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On November 18 a new release of the Snowglobe Viewer came out, 1-2-4-3007. On November 23 a new version of the bleeding edge beta Snowglobe Viewer was released, 1.3.0.3008. You can find the download links on this Second Life wiki page.

WARNING: Often new viewers crash more often than the previous version, not always. But often enough that one wants to keep a copy of the previous viewer in case one needs to rollback. Windows users can create a System Restore Point before installing a new viewer version for easy rollback. Linden Lab has a blog post on what to do if one keeps crashing. See: Keep Crashing

Interesting Side Bar: Gandark Wizardly created a launcher for the SL Viewer so one may use it as an application on public computers. I have not tried it but this would mean one could possibly run it from a memory stick on any computer. See: Second Life viewer(s) as a Portable Application?

One has got to love the official Linden Lab page listing the new Snowglobe Viewer 1.3 features. It’s empty (11/29).

The features for version 1.2 are listed here: Release notes for Snowglobe version 1.2 There are 7 new features and about 18 bug fixes 🙂 and 18 new bugs introduced 🙁

One of the new features is built in language translation. To turn it on click the menu Edit -> Preference -> Text Chat tab, check use machine translation and set your language in the drop down list. It uses Google.

A Worn Items tab has been added and inventory sort order problems have been resolved.

My first use of this Snowglobe version was in a combat SIM. I got good FPS (20 to 40 nVidia 8800 duel core cpu set on high graphics). Texture renders were good but many stayed fuzzy until I would click on them. I was online for about 6 hours and only re-logged once because if a series of little stalls. A couple of hours later I tried it again and had nothing but problems. Every 10 minutes it would white screen the viewer and go Not Responding. The CPU would peg at 50%, memory usage was at 60% and disk usage was low. Network use was low too. On the third try I caught Wind Light rendering as the problem. Once I turned that off the problem went away.  I realized that much of the first use I was inside a space station and buildings. The sky was occluded. Outside I had problems.

Several bugs were fixed for those using the viewer on OSGrid SIMs.

Lots of texture problems have been fixed.

There are some known problems; full screen renders very dark (re-log fixes it), a texture download fail does not recover (object stays gray), map dialog over flows in French and bump maps not rendering correctly. You can find more known problems here: Full list of postponed issues in Snowglobe

TEST VIEWER

After trying the released 1.2.4.3007 version I installed the Test Viewer 1.3.0.3008 in a separate folder. One of the first things I noticed is that it does not give one a separate icon. It will reuse the 1.2.4 version icon. If you want both icons on your desk top you will have to create one manually.

I immediately had the same problem as in 1.2.4. As soon as there was visible sky my screened did a white out. I turned off the Wind Light and the problem stopped.

I didn’t see any differences in the two viewers, but I only used 1.3.0 for a couple of hours.