Looking forward to Second Life 2.0

Reader Comments (2)

While the 'official' viewer and Snowglobe, the experimental viewer, have been quite the alternate viewers have been exploding with new features and a fast series of updates.

KirstenLee's viewers, targeted at SL and Open Life, have been increasing frame rates and adding dynamic shadows. Hippo, Imprudence, Meerkat and others have been adding new features. Greenlife Emerald seems to have collected most features and added a number of its own.

Things like a better chat box and easy to use IRC, breast physics, client side animation overriders, avatar lists (radar), inventory features ... and much more are common in the alternate viewers.

For probably a quarter to a third of the SL population a user interface change is not all that exciting.

See: Greenlife Emerald Viewer Breasts Review - http://nalates.wordpress.com/

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You're using as an example of superiority the very things the third party viewers have failed at - doing anything new. They've brought bouncy boobs and even more cluttered interfaces, which benefit very few people at best, while allowing more content theft simply because anyone can now write a client that can connect to the grid, and that's what's being done with some of them. The tradeoff hasn't been worth it.

I was expecting people to come up with something new and useful in the UI, and show LL what should have been done.

As for the number of people that won't care about the UI, people will appreciate a UI that gets out of the way and stops being such a large part of using second life. Far from making SL more immersive and realistic, third party viewers have done nothing but bring the man behind the curtain even more to the forefront. The only thing they've done in terms of UI changes besides adding visual clutter is throw some ugly colors in the mix and call them skins. This is not progress.

They get a D- at best from me.

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