Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
Update 4/24 – Emerald has made it on Linden Lab’s approved viewer list. See: Third-Party Viewer Directory
Yesterday Modular released an updated version of Emerald. This is the TPVP (Third Party Viewer Policy – SL’s TPV Policy) compliant viewer required to connect to Second Life after April 30, 2010.
I am the 23,275th person to download it. I’ll be trying it in a few minutes.
Today 4/20, the download is running very slowly. On my fast cable the 40mb is showing 20 minutes to download.
If you are following this blog you know KirstenLee is updating her viewer faster than I can keep up with. She has also written about what a hassle it is working with some of the new 2.0 viewer code. I have no doubt the Modular people working on Emerald have several challenges adapting all their features to the new 2.0 style viewer.
I’m not plugged into Modular’s developers’ channel so things seem pretty quite to me. I have great hopes for Modular’s next release of Emerald.
For those that want the new features of Second Life Viewer 2.0 without the drastic user interface changes, consider Kirsten’s viewer. Those making machinima certainly want to check out the version S20 build 15 and newer ones. The current build is 16. — As of 4/12 version S20 (17) –– As of April 15 version s20 (18) – As of April 24 version s20 (19) – As of April 26 version s20 (20)…
Kirsten is making changes faster than I can keep up. Work projects have me working more than playing just now. Kirsten’s viewer is progressing quickly.
Kirsten has made a new site. You can check it out here: http://www.kirstensviewer.com/ Update your bookmarks.
This morning Linden Lab released Viewer 2.0 and opened the new resident Help Island. New World Notes gives you a glimpse of the new user experience. We old residents can’t visit there. It is supposed to be better and should help retain more new users. We’ll see.
The new Second Life viewer is very much like the Beta 2.0 viewer. The Lindens say lots has been fixed and changed. Other than the side panel not messing up my HUD’s I didn’t see much in about 30 minutes of use.
In announcing the new Second Life 2.0 T. Linden tells us what Linden Lab has learned from their research and what they are focusing on. See: Unveiling An Improved New Resident Experience
KirstenLee has released another update on her S20 viewer now version (12). It has the new MOAP (Media On A Prim) feature. Her user interface makes more sense for existing residents. I still get those slow motion freezes where the Frames per Second (FPS) drop to 1 or 2 and ping goes to 50,000ms… If I get the region IP address I can ping it from out side the viwer and get a good ping, 80ms to 200ms. So, I doubt it is my connection. The previous version of Emerald and Snowglobe were doing the same thing.
She has fixed the chat and IM’s so they are more usable. In general it’s a nice viewer… and of course it does shadows.
New World Notes posted about this on a tip from Daniel Voyager. The chart is a Google Spreadsheet. If you are looking for a viewer with specific abilities, this chart is just what you need.
Update: 2014-06 – WebKit remains a problem. For the latest information scroll to the bottom of a WebKit article and look for the tag WebKit (or click this link). Click it to f ind the latest articles. You may need to use your browsers ‘Find-in-Page’ search (usually Ctrl-F) to find the pertinent part of the article. – Apple seems to have abandoned QTWebKit. In general the world is moving to Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) as a better HTML5 type replacement.
Update: 2011-08-25 – Be sure you read the comments. Additional recent fixes have been added by others.
Update: 2010-07-23 – The new SL 2.1 viewer is causing people problems. It is an old error coming up again. There are several threads popping up on the SL forums. See: (Second Life WebKit Fail / Error – Problem Again) – One new solution is from Jesica (see comments), which is to find slplugin in the SL install folder, right-click for properties, and set it to Win95 compatibility mode.
Update: 2010-06-17 – With the release of Emerald Viewer version 2165 several people are running into this or a similar issue again. Those not having a problem installed to a new directory/folder rather installing over the top of the previous install. Others have copied the WebKit files from Snowglobe to fix the problem. Others just added slplugin to there anti-virus/firewall white list. In my version 2100 MOAP (Media On A Prim) isn’t working otherwise the viewer is fine. More to follow once I upgrade my viewer, watch for a 2165 review update.
A new problem with the Second Life 2.0 Beta Viewer and viewers based on the new viewer software. People are getting a popup error when starting the viewers. Some think it is the firewall, doesn’t seem to be. Somethink it is the anti-virus software, doesn’t seem to be. But, I have yet to find a solution.
JIRA VWR-17087 – Plugin “media_plugin_webkit” has failed
JIRA VWR-17139 – Windows 7 With flash installed via mozilla auto discovery plugin fails to register in SL’s llMediaPlugin – Possible Solution for Windows 7 – The install of Adobe’s Flash 10 did not resolve the error for me.
Snowglobe users ran into this problem in October 2009… Its back…
The recent viewer update did not resolve the problem…
I added slplugin.exe to my Windows Firewall and told my anti-virus it is an exception. I checked my computer for older versions of slplugin.exe and replaced all the older versions with a copy of the latest. I rebooted the computer after the changes. After the restart the SL2.0 Beta viewer started without the error.
For now that appears to be the solution.