Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.