This morning Linden Lab released Viewer 2.0 and opened the new resident Help Island. New World Notes gives you a glimpse of the new user experience. We old residents can’t visit there. It is supposed to be better and should help retain more new users. We’ll see.
The new Second Life viewer is very much like the Beta 2.0 viewer. The Lindens say lots has been fixed and changed. Other than the side panel not messing up my HUD’s I didn’t see much in about 30 minutes of use.
In announcing the new Second Life 2.0 T. Linden tells us what Linden Lab has learned from their research and what they are focusing on. See: Unveiling An Improved New Resident Experience
KirstenLee has released another update on her S20 viewer now version (12). It has the new MOAP (Media On A Prim) feature. Her user interface makes more sense for existing residents. I still get those slow motion freezes where the Frames per Second (FPS) drop to 1 or 2 and ping goes to 50,000ms… If I get the region IP address I can ping it from out side the viwer and get a good ping, 80ms to 200ms. So, I doubt it is my connection. The previous version of Emerald and Snowglobe were doing the same thing.
She has fixed the chat and IM’s so they are more usable. In general it’s a nice viewer… and of course it does shadows.