Some recent posts by Botgirl Questi inspired me to get out my Femme Noir outfit: all-black skin and eyes, fullbright white hair (with signature rainbow strands, naturally) and wings.
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25Nov
Tags: flickr
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24Nov
I’ve written an LSL script which “serves” custom-generated HTML via a neat trick I discovered. But don’t bust out the champagne just yet — this method is extremely limited, so I don’t expect this to revolutionize HUDs or anything like that. Still, it’s a fun curiosity.
The trick is this: If you use text of the form “data:text/html,[html code here]” as the web URL, Firefox (and maybe other browsers?) will render the HTML code as a web page. For example, visit data:text/html,<html><body><h1>Oh hai!</h1></body></html>, and Firefox will render the words “Oh hai!”. It’s not accessing a web page, and it’s not loading a local HTML file, it’s loading the HTML code from the pseudo-URL.
The same trick works in SL as well, by setting the parcel media URL to the “data:text/html” string. You can use an LSL script to generate the HTML code and set the parcel URL, or even set the URL for an individual avatar. The result is that your LSL script acts as a very simple web server!
However, as I mentioned, there are some serious limitations: SL won’t let you set the web URL to a string longer than 254 letters! That means you have to cram all the HTML code into that tiny string, which severely limits the complexity of the HTML you can display.
Another problem is that the method may not work for other web engines besides Firefox / Mozilla. Linden Lab is (or was recently) working on switching to WebKit, the engine used by Safari, for rendering HTML. That’s good news, since WebKit is some great software, but this little trick might stop working when they switch. So, I wouldn’t rely on it.
So, I don’t expect this method to be more than a silly toy for programmers to play around with. But it is that! And on the plus side, there are signs that we might get proper HTTP server functionality in LSL sometime in the future, which would be a great boon to many scripting industries in SL.
You can get a full-perm copy of the object and script in SL at my sandbox or copy the following code (below the fold, if you’re viewing this on my blog front page) into an LSL script in your own object (in which case you should apply the “*Default Media Texture” to your prim from the Library, or you won’t see anything). Continue reading »
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16Nov
From the Imprudence Blog
It has been an intense two and a half months since we first announced the Imprudence project. There has been laughter, there has been joy, there has been boredom and frustration, stress and near burn-out, and a medley of other emotions thrown in there as well.
But today it’s all worth it, because today the first release candidate of the Imprudence Viewer is ready!
Read the rest for more information, plus sexy download links!
Tags: imprudence
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02Nov
Tired of those beautiful, photo-realistic sunsets? That new-fangled Windlight rendering engine slow your compy to a crawl? Want to relive the good old days, back when voice chat was new and strange, and Linden Lab even bothered to pretend to communicate with its customers?
Well now you can!
… Actually, you’ve been able to do so for a long, long time — ever since the Día de Liberación back in summer 2007. One of the benefits of “message liberation” was that you wouldn’t need to download a new SL viewer just because they made some server changes; old viewers would continue to work with new sims.
And in fact, that has held true, even to today. The only thing stopping you from using a 1.18-series (pre-Windlight) viewer is that annoying “You must download the latest version to continue” message, which is easily bypassed with a trick I’ll describe below.
But what of that mandatory security update in early October? Or the security update and protocol switch from UDP to HTTPS less than two weeks before that? Wouldn’t those issues prevent old viewers from connecting?
Apparently not. As of this writing, even 1.19 and 1.18 viewers (but not 1.17 or other older, “unliberated” viewers) can connect to SL with nary a hitch, though they’re probably still susceptible to the security issues mentioned above. As usual, the purportedly required updates are, in fact, not.
So, what is this trick, this secret knowledge needed to bypass the download prompt and log in with older viewers? Change the channel. It’s an old trick, though there was some concern that it wouldn’t work anymore since the change to HTTPS. Fortunately, those concerns have not come to pass, and the SL servers seem perfectly happy to use UDP with older viewers.
Changing the channel is easy. The viewer application takes a parameter, “–channel CHANNEL”, which sets the channel to use. The process for giving that parameter varies between operating systems. The processes are described on the SL wiki, but I’ve included a brief overview below.
- Windows: Create a shortcut to the older SecondLife.exe. Open up the shortcut’s properties (right click > Properties) and edit the shortcut path.
AfterAfter the closing quotation mark, add:SecondLife.exebut before the closing quotation mark--channel Happydays - Mac: Open up the terminal and run these two commands (adjust the first path if your Second Life app isn’t in Applications):
cd "/Applications/Second Life.app/" echo "--channel Happydays" >> Contents/Resources/arguments.txt
(Mac users, leave a comment if the above solution didn’t work for you. I don’t have a Mac handy to test it!)
- Linux: Run the viewer as:
secondlife --channel Happydays
You should now be able to log in to SL with your retro viewer version. Enjoy, good night, and good luck!
P.S. Don’t have the installer for the old viewer laying around? No worries, they’re still available for download. Mad props to McCabe Maxsted for putting that wiki page together!
- Windows: Create a shortcut to the older SecondLife.exe. Open up the shortcut’s properties (right click > Properties) and edit the shortcut path.
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