It’s time for another round of server maintenance! There may be some turbulence as things settle down, then everything should be back to normal. If after a day or so, you notice any strange site errors (403, 404, 500, etc.), missing pages, or links that don’t work — please let me know! You can leave a blog comment, forum post, or email (jacek at imprudenceviewer.org) to get in touch with me.
Just a quick post to mention that there is no new Experimental this week (2010-09-25). McCabe has been very busy with RL stuff, and I’ve been busy finishing up the 1.3 final release, so we haven’t had time to get everything together this week. A new Experimental will be available next weekend.
Imprudence 1.3.0 RC3 is now available! This is expected to be the final release candidate in the 1.3 series. If there are no new major issues in this RC, Imprudence 1.3.0 final will follow later this week.
The purpose of these release candidates is to make the final release as solid, polished, and reliable as we can. That means we intentionally do not add many new features during the RC process. If you’re itching for shiny new features and other bleeding-edge (and potentially unstable) changes, we suggest testing the new Experimentals each weekend.
Imprudence now uses the Droid Sans font by default, instead of Liberation Sans.
A new Fonts tab has been added to Preferences, where you can select from four included fonts: Droid Sans, DejaVu Sans, Delicious, and Liberation Sans. More flexible font controls are planned for a future version.
Imprudence now loads world map image tiles using HTTP when available. This improves the map loading speed on platforms that support it, e.g. Second Life. (It was intented to address the gray Second Life world map issue, but that issue has also been fixed on the server side.) Thanks to Henri Beauchamp for this patch!
Added the UseLegacyChatLogsFolder debug setting. If set to TRUE in Advanced > Debug Settings, Imprudence will save chat and IM logs in the old (non-grid-specific) location, as it did prior to 1.3.0 RC2.
Many bug fixes, including fixes for login errors, disappearing inventory search results, crashes with Make Outfit, and more. Read the release notes for the full list!
Yesterday afternoon, Linden Lab held a meeting of third-party viewer developers to inform us of some policy changes and implications for open-source viewers. One significant issue is that Linden Lab now considers the use of the LLKDU image decoder library by GPL-licensed third-party viewers (such as Imprudence) to be a violation of the GPL. Therefore, all GPL-licensed third-party viewers have been instructed to remove the ability to load and use LLKDU.
My name is CodeBastard Redgrave, affectionally also called Codie, and I am very glad to anounce my new position as the Imprudence team Community Liaison. You may have already seen me do some Imprudence evangelism around forums, Plurk, Twitter and in the official Imprudence Viewer group in Second Life.
My current role at Imprudence will be to be help the dev team with Imprudence related communications on the website, forums, social networks and so on. Also, one of my objectives is to help the development team concentrate on fixing the most important bugs and bringing to you the most frequently requested features. I am taking the Imprudence project from a user’s point of view, and bringing user’s needs to the developers, in order to make a viewer where you can feel at home.
My role is also to help revamp our information systems, inform our users of any issue or changes, announce updates, document and promote Imprudence. I also do moderation and general help in the forums and inworld group chat. I am not officially doing technical support per se, but if you need help, I will do my best to do so, and/or redirect you to the best resources available.
We are performing some minor maintenance on the website today. I’m expecting a smooth transition, but please let me know if you notice any strange site errors (403, 404, 500, etc.), missing pages, or links that don’t work. You can leave a blog comment, forum post, or email (jacek at imprudenceviewer.org) to get in touch with me. Thanks for your patience!
So, my time in the hotseat is over! Being interviewed on Tonight Live was an interesting experience. Lots of good questions were asked about Imprudence (why the name “Imprudence”, what makes us unique, how does our development process work, etc.). Plus it was great to see so many purple tags in the audience!
For those who missed it and want to watch, here’s the full episode:
If you enjoyed the show, please shoot Tonight Live a comment and let them know. They deserve much praise for being so organized and professional (not to mention for booking a quality singer/song-writer like Nance Brody. Good stuff :)).
For those of you who use Imprudence on Second Life, you may have noticed a strange bug recently: the world map is gray.
It seems Linden Labs broke our world map a couple of days ago, either accidentally or on purpose. A bug report has been filed with LL:SVC-6301 (now being addressed in SVC-4575). If you’d like to see this fixed, please join us in voting there.
We are very proud to present you the latest Imprudence Experimental release 2010.09.11 which contains lots of nice bug fixes and a few new features. Remember folks, this is an optional, bleeding edge test release. If you are looking for the latest stable release, 1.3.0RC2 is the current one.
So, what’s new in the latest Experimental? Several new features and a bug fix galore!
New Features:
Name/Friends Chat Alerts: displays bright colored text in open chat or group IM whenever your name is mentioned by anyone. Also allows you to display chat from friends in a different color. (thanks Elektra)
Font selection from pre-installed fonts. See Preferences > Fonts (thanks Jacek)
Teleport history (thanks Zi Ree and Ansariel Hiller)
Show access level next to region name (thanks Ansariel Hiller)
Right click/Edit inventory items (thanks Kitty Barnett)
ResetFocusOnSelfClick debug setting with default to false (thanks McCabe)
Group IMs now include the group. This can be toggled with the ShowGroupNameInChatIM debug setting (thanks McCabe)
Gestures can now be set to any key (thanks McCabe)
Changes:
New default font is now Droid Sans (thanks Jacek)
Ported two popular skins, Gemini and Dark (thanks McCabe and Codie)
If a region is listed as maturity “unknown”, it’s not appended to the region name on OpenSim
Re-enabled the “Avatar Imposters” option for low-end graphic cards
Currency spend or recieved also notifies through chat
Added slider to control the number of avatar impostors (thanks McCabe)
Replace ‘>’ glyph in cascading menus with a proper triangle (backport from Viewer 2)
Increased max settable value for RenderVolumeLODFactor from 2 to 4
Changed the menu enabled ‘x’ to a checkmark
Fixed Boost.cmake and removed the boost::system and boost::filesystem dependencies (thanks Elektra)
Bug Fixes:
Fixed Bug #240: Make Outfit crashes the viewer in OpenSim (thanks Armin)
Fixed known crash on bad teleports (thanks McCabe)
Fixed local textures not working on Mac Intel version (thanks Elektra)
Fixed regression of #295 in 09.04 Experimental
Fixed regression of #245
Potential fix for a rare crash when creating notecards in the AO – regression (thanks McCabe)
Fixed texture bug on all platforms (thanks Elektra)
Removed Object-Object Occlusion shortcut as it interferes with the AO (thanks McCabe)
32bit libs for linux64 are not actually downloaded (thanks Armin)
linux64: move cxx flags from external script into 00-Common.cmake for transparency (thanks Armin)
Fixed color picker size being too tiny for the label (thanks McCabe)
Use solid circles instead of asterisks for password fields (thanks Kakurady)
Mac Intel: Opening web pages in your external browser does not work unless your browser program is already running. (thanks Elektra)
Updated the fix for streaming issue on macs (Thanks Nemurimasu Neiro)
Known Issues:
Notecards are missing the “open” option in the context menu. File > Open works
The “profile” button in IMs sometimes opens the wrong profile
Communicate window closes when selecting Contacts
Lossless texture uploads don’t render correctly when using OpenJPEG as your J2C decoder
Selecting “About Landmark” causes a crash on newly received landmarks
Thanks to everyone in the forums/group chat who’ve been helping people discover how we do things in Imprudence. It’s been a great help, and you’ve been appreciated.
Our sister project, Aurora-Sim, is the server portion of our joint effort to enhance the metaverse experience, making it easier to use, more stable, and more feature-rich!
Weekly Meetings
We hold weekly meetings every Wednesday at 20:00 GMT on the Hoagie Sim in the 3rd Rock Grid. The meetings are for Dev and Project Contributor discussion and open to the public (Though it is not meant for technical support). You can find out Google Calendar right here.
