My SL Encounters & Stuff
This version is a bugfix and minimal update release:
It’s available for download now! (OSX & Windows)
We are still searching for a Linux C++ expert, who would like to maintain the Linux version of Snowglobe:Frequency… Just saying 
I’m happy to announce the release of Snowglobe Frequency Edition, which Alex Fride and I got out of the door for OSX and Windows today!
Here a quick summary of some of the features included:
It’s available for download already. Have fun! 
The main reason for this release is a fix for a problem with the on-disk texture cache, which would cause confusing error messages to pop up after login, and massively decrease performance.
Give it a go, please. More details here.
I’m fiddling with the blog yet again… You may experience changing layouts etc. But at least there wasn’t an interruption when I moved to a paid service (rather than the free hosting on wordpress.com).
Bare with me… By the end of the week all my removals will be finished (if not earlier). Thanks.
I’m proud to announce public availability of Snowglobe FE 1.0.0.
At the same time, I’ve moved the viewers off from this site to the Frequency Editions project page. There, both my viewer editions found a new home, which provides better usability than this blog or Google Code, in my opinion.
Check it out! And have fun
This is sort of follow-up to my previous article. I spent a whole day hacking, and this is what I came up with so far. The new Snowglobe Frequency Edition contains these features:
The only third-party patch so far is RLVa from Kitty Barnett. The rest is my work, but feel free to copy and use it, once I have released. Don’t forget to give credits, though
Expect an official release within the next few days.
Other features, which I will probably take from other viewers, and refactor them, include:
Allegedly Snowglobe is the fastest viewer at the moment. I can’t confirm that (didn’t see much difference), but I don’t want to ruin this myth by too much bloat. 
That’ll be it. I will fiddle a bit, and keep you posted. Watch this space!
First of all, Emerald FE 1.0.2 is out. More details can be found on the release page.
And what are those “other thoughts”? Well, I was thinking if, rather than slimming down Emerald, it wouldn’t be much more reasonable to take a current pristine viewer version, say SnowGlobe 1.1.2, and add the major features like all those I added to Emerald. Which other typical Emerald features do I really need? Let’s brain-storm…
I’m sure I missed some, but then again, if I did miss them, they can’t be that important to me.
So it comes down to Z-axis offset, RLVa, and double-click actions, plus maybe the avatar list. Can’t be a big deal.
And the advantages are clear:
I will need to think about that again just after, and not just before, bedtime. But it may actually make more sense. What do we have, when we strip almost all features off Emerald? Right, a SL 1.23.4 viewer plus some add-ons.
More on this subject at some point tomorrow…
I’m happy to announce that my special edition of the Emerald Second Life Viewer is out now!
For more details see my Emerald Releases page.
At first, I was a bit reluctant to use the Emerald Viewer, simply because it didn’t compile on Mac OS. The prepared OpenAL library (fmod replacement) couldn’t be downloaded (Error 403), and it didn’t seem to be available in that version anywhere else. But finally I found it on Google Code. With a bit of experience in compiling various viewers (see previous posts), I then got it to work.
I was really wondering what the fuzz was all about. Emerald seemed to be quite popular. And it didn’t take long to figure out why:
Unlike Meerkat, which is focused on open grids, also known as the “Metaverse”, Emerald clearly targets SecondLife. It is a massive improvement (in terms of included features) to Linden Lab’s original viewers. Plus, it’s based on the latest stable release — 1.23.4 as of this writing.
Currently, I’m fiddling with some customisations, first of all a new version of my busy-on-lost-focus patch. But I’ve got a couple of other ideas, which I like to implement. This, I will do for Emerald in the first place. I’m too selfish to prioritise Meerkat here, because I want a working, reasonably stable, and current viewer to log onto SecondLife. (Don’t get me wrong! Meerkat is still a cool project, and I will probably continue building Mac OS binaries for them, but it’s not the viewer of my choice when I log into the grid myself.)
Anyway. Watch this space!
Recently I stumbled upon the Meerkat viewer, and I have to admit that I loved it, because their main goal is to make the SL viewer 100% GPL compliant. I think that is the only way to go, because collecting all the supplemental libraries from different places and not being allowed to re-publish them with your own viewer built, is just bonkers.
Since some developers who create widely used patches have decided to license their patches under arbitrary licenses, it hasn’t exactly become easier to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong, when the only thing you want to do is to be creative, add functionality, and share it with others. (Insiders will be able to guess which major patch I’m talking about.)
Anyway, as Meerkat was lacking a Mac OS maintainer for their project, I felt appealed to get involved.
So I am going to implement RLVa into Meerkat, and maybe add the occasional other patch (e.g. my AFK/busy mode replacement). And of course, I will try my best to keep the Mac OS SL community happy by building Meerkat for them as well.
Got in touch with James from Meerkat, Kitty from RLVa, and the community via Meerkat’s JIRA already… So here I come, Meerkat 
UPDATE: I have successfully integrated RLVa 1.0.1h into the current Meerkat. Some testing and review required, but it does seem to compile and work. See this page for more details.
