Latest Secondlife news, updates to omvviewer the Secondlife text client and new releases of omvviewer

Well i'm really rubbish at keeping things upto date but the current status is as follows



omvviewer-light, the Gtk# cross platform text viewer for Secondlife, has had loads of work done to it, its much much more stable now and i have spent quite some time on stability as well as general usability improvements. The biggest fix is getting appearance to work correctly as i know a few of you were reporting errors with this.

Latest info and downloads can be found at http://www.byteme.org.uk/omvviewer-light.html although i have v0.45 in the SVN at the moment and should release within the next week.



omvviewer has undergone some work as well. We are now using a topgir controlled git repository to maintain the viewer source, I also have some help from Aleric and terrex on the viewer so it should keep the releases comming smoothly. Terrex is doing the ubuntu port of omvviewer.

If there are any other distros out there that want to come and join us it would be great to all be working of a common repsitory for this work.

Join us on IRC, #omvviewer on efnet

The last release on experimental is 1.22 RC1 but the source to RC2 is live so that will be updated in the next day or so as well. Also we have Dale Glass's Avatar scanner included now, this can replace many of the in-world lsl radars that we all use and is far more efficient and accurate. Check it out on the View menu. Thanks to Carjay for rebasing this patch, I started doing it myself and this saved loads of work ;-)

General SL news (source code related anyway)

OpenAL has hit trunk in Linden SVN that means the next 1.23 release should have openal sound working out of the box, *Horray*

Latest omvviewer news

Well its been a busy month for me, mainly with work, but i have also managed to move omvviewer-light, my text client for Secondlife and other 3D metaverses on to a 0.30 beta release.

The details can be found at http://www.byteme.org.uk/omvviewer-light.html

We've also had a security update to Secondlife and the Debian builds of omvviewer for version 1.20.16 and 1.21.3 are upto date for debian and ubuntu. Debian repository at

http://apt.byteme.org.uk (unstable and experimental repositorys for release and release candidates)

Ubuntu repository now at :-

https://launchpad.net/~capitanterrex/+archive (release canditates)

http://ppa.launchpad.net/openmetaverse/ubuntu (release versions)

It is now impossible to keep debian and ununtu from a single repository so with the help of Terrex we have full ubuntu native support now!

Hippo Awards

Contributor of the year

I'm very pleased to announce and very proud, that last night i won "Contributor of the Year" in the Linden Labs Hippo Awards.

All the award categories had very good nominations and the judges commented how hard it was to separate the nominations.

The announcement was streamed live from SLCC in Florida into Secondlife at the Hippotropolis meeting area. The voice feature of Secondlife was used. A few minor glitches with Rob Linden crashing, hehe, and we used a shoutcast stream instead on the media parcel which seemed to work fine. Overall the "simulcast" worked fine.

I was very pleased to get a nomination and even more so to win the award.

The future of llmozlib

Well we are right in trouble here at the moment. xulrunner has gone to version 1.9 in Debian now and this has broken my standalone llmozlib that linked directly to xulrunner. So now we have a choice what to do:-

1. Not build with llmozlib
2. Build with a stubbed out but non functional llmozlib
3. I start distributing xulrunner 1.8 on my repository as well
4. Distribute the Linden's hacked up mozilla version and link against that.

I don't like any of them. Currently i have 2 functional and this gives the possibility of just slotting "something" in with identical API in the future with no breakage. I had a quick look at the posibility of doing this myself and the basic problem seems to be accessing a texture buiffer of the rendered output. If i could find a html rendering engine that just gave be access to a rendered bitmap then i could lash something up.

I may have to fall back to 3 possibly with the patches that make 4 so we have the extra NotifyObservers for dynamic refreshes.

I'm still very unclear what is happening with webkit integration, there was lots of excitement a few months back with the announcement of http://www.atoker.com/blog/2008/06/12/webkit-meta-a-new-standard-for-in-game-web-content/ but nothing has happened the site looks like its dead and no code has appeared at all. Plus some various comments I have over heard make me jump to conclusions that all is not well with webkit integration still.

Secondlife Debian Package Status

Well this has been fun so far. Despite spending a lot of time with the early cmake adoption with in the source code, the transition over for the Debian packaging has not been easy but the good news is I am mostly there.

I spend time over the weekend porting the openAL patches to the 1.21 build environment and that seems to have lead to Tofu grabbing the code and importing to a Linden Internal branch, woooot!. Ok its just some random internal branch but its a big step forward.

I've also changed my patch system to quilt (which i was meaning to to for a very very long time) and this is a big improvment and makes updating patches far easier. I've ported over the rest of the required patches and also had to create a few new ones to get cmake to do what I want when building a pacakge of the viewer. This includes the ability to rename the output binary, to allow build without the artwork package present and some other minor niggles.

The viewer packaging source is avaiable on http://git.debian.org/git/pkg-games/slviewer.git it's mostly working but the dependencies are probably buggy as thats my next task, after upgrading my sid laptop this afternoon, get it builkding in Sid, then in a Lenny chroot. I'm less worried about ubuntu issues now as I have help in the form of ubuntu packages being built on a ubuntu system so this should prevent crazy ABI incompatibility with various libs.

With my upgrade now i can look at this Mozilla/XULRunner 1.9 issue and see what llmozlib2 requires to build against that.

I kind of got distracted whilst waiting for the packages to update (and my real job was stop/go/stop/go) so i was fiddling with my eggdrop to get the grid status into EFNet channels #lsl #sl and #opensl and had to crash course Tcl. So now the status updates are announced into the vcarious IRC Channels and i've even color coded the [RESOLVED] tags green.

So i've got a blog

Well its about time, years after it was fashionable and everybody has already done it, its about time i got my act together and started posting my random thoughts and other info relating to my work with SecondLife. It also seems to be a mandatory requirement these days that if you are active in SecondLife you have to tell everybody about it via a blog.

So this is just a test really, but i am going to use this to post on my open source development work. Currently I am packaging the SecondLife viewer for Debian Linux, under the package name "omvviewer" or Open Metaverse Viewer. I am also messing around with a Gtk# implementation of a "light" client for connecting to metaverses using a text only interface, this is currently known as "omvviewer-light"

Well that will do for the moment, time to find my way around this blog and start to have a play