Second Life Beta Viewer 2.3.0 Released

The new SL 2.3 Beta version viewer is out. You can read the official release information here.

Display Names

The big change is the addition of Display Names. There is a Torley video at the link above showing how to use Display Names.

While the viewer has the feature not all the regions have it turned on. The Lab is being cautious rolling it out. They made changes from user input. Griefing and impersonation being the leading concerns. 

One of the concerns was being able to capture a name for abuse reports. Because names can use Unicode characters it can be hard to type them in. Also, names can spoof by doing tricky things like using lower case ‘L’ in place of upper case ‘I’ and other spoofs. So, they have made it easy to use copy/paste with Display Names.

They tell you to go over to Blake Sea to try it out. Type Blake Sea into your map and you find a load of Blake Sea this and thats. I suppose any of them will do, but I couldn’t find any that worked 10/27 about 10PM SLT. Bay City is another area. It has about a dozen regions named Bay City something. Tanelorn had Display Names enabled. You may have to exit Profile Edit and re-enter to see the Display Name wrench that lets you change the name. Use the Edit and Cancel at the bottom of the Profile Sidebar panel.

When the region has Display Names enabled you will see and additional control near the top of your Profile just under your user name.

Of course the first thing the I was told was invalid characters… ☻ ❤ Nal ❤ ☯ …which doesn’t look all that invalid to me… :/

Chat Logs

You may be aware the chat log formats were changing. There is now the option to save them as plain text or use the new format. By default it uses the new format, which is apparently going to be more JSON than XML. Look in Me -> Preferences -> [Chat].

Problem

The viewer kept slowing down to 0.7 FPS. I had my graphics set to High. On Low I was getting 30 to 60 FPS. On Medium I began to slow down again 0.7 to 15 FPS, very jerky as it moved back and forth.

With a ping of 64ms I found the viewer basically unusable.

Alternate

The SL Development Viewer 2.4.0. (213153) has the Display Name code in it. So, if you run into FPS slow downs with the Beta consider getting the Development Viewer.

4 thoughts on “Second Life Beta Viewer 2.3.0 Released

  1. I wonder what’s wrong with your computer / operating system ?
    It’s not the first time you get spotty ultra-low framerate, with no apparent reason.

    With this viewer release I immediately got 50-60 FPS at High level, 80-140 at Low level. I have a good PC (CPU Core2Quad 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 9500GT) but your one is good as well, if you also get 60 FPS (sometimes at least).

    I rarely see huge differences in viewer performances as you do – when it happens, I’m prone to blame the hardware, the drivers or a misconfigured viewer setting (I like to tweaks settings but sometimes that can cause performance degradation).

    • When I see these low FPS rates I start looking to see what is up. Often I go through clearing caches and user settings. User settings can be a problem because I do tweak lots of settings. Plus I have over a dozen viewers installed. Some times one install blows up several viewers. I have done several system roll backs to undo installs that mess things up. I keep the drivers updated and try to have all the MS updates done and viewers tested before installing a new viewer.

      So, generally I am pretty sure when I’m seeing a problem in the viewer. Ctrl-Shift-9 often tells me where to look for problems. That the Development viewer works better suggests it is a specific problem with the viewer or a viewer setting. Then it is just a matter of whether I want to take time to run it down.

    • Once I know English is not a first language I think more about what I’m reading and what you may mean. Thanks for using English.

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