Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
Drama swirls around the coming end of the Second Life Viewer 1.23 (SLV1) and SL Snowglobe 1.4 & 1.5 viewers and possibly some Third Party Viewers (TPV). If you are interested in getting perspective and an idea of what is coming and why, read on.
It appears to have many upset and predicting the end of SL over the viewer change from the SLV1 to the SLV2 series viewers. I personally think these are people not paying attention to what is happening at Linden Lab.
A new Release Candidate (RC) is out. Release candidates are about stability. If this one proves to be stable it will be come the main Imprudence Viewer. For new features check out the Experimental Viewer. You can down it here: Imprudence 1.3.0 RC3 Released
Imprudence Viewer now has selectable fonts. Click Edit->Preferences->[Fonts]
Gray map tiles has been fixed.
Chat spell check is not part of the 1.3 series viewers. Spell check appears in the 1.4 series viewers, now the Experimental Viewer.
The full list of release notes is here: Imprudence Viewer 1.3.0 RC3 Release Notes
Today there is a new release of the Experimental Viewer. See: Release: 2010.09.18 to download Windows, Mac, and Linux. This is NOT the recommended stable version.
This revision had several additions. There is now a search in Friends and Groups dialogs. The search even has an auto complete, which is triggered by pressing Tab after you type in some initial text. There are instructions for use at the link above.
There are a number of bug fixes and changes. The list is at the link above.
KistenLee has released a new test viewer. This one is especially for higher end computers and is classed a Test Build. Download it from the Test Build section of KirstenLee’s site.
S20(37) is the current main release.
One needs a Dual Core2 or better and at least a 8800 GPU or better to run the new test viewer. The code is optimized for SSE3 and GPU compute capabilities for OpenCL/Cuda.
This version contains lots of bux fixes and the addition for more Project Snowstorm code. Support for the nVidia 450 chip was added.
This should be a fun viewer to use. More later. Later…
Updated: 8:00 PM
A new release of the Phoenix Viewer is out. This release fixes lots of problems. It takes some time for a new team to get things together and get organized. This release says much about the team coming together and stabilizing the viewer.
Jessica Lyon has published a blog article that contains the release notes and a new features list. See: Some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is a couple of team members are leaving. Seems there is a disagreement about how the team is to be run. That is not an ideal way to start off. But, this may just be a new team shaking out and people learning who they want to work beside. As time passes we’ll learn if this is just a startup issue or a more pathological issue.
In Esbee Linden’s Thursday meeting User Interface (UI) changes were being discussed. The item currently being worked on is detachable sidebar panels and how to open multiple copies of them. The latest Second_Life_2-1-2-209322_Development Viewer has a test version of the change.
Imagine being able to arrange the panels for building or scripting and save the panel layout. Or save several different layouts. The idea is that there could be a newbie setup, photographers, scripter’s, explorers, builders, and more. Some of these would be default layouts that come with the viewer. Users would be able to create their own.