TriloByte Zanzibar

Fantastic guide, Chosen, awesome resource!

Whoops, I forgot to add that OS-wise, ideally you want to be running OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Previous versions will still work, but won't have the most up-to-date graphics drivers, and won't have the overall speed that Snow Leopard offers on Intel Macs.

My partner and I have done tests on a number of Mac systems, and have had great results on a lot of machines. Since early 2009, everything Apple makes has come with a pretty solid GPU under the hood. Entry level machines came with an nVidia 9400m at the very least, which got respectable frame rates in SL and could be used to film machinima. Better machines will of course deliver better performance, so keep your eyes open for options that include a better GPU, more video memory, and more system RAM.

+1 on the Space Navigator, it's a lot of fun and lets you achieve shots you just can't get with a mouse, keyboard, or joystick. For Mac users, I'll also recommend TeleStream's ScreenFlow. It's a little spendier than some of the other solutions, but it's easy to use and has a fantastic user interface, has great editing tools, and has the lowest performance overhead of anything else I've worked with. What's performance overhead? It's the performance hit your computer takes when you're recording from SL.

It was my understanding that the new forums were starting fresh for all topics, not just for topics related to viewer 2 criticism. The irony in all of this is that un-learning the 1x quirks (nested pie menus don't occur randomly in nature) and getting acclimated to the 2x interface takes just a few days at most. A year has gone by, and quite a few significant changes and improvements have been made, it might be time to stop holding grudges and move on.

Viewer 2 had a number of great ideas, but also a lot of technical challenges. But those responsible are gone, the development process has changed, and since last summer I think the viewer development process has definitely been on the right track ever since. As one of many participants in the Snowstorm viewer development team (relaying feedback gathered from other creators, from customers, and from communities and providing testing/feedback to the group), I'm proud of where the Viewer is today, and excited about where things are headed.

It might be :-)

Check out Torley's video on this page. You can jump right to 4:40 in to get right to the walk-through on changing your profile/avatar pic. In a nutshell, click on your name up at the top of the browser window, then add images using the link on the right side of that page. Hope that helps!

User-generated content makes for a completely different set of challenges, Guinevere. Warcraft and other game titles have a much more limited palette of textures and objects to worry about loading and rendering. In SL, the variations are limitless and the content is delivered on-demand. Q glossed over a number of the features in this particular Viewer version, but one of the most important ones was an upgrade to the libraries used for texture rendering. Significant boost in performance, meaning textures load much more quickly. The performance gains are even bigger for Linux and Mac users (since the old versions of those libraries were slower on those platforms) - kudos to Merov Linden and everyone else involved, who have been working hard on that upgrade since sometime last summer.

Accessing Favorite LM's on the login screen requires you to enable it on the Privacy tab in preferences (since it would let someone at your computer see your favorite LM's before they enter your user name/pw).

The issue is most definitely NOT fixed, the filtering problems that are resulting in my General content products being flagged as Moderate persist. Please re-open the JIRA asap, and assign resources to review and correct the items listed ASAP.

I had been hoping my question about the name change could have been answered as a response in this thread, but if not, I'd like to have it as an agenda item. Explanation/justification of the name change (from Office Hours to User Group). I'd also like to see Traffic and Sales Reporting get covered this time. I know it was on the ambitious agenda from last week's session, but there wasn't enough time to get to it. Sales and traffic reporting tools were talked up early in the development stages, and we were promised better tools than XStreet had, and that those tools would be in place before the big launch. As data migration problems continued to stall development, reporting slipped from the site's initial launch with a new pledge that we'd have them within a few weeks. That was back in October, and we still do not have functional tools. Many of the current reports are flawed (only Transaction History and Orders are accurate, and with those reports we've got fairly limited sorting/searching capabilities). Please share with us the current status, and an ETA on when we can expect to get some of this functionality.

@Loving Clarity: I've atended a number of Office Hours meetings held by different individuals & departments over the years, and a fair number of them work from an agenda. Some have a fixed agenda, and others use the SL Wiki for their agenda and allow community participants to add/suggest items. If there's a good reason for it, rebrand away. But changing the name from Office Hours to User Group without good cause just makes things more confusing (and more difficult) for new residents, and muddies the waters rather than fosters clear communication.

I'll bite... what's with the name change? Is this a company-wide direction, or is something going to be done differently with these sessions than is done with any of the other office hours sessions held by all the other staffers?

I'm not sure if this means the filters will be running until next week or running continuously from now on, either case, Brooke's first point seems to indicate that we're not going to get any fixes until Tuesday of next week. In retrospect, it was a monumentally bad idea to begin this process on a Thursday, as we now have a major disruption to a lot of Marketplace businesses that will run over the course of a weekend (prime time in SL). Brooke, if you get the time to read this and care to elaborate, that would be great. In my opinion, continuously running filters are the worst possible idea. It will only encourage people to 'game' the system, there's already been a lot of talk about people posting known filters/ratings and changing the keywords they use to get around the filters anyways. On day one, that's a fatal flaw. Continuous filtering only wastes processing time, and makes things difficult for customers and legitimate businesses.

Great inaugural post. Glad to see you're having fun exploring - I've been in SL for a couple years now, and for me that never stops being fun. I wish you the best in getting up to speed, and taking on the challenges that lie ahead - exciting times ahead

Sounds excellent! As always, thank you for such an informative post.

Great news! Welcome to our world, we look forward to working with you and making SL better than ever in 2011.

Best wishes for your future endeavors, and hopefully as a resident you're able to enjoy Second Life as much as some of us do. Cheers

For Mac users with nVidia graphics, it's possibly the best Viewer release in years. Nice mix of important fixes and enhancements, plus dynamic shadows (nVidia 8800 and above). Shadows still have some glitches (eyelashes don't render properly, shiny/bumpy are broken), but overall a massive improvement. And zippy. For Mac users with ATI graphics, it's another story. To get Anti-aliasing to work you have to enable FBO, which unfortunately breaks Name Tags. And any attempt to use the deferred renderer results in a system lockup that will cause residents to lose unsaved data in other applications (not fun). Significantly better than Viewer 2.2, and once AA/FBO and the fatal crash are resolved for ATI users it'll be a must-have for all Mac users. As a tester, kudos to the development team and open-source communities, I'm loving the progress and look forward to even more.

Thanks for the info. Overall not a bad quarter (better than a lot of RL companies in this economy), here's hoping that some of the recent initiatives start to have an impact on increasing numbers of new residents, increasing retention, and increasing user hours.

It sure would have been a great viewer for Mac users too, except that anti-aliasing is broken for all users. For many, the viewer actually defaults to turning on the broken AA and the incompatible FBO settings, which result in a VERY garbled screen that can only be un-garbled after playing with debug settings (set RenderFSAASamples to 0, or enable the Development menu and choose Development -> Rendering and uncheck FBO). In the meantime, Mac users should not download this version. The video shows the problem as it exists in both the beta and release version, hopefully it will get fixed soon.

Actually, that percentage is up to over 10% in the US, and I suspect that among SL users, Mac usage is even higher. Even if it's not, that's 10% of 1.36m logins in the last 60 days, or 136,000 of what LL describes as current users. Worst part is that this issue was on LL's radar. Esbee, Oz, Q and others were well aware of the problem and Q even acknowledged it as a showstopper that must be fixed and tested less than a week ago.

Hitomi, unfortunately this doesn't work for Mac users. LL never quite got the render engine right on the Mac client, enabling both FBO and anti-aliasing on the 2.2 release client (and all versions prior) fills the screen with graphics artifacts and junk on the screen.

Anti-Aliasing is still broken on Mac. This is a major regression that you've known about for nearly 2 months, it's a crime that you let this ship without being fixed. When I say you I mean both LL viewer development in general, and Q, Esbee, Oz, Vir, and recently departed staffers Aimee and Tofu. What part of "fast, easy, fun" does this fall under?