Big changes are coming to the underpinnings of SL, and I can’t wait to see how this improves Second Life. (For the record, I don’t seem to experience many of the problems others have — no lost inventory, etc.) The first big change is something announced some time ago:  the messaging system. Linden Labs has changed the method by which the simulator servers and the viewer software exchange data, making it much more flexible. So flexible, in fact, that except for important updates like security fixes, you won’t have to get a new viewer every time something changes on the grid. Sabin Linden tells us all about it in his post on the official blog.

The other big change is one hinted at in another blog post. This is related to the messaging system, but is a change in the way the messages are sent — TCP versus UDP. UDP is faster than TCP, but that’s because it doesn’t guarantee delivery, or order of packets. TCP is a tad slower, but the server and viewer are assured that everything sent is indeed received. This sounds like it could have a huge impact on issues that may be related to bad connections. I’m thinking lost inventory issues.

I’m excited about these big changes — they seem like a huge step forward to improved stability and usability. (Of course, the usual residents are complaining in the blog that these posts make no mention of their pet bugs — the same people who refuse to actually use JIRA “because its too hard” and would rather just whine in an inappropriate venue.)

I was traveling recently, and in the hotel one night I was flipping through channels on TV and suddenly saw an SL logo pinned on the bottom-right corner of the screen.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly an SL logo. It was the logo for a network called “The N”, owned by Viacom. Here’s a cap from their site, with the logo prominently displayed:

And the familiar Second Life logo:

I wonder if these logos look too much alike. Who was first? Is Viacom ripping off SL?

If you’re like me, you’re annoyed that Second Life has its own menu bar and doesn’t use the Mac menu bar, at least when running in windowed mode.* This tip from Macworld shows you how to modify Second Life’s info.plist file (or that almost any other application) so that whenever you run SL the Mac OS menu bar is hidden. You can then use the green button on the window title bar to zoom all the way to full screen. It’s only a few pixels, and the title bar is still there, but it does seem, er, roomier. This tip also hides the dock to maximize your SL viewing pleasure.

* Running the Mac viewer in windowed mode is preferred to full-screen mode, since the SL viewer seems to become unstable and crash in full-screen mode.

Oh noes! Does the new SL sky mean that the traditional holiday sun is gone now? I think I’ll start a group called “Avatars Against Realistic Skies” and stand outside Torley Linden’s office with a protest sign. This absolutely must stop now! Hmpf.

I was reading the SL blog today, and saw the announcement about the new technology/company acquisition made by Linden Labs. I cannot wait to see the new sky in SL! I read the blog comments. Wow, way positive in general, but the usual pinched nay-sayers were of course in attendance. Was pretty easy to tune them out.

I then wanted to see what people were saying about it elsewhere, and I went to the forums. Pretty much the same thing, but maybe a couple more of the “OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!!! LL totally never listens to us and this is gonna forever bork the grid and there will be furries, goreans and ageplayers looking at the horribly too-realistic sky while my client crashes on my Pentium II 133MHz with 32MB RAM and 8MB SIS video card. SL is DOOMED!!!1!!!’

Then, in the Resident Answers forum, something caught my eye. The “Age Verification Answers” thread I started when the Age Verification thing stirred up was made Sticky! I announced in the forum that I was basically abandoning it, but it has continued to live on.

I’m glad someone thought enough of it to feature it that way on the forum. I haven’t looked at the thread after I left it, but I hope it has some good info among the 174 replies.

Off to play with sculpties, now that I have Wings3D and the Wings3D exporter the Residents on the forum have created.

Why I always gotta be workin’ when there’s a party? Sheesh.

Server fixes rolling out tomorrow on the SL Grid — hopefully including the fix for the reopening group IM bug. If that’s fixed, and along with the new 1.15.1(3) viewer pushed out yesterday, I’ll be tickled pink.

So, while the grid’s down for the patches, go party! I’ll pretend I have a virtual beer in my hand.

One of the things I’ve been keeping in mind while working on changing the icons in Second Life is, “Is this the right way to do this?” The main reason is because of the UUIDs that are the names of the icon files. UUID means the file is unique. Using a different bitmap in the same file name breaks that uniqueness.

I’ve read that part of the move to an XML-defined UI in SL is to allow it to be changed more easily. Indeed, poking around on the SL Wiki I found there is even a parameter to tell SL to use an alternate UI skin, use -skin <directory> on the launch command line. How exactly this works, and what level of control it affords, isn’t documented anywhere that I can find.

I went to check out the source code for Second Life’s UI, llui, on the public SVN repository to find more. There I found the answer to another question — the viewer appears to use neither XUL or XUI. It appears to be a custom XML implementation.

The first thing that popped into my mind was, “Can all of llui be tossed in favor of something cross platform?” Maybe full XUL or XUI, or something even better, like wxWidgets. I really want the SL menu bar moved out of the GL view and back to the Mac OS menu bar where it belongs (and, on Mac OS, everthing is a GL view anyway).

So how does all this fit with changing the icons? Well, it appears that I can stick with the custom XML UI description and skin it somehow with the alternate skin directory. That way I don’t mess with UUIDs in a way that I shouldn’t. But I have to find out how that works.

Further down the road, though, is finding a way to exploit a cross-platform UI library to allow skinning and to decouple the current SL UI from the viewer windwo.