Snowglobe - Second Life OSS - LL's open source viewer

That happens if application is not named "Second Life"

Yes, Slurls are not recognized by this browser. Which is inconvenient.

Other than that, its performance is slightly better than the regular viewer for me. I'm on a Imac Intel.

The slurl problem on Mac should be temporary, apparently it was an accidental oversight when the rebranding work was done.

For mysterious reasons, my problem with banded skies using Snowglobe disappeared. I used it today and the texture loading seemed to be much faster than usual, though that might be due to some other factor than the Snowglobe viewer.

read this article to learn how to make Snowglobe run faster:

[ i m g ] http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2009/06/30/pushing-the-limits-ii-%e2%80%94-snowglobe-and-ultrafast-texture-download/[/ i m g ]
That method of encoding an url causes the url to vanish entirely on some systems, such as mine, for example.

http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2009/06/30/pushing-the-limits-ii-%e2%80%94-snowglobe-and-ultrafast-texture-download

Note that the HTTP Get Texture features that was originally described as working if you set a debug variable a certain way in that article is now said to not work as the article originally said it did. Gwen added a "Nevermind" note in her post saying Soft Linden says the HTTP Get Texture function is not functioning except for map textures.

And now SL users are all dancing around their living rooms, trying to get their webcams to recognise them? And.. all that standing about as opposed to sitting at a keyboard for hours on end will probably turn off a lot of users.
I can see perhaps disability applications that would assist them, although being able to remap the keyboard/mouse controllers will do just that anyway.

As for Snowglobe or any other client that is deemed 'Unsafe for use', buggy, flaky, crashes a lot... is not my idea of fun anfter 5+ years of putting up with that virtually everyday from 'normal' clients... Oh, did I mention the millions of USD revenue that drops into LL's bank each month, and after 6 years, they are still releasing buggy beta/late alpha clients of their own. Past couple of weekends we have seen near cascade failure of the LL network.. for me, enough is enough.. its about time we can do our thing, in this very expensive platform, with a lot more stability.. a LOT more.

You clearly don't know what you're talking about here.





By the way, I heard that "xxx will probably turn off a lot of users" thing lots of times with regard to SL. However, facts and reality never matched those scaried predictions.
Time will tell. You said "enough is enough", so if you behave consistently with your words, I guess you're going to leave and you won't be here to see it yourself.

LOL... you read 'stuff' that LL put in their sacred wiki and you run with it believing its written in stone. Unless you are using an alt, I'd say, you lack the full understanding of LL. If they put some meat on the plate, I could see the benefit of having a useful device that would do more than imitate a yes/no and shrugging shoulders. Their time would be better spent gaining stability, security and predictability for the platform.. maybe allowing remaping of the keyboard/mouse functions to devices that would allow disabled users to use something useful.. that would be progress.

Having developed our own VR platform which addresses a lot of the issues such as stability, security, predictability, has programmable API's in mainstream languages, is Hypergrid, scaleable, owners get to keep their goods and can deploy them wherever they wish, we can handle around 5,000 users on a single server, full behind the firewall solution, has dynamic shadows, raytracing, runs on hardware SL can no longer support and is accessible from a standard browser, uses nVidiaPhysX.. modules that will allow speech to text, text language translations, text to speech convertions, and much more.... We do not have an income of around 60 million USD or the resources that LL have... has brought me to the conclusion, they waste huge sums of money on superflous trinkets, when the real issues remain unaddressed.

I just downloaded and installed a new version of Snowglobe - 1.03. However I can't find a version history or anything. Can anyone point me to a URL or text file showing what's new and what's fixed in this version of Snowglobe?

There was an email to sldev with the changes.
https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2009-July/014815.html

Thanks, I appreciate this. I like to know what I'm installing on my machine so I know what to look for and who to blame...

URL? I didn't see it in your siggy.

Oh geez, I want this system so bad....are you doing this thru Open Sim or Open Grid or whatever the h they are?

Maybe you should wait some months, and see if Snowglobe implements this feature or not - before you make fun of me because I'm reporting they're going to implement it.

*shrugs*

We are not using OpenSim, whilst it has progressed in many areas over SL, there is still someway to go before it can be hypergrid and allow users to tranverse the internet via many platforms. We are progressing ourselves with programmed layers that allow builds/constructs to be ported between SL/Opensim and our vector based platform (providing you own the goods).

Vector based VR platforms have been around for many years, however all have been encapsulated into sink holes and required Client software to run them. Browser based versions have been scarce but are on the increase. They offer greater 'eye candy' and functionality, along with lower overheads in regards to hardware, hosting and bandwidth.

What we have done, is not simply dropped an environment into a webpage, but created a 'Internet Desktop' solution. By using this approach, we can modularise components around the environment and through a rich API set, actually interact with functionality within the environment on the fly, using mainstream programming languages such as javascript, php, python, C++ etc. The actual environment itself can be swapped, without loosing the module components, albiet that not all environments are equal, so we can also swap out the components to syncronise with those that do.

Adding existing 'social' components such as Skype, GTalk, Yahoo etc friends lists to the environment, removes the need to create yet another sink hole of contacts. We have also added secure text chat and VOIP.

The core of the process of deployment is based upon having absolute control over 'Instances', whether for security, or hardware/bandwidth strategies for scalability. Binding these to secure and controllable text and VOIP, along with content.

When is this going to be ready? Well, development of a completely new concept isn't easy to predict (look at Blue Mars). We have 2 basic offerings, ECO-Grids mainly aimed at Business and Education, training and onboarding etc, and ETHOS-Grids the social and entertainment version. We have already completed the 'Proof of Concept' phase of the ECO-Grids and this is planned for release either August or September. The ETHOS-Grids, planned for early next year.

We will NOT release our environments until they are out of Beta, we will not spend the next 6 years fixing things whilst having paying customers generating millions of USD for the privilage of having low standards of service. We know we will be judged/challenged against the ilks of OpenSim/SL, deploying the Business and Education grids first, where security is paramount, along with scaleablity and hardware/bandwidth strategies, is a market whereby OpenSim/SL are unable to compete in comparison. Early next year, our teams will be let loose developing the ETHOS-Grids and we believe, what we will be offering, will meet those challenges head on.

My intension is not to make fun of anyone, if you feel I did, then I am sorry, but simply point out, don't believe all you read. With the prolifercation of issues regarding security and stability with SL, I cannot see the advantage of adding such a device, other than 'sweeties for the kiddies' to keep them happy.
Copybot has caused huge devistation and loss of earnings, to content creators in SL. It was 'introduced' some years ago, but despite acclaiming that LL respect and look after your IP rights, what has been done to erradicate this?

All the best in creating this AWW Mars. It is an ambitious undertaking - and one clearly only able to be undertaken by a decent-sized company or one with reasonable venture or private capital backing. I hope the company you are Director of, V-Innovate, has such backing; as it was only registered 4 months ago I am presuming that this work is a spin-off from work you have done earlier.

For those of you who want to see something more of the ECO-Grids AWM Mars has mentioned you may like to visit www.v-innovate.com which has some very nice screenshots, and there are some even nicer pics at AWM Mars's Associaton of Virtual Worlds page - http://network.associationofvirtualworlds.com/profile/AWMMars.

In the meantime I am hopeful that Snowglobe and Philip Rosedale's move back into development will bring about a lot of the promised improvements.

So we will have a look at it when it's released from beta in 6-10 years time?

So what's new in Snowglobe 1.2 as compared to 1.1?

https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev-commits/2009-August/003035.html

Is there a more recent version than that?

Ah, I see what's new in Snowglobe 1.2 .

It doesn't run at all. Click the shortcut, that's it.

All was fine with 1.1, I even had shadows active with little FPS change. The worst mistake I made was to upgrade to 1.2.
As soon as I tried it first time, nothing rezzing. Viewer crash after a couple minutes of wait. No exceptions. What did they do?

The current Snowglobe version is still 1.1, stick with that unless you want to hunt down crashes. The 1.2 branch is brand new, and the only real testing on those builds is "it compiles". Most of the patches in 1.2 so far are to cut down CPU usage with audio, there really isn't much in the way of features yet. Maybe revisit 1.2 in a little while when things have progressed a little more =)

Viktoria (or anyone else who has an idea), on Snowglobe 1.1.2, I'm seeing system skin & clothing layers often not rezzing when changed. This is extremely reproducible on my cruddy laptop with not-officially-supported graphics chips, not reproducible at all on my desktop with 8800GT. It never happens with an ancient 1.19-based client on my laptop.

There are occasional threads about this same problem - usually stated as "my avatar is naked". e.g. /327/94/333805/1.html
/111/5f/335202/1.html

Do you have any insight into why this started happening? I think some folks are seeing this on 1.23.4 too; but can't personally verify that.

I haven't pushed the bug about it, since the machine I personally see it on has unsupported graphics. But I think it's being seen by a fair number of people.
VWR-14463
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-14463 "Avatar clothing change invisible to all inworld, but visible to me."
.

There was a Snowglobe-specific invisible avatar problem that got fixed (SNOW-, the rest of them are shared with regular 1.23. Snowglobe likes to load textures in a different order, and that does seem to make it easier for the bug to trigger.

It is one of those fun sorts of bugs that doesn't affect everyone the same, so it may be one of the ones that lingers for a while.

My hunch is that this may be the same partial Ruthing that we've seen all along, because it matches how full Ruths render now with the new default alpha mask: attachments and system hair present, other mesh sections invisible.