Second Life Grid Status Reports

We are releasing the first iteration of the new Viewer 1.21 Release Candidate (RC0).  Help us to identify new bugs and try out the new features before it becomes an official download for Second Life!  Participating in the Release Candidate viewers is completely optional.  You may install this viewer side-by-side with the official 1.20 viewer that you normally use.

As many scripters are keenly aware, this 1.21 viewer brings you the ability to compile scripts using Mono on regions running Server 1.24.  (Learn more about Mono in a video tutorial by Torley Linden.) But this viewer could also be called “the viewer of bug fixes”:  There are over 155 fixes that solve bugs from previous versions of Second Life.  Many of these are small improvements that make existing features work more smoothly (like menu shortcuts, Inventory offers, IM and Chat, Snapshots, Estate tools, and many more).

There is so much to list, please check out the Full release notes.  There is a lot worth reading.

NOTE: Because of a number of known bugs, we have made this RC0 viewer an optional upgrade from the previous Release Candidate.  For example, we are investigating that this RC0 fails to run on a Mac PowerPC.  You can choose to wait for RC1 before upgrading your Release Candidate.  Also, some features in this viewer require you to be in a region that is running Server 1.24 – which is being deployed to the entire grid this week.

Still, we do need your help to find crash cases and other feedback!  Please visit the Test Viewers page to download the 1.21 RC0 viewer at your convenience.

You can discuss the release of this new Release Candidate here in the SL Forums.

Be sure to report new issues in the Issue Tracker and set the “Affects Version/s” to “1.21 Release Candidate”.

For more information, see this post on the main blog.

The version to be deployed is currently on the “Second Life Beta Server” channel of the Preview Grid (Aditi).

(This roll has been superceded by the rolling restart to revert 1.23.0 to 1.22.4.)

After this morning’s rolling restart of half the grid, a problem was discovered with “floating text” over objects (SVC-2633). We have fixed that problem. We will be rolling out the fixed server version tonight (Friday night) at 8PM to all regions currently running server version 1.23.0. (That includes regions restarted last night and this morning.) The remaining regions (those currently on 1.22.4) will be restarted tomorrow morning for the deploy. For more information, see this post on the main blog.

We are postponing the rolling restart again by a day. We may need to postpone it until next week; we will make that call tomorrow (Thursday). At the moment, the plan is to have the pilot roll Thursday evening, followed by half-grid rolls on Friday and Saturday morning. Please see the post on the main blog for more information about this rolling restart.

The rolling restart this week has slipped one day. We will do a pilot roll Wednesday evening, 07/09. Thursday morning between 5 and 9AM, we will deploy server version 1.23 to half of the regions on the grid. Friday morning between 5 and 9AM, we will deploy server version 1.23 to the rest of the grid. For more information, please see this post on the main blog.

For more information, please see this post on the public blog.

For more information please see the announcement on the Official Second Life Blog.

A new Release Candidate (RC8) viewer has been made available on the Test Software page for connecting to the Second Life Grid. This viewer contains bug fixes and/or soon-to-be-released new features. Release Candidate viewers are optional and can be installed side by side with the primary viewer.

Please remember: try the RC viewer only if you want to participate in the bug reporting process and identify issues before it becomes the default viewer.

For more information please see the announcement on the Official Second Life Blog.

A new Release Candidate (RC7) viewer has been made available on the Test Software page for connecting to the Second Life Grid. This viewer contains a large round of bug fixes and/or soon-to-be-released new features. Release Candidate viewers are optional and can be installed side by side with the primary viewer.

Please remember: try the RC viewer only if you want to participate in the bug reporting process and identify issues before it becomes the default viewer.

[UPDATE 2008-04-15, 5:16 pm PDT] Linux viewer crashes fixed!: We’ve fixed the issues that were causing the Linux 1.20 RC1 viewer to crash. Please download the new Linux viewer here. Thanks for your patience!

[UPDATE 2008-04-16, 1:02 pm PDT] Korean, Japanese and German viewer crashes: We have investigated a problem that causes this Release Candidate (1.20 RC1) to crash on startup for foreign languages; this will be fixed in the next Release Candidate (1.20 RC2). To revert to the English version of 1.20 RC1, you can delete the malformed file in the language folder .\ko, \ja, or .\de as appropriate:
..\skins\xui\de\panel_speaker_controls.xml
..\skins\xui\ja\panel_speaker_controls.xml
..\skins\xui\ko\panel_speaker_controls.xml

[UPDATE 2008-04-15, 3:47 pm PDT] Linux viewer crashes: We’re investigating a problem that causes the Linux 1.20 RC1 to crash on startup. Linux users are encouraged not to upgrade at this time. In order to prevent the viewer from forcing you to download an update, open gridargs.dat in a text editor and edit the text that reads:

secondlife --channel "Second Life Release Candidate"

so that it reads:

secondlife --channel "skipRC1"

We’ll post an update here when a more suitable Linux release candidate exists.

A new 1.20 Release Candidate Viewer is now available with some important fixes and changes.

If you’re interested in helping us test these optional viewers, please visit the test software page to download the Second Life 1.20 (RC1) Release Candidate viewer. Source code will be available for download soon.

Changes:

• Reminder that the Tools menu now displays in the main menu when editing/creating objects. Click on the Build button or right click and select Create. Existing short cuts (CTL + 1, 2, 3) all still work and will also activate the Tools menu.
• Disabled Avatar Imposters to address suspected cause of increased crashes on nVidia cards
• Allowed disabling of Joystick devices globally and selectively for avatar/build/flycam
• Backed out changes to put the Friends dropdown back on the world map (VWR-6243).

Fixes:

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