went open beta!

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