SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

As your login splash screen may have already told you, an optional viewer upgrade is available today… Announcing the Second Life 1.20 Viewer! It features improved reliability and a more flexible UI architecture so you can select the color of the User Interface. It also brings several improved features and many important bug fixes. Download it here! For those of you who’d like more detail on what’s in the new viewer, please read on.

This 1.20.15 version has finished fifteen weeks in a Release Candidate cycle of testing (with thousands of your reports & logs volunteered to our engineers). With more than 35 crash fixes in this version, you should experience better stability than the previous version 1.19.1. From all crash metrics collected to this point, we have observed an approximate 20% improvement in total crash rate in this viewer across all types of hardware.

One new feature is the ability to change the color theme (or “skinning”) of the User Interface. To do this, use CTRL+P to go to Preferences > Skins tab and select one of the options! The new Silver skin provides a refreshed color scheme for the UI and icons. This is the culmination of Project Dazzle, which was refined with residents in previous First Look and the Release Candidate cycle. Based on YOUR FEEDBACK, this new color scheme is optional in the final viewer: Second Life will install with the classic appearance until you choose to change it.

Finally, this viewer delivers some anticipated bug fixes as reported by you, our Residents… and a number of Open Source contributions. Here’s only a few of these from all which we are proud to include:

• Fixed: VWR-2778: System skirt textures turn invisible on wearing
• Fixed: VWR-2404: Lossless texture compression on small textures is not lossless
• Fixed: VWR-2633/VWR-6889: Unable to interact with some Groups when role has no allowed abilities
• Fixed: VWR-6800: Eliminate memory leaks in llcharacter/llmotioncontroller code
• Fixed: VWR-4860: WindLight: Planar texturing renders incorrectly in version 1.19
• Fixed: VWR-4580: Property lines are visible through avatar, objects and through ground
• Fixed: VWR-1735: Directly interacting with a muted resident should unmute them
• Fixed: VWR-6350: Word “Flycam” appears in Flycam Mode and does not disappear with UI
• … and 104 more bugs as listed in the complete Release Notes!

There are plenty of small changes and improvements to explore — and you can find out where you can update your graphics card drivers (as we always recommend) — starting with this page on the Second Life Wiki:

» The 1.20 Welcome page «

Note: This viewer upgrade is OPTIONAL: You may still log in to Second Life with older viewers 1.19.0 and version 1.19.1.

Today we are releasing a new Release Candidate, 1.20 RC14. If you have already been using the Release Candidate (RC13), you will be required to update to RC14 with the latest bug fixes. But, the Release Candidate is always an optional series of viewers that you may choose not to use — or use side by side on your computer with the main viewer offered on our Downloads page (and at get.secondlife.com).

This RC14 includes a few last polishes to the Classic and Silver skins, as reported broken in the previous iteration. We have also resolved a few outstanding behavior issues to Snapshots, and to Unmuting a muted Resident (VWR-1735)…. These were small features that were introduced along the way in RC7, but needed more complete thinking and revision based on your feedback in the Issue Tracker. In RC14, these now behave logically/as expected for those features.

We expect this to be the final Release Candidate in the 1.20 viewer series, barring any Showstoppers that you may find. Please of course continue to report any new issues (large or small) in the Issue Tracker, and be sure to set “Affects Version/s” to “1.20 Release Candidate”.

• When this version 1.20 becomes an official version of the Second Life viewer, it will NOT be a mandatory upgrade; you will still be able to log in with the current viewer 1.19.1.4 or the earlier 1.19.0.5 version. (Those versions will simply let you know that a new 1.20 version is available, if you wish to download.)

To get started with this RC14 viewer, visit the Test Viewers download page (NOTE: use the links at bottom of page, under Test Viewers).

Fixes in 1.20 RC14:

Changes:
* Moved the Preferences > Skins tab to the bottom of the list of preferences tabs.

Fixes:
* Fixed: VWR-7353: Auto-snapshot should not be tied to Freeze Frame (full screen preview) when taking a picture in Snapshots
* Fixed: VWR-7344: “Shutter sound” should not play every time Snapshot Preview window opens or when a setting is modified
* Fixed: VWR-7389: String is missing when opening an IM window to a muted resident (string that the resident is currently muted)
* Fixed: VWR-7510: Muted resident is unmuted if he/she initiates a Group chat
* Fixed: The upgrade from RC12 to the new RC leaves the old /skins/html and /skins/xui files on the hard drive
* Fixed: Grid selection on the login screen is not set, unless you hit return
* Fixed: A new debug setting “TutorialURL” to change the URL used by the Tutorial window
* Fixed: The list on Preferences>Popups is right justified on the Mac PowerPC
* Fixed: Enlarge the browser tutorial window slightly
* Fixed: Some dropdown selection boxes are clipped
* Fixed: All HTML floaters have Dazzle scrollbar art

Localization Fixes:
* Fixed: some text overlaps in Buy Land floater in Portuguese
* Fixed: add final translations for Preferences>Skins options in German, Japanese, Korean
* Fixed: Update the viewer credits in About>Second Life…

IMPORTANT: Known Issues with RC14:

• It is a Known Issue that this Release Candidate will not run successfully on a Mac PowerPC that has the operating system OS X 10.3.9. It will only run on PPC hardware if you have Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher.

• The current viewer, version 1.19.1, still supports the Mac PowerPC that is running Mac OS X 10.3.9. Katt Linden has been gathering feedback about continuing our support for this Mac operating system in future releases of Second Life.

* * *

A final, HUGE thanks to all of you who participated in this extended-length RC cycle — those who downloaded & tested, posted reproducible steps and system environments, responded to questions, and clarified and linked. Your help to improve the new Second Life viewer is greatly, greatly appreciated! I hope the improved stability of this viewer, and major bug fixes that we accomplished with your help, make this the best viewer so far to experience Second Life.

Today we are releasing a new Release Candidate, 1.20 RC13. If you have already been using the Release Candidate (RC12), you will be required to update to RC13 with the latest bug fixes. But, the Release Candidate is always an optional series of viewers that you may choose not to use — or use side by side on your computer with the main viewer offered on our Downloads page (or get.secondlife.com).

This RC13 introduces… drum roll… the feature VWR-5059 which enables you to switch the look and feel of the User Interface between 2 options: the classic grey color or a lighter blue/silver theme.  Go to Preferences>Skins. (Side note for SL historians keeping track: As you know, the multi-month project was code named “Project Dazzle”– but that’s really the name of the architecture juggernaut work that got us to refresh the UI. In the final presentation in 1.20 Viewer, we opted to call the resulting color option by a simpler name, ‘Silver’.)

EDIT 2008-07-10 11:30PST: To be clear, the feature VWR-5059 allows you to switch between the 2 pre-installed skins only, as requested by many Residents in this 1.20 viewer. This is not the complete Skinning architecture outlined in the Skinning project… which is a long term project and takes more time. Resident-created skins will still need to update their instructions to install them, if they are posted on the SL wiki.

IMPORTANT: Minor Known Issues with RC13:

• It is a Known Bug that HTML based windows (like Search>All) will still have a scroll bar with the lighter Silver look to them, even if you are using the Classic skin.
• It is a Known Bug that the art arrows on some dropdown combo boxes may appear clipped.

• When upgrading from RC12 to RC13, the new XML skins files are installed (under-the-hood) to a folder called \skins\default\xui\. Unfortunately this leaves behind legacy files from the previous Release Candidate in the old \skins\xui folder. This is completely harmless and will not affect RC13 at all. We mention this only to avoid confusion by advanced users who are interested in the Skinning architecture. The next iteration of the Release Candidate will resolve this problem.

Please continue to report any new issues in the Issue Tracker and be sure to set “Affects Version/s” to “1.20 Release Candidate”. Visit the Test Viewers download page (Note: use the links at bottom of page, under Test Viewers) to get started with the new Release Candidate!

Fixes in 1.20 RC13:

Changes:
* The viewer installs with a default classic grey color of the User Interface. This can be changed in Preferences > Skins (It requires a restart of the viewer to take effect.)

Fixes:
* Fixed: VWR-7893: create a Classic skin for the viewer
* Fixed: VWR-5059: add option to switch between a Classic and Silver theme from within Preferences
* Fixed: VWR-3529: WindLight: Saving snapshots to disk crashes viewer
* Fixed: Assign user agent strings with the name of skin in the internal Mozilla browser
* Fixed: The user-agent string in the browser is not HTTP 1.1 compliant
* Fixed: A new debug setting ‘SkinCurrent’ is used to persist the chosen skin, to avoid crashing older builds