Tag: “Third Party Viewers”

Posted in Second Life, tips, Viewers

Oh no! I deleted half my house! (and other disasters)

Posted on by beccapet

[NOTE: This is very out of date now that we no longer have prim link sets and most things are mesh instead]

A friend recently IMed me with exactly that. And, to be fair, most of us have been there. But don’t panic, and all is not lost.

Likewise do not panic if you accidentally moved something. Or if you rezzed something and exceeded your prim count and half your house got returned to you instead (that happened to me once), or your landlady had a blonde moment and returned half your stuff (happened to me also).

Here are some handy hints on what you can do in each circumstance.

 

You moved something

If you’ve moved something by accident the first thing you should do, if your Viewer supports it, is to hit Ctrl-Z which is the shortcut key for “undo”. Very often this will snap things back exactly as they were.
Phoenix and Firestorm both have this functionality, and doubtless many other Viewers do too.

However, this does not always work. So you will have to move it back manually. Now your first inclination will be to grab the object and start dragging it around but this is the worst thing you can do as, trust me, you will not get it back to exactly where it was. Oh, sure, it may be “good enough” and that’s fine. But then you wouldn’t be reading this if you were happy with just that. Besides, in the case of segments of a house it will not look right unless correct down to the smallest decimal point.
What you need to do it right-click on the object, select Edit, and then choose the Object tab. If you look at the screenshot above you can see what I mean. I was running Firestorm Viewer so if you’re using a different Viewer it might look slightly different.
If you look on that you’ll see all the numbers for the exact placement of the object. Now, with some rezzboxes (the box that rezzed your house) they add the exact position co-ordinates of when they were rezzed to the description field. So if that’s the case then you’re sorted as you can manually set them back to the correct value. They will very likely write the X, Y and Z values as , eg. <105.83778, 146.98111, 35.75515>
If not, you may be able to deduce the settings by looking at surrounding objects. This is often hard though.
One sure-fire way, albeit rather tedious, is to rezz a copy of the house (you may need to go to a sandbox if you have insufficient prims to do that) and examine the values of the offending segment and also those of an adjacent one, and with some very simple maths deduce the offset of one to the other. Then return to your proper house and apply the same offsets, thus returning the moved segment to its correct position. So if, for example, SegmentA is at 100,100,100 and Segment B is at 100,110,100 on the new house, and on the proper house SegmentA is at 200,200,100 then SegmentB should be at 200,210,100 because there is an offset of 10 on the Y co-ordinate.
I find that using a simple spreadsheet to do this helps enormously. If there is enough demand I could make one available.

Finally, prevention is better than cure. Once you have things back the way you want, be sure to lock the object. All this does is mean you can’t accidentally move it again until you unlock it; it’s just like the safety catch on a gun. You’ll find a tick box to lock & unlock objects on the same tab as all the numbers we’ve been looking at – it’s called “Locked”.

 

You deleted something

First thing to do is to find it in your inventory, and it will be in your Trash.
Note the name of the object, then right-click on it and choose “Restore” to undelete it. Do NOT click “Purge”!!
Then find the object again (searching for it by name if necessary) and see what menu options are available. On some Viewers there is the option to “Restore to last position”. Phoenix and Firestorm definitely have this, and I’m sure many other Viewers do too. If that is the case then use this option and you will very likely find the object restored to its correct place. However, I disclaim all responsibility if for some reason it doesn’t, especially if it is a no-copy item that disappears into the far blue yonder never to be seen again. You have been warned.
The other option is to just rezz the object in approximately the correct place and then use the techniques mentioned earlier for moved objects (although obviously not the first one to do with “Undo”)

 

You had something returned

First thing to do is to find it in your inventory, and it will be in your Lost & Found. Something worth bearing in mind is that if a large number of objects are returned to you, SL may package them up. You will find what looks like just one of your objects but it will have an icon that looks like a pile of building blocks rather than the normal icon for an object which is a box. Rezzing this will rezz all the returned objects inside the package, although possibly in the wrong place. But at least they will be rezzed in the correct relative positions to each other so it should be a case of calculating the offset to their correct position (as I outlined earlier) and then moving them.
However, if it is just one object, and not a package, then use the same technique as outlined above for deleted objects.

Posted in Fashion, Flickr, General, Opinion, Second Life, Viewer 2.x

Mesh

Posted on by beccapet

Slink Mesh Boots!!, originally uploaded by Nana Minuet.

I have to say I was getting very excited by Mesh, especially with the recent announcement that Phoenix is going to be supporting it (thanks to some dedicated work by Henri Beauchamp of the Cool Viewer).

These boots are a great case in point – imagine how wrong the knees would look in that pose if those were sculpt boots!

However, all is not as good as it seems; I’ve learned that the current implementation of Mesh is worse than useless, for clothes at least. It would seem that a mesh object attaches to your skeleton, not your “flesh”, and cannot be resized in-world. That means that if you are slim like the model in the above pics, those boots would look great. However, if you are any other size than her they won’t fit. Oh, sure, an alpha layer will mask out the bits of you that the boots cover but if you have bigger thighs than her you’re fresh out of luck.

One of the biggest benefits of Second Life is you can be who you want to be. You (or, rather, your avatar) can be exactly as you want it – it’s the overriding expression of your individuality and what makes Second Life so wonderful. But if Mesh clothing is going to force us all to resize our avatar to the clothing, rather than the clothing to the avatar, then this is a bad thing.

There is a JIRA running on this. It’s rather technical but the gist of it is “change Mesh to resize to your flesh not be fixed size and attached to your skeleton”.
See https://jira.secondlife.com/si/jira.issueviews:issue-html/SH-2374/SH-2374.html

Posted in Emerald, General, Imprudence, Phoenix / Firestorm, Second Life, Viewers

Killer features (Imprudence & Phoenix)

Posted on by beccapet

What I like the most about Third Party Viewers such as Imprudence and Phoenix is that they are developed by people who actually use Second Life and so have features that, whilst they may not grab the headlines, are genuinely useful. As an aside, I think it’s pretty clear that the developers at Linden Lab who developed Viewer 2.x don’t, but that’s not the subject of this entry.

This is a roundup of what I consider to be genuinely useful features. It’s by no means an extensive or all-inclusive list.

Imprudence

Profile groups
When viewing your profile, groups that you have hidden from public view are shown greyed out, giving you an idea of how your profile will appear to others.

Communicate window
When new IMs come in, the title bar of the ‘communicate’ menu updates to say how many are unread. My friend Mariana actually ported this to Phoenix and submitted it as a patch and it was rejected as the person who rejected it didn’t see it as being useful, which was a shame as I think it is.

Group chat
You can suppress Group Chat for individual groups. This is just so useful for those busy groups where people just can’t STFU in group chat but you still want to receive group notices.

Radar
The client-side radar / Avatar List is very compact and hung off the bottom of the Mini-Map. I actually really like this as it is very compact and can be up all the time, unlike the Phoenix one which takes up too much screen space to be up all the time.

Phoenix

Intra-sim teleports even when there is a Landing Point
By this I mean teleports that take place within a sim, rather than when teleporting into a sim from another sim.
Sim Owners have long been able to set a Landing Point to dictate where you land when entering their sim. I can see the value of it, as it means people are forced to rez near a rules giver, or a prim notice, or a shop display, or the starting point on a tour, or whatever. But when you are already in a sim, is it still necessary? I don’t think so. In fact it is really, really annoying when you want to cam around a large shop (for example) and then TP to where your camera view is to get closer to a vendor board, or the like. Most Third Party Viewers allow you to double-click teleport, but often you fall foul of the Landing Point and get an unhelpful message saying you are unable to TP closer than where you are. Or, worse, you get zapped back to the Landing Point.
However, there is an option in Phoenix when using the LSL Client Bridge to use llMoveToTarget for double-click TPs and this zips you straight to where you double-click even if this sim has a Landing Point. It does this because llMoveToTarget is a script command used to move things around rather than a teleport as such, so isn’t restricted by the Landing Point rules. For me this is the killer feature as it is just so useful for enabling me to shop in a large store the way I want to.

Aspect ratios on textures
As I’ve blogged about before [link], Second Life stores pictures (textures) in squares, or rectangles made of squares, and unless the Aspect Ratio exactly matches that of the texture it’s going to be distorted. With most Viewers you have to stretch the texture till it looks right.
Phoenix adds a useful little drop-list at the bottom of a texture view to let you tell it what Aspect Ratio it should be. So for a 16:9 picture stored in a texture you can send it to a friend and, provided they are using Phoenix, tell them in IM “you’ll need to view that at 16:9”. They set the drop-list selection to 16:9 and ‘hey presto’ the picture looks right. Useful!

Profile pictures
This one has been around since the Emerald days. When there is a picture in a Profile (wherever it appears) you can pop it out into its own window and view it actual size (which will be bigger than it is being displayed at in the Profile). Of course the Aspect Ratio may then be wrong and you might need to refer to the above and also my blog post on Profile pic aspect ratios [link]

Prim manipulation – cut & paste values
One for the builders and tinkerers amongst us. Phoenix has a really useful feature where you can copy the size, rotation, etc. of a prim and paste it to another. It saves you having to individually highlight and copy each value for x, y & z and paste it into the same box on another prim.
It’s easy to miss this feature, but if you look next to the values you’ll see little buttons marked “c” for copy and “p” for paste.

Prim manipulation – linked prims
Following on from the above, there are also useful buttons for linking / unlinking prims when editing parts of a linked prim set. There is also functionality for moving through a linked prim set.

Autocomplete for names in chat
Finally, a useful little feature for open chat. If you type part of someone’s name you can hit the tab key and Phoenix will try and complete if for you based on who is in chat range.

—

It’s a shame that Phoenix is now in a maintenance phase, with no planned new functionality, because I would love to see the features I mentioned for Imprudence brought into Phoenix. However, I have it on good authority from one of the Lead Developers that this is not going to happen.

Posted in Imprudence, Opinion, Phoenix / Firestorm, Second Life

Is Imprudence withering on the vine?

Posted on by beccapet

I like Imprudence. I’ve been using it for 3 months now and I feel very attached to it. But I think the time is approaching when I’m going to have to look to other Viewers, with Phoenix as a prime candidate.

Why is this? Well, one reason is that there is a show-stopper of a bug in v1.3.0 which is forcing me to continue to use an earlier Release Candidate (RC3) as it directly affects my photography.
Imprudence v1.3.0 was released in early October (ie. 2 months ago) and around a month ago this bug was fixed, along with Jacek commenting that it should provoke an immediate v1.3.1 due to the severity of it. However, this has not happened and I’m unwilling to adopt a beta release to get this fixed.

However, for me, the writing is on the wall for two very significant reasons. One is that there have been no releases at all for several weeks, not even Experimental releases, suggesting that the development team are spending all their time on Kokua (the new Viewer based on SL 2.x) at the expense of Imprudence. And the other is the thorny issue of Multiple Attachments.

The developers of Imprudence have always been quite bullish about multiple attachments, stating that they would not support Emerald’s “hacky” multiple attach point code, not even to properly render avatars being run by people using Phoenix (despite it being easily added to Imprudence by simply updating a single XML file as it turns out) because they were going to support the “proper” Multiple Attachments of SL 2.x by back-porting it.
Well, a couple of days ago a new version of Phoenix was released that supports just that, whilst Imprudence still does not.

This, to me, says that Phoenix is still actively being developed and supported and Imprudence is withering on the vine and is not. It also feels as rather an egg-on-face moment for Imprudence (in my humble opinion).

As I said, I really like Imprudence, but I feel like it is being left further and further behind by Phoenix and eventually I’m going to have to jump ship.

Sorry, Imprudence. It’s been nice knowing you.

Posted in General, Imprudence, Phoenix / Firestorm, Photography, Second Life, tips, Viewer 2.x, Viewers

Profile pics and profile Picks (a tutorial)

Posted on by beccapet

A lot of people who have made their own picture for their Profile find that it appears squashed or stretched. There is a very good reason for this and it is fairly straightforward to work around. The aim of this post is to try to explain how.

Before I go any further though, do bear in mind that this whole tutorial is all to do with 1.x Series Viewers (ie. official Viewer up to 1.23.5 and most Third Party Viewers such as Imprudence, Phoenix, Emergence, and the like) since Linden Lab in their infinite (lack of) wisdom changed it for Viewer 2.

The key thing to remember with textures (which is the name Linden Lab uses to refer to anything that looks like a picture, which includes snapshots) is that they are always square or else rectangles made up of squares. And those squares are always powers of 2. So a texture can be 256×256 pixels, 512×512, 1024×1024, 512×1024, 512×256, etc. – you get the idea. The maximum size allowed in any one direction (in Second Life) is 1024.
If a picture does not fit into one of these combinations then it is stretched or squashed accordingly, and this is where the deformation comes from.

You would think that you should be able to just take a snapshot in-world and use it, however this is not the case because the Profile picture, and the picture used in the Picks section of your profile, have specific aspect ratios which are clearly defined by Linden Lab [link]. For your Profile pic this aspect is 4:3, and for a Profile Pick this is 16:9 (for 1.x Viewers. For 2.x Viewers LL changed it to 1:1 and 8:5/5:3 respectively. Don’t even get me started on why the Picks have two aspect ratios in the 2.x Viewer).
If you’re unsure what I mean by “aspect ratio” then please refer to [this link].
Unless you can somehow capture your in-world snapshot at something close to the correct ratio, then it’s not going to look right.
(I should note at this point that the RL pic in your profile has a 1:1 ratio, which since it is square is so trivially easy to do that I won’t mention it further)

So, how do you get it right? Well, provided you are happy to do a little bit of simple post-production then it is quite easy.
In order to do it you’ll need a photo editing application such as Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.net or even an online service like Picnik. All except Photoshop are free so don’t be worried if you don’t have one of them. I’ll leave it to you to choose what to use. I use GIMP myself, because it is almost as powerful as Photoshop but is free and Photoshop is very expensive. However, if you are a beginner then paint.net is a lot easier and more intuitive.

First you’ll need to take your snapshot in Second Life. Take a snapshot, but instead of saving it in-world, save it to your hard drive.
In v1.x viewers then this can easily be done with the Snapshot dialog, assessed with the “snapshot” button on the bottom toolbar (or the Ctrl-Alt-S keyboard shortcut if you’re using Windows). There is a radio button under ‘Snapshot destination’ at the top of the dialog, one option of which is “Save to your hard drive”.
You can also use “Snapshot to Disk” from the File menu.
Save the snapshot to somewhere that you can find it again shortly.

If you already have a snapshot in-world which you want to use then it is possible to save it locally and use it. Provided it has full permissions, you can open it and then choose “File -> Save Texture As” from the top menu (which is slightly counter-intuitive as you might reasonably expect it to be a menu on the window of the snapshot itself)

Now fire up your photo editing software and open the picture you just saved (regardless of which of the above two methods you used to create it).
Select the crop tool and fix the aspect ratio. In GIMP this is a checkbox on the crop tool and an edit box to specify the ratio. Your mileage my vary.
For a Profile pic you’ll want 4:3 and for a Pick you’ll want 16:9.
Don’t worry at this point what the final image size is because we will be resizing it.

Crop the picture to the correct ratio. It’s up to you how you want this to look, and it depends on your picture, but do remember that when someone looks at your profile the picture can look quite small. So, for your main profile pic at least, I find it is best to close crop and get your face quite dominant in the picture since your Profile picture is meant to be about you. However it’s entirely your call, of course.

Now, this is the important bit; the trick that this whole entry is about is coming up. You want to resize the picture so that it looks squashed, so that when SL uses it and stretches it, it regains its correct Aspect Ratio. Sneaky, huh?
You can do this in one step, but I like to do it in two steps as it makes more sense to me.
Resize your picture, preserving the aspect ratio. You’ll want to set the height of the picture to be either 512 or 1024 and let your software work out the width.
You’ll notice that the picture still looks right. Which is what we want.
Now the sneaky part – size the picture again but this time turn off keeping the correct aspect ratio. In GIMP this is a little icon of a chain between the height and width. Now set the width to be the same as the height. Do not change the height.
Your picture will now look squashed. Don’t worry, this is fine!
Save your picture – I’d recommend to a different filename.

Now, we need to get the picture back into SL as a texture.

Fire up your SL Viewer and, when ready, upload your edited picture (it’s under the File menu). It will cost you L$10 to do this. It’ll probably end up in the Textures folder of your Inventory.

Finally, edit your profile and drag the texture (ie. your uploaded picture) onto the appropriate picture box of the profile. Or, alternatively, double-click on the picture box and browse for it.

Hopefully your picture will look correct again – it will have been stretched out to the correct aspect ratio again. If it has not you’ve probably used the wrong ratio for the wrong box. Remember, for your main picture it should be 4:3 and for a Pick it should be 16:9
Also, bear in mind that it will only look right on 1.x Viewers since Viewer 2 uses different ratios.

That’s it! I hope that this was useful to you.

Posted in Phoenix / Firestorm, Programming, Second Life, Viewers

The pain of compiling your own Viewer

Posted on by beccapet

This post has been superseded. Click here for the updated post. 

I’m sadly well aware that very few people read my blog and that even fewer have the technical ability or desire to build their own Viewer from the source code, but I know there are a handful and this is for them.

Firstly there is a LOT of pain. Lots of getting all the right libraries, support tools, resources and the like before you even begin to struggle with compilation errors.

Mariana Latynina is blogging about compiling under Linux64, and has tried several code bases including Phoenix
See http://marianalatynina.blogspot.com

And Forestaurora is blogging about Phoenix under Windows
See http://forestaurora.wordpress.com

You can see from there quite how much work is involved in getting a compile done. Surely it has to be easier than that?

(Oh, and a ‘hi’ to Tonya as she’s probably the only person who will read this post and even then only because I’ll point her at it. LOL)

—

Update: The guys at Radegast have the right idea. Ok, it’s not a full Viewer, but even so it’s the kind of thing we’d like to see:
http://radegastclient.org/wiki/Building_From_Source

Posted in General, Second Life, tips

Top Tip: Disable scripts on items that don’t need them

Posted on by beccapet

Lots of clothes are now coming with standard resizer scripts, which include the ability to delete the scripts when you have fitted them right. This reduces lag and is a really good idea, although you should always make sure that you have a backup copy first. Never do this on your only copy if you ever plan to change your shape!

But what if you have a no-copy outfit like the amazing full-prim outfits from Feral Spirit by Melanie Jaehun? You have a problem, because you can’t make a backup and you don’t want to delete the scripts in your only copy of the outfit.

Melanie made the excellent suggestion that, for objects that are no-copy but are mod, you can disable the scripts instead. With 1.x Viewers (eg. Phonenix, Imprudence, etc.) you go to the Tools menu and select “Set Scripts to Not Running in Selection” for each object. This will have the same lag-reducing benefits as removing the script, but without losing the ability to re-enable it and run it again in the future.

Thanks for the tip, Melanie!

Posted in Emerald, Imprudence, Phoenix / Firestorm, Second Life, Viewers

Viewer usage in Second Life, post-Emerald

Posted on by beccapet

As I wander around Second Life at the moment, I’m keeping my eyes open for what viewers people seem to be using. Not in a clipboard and notebook way, just getting a feeling.

Before the Emerald scandal, an awful lot of people would have been using Emerald. In fact, up until the point it was blocked there were still a significant number of people using it.

Now that Emerald has been blocked, I was expecting to see a marked increase in the usage of Phoenix and Imprudence, with possibly the odd Emergence from people who don’t realise it is a dead-end choice.

Instead, I’m seeing a handful of Imprudence, the odd Phoenix and a handful of “LGG Proxy” (which I assume is Emergence). And, amazingly, I’m still seeing the odd Emerald (which surely shouldn’t be allowed?)
Everyone else displays no Viewer tag which either means they are using an Official Viewer or else have suppressed transmitting their tag. I know a number of friends who do the latter so this is obviously skewing my results.

I am left with the feeling that public confidence in Third Party Viewers has been severely knocked and people are returning to the Official Viewers in droves. I’d be interested in hearing other peoples’ comments on this.

Posted in Emerald, Privacy & identity, Second Life, Viewers

The Phoenix Arises – Emerald by a different name

Posted on by beccapet

Well, it seems Jessica Lyons doesn’t hang around and has assembled a team to take over where Emerald left off. And amongst that team is LordGregGreg.

According to her blog entry [here], Phoenix is starting out as a sanitised Emerald, like LordGregGreg’s Emergence Viewer, and will be developed from there.

In keeping with my recent post [here] on how an Open Source Project should be run, they’re running a publicly-viewable repository and full transparency.

This is very encouraging news indeed.

Posted in Emerald, Opinion, Second Life, Viewers

Emerald – so what went wrong?

Posted on by beccapet

[Disclaimer: This blog entry is personal opinion based on a personal understanding of current events. Should you feel any facts are materially wrong then please contact me, citing sources, and I will be happy to make corrections or retractions as appropriate]

—

I try to keep my RL separate from my SL, but I guess it’s not giving too much away to say that I work in the IT Industry and have direct experience with software development. So the self-destruction of Emerald has been very interesting for me.

So, where did it all go wrong? I think to answer that you need to look at how a proper Open Source Project is run.

Generally you have a version control system which is able to be read (but not written to) by anyone who cares to do so. Obviously members of the development team can write as well.

This open access ensures transparency, because anyone with the technical ability can examine and review the source code to make sure there is nothing nefarious in it. They are also able to download the entire codebase and compile their own version of the application rather than trusting that the pre-built binaries available for download were actually made from the source code.
Furthermore, the version control system has an audit trail of every check-in, showing what changes were made, by whom, and when. This makes it more difficult to introduce malicious code although there are ways round it, of course. However, even if the developer subverts the process to avoid the audit trail (if they have direct access to the actual files on the server hosting the repository), the code is still available for inspection and anyone can compare a previous snapshot of the code with the current one using an automated difference tool. So there is still transparency.

The trouble with Emerald is that the version control system was not open and there was no transparency. Yes, the source code was published periodically but in a snapshot form. You were expected to trust that this source code was the real deal and not some sanitised version. And that trust was betrayed.

Because there was no transparency, certain members of the Emerald team were able to inject undesirable code (which is well documented elsewhere so I won’t bother going into it here).

Worse still, Emerald also used some Closed Source software which meant that only the developer(s) of that code knew what was in it and the members of the Emerald team were expected to trust that it was non-malicious. Again, that trust was betrayed.

It also appears to me that the team weren’t really following good Software Engineering process. This isn’t too surprising as, as far as I understand, they were all programming for fun and were all fairly young. So there were few controls in place to audit what was going on. I genuinely believe that the more respectable members of the team (and I’ll leave it for you to decide who they are) didn’t know what was being put in by the less respectable members. This is why we have processes, checks and safeguards in professional Software Development and I simply don’t think they were in place for Emerald.

And I’m not even going to comment on the clash of personalities, egos, hidden agenda and motivations of the actual developers of Emerald. That’s not something I want to explore as this piece is really more about the technical side of things.

In many ways, the Emerald project was a nuclear reactor being run without control rods or safety systems, and it went critical and suffered a meltdown.

So, where does this leave Third Party Viewer Development? Are we doomed to use Linden Lab’s awful Viewer 2.0? The short answer is no!
Emerald was not the only Third Party Viewer and some of the others are being run properly. Imprudence, for example, is fully transparent and Open Source. They are by no means the only one, of course, but it’s the one that springs most readily to mind.

Finally, I just want to say that this blog entry may seem very negative about Emerald. However, I don’t mean it to be because I do genuinely believe that Emerald was truly innovative and really moved the Second Life Viewer game onwards. The developers added some very good features (the nefarious ones notwithstanding) and they should be praised for it; they’re clearly very talented. However, as I’ve said, I think the project was very badly run and was very open to abuse. And that abuse was made.