Snowglobe:Frequency

Yeah that's right, there won't be any development any more. So don't expect new releases here. Maybe I'll change my mind some day, but it's not likely. However, this website will remain online for quite a while.

More details in this blog post.

Thanks to those few people, who actually helped or contributed!

Hey folks. Sorry for having been rather quiet recently.
Please see my blog for details
It's easier to comment/discuss there than here.

As an addition to the blog post, the Snowglobe:FE project web site (this one!) will move into another data centre within the next few days. Expect about 10 minutes downtime (probably less than that).

Hello folks,

Apologies for the small outage (less than 10 minutes), which just happened. We had a problem with the iSCSI storage, which for some reason quit serving and didn't give its IP address to the secondary storage, so we had to do the fail-over manually. All is back to normal now.

Cheers
Sean

Linden Lab have made the point that they don't want any third party viewers, which violate the ToS or do otherwise support malicious activities. It seems that they are mainly concerned about content copying, and whilst I think it is difficult if not impossible to prevent content copying (as a matter of fact, all textures and object shape details have to be transferred to the client in order to display them), I absolutely do support their intentions.

I'm pretty sure, our users are with me here. (We are currently seeing an increase of logins with Snowglobe:FE by ~50% per day, which is quite encouraging.)

Our main intention is to create a viewer, which is easy to use and contains a lot of useful features that do support this target. Our target group are normal SL residents, not freaks who need the most geeky features (I do appreciate that, but there are other viewers, which offer that already, and we don't want to compete with them). Over the next releases, we will do a reasonable amount of code review to actually improve performance and stability, and get rid of features which are useless to the majority of residents.

We never have provided and never will provide any features, which are violating LL's ToS (or make it easier), nor any features which are on the darker side of the grey area between good and bad. Hence, there'll be no features in our viewer ever, which can pose a nuisance to other residents, or make stealing of their intellectual property easier.

There's no urgent need to make this statement, as the famous "Brown Bag Meetings" have yet to be held and clear policies defined. However, I'd like our fellow residents and fans of Snowglobe:Frequency (we indeed do have a few already) to know what's going on, and what they can expect from us.

Thanks for reading this, folks. Have a happy (second) life! :-)

Linden's Blog Post: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/10/20/third-party-viewer-policy

Earlier today, I've compiled Snowglobe:Frequency on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 32bit for you Linux guys.
I haven't had a chance to test it yet. I suppose it should work with versions of Linux which are not the absolutely latest ones -- for example Debian Lenny, Ubuntu 8.04 (of course), Fedora 9 maybe...

If you have problems with the other versions we have published so far, please give this one a try, and let me know if that's working better.

Here's the link (just uploaded): Snowglobe:Frequency for Linux glibc 2.7+

UPDATE 21:06 GMT: -- Maintenance finished. All services back up & running.

--

After the move to the new server was almost seamless last weekend, I am now going to do some additional maintenance work, which may lead to one or more short downtimes. (A few minutes each.)

This will start in about 30 minutes (20:30 GMT) and last until approx. 21:30 GMT.

Once that is done, you shouldn't see any downtimes whatsoever for quite a while :-)

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Hello everyone,

This is an advance warning for website maintenance.

I am currently moving a bunch of servers from the U.S. to Europe, and the Frequency Viewer sites are part of that move.
At some point later today (Sat 17th), or tomorrow, this website will not be available for about 15 minutes. This downtime is necessary to make sure that the databases and file attachments are the latest versions, before we swing the name servers to point to the new destination.

The viewer itself is not really affected. The login background page might stay blank for a few minutes, but you can still log on without problems.

Anyway. I thought you might want to know before hand what's going to happen, because nobody likes bad surprises :-)

We, and in particular Alex, were very busy recently to get the next version for you out of the door :-)

So here we go... with many new features:

• Teleport History Floater
• Option to disable Progress Screens (Teleport, Login, and Logout respectively)
• Show List of alt Avatars upon Login
• Inventory Quick-Filter
• Detection when someone starts a new Instant Message (allow to optionally steal Focus)
• Show number of new IMs on "IM Received" button
• Notification when a Friendship ends
• Build Floater shows previous Owner, and allows to copy the UID of the Object
• Profiles show Agent UID
• Avatar Height displayed in "Edit Appearance" Floater
• Sit anywhere Functionality
• New menu for SnowglobeFE
• Our own Status Page
• Allow 100% Transparency when creating/editing Objects (as opposed to only 90% in default Viewer)
• Update RLVa from 1.0.2c to 1.0.4e
• Enable our Status Page to detect Viewer Version and inform Resident about new Updates

Windows & OSX versions are already available, Linux will follow soon.

Have fun! :-)

Santomi Ahn kindly provided a Linux version for us, which can be found in the files section.
Please note that this version is not officially supported by us, as Santomi is not (yet) maintainer.

Anyway, if you want: give it a go! Feedback appreciated!

Thanks, Santomi!

(Edit: The built actually was a pure 1.1.1 version, and not -- as I wrongfully assumed -- pre-1.2.0. I've edited this post accordingly and renamed the file.)

I guess I didn't point that out well enough elsewhere, so let me put it into a dedicated news post:

• speaks C++ reasonably well
• covers themselves with hardcopies of source code at nights
• lives in a Linux box
• makes holidays in Second Life.

Does that sound like you? And do you also think coding is fun, and the only reward you really need is people who appreciate your work?

Well then, what are you waiting for? Say hello, and become Maintainer for the Linux version of Snowglobe:Frequency!

Contact me, Sean Frequency, in-game, or on Twitter (@seanfrequency), or use this contact form.

Looking forward to hearing from you!