Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The team building the Kokua and Imprudence viewers has announced they have moved their bug reporting and code repositories to Source Forge, a well know repository for open source projects.
The Imprudence Viewer’s bug reporting is here.
The Kokua Viewer’s bug reporting is here.
You can read the brief announcement here: Issue tracker move to SourceForge.
We seem to be coming to a crunch point in viewers. The Lab is changing things so quickly third party developers have a challenge keeping up. Henri Beauchamp does well with Cool VL Viewer, which is a viewer based on V3 code with a vintage V1 user interface.
Niran seems to have leapfrogged the Niran’s Viewer to having all the latest Linden features by jumping to a recent SL Viewer V3 model. Niran’s Viewer is now Nirans Black Dragon viewer. Niran’s features from previous versions are being added to the new SL V3 Viewer code in Black Dragon. Eventually Niran will have Black Dragon on a feature par with his previous versions.
So, both of those viewers have materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 doesn’t and Tonya Souther of the Firestorm Team explains why, in a blog post: Tracking LL’s big changes, and why the 4.4.2… well now that there is an emergency roll out… 4.4.3 version won’t either.
I liked the Imprudence Viewer. But, it is far too behind the times for me to use it. But, that may change.
There is an article on Hypergrid Business by Maria Korolov: Work Resumes on Imprudence Viewer. Maria has news I had yet to hear. Seems a team is taking on updating the old viewer.
They will be avoiding the Havok Code Licensing. Unless a grid is going to implement Havok Physics and add Pathfinding there is no purpose to having the code in an OpenSim viewer. Plus few people even know what the code does or how to use it in Second Life. So, there is little point to adding it.
However, mesh, media on a prim and other parts of the SL tech will be added to the viewer.
It seems they will retain the V1 user interface. For a V3 interface one can use the sister viewer Kokua.
I wish them the best and will be watching how they progress.
OK, I’m surprised. There is a new experimental release of the Imprudence Viewer out. You can get more information here: Imprudence Blog.
I removed the viewer some time ago. At one time it was my preferred viewer for building in-world. For even longer it was my viewer for OpenSim grids. But, it was slow adopting mesh and AFAIK still does not support mesh.
As far as I can tell this viewer is not Sever Side Appearance baking compatible. So, it is good for from 2 to 8 weeks, until the Lab rolls out SSA.
It has been a while since I took a look at a number of viewers. Rather than post them separately, I’ve lumped them together, except for Nirans. I had not used it for months, so I expected lots of changes.
The main Linden Viewer is still at version 3.4.5 (270263), pre CHUI (Chat Hub User Interface). I seldom use the Beta Viewer now. It is more of a fall back viewer for when a Development Viewer version has problems. This morning the Beta is at version 3.5.0 (271345). The Development Viewer had been at version 3.5.1 (270826) for about 10 days. Today it updated to 3.5.1 (271386).
I am still fighting with the CHUI update to keep it the size I WANT IT. Other than sizing problems I like the new CHUI. The new build 271386 seems to have some of the sizing problems fixed.
I don’t keep up with Kokua and Imprudence as much as I might and certainly not as much as I used to. Imprudence Viewer was for some time my favorite viewer for both SL and OpenSim. Soon it slipped to being my choice just for OpenSim. Then it fell so far behind I stopped using it. I still have it installed… I’m not sure why.
There is a small effort to update Imprudence. But, I think it is so far behind it is no longer usable.
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Kokua was to be the primary OpenSim viewer. I had hoped to see Aurora and Kokua offer some competition to Second Life™ by providing combined viewer and server features creators could use. I got the impression there was a goal to develop viewer and server dependent features more quickly and lower the wall between the viewer and server.