The Imprudence project now has its first release candidate viewer for Second Life available, and far sooner than we expected. It's impressive work for a first release candidate as well. We've not had such a fast and smooth viewer experience since Nicholaz "The Mad Patcher" Beresford's series of Second Life viewers. Indeed, many of Beresford's patches are also a part of the Imprudence project.
Imprudence necessarily replaces proprietary fonts with Liberation Sans and Bitstream Vera Mono, which look a little peculiar the first couple of times out, but score high on improved readability. There's no audio either, yet, as the proprietary FMOD audio system has yet to be replaced with OpenAL, but that is coming soon, we understand. As for the change from Kakadu/KDU to OpenJPEG -- this is supposed to be fractionally slower, but honestly, the whole experience was so smooth we never noticed.
There are a few known issues with this release, particularly with Windows, and you should check those out so you know what you're getting into. Overall, despite some problems, this is an excellent viewer. Especially so for a first release candidate. Once those few issues are addressed, this could easily be considered a cut above the official viewer from Linden Lab, and then some.
Changes
This version of Imprudence includes the following changes (as compared to Second Life viewer 1.21.6):
- Building: You can now "Slice" (aka. Dimple / Profile Cut) the Box, Cylinder, and Prism prim types directly, without needing to switch to Sphere and back. (VWR-7827; thanks McCabe Maxsted!)
- Stability: Several patches by Nicholaz Beresford to fix memory leaks and improve stability. (VWR-2003, VWR-2683, VWR-2685, VWR-3877, and VWR-3878; thanks Nicholaz!)
- Misc.: The "Advanced" menu is now written in XUI, so you can edit shortcuts in that menu by editing the XML file, instead of needing to recompile the viewer from source. (Note: The file to edit is
skins/default/xui/en-us/menu_viewer.xml) (VWR-2896; thanks Jacek Antonelli!) - Social: Added "Invite..." button to the Groups section of the Communicate panel, to make it easier to invite people to the selected group. (VWR-8024; thanks McCabe Maxsted!)
- Building: Up and down arrows change Path Cut / Profile Cut by increments of 0.025 instead of 0.05, to make it easier to path-cut boxes in half, etc. (VWR-7877; thanks McCabe Maxsted!)
- Misc. UI: Added "Return Object" to the Tools menu, to make it easier to return objects that are hard to right-click on. (VWR-1363; thanks McCabe Maxsted!)
- Social: Added "Offer Teleport" button to the IM window. (VWR-2072; thanks Paul Churchill!)
- Building: Added "Tools > Set permissions on selected task inventory" menu item, to set perms on multiple in-world objects and/or their contents. This will have a nicer UI later. (VWR-5082; thanks Michelle2 Zenovka!)
- Misc. UI: Several usability and UI layout improvements to the land tools floater. (VWR-8430; thanks Aimee Trescothick!)
- Misc. UI: Added "Flycam" button that appears when you are in flycam mode (using a joystick or SpaceNavigator); click it to cancel flycam mode. (VWR-8341; thanks Aimee Trescothick!)
- Building: Rephrased "Select Texture" to the more accurate and descriptive phrase "Select Faces to Texture". (Inspired by VWR-5962; thanks McCabe Maxsted and Jacek Antonelli!)
- Building: Increased maximum settable transparency from 90% to 100% in the Textures tab. (Thanks Jacek Antonelli!)
- Social: "Offer Teleport" buttons throughough the UI are now always clickable, even for avatars who are not on your friends list or who appear offline. (Thanks Jacek Antonelli!)
- Misc.: Changed the application name, logo, login page, etc. to Imprudence.
- Misc.: Imprudence has its own version numbers, starting at 1.0.0. Use "Help > About Imprudence" to check the SL source version it's based on.
- Misc.: Disabled FMOD, KDU, and Vivox (SLVoice) proprietary software.
- Misc.: Changed fonts to Liberation Sans and Bitstream Vera Mono.
Known Issues
- Windows: At the end of the installer, if you leave the "Launch Imprudence Viewer" checkbox enabled and press "Finish", you will receive an error message and it will not automatically start the viewer. But this does not harm anything, and starting the viewer yourself (e.g. from the desktop shortcut) should work fine.
- Windows: When the viewer is started, a text console window will appear displaying debug information, and then be covered by the main viewer window. This will be disabled in future releases. You can disable it manually by opening "Advanced > Debug Settings" and changing "ShowConsoleWindow" to false, then restarting the viewer.
- Windows: The viewer may crash when clicking links in embedded web pages, including certain sections of the Search window and the "Web" section of avatar profiles. We hope to fix this in the future. To work around it for now, just avoid clicking on links in embedded web pages in the viewer.
- Mac: The viewer may be (very) slow to start the first time. (We suspect it may be clearing the cache, but that's just a guess.) If the viewer does not start after a long time, you may need to Force Quit it and/or restart your computer. It should start normally every time after that.
As always, you should consider the risks before installing third party binaries on your system. This is a release candidate, so project members are looking for feedback on any additional issues that may crop up.
Imprudence viewer 1.0.0(RC1) is available for Linux (33MB), Windows (20MB) and Mac (66MB universal binary), or go to the project's download page where you can also get the source code.
 |
Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop. |
