GreenLife Emerald Viewer Review

Emeraldhttp://nalates.wordpress.com/?p=282&preview=true01

Emerald Drop Down Menu

Update 10/2009

This viewer updates rapidly. I have made several posts here about the different features being added to Greenlife Emerald viewer and provided reviews. There is a trail of links you can read through to read them in order. Or you can click on the Archive page and select the Emerald Viewer Reviews to see all the posts that relate.

12/3/09: I’ve added an index to all the Emerald Viewer Reviews. See: Emerald Viewer Review Index

Original Post

Seems like everyone is making viewers for Second Life. GreenLife Emerald Viewer is an outstanding viewer for builders doing build-by-number building and sim managers that need to control AV’s in their sim. Emerald has several neat features handy for games inside SL.

You find several of Emerald’s new features in a new menu item labeled Emerald. See the image for a list if the items in this menu drop down.

Radar

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Emerald's Built in Radar

The radar is fun. (See image of the floater) Since it runs entirely in the viewer it does not lag the sim. As far as I can tell it is undetectable by anyone in the sim. It shows all the AV’s in a sim and reaches outside the sim to adjacent sims. It’s hard to tell exactly what it is doing but it appears to list AV’s in the sim you are in and AV’s in adjacent sims near your AV. It proves AV name, SL age in days, payment status, distance away, activity (I’ve seen moving and stationary) and it tells you which viewer another AV is using, in some cases. But you can always tell who is using Emerald whether you have the radar open or not because their name tag turns green. Update: More viewer names have been added to the feature.

In the bottom section there are four tabs that group the features; Avatar, Moderation, Custom and Options. The items in the ‘Avatar’ tab are likely the most useful to most players. Just as you can have a beacon for a map location Emerald lets you set a beacon on an AV. Even more fun it will let you TP to the AV. As the AV moves about the beacon moves with them and the location updates.

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Emerald03a

There seems to be no manual for Greenlife Emerals viewer. But as one explores it there are lots of hidden little features that can surprise one. The Radar has one I like. Double click any AV name displayed in the radar that is NOT marked out of range and the camera pops to that AV. OMG there goes even more of our privacy.

Teleport History

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Emeralds Teleport History

This is something I have wanted. This is like the history list in a browser. It is a list of all the TP’s you have made in the current session. You can copy the TP as a SLurl, show the location on a map or TP there. Very nice feature.

Moderator Tools

These are the tools that estate owners need. Not being an estate owner I can’t test them in SL. See the image for available commends.

Properties

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Properties Panel

In the standard ‘properties’ dialogs is an Emerald properties with six tabs, Teleport & Login, Voice, Shields, IM/Auto-response, Misc and Cmdline (Command Line). If the region allows point to point tp you can tp by double clicking on a spot.

Shields is about protecting clothes your AV is wearing from theft and duplication. Great for runway models.

IM/Auto-response is about automatically handling incoming IM’s. Great got business owners that must handle hundreds of IM’s. The image shows the options and there are several. This is also handy for those x’s you caught cheating and don’t want to talk to.

Miscellaneous is about enabling always fly, the Ctrl-Alt-P and S enabling for Phantom and Sit by key press, how radar shows in chat, allow double in inventory to wear things and some techy stuff.

Command line is geeky but is sort of like gestures. Type a command like gtp x, y, z (where x, y, and z are region coordinates) to teleport there. There are six and some are handy things for builders, like rez a platform in air.

The Skins property gives you 9 choices of viewer skins. These images are of the purple skin.

Most other properties are identical to the SL viewer.

BUILDING

For those building by the numbers this viewer is a step up. The values in the Object panel of the Build dialog are 5 decimals instead of 3. You can get a bit more precise and that can come in very handy. Still 10m is the max limit on dimensions.

Emerald has 18 types of prims, more than the standard viewer. I have no clue how to use these new prims. They are bizarre to say the least. Shapes like Circle2->Square give interesting results and taper, skew and other editing criteria have fantastic, bizarre results. You have to see it to understand.

I’m not much on prim torture. But I read that one can change prim parameters without changing the prim’s shape… huh? Supposedly that makes prim torture easier… Next time I’m working out anger issues I’ll torture a poor prim.

One can set transparency to 100%. Now that changes the way I do several things. Also one can set repeats above 100, which is a problem I’ve never needed to solve.

ANIMATIONS

A special window can display all the animations running on your AV. Best of all one can cancel any single animation. So, you have more control than just Stop All. The window includes the name of the owner of the animation, which means more trouble for griefers.

Plus you can block one click sit animations… there are some tricky griefer traps a girl has to watch out for… this is a big help when you think you may be about to be punked.

INVENTORY

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Greenlife Emerald Inventory

In May this viewer had no WORN tab in the inventory window. Now in June it does. This is a way handy feature. And it is not like the way Torley shows in his tutorial for finding worn items. (Thanks Torley – I used your trick all the time) Using search and typing ‘(worn’ reveals more items than just the items I am wearing. Several no mod items have names that include ‘(worn on arm)’ and the search pulls up those things too. The worn tab eliminates those and shows just the items I’m wearing. It is fine for taking things off. Not so good for adding other items in the same folder.

In preferences one can turn on Double Click to Wear. Then one just needs to double click a wearable item to have it pop on. Nice, saves a couple of clicks.

PIE Menu

The pie menu changes. I think it is better and will be easier on new people in SL. Those using the Release Candidate viewers will immediately recognize the new pie menu. So, we will all see it soon. Changing back and forth between the Emerald and RC 1.23 and the 1.22 viewers is the pain. Once you adapts it is fine.

As I learn more I’ll post more…

Update 6/24

I am seeing this view more and more often in Second Life. I am also seeing more of the Gemini viewer too. These are very similar viewers. Read the Gemini Second Life Viewer Review.

I like the viewer. However I have had several crashes with it. I suspect a memory leak or two as depending on what I’m doing I get a crash every 2 to 4 hours.

Also the viewer does not have the check boxes needed to allow one to view Adult Content. But neither does the Gemini viewer.

Update 6/28

See: Update Gemini Viewer Review for RPG’s

Update 7/20

The Gemini and Emerald viewers have combined. The people writing code are working together. The Gemini viewer is discontinued. Emerald and Gemini were very much alike anyway.

Windows updates since 7/4 made most of my viewers unstable. After about 2 hours of use I would see client side slow downs to 1 or 5 fps. The stats bar would show the server running well 44 fps etc. Re-logging did not help. Computer restarts were a problem too. The install of Vista SP2 seems to have corrected the problems. Emerald ran fine for several hours this last Sunday.

Update 7/27

The version of Emerald I have now is 1.23.4 (288). In the post Snowglobe Viewer Review Update I wrote about some of the problems it was having. These are the same problems I’m seeing in Emerald 288.

Now that N. Korean attack seems to have subsided and Microsoft as plugged a number of wholes I can’t blame it on them. Emerald seems to have some of the same low FPS problems Snowglobe had and to some measure the SL Release Candidate.

If you are a combat gamer and don’t mind giving up a few nice features, try the Snowglobe Viewer for high fps rates. I expect the next update of Emerald to resolve these problems.

Flash

I no more than get this written and see there is a new release of the Emerald Viewer out (Doh! – version 1.23.4 (439)). We are now sent to a new location for the download, the Google code site (if your the paranoid type, fire up your Emerald viewer and it should send you to the new location… not that you would not trust me… paranoia is not always a bad thing.) Greenlife Emerald Viewer Download Or read down the page for their notes on security. There are public key signatures you can use to verify the authenticity of the packages.

This is a two part download and install. There are two packages to download. The Main Setup and a Proprietary Pack. Once I have time to install them and try them, I will post an update. Leave your comments if you would.

And if you are hitting those lag problems, Modular has some suggestions. See Emerald Viewer Common Errors and Fixes! I did not see much change… but you never never know. Hopefully the update fixes things.

Update 8/3

The low FPS rates are intermitant. Mostly they have been fixed. Did find that after downloading Snowglobe’s latest they got worse. I reinstalled Emerald and that seems to have fixed the problem. These viewers install in seperate folders so I do not know why the reinstall seems to have helped. It may have replaced a damaged file or cleared a cache index… whatever it helped.

This latest viewer has OTR encryption for IM’s. See Second Life Emerald Viewer’s Unverified Chat? for more information on that.

Update 8/8

I’ve started another post for updates. This viewer is being quickly updated and I want this blog to remain fresh, so… please see the link just above on unverified chat.

23 thoughts on “GreenLife Emerald Viewer Review

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  3. Thank you for making the update of 7/20 about the fps rates slowing down. Actually, I have tested the Emerald viewer on one computer with 4 hours of building and the SL viewer on a near identical computer and there are times the Greenlife viewer really slows the fps rate while the SL viewer is not doing that. It’s still an undetermined situation, but I’m thinking the Greenlife viewer is doing something that is slowing down the frame rate. – Ancient1 Aeon at AncientHomelands.com

    • Snowglobe build 2537 was doing the same thing. Build 2565 (7/26/09) works much better. After 3 or 4 hours the SL RC does the same slow down, at least on my machine. I think it is wide spread but most I talk to think it is their computer.

      • Nalates, this past weekend I put in a lot of hours building new products, and about every 3-4 hours either the Emerald viewer or the SL viewer would slow the frame rate. I build on a platform at 1500 meters and the fps is usually 16-22 (high/128), but somewhere around 4 hours it would go down to around 8fps. If I just closed and opened the viewer with no restart of the computer, the frame rate would hold again at 16-22. I don’t think its the computer (64bit, 3Ghz, 8Gb mem, nVidia 285) I think its the veiwers.

  4. Pingback: Snowglobe Viewer Review Updated « Nalates’ Things & Stuff Blog

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  7. I have installed a new version of Greenlife Emerald Viewer, but i checked the question about clients listed as “no”…now i don’t have any friends list anymore. Then i have installed the viwer once again…didn’t asked me the same question again….I don’t know what to do….Can somebody help me, please?

    • You can try Ctrl-H to open the chat window. The Contacts tab at the bottom of it should show you your friends list. Not to worry the list is part of your SL stuff so I don’t think you can lose it from changing viewers.

  8. been trying to figure out how to show incoming IM’s in the local chat window like you can do it in the regular SL viewer.
    Can someobody please guide me to the place where i can find out about it

  9. I need some help! My bf has tried to download the last 2 updates and for some reason he only gets a FPS of 1. He is on the 1st update and it works fine but the last two he can’t use. He’s contacted the support team for Emerald and they don’t respond so I’m reaching out to you all for help. I have an older pc than him and I get no less than 20 FPS. Please help me help him get running.

    Thanx,
    Panda

    • Make sure he re-installs the Proprietary Pack after the new install. Also, make sure he installs Emerald then downloads and installs the Pack. Other than that I have no idea. SLUniverse has a thread where some of the Emerald people answer questions.

      Also, have him join the Emerald Group in SL. He can ask in their chat.

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  12. I’m having a problem that may have started when I started using the Emerald Viewer. I can put on clothes and I can see them. But other avatars can’t. I’ve tried all the usual things to fix it…appearances, rebakes, reboots,reinstalls, clear caches, etc. Nothing fixes it. Any ideas anyone? (Oh…and I replaced that art file).

  13. Hey Guys..u know of any reason why when I try to edit appearance I only get body parts and clothing is greyed out and cant modify anything at all even though it is modifiable 🙁
    Any help welcome

  14. Pleasw could you do something about the 25 group limit. Everywhere you go the offer discount if you are member of their group and you are consatnly trying to make a choice of which group to delete. I don’t see why you can’t do it like Inventory and have folders for Clubs, stores, and games.
    Thank you

    • AFAIK, the Emerald viewer does not control the number of groups, that is controlled by the server. You would need to ask the Lindens to change the group limit.

    • Oh geez… Emerald is an old banned viewer. Click the menu item VIEWERS and then Emerald Viewer. You can learn about the viewer in that series of articles.

      The viewer has, for practical purposes, been replaced by Firestorm Viewer.

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