Experimental Voice on Linux

LL released some new development code, and an experimental SLVoice binary with it. This should be usable with the standard viewers from LL, Windlight, as well as ones built from source. Here’s how.

First, download the libraries package. This file contains libraries and headers needed for building a viewer, as well the SLVoice binary.

Uncompress the file.
In linden/indra/newview/vivox-runtime/i686-linux/ you’ll find all the voice files.

If you run the standard viewer downloaded from secondlife.com:
Copy SLVoice into the installation directory
Copy the rest into the lib directory

If you build your own viewer and run it from the source tree:
Copy SLVoice into indra/newview
Copy the rest into libraries/i686-linux/lib_release_client

Now if you start the viewer, voice should work. This is of course experimental, and might crash, but it seems to work a lot better than the Wine hack did.

TrustNet Server’s PSU Blew Up

About an hour ago I noticed the server was off. On looking at it, the power supply was very hot. I thought the problem was that it got clogged with dust and shutdown. So I used some canned air on it, and gave it a good cleaning. Then I plugged it back in. That turned out to have been a bad idea.

The PSU made several loud exploding noises, and bright sparks could be seen inside. Pretty scary stuff since this happened the moment I plugged the cable in, so I had my hand right near the thing. Lights went out.

I unplugged the cable, and turned things back on. Fortunately, the UPS it was connected to survived fine. Inside the server nothing looks obviously burned up, but since this is an ATX case, the PSU provides power even when the computer is supposed to be off, so something might have got fried.

The server will remain down for some hours, as it’s late here and no shops are open. If I’m lucky, and only the PSU died then it’ll go back up as soon as I get a new one, otherwise it could unfortunately take a few days, as I may not be able to get replacement hardware on the same day.

TrustNet won’t be working while the server is broken. If you’re constantly getting errors, reset the scanner. It should fail to login and then shut up. The downtime will be credited towards your subscription when it comes back online.

Viewer With Stereoscopic Patch Released

The latest viewer supports real 3D, courtesy of the University of Michigan. It should support both anaglyph (red/cyan glasses) and active (shutter glasses) modes.

To set it up, first get the viewer, then configure the stereo mode in the advanced graphics settings:

Installer fixed, Vista supported

Turns out I broke the installer on the previous release. Sorry about that ^_^;;

The new 1.18.3.5.285 has no new functional changes, but has an improved installer. Now it should work on Vista and will uninstall correctly. Some files also had the line endings fixed, which means the .zip now has less files, and the installer will work a bit faster as it won’t have to download files that didn’t actually change.

Interesting Search Terms

Once in a while I check the WordPress stats to see how people got to my site. Today I found two interesting search terms in the list:

blocking avatar scanner on SL
make a second life particle spammer

To the people searching for the former, there’s no way to block my avatar scanner, so don’t bother trying. 🙂

To the ones searching for the latter, shame on you. My latest work is precisely on dealing with particle spam, and I believe I’m making pretty good progress there. There are big changes in this area yet to come, which I hope will make a difference.

Version 1.18.3.5.273 released, Vista now works

I finally figured out the problem with Vista: On Vista, the installer fails to work correctly. The installer is still broken in this release, but the .zip should result in an usable installation. Work on fixing the installer is in progress.

To use the .zip, first install the right original version (there’s a link to it on sl.daleglass.net). Extract the .zip to the installation directory, overwriting any existing files, then run DaleGlassRelease.exe.

This version has a much more functional, but still unfinished Event Log screen, and an updated list of regions for the IM location logger.

WordPress Broke My Login Page

I just got told that my viewer’s page broke some time ago.

Turns out it’s WordPress’ fault. My login page fetches the RSS feed from this blog to display the latest blog entries. The feed used to be this one, so that it would only show the SL related news. But WordPress broke that for some reason, and that made the login page fail to work.

I set it to the full feed, which means unrelated things may appear on the login page ocassionally.

Bug Tracker And New Features In Development

I’ve created a bug tracker at http://mantis.daleglass.net. If you have any suggestions for things to add or improve in my viewers, or bugs to report, then that’s the right place for it.

In other news, I’m working on a new feature to make it possible to very quickly figure out the source of particle spam/griefing and deal with it. The new screen gathers statistics on particle effects, measures their relative “annoyance factor” based on the amount of screen space they take, and allows to perform actions like moving the camera to the source, banning the owner, etc.

Here’s a screenshot of what this looks like during an attack. The 3 boxes on the right automatically display the 3 most active effects.

Linux Version Released

From now, Linux binaries will start being released as well. The website for my viewer now has links to the Linux downloads.

This is the viewer I use 99% of the time, so it should work well. Please contact me if you have any problems with it.

New Version Released With New Features

Finally got a new version out! This was planned a lot sooner, but things got quite busy here, and the new feature required rather more coding than expected.

The new feature is that now there’s a checkbox in the chat history to enable logging of the owners of talking objects, as well as the location if available. This helps track down objects that spam or that are cleverly hidden somewhere they’re hard to find. It will also tell you the owner and the location of an object IMing you, so even if there’s an object on some entirely different part of the grid, you’ll be able to know who owns it, and where it is.