Saturday, October 22, 2011

Restrained Love v2.7.3.3

Hello there !

Finally, here is the version I've been working on loosely, while waiting for LL to deliver sources to a viewer that actually works. It's not perfect, I find it works better than 2.7.3.2, but I still experience occasional crashes, especially when downloading a lot of textures (in crowded areas for example). But at least it's usable.

Here are the bugfixes and improvements I have added in this version :

- added : Make gestures activate/deactivate when wearing/removing items respectively through a script.
- added : New icon for the viewer, thanks to Kittin Ninetails's nice work :)
- added : "Use region settings" menu item in the World > Sun menu, to be able to revert to default without having to open 3 windows.
- fixed : Now each prim handles its own restrictions (instead of all defaulting to the root prim), but if ONE prim is set to be undetachable, then the whole object is undetachable.

Link
Grab the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 for the Windows installer is
374576d5cf34e4ddfbe084662b1e8921

Now I'm going to try out LL's latest viewer, with all their UI changes. It looks good so far !

Have fun !
Marine

Sunday, October 9, 2011

RLV Issue Tracker

Hi again,

It's been a long time I should have done this, but now it is official : the RLV has its own issue tracker now ! This comes directly from my blog post about opening the specification of the RLV : http://realrestraint.blogspot.com/2011/07/rlv-to-become-really-open.html

If you don't know what an issue tracker is, think of LL's JIRA dashboard, through which bugs and feature requests are filed by the users. The RLV issue tracker works exactly the same way, but is much simpler.


Issues are separated in four main categories (more may be added later) :

- Discussions : This category is meant to serve as an informal forum. Bugs and new features will be discussed here, like a big brainstorm before triaging and turning the good ideas into projects.

- RLVSPEC : This category is meant to contain all the bug reports and new features that impact the specification (the API). It is formal and features in that category are to be considered seriously.

- RLVORIG : This category is about bugs and features in my own RLV (not RLVa).

- RLVUNIF : This category is empty for now, since there is no "merged" RLV yet.


If you encounter a bug and you are sure it is tied to my RLV (the viewer, not the spec), please file it under "RLVORIG". If you are sure it is tied to the specification itself, tag it "RLVSPEC".

If you wish to share your new feature, please drop it on "Discussions" first so that you can discuss it with other people, because "RLVSPEC" and "RLVORIG" are meant to be more formal.

You can find the tracker here :
https://bitbucket.org/marinekelley/rlv/issues


Sorry again for the time it took. I should have done this looong ago !

Have fun !
Marine

Saturday, October 8, 2011

RLV news

Hello there,

Wow it's been two months since my last post... Sorry about that. Let me briefly explain why I've been so silent :

- The V2 SL viewer has been added more nasty bugs than fixes, and that hindered my ability (and motivation) to work on a new RLV, although it has been on "active waiting" mode for more than two months. The bugs are about very frequent crashes due to memory bloat (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-1650), invisiprims being totally useless when using dynamic shadows, breaking prim shoes (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2181 , I think, it is marked as fixed but I had to back it out from my code if I wanted to see invisiprims again), and other countless bugs that, frankly, should have been fixed two years ago when V2 was still beta. This is a shame. Even now, you can't write in a notecard and be sure that what you write will be added where your cursor are. You can't use Mouselook either. Ctrl-W works when it wants. The Discard button is so invasive that you often press it by mistake, losing your purchase and wasting your money. What a joke.

- For more than a month now, the latest version was so bloated that the textures would suddenly start to re-rez repeatedly as soon as the memory limit was reached. It was sickening. First time the viewer made me wanna puke for real.

- I've been working at testing mesh on my RLV, so far so good, except... well, meshes are not resizable when rigged (i.e., when used as a piece of clothing). Apparently, it is too hard technically to allow for resizing a rigged mesh, but this limitation is a fatal blow to the mesh clothing and restraint market. This is so disappointing, I was working on some new mesh restraints, well this project has been shelved now. The official ETA for the fix is "Someday/Maybe". Just take a look at the JIRA entry to see for yourself : https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2374

- Third party viewers like the RLV are still unable to upload mesh, because the library is proprietary. I've been trying the open-source version, but had less success than others.

- I am currently working on overhauling the animation system in my products, to give more choices to the user without breaking the existing RR plugins. I'll blog more about this later, when it's ready.

So right now the RLV is on standby, but almost ready for a release should something new happen. It is just that for now, I have nothing new to offer compared to 2.7.3.2, which is more stable and usable than 2.7.3.3.

Ok, this post sounded like a rant... And not at all what I was supposed to talk about in the first place. No worries, I'll blog about the next thing shortly :)

Have fun,
Marine