Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
KirstenLee has a new release of her viewer out. The big change is the addition of more SLV2 code visible in the form of Display Names. Other SLV2 bits have been added but KirstenLee was not specific beyond saying she added the viewer ID code.
I won’t get to use this version until later today.
Lots of the work being done by the Snowstorm team is boring, sorry guys. But, it is necessary and it is moving the viewer forward and laying foundations. JIRA and Backlog issues are being resolved. Ideas from various people are being incorporated. Some of the things I think are noteworthy follow;
Plugins and client side scripting are items being dusted off. They were considered earlier in the year and ran into obstacles, which moved them to shelf. The change in development process and the more modular nature of Snowstorm appear to be bringing new life to the features.
The Lindens have posted on the SL blogrum that the Emerald Viewer will be blocked Wednesday 9/8. See their post here: Emerald Viewer to be Blocked From Second Life
Most importantly it appears the Lab may close the accounts of those that attempt to circumvent the block.
Please be aware that attempting to circumvent our blocking to access Second Life with a banned Viewer is a violation of the Policy on Third-Party Viewers and may result in the loss of one’s account.
Today Jessica Lyon announced the Phoenix viewer is now on the Third Party Viewer (TPV) List. Congratulations!
See: Second Life Viewers and the Third-Party Viewer Directory and Phoenix is on the TPVD by Jessica.
I see that two other viewers are on the list since I last looked. One is Ascent. The other is Emergence.
All of these viewers are based on Snowglobe 1.4 and 1.5 code for now.
The newest release is: Imprudence Experimental Release: 2010.09.04
The Imprudence team is changing the name of their Weekly Release to Experimental Release. They feel the term “Weekly Release” has some people thinking the Weekly is a required download and install, which it is not. The hope is this change will make it easy for new Imprudence Viewer users to tell the latest Stable Release from the Experimental Release. I have both but I actually use the Experimental most of time.
This release has several new features. See: Imprudence Experimental Release: 2010.09.04 Viewer
Voice chat using Vivox is now part of the install. That makes voice chat on SL much easier.
Updated 2010-09-04
I think many of us were expecting something like this. Jessica Lyon is heading up a team to build a TPV (Third Party Viewer). The name… Phoenix Viewer… ok… it is not that novel but it certainly is appropriate. See the announcement here: From the ashes….
The new team currently consists of; Dakun Flux, Dimentox Travanti, Jessica Lyon, Kitty Barnett, LordGregGreg Back, Techwolf Lupindo, Tonya Souther, Vortex Saito, Wickman Gibbs. We are told more are to come.
They have a web site up, incomplete… very incomplete. One can get a copy of the Phoenix Viewer (1.5.0.1) there now. I downloaded my copy. This viewer is based on the Emerald Viewer code and that on Snowgobe 1.5. Their plan is to move quickly to the Snowstorm code base, which is the SLV2 code base and the future of SL viewers. We may yet get a good interface for SLV2 improvements.