The new R16 Viewer, eye candy and functionality in one!

[OpenLife at OLX]

The new R16 Viewer, eye candy and functionality in one! By Macphisto Angelus

Yesterday another new phase in OpenLife’s continuing growth happened. Kirstenlee Openlife (Cinquetti) released the latest version of the OpenLife viewer. I always feel like a kid at Christmas waiting for the new viewer and yesterday I got to open the package. My jaw dropped. This viewer is sexy! It moves away from the greedy grid (second life) references and even has great UI changes such as transparent windows when they are not selected. Also present was a cool new animated walk that is unisex and now the OLG Credit symbol is in place so there will be no confusion. And that is just the eye candy. Does it have new functions as well? OH YEAH! Let’s look at some of them.

First up: Physics. Klee did some changes to the ODE physics. One advantage to that is less sinking into prims. Animations will appear smoother and more natural (like the new walk).

Inventory works better now as a bug was corrected from the R15 that caused disconnection when dragging folders around the screen.

Better frame rates and lower memory usage is another new advantage. Klee achieved as much as 80FPS in full screen mode using an ATI 3870 card. This will show improvements on even older machines.

Some scripting improvements like line numbering and some recoding of LSL to better fit the OLG environment took place as well.

One nifty new advantage for you snapshot takers out there is the addition of the ability to save to hard drive in PNG format as well as JPEG and BMP.

More eye candy in that the viewer has two skins available with an OLG and REX theme. This is another step in distancing the viewer from SL. Also new colored tabs offering a great contrast that is welcome to me personally due to its better visibility.

The time zone is now set to UTC (GMT). This moves away from the Pacific Standard Time to recognize that OpenLife is a worldwide community.

This viewer was made by Klee with the idea of making other platform versions. A MAC version is slated for the close future. Also a Linux viewer is in the cards. No more needing that clunky viewer from SL to log in. Soon everyone will be enjoying the rock solid Kirsten Viewer.

Also missing from this release is support for use on SL. This viewer allows three connection options: OpenLife, OpenLife Beta (offline at this time) and the 3DX Studio Standalone server. Why no support for SL? Well, simply put SL is unable to handle the new improvements. OpenLife moved beyond SL in these instances.
For instance:
The maximum sized prims. (100M)
New “nano” prims that can be sized down to (jewelers are you ready for this?) .001! Compare that with the past .01 size prims.
99% Hollow is also possible with this viewer.

Soon OLG will no longer support log-ins from alternate viewers. Only the OpenLife viewer will work. This is to prevent hacked clients from logging in which eliminates some griefing tools and security holes that can be present without this measure.

So, what about the future of the viewer? Are there any big things ahead? Of course there are big things ahead! This is OpenLife, where improvements are always on the way.

Sometime around 16.1 or 16.2 we can begin to see some integration of REX features. This will allow the working aspects of the OpenLife viewer (streaming audio, Full screen mode, etc) to be coupled with some of the REX features into one rock solid, feature rich viewer with security. Is anyone else drooling at this point? I sure am!

For the rest of the meeting Klee took on requests for a wish list of future features. Many that were brought up dealt with building tools, texture sorting and partnering and Animation integrations. Klee and Dawny took notes and Klee will see what can be done to work them in to future releases.

Do you have a suggestion? Feel free to put it in the comments below and maybe Klee can see it through for you.

Now, where do you find this great new viewer?
R16 Viewer download

Klee asks us to remember it is a work in progress and wants us to keep an eye out for any LL or SL references that may still be lurking in there. If you find one please list them here in the comments or there is a thread on the official OpenLife forums for that purpose.

Be sure to let Klee know you appreciate all the effort put into this viewer and tell Sakai how much you love the new UI tweaks. In my opinion this is the best viewer release ever!

[Yichard]

the idea of having compatible worlds and browsers is very appealing: Teleporting from a world to another, bringing our avatars and inventories... However this is much less simple than with the 2D web. Add to this that, as we see today, each world will want to have its own features, ruining any attempt to make ONE 3D browser.

A general solution to this is to have a flexible client-server protocol, allowing to dynamically add new functions, combining a modular build, an object-like expandable definition of the transfer protociol (combining several flux like http or others), a dynamic download and link of extensions, and a DOM like definition of objects and functions, allowing every language (LLS, C, PHP, Javascript, Python, Java...) to manipulate them simply (for easy development of in world applications. .

If we don't do this, we shall have a useless competition of different browsers and 3D hosts, which will strongly weaken the alternatives to Second Life. We already have two seemingly uncompatible alternatives, open Life and OSgrid. If some want to make competition, let them do it about quality or service. But each time a competitions appeared between the industry standards themselves, it always was harmful, delaying development and useful applications.

[Yichard]

I think groups should be one of the priority functionalities to make work. Groups (and search) are one of the great features which made the good of SL. Also, to simplify this function, I long ago proposed to have several group types, some being simplified, such as chat only or notices only. See http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2816

And then, hello everybody, these were my first posts here. Great to meet new people, and great too to see some old friends of SL...

[Yichard]

to comment on Wayfinder Wishbringer's post above: yes we must go in a way where all VR will be compatible like 2D web sites are. This will be less simple however.
On openlife moving out of compatibility with SL, this is certainly detrimental, but alas unavoidable: simply we cannot have a community work with the SL team. I can make such a statement, because I have about ten JIRA threads on the SL site, some very simple to implement. In one year, several were griefed, none was answered or even aknowledged. So...

[Yichard]

-further to the previous, to be able to import shapes made with other 3D languages, which are defined as vertexes lists and face lists. That is, one parser per common format, like VRML, 3DS, .OBJ, etc.

This however arises a problem: shapes must then be stored in one of these mesh formats, not the SL prims format. This is not so much an issue, because at a time or another the SL prim format must be translated in a mesh format, for the viewer to display. And we still need the SL prim format (see previous post). So, simply, when a mesh prim comes, the translation is not needed. We just have to add another prim type: "mesh" (which would also code for cumbersome SL "sculpties", if one has sculpties to save into openlife). The suggestion above (also, adding addition of substraction of shapes would produce meshes in most cases).

this was discussed in the SL JIRA http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1110 and especially in http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8145

[Yichard]

Second wish list, to add more build capacities. The SL viewer is very peculiar, as it doesn't uses meshes (usual 3D description of random shapes, using coordinates of vertexes (angles) and descriptions of faces and texture position) but rather predefined shapes, with some parametres (a cube is described by its size, desription, etc).
This peculiarity of SL makes of it a very simple environment for building, without expensive tools or complicated learning. so it should be kept
However this simplicity is very frustrating for more professional builders, as soon as some more complicated shapes are needed.

So a tip would be to be able to have addition or substraction of shapes, which are basic functions in 3D modelers, and however still simple to lear functions.

[Yichard]

Hi, so many suggestions... just some which look the most important for me. I do one comment per feature, to simplify reading.
This one is about working with the W3C to normalize the client-server protocol transfer, so that it becomes a standard like the TCIP (2D internet transfer protocol, often referd as http://) This however must be much more evolutive than the TCIP. We should have an object (in the sense of the C language) definition of functions, allowing to add new. Today, we have TPs, loading shapes and textures,exchanging movements and chat, in the future we shall have to add smell, touch, etc. I have some more ideas on this, it would be better to have a thread of its own

[Fae Wayard]

IANAL but it's my understanding the LL, being the original copyright holder, distributes binaries and the source under multiple licenses (see commercial license for OnRez viewer) thus KDU linking with the LL binary distro is legal, but not with any GPL-based distro. http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense - I read that as, any library/DLL that is distributed with a GPL-based viewer (i.e. OLV) must also be GPL, and distributed in source form, exactly matching the distributed binaries.

[Wordfromthe Wise]

microprims.. wow .. great overall performance .. real recycled plywood .. just wow .. great work Kirsten .. hope you dont end up as the project leader for the SL viewer .. we need you here ...

[Hercimer]

I still don't understand the thinking in tens and land being in 4's for building prims like SL did and that caused so many problems for builders of buildings in SL.
Land is in 4 meter square blocks:
4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56, 60, 64, 68, 72, 76, 80, 84, 88, 92, 96, 100.
While 100 meters is a number that evenly divides by 4, it still falls 28 meters short of 128 for a one quarter sim. So builders making things for a quarter sim will still be hamstrung to some extent on this limit of 100 meters. I really don't understand them stopping at 100 meters when a limit of 128 meters would make much more sense and be a lot more useful to builders. Say you want to make a mall on a quarter of a sim and now you have to go back to piecing bits of prims together to make it a full 128 by 128 and is a waste of prims and still a pain for builders to have to deal with. Don't get me wrong, and improvement over the artificially set limit of 10 meters in SL is more then welcome, but why the stop at 100 meters when 128 meters would be much more functional to builders?

[Chili Yiyuan]

Hi

Found another bad image today. I was trying to login, but had no network, so got the old message "Despite our best effort............", clicked OK button, and then, the screen was filled with the awful image Second Life. Must be hiding somewhere :)