Second Life 1.21 RC0 Released!

August 31, 2008 at 3:51 pm | In SecondSolutions, second life | 1 Comment
Tags: 1.21, mac, performance, ppc, RC0, release, second life, SecondSolutions, watchdog

On August 28th LindenLab® announced their release of Second Life 1.21 RC0 exiting! Well this release will be the first of it’s kind as it will enable the option for getting your scripts compiled to MONO through a new option in the script editor. And after a while they released a new revision that corrected the bug that prevented PPC mac users from using it, now its all clear and everybody should be able to use it. Also, for some people it seems that this new viewer isn’t having a good performance, I encourage reading the Release Notes for this viewer, as they explain they have enabled the thread-watchdog debug function which slows down the performance as each thread is enabled to monitoring, this can be fixed by adding a command line argument.

˝We have enabled some special debugging checks during the Release Candidate cycle. These have a short term effect of causing the viewer to crash more when something goes wrong, but it assists Linden Lab to improve stability by identifying those failure cases. We appreciate that you send us crash reports that occur!

These extra checks WILL be removed in a later iteration of the Release Candidate. But these can be turned off by a Resident at any time:

Turned on Thread monitoring (Watchdog) during the Release Candidate cycle

Thread monitor will detect when the application is frozen for a period greater than 20 seconds and possibly force a crash with detailed logs

Thread monitor can be disabled by choosing to never report crashes, or with a command line setting “–set WatchdogEnabled 0″

The threshold timing of the thread monitor is set in the file \SecondLifeReleaseCandidate\app_settings\settings.xml under the key “MainloopTimeoutDefault” ˝

There are also a lot of improvements, and bug fixes, starting by a cool new feature that allows you to transfer inventory items by dropping them in the conversation IM. The tools menu seems to got restored to always be shown due to the users asking for it back, it wasn’t a great deal for me but i guess it wasn’t a problem to have there on top. We also got with this viewer some changes to the LSL api:

˝Changes to LSL:

Add an LSL call llGetRegionAgentCount() for count of agents in region

Add an LSL call llGetAgentLanguage() to get user’s viewer language setting

Add “touch position” information to touch-events in LSL

llDetectedUV()

llDetectedST()

llDetectedTouchFace()

llDetectedTouchPos()

llDetectedTouchNormal()

llDetectedTouchBinormal()˝

The release keys button has been moved to the world menu, cleaning the interface. Now in the chat window your messages will appear under your name rather than under “you: ” that was the way used, a new option for friendship requesting is added, and now it will allow you to enter a custom phrase at the request like “hey wanna be my friend?” hehe but remember not to go around asking people as they will think you’re a jerk and nobody likes that. Well so this update will add many features and corrections, some of these “bug-fixes” are really bug fixes just nearly patches to prevent you doing certain things that would fail silently instead of truly implementing them but well we still in early stage of the development so we will start blaming them when we’re at RC10 So the overall rate of this release will be quite good, no crashes for now and good performance. Let’s hope that with the further releases it gets even better.

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Those are some great additions and an interesting direction that the viewer is going. I very much like that you can detect the language, that will be a great tool for business users.

The new inventory transfer option with convo will save time as well and reduce screen clutter, very handy for day to day uses.

Thanks for the overview! Guess I should go get it!

Comment by Ener Hax — September 1, 2008 #