Resident Transmission
There once was a court
There once was a court in Concinna. A court that saw high drama, unbelievable stories, sad fates, conflict resolution, but also petty crime and theft.
The court had judges, prosecutors, lawyers, witnesses, court admin, police officers guards and almost 2000 convicts during its 19 months of operation.
The court originally assembled for the first time in the summer of 2007 in Ghul, but since there was no more land there to expand on, it was moved to Concinna in December 2008 where it stayed till SecondLife went trough an upheaval that sent it to Bay City, on to Fenfarg, and back again to Concinna. The turmoil had taken its toll on the court so in 2011 it was closed for good. The building decayed and was taken down in the winter of 2015.
Enter Murat. – Murat has quite a few buildings from the MOSES sims, and one of the original buildings was a court. Although not a bad build at all, it was a traditional prim build both in style and impact on the sim with a large number of scripts.
By putting together pieces that had been made over a long period (since 2012) and combining them with the two story version of the vicar house building, Murat still has a court; The Murat River Valley District Court. Perhaps one day it too will be the scene of drama the likes of what passed down in Concinna.
Window dressing the old vicar house
Sometimes the light and photo opportunities on the grid just takes you. The old vicar houses in Norderhov was up for some window dressing as the original very industrial looking windows no longer fit the environment.
As darkness fell and the cam was zoomed out this very 1850-ties national romantic moonlit scene just emerged – as if painted.
Tying up some loose ends
The last few weeks have been spent tying up some loose ends in and around the grid.
One corner of the Conference Center was still standing empty and barren so something had to be done about it. A bar desk and cozy lanterns was made and the icing on the cake was a very nice looking grand piano that was licensed for use on the grid. It all came together quite nicely in the end.
Presence is everything
A number of software issues that prevented the grid from working properly was sorted out by updating the database tables in the PostgreSQL database – tables and driver software that had been badly neglected compared to the MySQL counterpart that most grids are based on. By fixing the Presence service - the piece of software that tells who is logged on to the grid, who is visiting and where they are, made a number of pieces fall in place and the grid and visitors are so much happier. You can even visit with a 64-bit viewer without being kicked to the ground.
There is still an issue with IM sent to someone who is offline, and the same type of issue exist with placing classifieds. The good thing is the root cause has been identified, so a work-around can be found.
Building a better Mac viewer
In many ways the Mac version of the viewers has been the step-child of both Linden Labs and most developers of third party viewers (TPV). The reason being the Mac has been seen as inferior for use with “games” by many – which there is a good deal of truth to as Apple never focused on that part of the market segment. The success of iOS devices as game machines is in the process of changing this also on OS X where OS X 10.11 will bring very many improvements for developers in this area.
Another important aspect is that while the first generation viewers were built with largely the same tools and code as the Linux version of the viewer so code sharing was easy, and the viewer could be built without having access to a Mac.
When Apple moved from a 32-bit architecture to 64-bit in OS X 10.7 not only did they change toolset moving to the Clang compiler, but all the system frameworks moved to Objective-C – a coding environment completely unknown to developers rooted in Windows and Linux tools.
For a while it was possible to keep the Mac version of the viewers alive by using the dated development tools, but it became increasingly difficult, so Linden Labs finally got their act together and did some necessary cleanup to the code so at least it would compile with the Clang compiler. For the TPV developers the transition has been painful, and most of them have dropped development of a Mac version.
When Nicky made the decision to move the Kokua viewer to Linden Lab’s codebase, but no longer was able to build the Mac version, I offered help to get it built.
The Kokua viewer has steadily been added to with solid support of features and bug fixes from the SecondLife viewer, but the developer has also been very forthcoming and persistent in fixing often complicated issues affecting OpenSim use. – This without making a clutter of the usability or piling on functionality that very few use.
With the latest version finished just a few days ago, the Kokua viewer is much more useful than the SecondLife viewer with enhanced building tools, but it also brings the same great feature set and stability to users of OpenSim. For Mac users – and I am biased – this is the only viewer to consider if you use OpenSim! For everyone else too.