The Kokua-Imprudence team has a new Experimental release of the Imprudence Viewer out and ready for download. The big fix in this release is media features and voice. Lots of people have been running into voice problems. The team thinks the other big feature is media filters, the new feature everyone turns off…

Linux users will find new versions and more Ubuntu support.

Media Filter

If you don’t already know, cause you are …like living under a Geico insurance rock… RedZone was able to track users via IP Address by using fake media. This filter is somewhat like a firewall that allows you to stop the viewer from contacting selected URL’s. Once people use it they find the feature so annoying they turn it off. The annoyance comes from the popup popping every time you cross a parcel boundary to ask if it can contact the parcel’s media site.

While media filters are a good safety feature the implementation generally sucks. It is like requiring a 40 character password, which is really strong but everyone promptly writes it on a post-it and sticks on the monitor totally removing all the security. Pointless.

However, one nice feature of the new media stuff is that one can read the music URL’s that used to be hidden, which helped RedZone get away with its abuse for so long.

OpenSim

This version has some features for Aurora Grids, a branch of the OpenSim software. Regions in other grids can be larger than 256×256 meters. Blue Mars is doing 16km regions. I haven’t seen anything that large in OpenSim, but there are some 1024×1024 regions, called mega-regions. They are great for flying, driving, and boating.

Download & Install

The download is about 34mb on Windows. You have some options when installing. One of those is to associate SLURL’s with Imprudence. This means any browser smart enough to ask the Windows System which program to use when opening SLURL’s will open using the viewer associated with them. So, you have a choice to associate or not to associate. If you want SLURL’s to open Imprudence Experimental 2011.03.20 then check this option. Nice feature for Windows users.

Experience

My first logon was to OSGrid. The map doesn’t work well. Your location is off one region up and one region right… plus most of the region maps don’t load.

Inventory and clothes all seem to work. I get about 25 to 40 FPS in medium complex regions. CPU use was low bouncing around 40 to 60%, nice. The viewer feels fluid and responsive.

This viewer and the new simulator software on OpenSim seem to work well together. I could move from region to region very nicely.

For my second logon I cleared the cache, closed the viewer, restarted it and logged into Second Life. In my cottage I get 30 to 38 FPS. My cache had to reload. Through that the FPS stayed around 35 FPS. I TP’ed over to Celtic Myst to see how it handles a complex area, it bounced around from 15 to 45… mostly around 15 to 20 FPS. In the mostly empty Blue Steel Sandbox I get a steady 45 FPS.

The map works well in SL, your location appears in the correct region. All the maps appear to load and quickly.

Avatar Name Auto-Complete

I tend to forget which viewers have this feature, so I tend to forget to use it. Start typing an avatar name and press TAB. The name should complete. If there are similar names you can rotate through them with repeated presses of the tab key.

Summary

It looks like this version of Imprudence is better on OpenSim and SL. I was able to change and edit clothes and had no problems on either grid, which was not the case with earlier versions. That makes this viewer useable on multiple grids. It returns to my favorite viewer for building.

You can read the list of bug fixes on the KoKua-Imprudence site. The download links are there too. See: Imprudence Experimental Release: 2011.03.20. The release notes are in the wiki. See:  Imprudence:Features.