Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
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.
LSL is the Linden Scripting Language. This is the scripting language used to program everything in Second Life. Advanced programmers are used to having libraries of code that can be used in several programs. No provision is made in Linden viewers to provide this feature. Emerald had a Preprocessor that provided programmers the feature. Phoenix … Read more
Update: This article constantly pulls lots of people. I’m not sure why. In February of 2011 the Ascent Viewer’s development was discontinued. I wrote 2 articles about the Ascent Viewer; this review (Sept 11, 2009) and the one about its being discontinued (linked in this paragraph).
The Singularity Viewer is the descendant of the Ascent Viewer. Or in more geeky terms, Singularity is a branch of the Ascent Viewer code. — End update.
Finding a new viewer has become the new quest for many Second Life residents. In general most have made the safe and simple choice and are using the Imprudence Viewer. A number of residents have abandoned Third Party Viewers (TPV). They have started to use the official SL viewers either SLV1 (Second Life Viewer version 1) or SLV2. A few of us are using Second Life Development Viewers (SLDV), which come out daily as part of the Snowstorm team’s work. Others are exploring and testing other viewers. This is about the Ascent Viewer for those exploring TPV’s.