Many of us have learned we have fewer problems if we use separate caches for each viewer. Going into Preferences, Network tab, and changing the cache location is a basic post-install step. What many of us miss is the idea of having a separate cache for each alternate avatar. Plus there are other settings we may want to change from avatar to avatar. Those changes have been an annoying part of the pre and post login process for those of us that need to have separate settings for an AV. However, there is an easy way to create a settings file to remember those changes and create a desktop icon to start your viewer of choice using different settings for each avatar.
Viewers
General Viewer Information
Things Around Second Life and OSGrid
Both Second Life (SL) and OpenSim (OS) are advancing; changes, updates, events, people. Several are small things that I doubt deserve their own post but are worth noting. Also, I’m part of a Myst-Uru fan community. So, some things come from far outside the normal SL/OS circles.
Imprudence Viewer Bug (Beta 3)
Imprudence Viewer 1.3.0 Beta 3 has a serious bug. Appearently this is a difficult one to fix as it involves some Linden Lab problems. Whatever, there is a fix placed in Beta 4. Get your update now.
Problem: Warning: Serious bug in 1.3.0 beta 3 on Second Life
If you are using Beta 3, DO NOT rez inventory items while in build mode. Objects may have their permissions messed up. This is especially true for no copy items. It can render them useless.
Emerald Viewer & LSL Editor
For those of us that script in Second Life the LSL Editor is a time saver. The author of LSL Editor, Alphons van der Heijden, has donated the program to the public domain, it’s now open source. Reference: LSL Editor
LSL Editor allows one to work off-line and to debug scripts outside SL. This can be a huge time saver. Plus the editor has lots of handy features. The latest release is 2.40. It runs only on Windows machines.
Emerald Viewer Alpha Release
Today I see the Modular team has release an alpha version 1.3.2.1839 of the Emerald Viewer. It sounds like this release is both an advance and a step backwards.
In the advance part MOAP (Media on a Prim) and faster rez’ing have been added. I am one of those seeing slower rez’n with Emerald 1634. But, I like the features and build 1634 is more stable than Kirsten’s latest, so I use Emerald most of the time.
For use on OpenSim grids Emerald 1634 is giving me problems. I have to see if I can find out why it is not allowing me to log onto OSGrid. The error message is SL related…
On the regressive side… several Emerald features have not yet been ported over. I’ll report more on that once I get to use the viewer.
Of the hundreds of thousands that downloaded Emerald, only 40,000+ have downloaded the new 1634 TPVP compliant viewer. Obviously Linden Lab is not blocking earlier version viewers.
On another note, Hippo and Imprudence have released updates to comply with Linden’s Third Party Viewer Policy. In general, for now, that means the export features of the viewers have been crippled until they can be updated to comply with object permissions to restrict what one can export.
Update
Most of the features I use are in the Alpha viewer. It also seems to rez things much faster. I didn’t look hard but the MOAP didn’t work. Probably needs to be turned on somewhere… Help Chat is not working, yet. Menus remain pretty much as in 1634. The new 2.0 menu arrangements have not been adopted, which doesn’t mean they won’t be. I got 35 to 60 fps on my Dual Core 2 with an 8800 nVidia.
Imprudence Viewer Update
A new Imprudence viewer is out, version 1.2.2. The Imprudence blog in a post by Jacek Antonelli states the only real change is the removal of the ability to download textures from Second Life using export. It seems it does not matter whether you created the texture or not. However, this only affects you while connected to Second Life.
So, if you are only using the viewer on grids other than SL’s, you DO NOT NEED this download. Only if you use the Imprudence Viewer in SL will you want this download. They are looking to enable permissions compliant texture download in the future.