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.
