Archive for the 'Announcements' Category
February 21st, 2012 by ZATZAi
Volunteer to be a Dev/Tester/Etc for Imprudence (Not Kokua)
Sunday February 26th @ 20:00 UTC / 12:00pm Noon Pacific
Hoagie Sim @ 3rd Rock Grid
As many if not all of you are now aware, after a lot of input from the public and our own discussion and thoughts on the matter, the current team has decided to move ahead with Kokua development to the exclusion of Imprudence. However we wanted to find an answer for our users who still prefer/rely on Imprudence but we weren’t sure what that was going to be, which was why after the town hall we stated the future of Imprudence was still to be decided. One developer outside our team had desired to join us or some time now, but he wanted to work on Imprudence not Kokua. Some of you may be able to guess that his person was onefang rejected, create of Meta-Impy. This gave us a series of options on how to proceed with either depreciating or continuing support for Imprudence.
There was much internal discussion on how this should be handled, we definitely wanted to move the existing team to Kokua. This extra help certainly meant we could at a minimum push out a final 1.4 release of Imprudence, but was it possible to do more? We decided to take a chance, and for the first time create two teams under the Kokua/Imprudence project (Perhaps we should call it Team Purple to simplify the joint name); the existing team members would work on Kokua and a new team of separate devs would continue work on Imprudence. These would be devs who would otherwise not work on Kokua, and the Kokua devs would largely not involve themselves with development of Imprudence as Kokua is now the flagship project (Though we’ll have occasional joint meetings and try to help each other of course). So it was decided to invite onefang rejected to join the team as the head of the Imprudence project, he’ll have to staff his team with devs and volunteers who are passionate about Imprudence like himself, so for all of you who love Imprudence he’ll need your help.
Thus we will be holding an Imprudence town hall of sorts, this Sunday February 26th at 20:00 UTC (That’s 12:00pm Noon Pacific) at our usual meeting place on the Hoagie sim of the 3rd Rock Grid. The purpose of said meeting will be to enlist volunteers to help develop and test Imprudence going forward, and to decide what direction to take it in. However unlike the recent Kokua reorganization, this will not be a “reboot” of the project but a continuation. So for all of you out there who lamented the “death” of Imprudence, here is your chance. Join us this Sunday, be you a potential developer or tester and help us to bring Imprudence into the future alongside Kokua.
February 16th, 2012 by ZATZAi
Work continues on the new Kokua viewer. We’re moving forward using the v3.2 Linden viewer as a base, we feel this version of the viewer is stable enough and has solved enough of the UI problems from v2 that our users will be happy with it. It’s also what many of you recommended in previous blog comments and at our meetings. We’re currently focusing on releasing a stable viewer on at least three platforms, Linux 32bit, Linux 64bit and Windows 32bit. You can follow our progress by trying our experimental viewers if you’d like, but buyer beware, these are alpha viewers and you should read the warning label carefully before use. You’ll find the link to our experimental viewers page on our wiki bellow…
http://wiki.kokuaviewer.org/wiki/Kokua:Experimental
Currently there is both a Linux 32bit and a Windows 32bit experimental client available and we’re working to support more platforms but said clients just aren’t ready to be posted to the wiki yet (They either don’t run/compile or have known showstopper bugs). With the coming site redesign we’ll create a better way for users to talk about the features they’d like to see. Please understand that these experimental viewers are pretty bare-bones and lacking features we plan to implement at a later date. We feel that right now the collection of sites we have is a little unruly for both you our users as well as ourselves in an administrative capacity and we’re working to improve that.
Correction
The current experimentals are based on v3 viewer code, future version will be based on v3.2+
January 31st, 2012 by ZATZAi
This last weekend we had our all hands meeting where we discussed the fate and direction of the project going forward. I’m pleased to say that the meeting was well attended not only by team members but the public as well. A few of us even met for the first time as not everyone is able to make the regular meeting due to scheduling conflicts. You’ll find a full transcript of the meeting on our wiki but I’ve included a summary of what was decided for convenience.
We’re going to continue to develop Third Party viewers with a focus on cross supporting Second Life and OpenSim/Aurora. However we’re going to focus on Kokua in the future, the ultimate fate of Imprudence is still undecided though as we may push for a final 1.4 release but nothing that takes up too much of our time. Kokua will use Second Life v3.2 as a base, we feel the LL code for v3.2 has matured greatly beyond v2 and v3 and we’ll of course make our own modifications to it to make it more “purple” in flavor. It is also our intent to finalize the name change from Imprudence to Kokua, Imprudence and Kokua are separate viewers and the project has historically been called the Imprudence project. The intent was to switch from Imprudence to Kokua as the next generation client was released but it has been dragged out for quite a while now and caused confusion, so we’re going to finish the change over to Kokua.
It’s also our intent to give a fresh face to our web presence, to update the look and feel of the blog and forum, and possibly eliminate some section like the rarely used Q&A sub-site. Our hope is that this will make it easier for users to navigate our online infrastructure and find the information or support they need. This may include the addition of a few simple tutorials about how to use the client and how to connect to grids besides Second Life proper.
Windows 32bit, Linux 32bit and Linux 64bit will be the three platforms we focus on primarily. We’ll make an effort to get out a Windows 64bit and Mac client down the line, but right now we need to focus on getting things rolling and these best fit our users demographics. We’re supporting two flavors of Linux because our devs use both Linux 32bit and Linux 64bit, plus it’s a big PITA run the 32bit client on Linux 64bit so we’ll continue to make a Linux 64bit client available. Regarding Windows, at first we’ll only provide a 32bit client (With SSE optimizations) as we have been doing already, the necessity of a 64bit client on Windows is questionable as the client can’t quite make use of all that ram (Yet, but that can change), plus Windows 64bit OSes can easily run 32bit programs. Still we would like to release a Windows 64bit version at some point to try to see if it makes a difference. Unfortunately we still don’t have a Mac developer and thus can not support the platform, we’d like this to change but it is the state of things for now.
There are other matters besides these that were discussed at the meeting, I encourage you to read the meeting transcript on the wiki if your curious.
January 29th, 2012 by ZATZAi
This weekend we’ll be having our all hands meeting to discuss the future of the project as mentioned in our last update. Many of you have replied with your thoughts and suggestions on the last blog post and even attended our weekly meeting to lend your thoughts. We’re very pleased to see such interest in the project, and a lot of your thoughts are in line with our own. So it’s good to know we got the right idea. Here is a highlight in no particular order of some (But not all) of the ideas that were suggested by you…
- Focus on the next generation Kokua client rather than Kokua & Imprudence
- Continue to support Linux 64 bit
- Keep it easy to explore alternative grids (ie not Second Life proper)
- Mesh support in Second Life and OpenSim
- Support older hardware
- Experimental builds
I think my favorite comment was from Chaniyth, simply because it made me laugh out loud, literally. Here’s what Chaniyth had to say (Emphasis mine)…
First and foremost, please don’t be asses [...] listen to your end users, do the respectable thing and listen to what your end users want and need, and in a timely fashion [Experimental Builds]!
That would make a great company slogan wouldn’t it? “Please don’t be asses”, perhaps even better than Google’s “Don’t be evil”. Could we live up to it I wonder? Haha
It brings up a good point though, in that it’s important to listen to what your users want. Granted sometimes there are things we just don’t have the manpower to do. Ideally we’d love to make a viewer every month with a completely revamped UI that is fully customizable and adjusts to a users tastes (Are you a builder or a shopper, a dancer or a socialite, a machinima maker or a sailor etc). Unfortunately there are limits to what we or any developer can do, but we’ll try to work out what’s best and try things from time to time. Experimental builds are a great step along this line, as suggested be several people, as it allows the public to test out new viewers before they’re really “ready” and give us feedback, allowing us the opportunity to make changes to things before we put too much time into them and it’s too hard to change course.
And so we’re going to try to release more test viewers, starting today. We’ve set up a special page on the wiki were we will post test viewers as we can, they may or may not be announced here on the blog. Please understand that these are not Beta viewers but Alpha viewers and are generally only tested internally. We’re going to make an effort to put more of them up on the blog though. They may not be available for every platform (ie it may be only Linux 64 or Windows 32 and nothing else). But if you want to see what’s “brewin in the pot” this is one way you can do it, just be sure to read the instructions on the page and take whatever necessary precautions are recommended (This is the knife’s edge folks, you have been warned).
On The Wiki – Kokua: Experimental
January 20th, 2012 by ZATZAi
Here at Imprudence we’ve been juggling several issues, trying to develop two different clients at the same time (Imprudence and Kokua) for three different platforms in 32bit and 64bit flavors. not to mention supporting not only the Second Life grid but all the various OpenSim grids as best we can. We think we’ve made some pretty awesome viewers but lately we’re also become stagnant as we’ve been weighted down by trying to juggle all these various things. It seems we may have over extended ourselves a bit and to fix that we need to refocus and simplify. Thus in the coming weeks we will be holding an all-hands team meeting for all Imprudence/Kokua team members, be they Dev or Support, where we will discuss what’s working and what isn’t and what we plan to do about it (Details have already been sent to all team members).
But we’d like to hear your input as well, as we make these viewers for you our users after all. Tell us what makes Imprudence special for you, what draws you to this particular Third Party Viewer over others and what you would like to see going forward. How do you use Imprudence, and how do you use other viewers even the official one? What do you like about them, what don’t you like, and how is that similar or different from Imprudence. Do you use OpenSim, Aurora or any other alternative grids, even your own local grid? Is there anything you think that Third Party Viewers are missing that would make them easier or more productive for people? What about the site itself, this blog, the forum, the wiki and etc, how can we improve it?
While we can’t make any promises about addressing every issue, we will try to discuss any points made here in the comments.
December 21st, 2011 by ZATZAi
All of us on the Team would like to wish you all Happy Holidays. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or simply New Years we hope you have a wonderful time this end of year with family and loved ones. We’ll be back next year with more Imprudence/Kokua goodness to come.
Our weekly meetings will resume on Wednesday January 4th at 20:00 GMT. We have changed Google Calendars and you can subscribe to the new calendar at this address, if you want to keep abreast of any changes to meeting times.
November 23rd, 2011 by ZATZAi
Thanksgiving at the Trolls by martha_chapa95
It’s Thanksgiving this week in the United States, and while not all of the team is based in the US a number of us are. And while we’re with our friends and loved one’s this holiday, we wanted to wish everyone the best this week, whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not.
As an update; work on the Kokua client continues and we’ve had Mesh view working for a little while now in this very alpha client, and now we have Mesh uploading working as well (On both Second Life and OpenSim 07.2+ based grids). The client is still very alpha though and we don’t yet recommend people testing it out as we can’t guarantee a stable experience (We hope to have something stable enough for people to test soon, and we’ll announce it here on this blog when we do). Further we won’t be having our usual weekly meeting this week due to the holiday, but will be returning next week, at the same time but on a new day (Wednesdays at 20:00 UTC on the 3rd Rock Grid as always). Meeting logs will continue to be posted to the wiki for those who can’t attend but wish to see what was discussed.
So be safe this holiday everyone, and we’ll see you next week.
October 13th, 2011 by ZATZAi
As announced two weeks ago on JustinCC’s Open Simulator Blog, the 6 month development barrier between opensim and viewer code has been dropped in favor of a new policy.
The original policy was put in place near the birth of Open Simulator due to legal concerns over derivative copyright issues. The policy stated that no developer contributing code to OpenSim could have looked at or worked on viewer code within the last six months prior to submitting any code to the Open Sim project. This effectively divided the development community into those working on third party viewers like Imprudence and those working on OpenSim. This made it difficult for developers are the respective projects to squash bugs that not specific to the viewer or the server, but that bridged across both (For example the 4096 ‘hg’ bug). Now that this policy has been retired for something more liberal it will be possible for developers to look at and work on both the viewer and Open Sim server code to better optimize both projects.
According JustinCC, under the new policy developers on the Open Simulator project make interact with viewer code and still submit to the OpenSimulator project so long as the code is either under 100 lines in length (And strictly a bug fix not a new feature), or if a new feature or over 100 lines that the developer agree to a contributors agreement. Said agreement is modeled on the one developed by the Harmoney project, it asks for an explicit copyright license but not transfer of copyright ownership ant it further asks for a patent grant, like the vast majority of other such agreements out there. What this means for projects like Imprudence in the future is better integration and more stability with Open Sim and visa-versa, as well as possibly broader developer support as devs will no longer have to isolate themselves to Open Sim or 3rd party viewers but can now work on both at the same time. Now that this step has been taken there is no going back, as it would be nearly impossible to reverse course on a decision such as this, so developers need not be tepid about wading into the waters of the respective viewer or server projects. And while the effects from this may not be immediately felt, it is a very positive step forward for both Imprudence and other 3rd party viewers and the Open Simulator project itself.
It should be noted however that the 6 month exclusion policy was specific to the official Open Simulator project and competing projects did not necessarily have the same restriction. Other restrictions or policies may apply besides those listed here, this article is merely a summation of the recent changes to Open Simulator in relation to 3rd party viewers.
September 25th, 2011 by Codie
It is with great joy that we bring you Imprudence 1.4.0 Beta 2. This release contains a very large number of stability fixes especially for Windows machines. We also fixed several bugs with the audio subsystem and replaced the old flaky Windows installer.
IMPORTANT: Unfortunately those fixes does not include streaming for Macs, as we are currently out of a regular Mac developer. This build does NOT include Henri Beauchamp’s mesh patches either, as Imprudence is feature frozen. We are currently discussing the possibilities but are really focusing on Kokua’s next release for now, which will bring mesh support anyways.
If you need help with the viewer, please see our Support page. If you find a bug and want us to fix it, please follow our Reporting a bug guide.
Fixes
This build is mostly about bug fixes, you can view the entire list here: Commit list
Features
- Selective cache clearing: now you can selectively delete different types of disk cache separately.
Download
Builds for other platforms should be released soon, thanks for your patience.
Enjoy!
September 1st, 2011 by Jacek Antonelli
Please join me in welcoming our new project organizer, ZATZAi Asturias! He will be responsible for many of the day-to-day operations of the Kokua/Imprudence Project, such as organizing meetings, monitoring development progress, and administering the secret daily beatings I have used to keep the rest of the team hard at work for the past 3 years. 
ZATZAi brings a wide range of skills and experience to the project. He has been involved in Second Life since 2005, and for a time was one of the estate owners of the United Sailing Sims, keeping track of projects there, and working with estate managers and leaders from the community. He helped organize and hosted the in-world portion of SLCC 2007, and has even run his own inworld-only convention called (of course) Second Convention.
In addition to his experience organizing virtual world projects and events, ZATZAi has many useful technical skills, including web site development, programming, and graphic design. I’m sure you’ll agree that he is a great addition to the team!
So, we’re very excited to say: Welcome aboard, ZATZAi! 
P.S. Everybody: don’t forget the birthday parties this weekend! 