The Imprudence project has released version 1.3(beta 1) of their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and the only third-party viewer that we're certain complies with all of the source and asset licensing.

This edition merges all things Imprudence with the codebase for 1.23, providing one of the fastest and smoothest viewers currently available that we're aware of, along with the usual featureful experience.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.3.0(beta 1) released

Imprudence 1.3.0(beta 1) released originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Quite a delicious seasonal treat for those that use the third-party Second Life viewer from the Imprudence project, as they've got a test-build out today with all the usual goodness, but rebased against the 1.23 source tree.

What the heck does that even mean anyway? Well, it means that the Imprudence viewer now supports adult content ratings and restrictions, and is compatible with a larger variety of third-party features and extensions than previously.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.3 merge test build for Second Life

Imprudence 1.3 merge test build for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence project has released the next beta in this release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers (and just about the only one whose licensing status we've been able to verify with confidence).

The new beta has some changes to the pie menu (which often makes people just a little tense), updates Kitty Barnett's RLVa support, fixes 24 bugs including some search and appearance problems, two crashes and some assorted UI weirdness that crept into the last build.

The first round of Windows binaries in this beta release had a minor installation issue, but fresh installers were issued quickly and have sorted that out.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.2 beta2 viewer for Second Life

Imprudence 1.2 beta2 viewer for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence project has started a new release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and the new 1.2 beta contains a number of delicious treats.

The new beta features a grid manager, new minimap radar with some useful features, optional support for Restrained Life (using RLVa), a selection of Emerald viewer features, object backups (for your own creations only), and a heap more. Our personal favorite is the option to have a draw-distance slider on-screen, as it is perhaps our single most-commonly used UI feature.

Continue reading New: Imprudence 1.2 beta viewer for Second Life

New: Imprudence 1.2 beta viewer for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Snowglobe, Linden Lab's community-developed after-market Second Life viewer has hit another milestone with a 1.1 release.

This version mostly focuses on bug-fixes, but has a few additional enhancements. A nasty race condition in texture-fetching has (hopefully) been resolved, reducing viewer crash-rates, bump-mapping has been corrected, the minimap has gotten some tweaking and tuning, and more. Read on for the complete list.

Continue reading Snowglobe viewer 1.1 released for Second Life

Snowglobe viewer 1.1 released for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A while back, Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale announced a new Second Life viewer development project. That project ultimately grew along lines similar to that of third-party viewer project, Imprudence, breaking down many barriers to user contributions, and adopting a more agile methodology. After only a couple of release-candidates, the result is already available.

One of the biggest developments you might see in the Snowglobe viewer is that the map is now an order of magnitude faster to load, rather than taking several fractions of forever, as is traditional. This is the start of a new texture-transfer pipeline, which we can reasonably expect to become standard in future viewers, and to encompass more kinds of textures, however there's a new caching architecture which should benefit all textures.

Continue reading Linden Lab releases Snowglobe 1.0 for Second Life

Linden Lab releases Snowglobe 1.0 for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence project has reached the end of the second release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is now in official release. Imprudence is one of our favorite Second Life viewers.

Context (pie) menus have been reorganized again, there's improved support for sound and streaming media through gstreamer, some backported fixes from the official 1.22 viewer, and confirmation popups have been added for a number of operations. There's also a Mac version, which last year's 1.0 release lacked due to hardware and development constraints (though only for Intel-based Macs, unless there's significant demand for a universal binary.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.1.0 for Second Life

Imprudence 1.1.0 for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab founder and chairman, Philip Rosedale, yesterday announced changes to the open-source Second Life viewer program that would enable the fast-tracking of user-contributions to the code-base. The viewer source-code was originally released just a little over two years ago on 8 January 2007, and spurred an immediate surge of development, spurring developments of a variety of software including third-party server opensim.

The procedure for actually submitting patches to the codebase however was clunky, and some contributors abandoned their development efforts after contributed code (some which corrected egregious problems) was left to languish for many months without approval. The new scheme seems set to fast-track user-contributions and eliminate that particular problem.

Continue reading Linden Lab ramps up open source viewer program

Linden Lab ramps up open source viewer program originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence Project has a release new candidate viewer for Second Life available. Imprudence 1.1 RC2 (unlike Linden Lab, the Imprudence Project counts starting from one, not from zero) features a number of improvements and fixes over RC1.

This release candidate has a new storage allocator for Windows which improves frame-rates, reduces memory-usage and is all-around more efficient. Several crash-bugs have been fixed, and support has been improved for Linux systems that use the PulseAudio sound server. A few UI tweaks and inconveniences have also been tidied up. Unfortunately there is still no version for the Mac as the Imprudence Project is starving for a Mac developer to handle that side of the code. Full release notes are after the jump.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.1.0 RC2 available

Imprudence 1.1.0 RC2 available originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence Project has a release new candidate viewer for Second Life available. Imprudence 1.1 RC1 (unlike Linden Lab, the Imprudence Project counts starting from one, not from zero) features a number of substantial improvements over 1.0, including openAL and Gstreamer support for general sound, as well as audio and video streaming.

This release candidate also features updates to the user-interface, arithmetic expressions in the build floater's texture and object tabs, quick-filtering for the inventory and more. Unfortunately there is no version for the Mac as the Imprudence Project is starving for a Mac developer to handle that side of the code. Due to licensing issues, Imprudence cannot ship with voice components, but you can add them yourself very easily. Full release notes are after the jump.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.1.0 RC1 available

Imprudence 1.1.0 RC1 available originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence project has reached the end of the first release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is now in official release, and will soon show the first of their 1.1 series of viewers, sporting sound and more extensive modifications.

As is proper, there's very little difference between the release version and the release candidate. Pretty much just a couple fixes for memory leaks, and some minor tweaking. OpenJPEG 1.3 removes issues with transparent skirts.

Aside from the temporary lack of audio, this seems to be the smoothest and most reliable viewer presently available based from the 1.21 code-base.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.0 released for Second Life

Imprudence 1.0 released for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence project now has its second release candidate viewer for Second Life available. Building on the feedback from RC1, Jacek Antonelli, McCabe Maxsted and team have churned out a whole slew of bug-fixes for the already tasty RC1.

Crashes when clicking on some hyperlinks have been fixed (the problem was traced to the Linden build system pulling in the wrong library), the debug console window has been hidden away (as it should be), the search interface no longer clears results between invocations, a prospective fix for issues with palletized textures (which could be related to a lot of minor issues) and more. The transparent skirt issue will be fixed in the next (and likely final) release, but you can fix it yourself now with a fresh library. Full release notes after the jump.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.0.0 RC2 available

Imprudence 1.0.0 RC2 available originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 06 Dec 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.0.0 RC1 available

Imprudence 1.0.0 RC1 available originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 16 Nov 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Second Life user Jacek Antonelli has announced a new, user-interface oriented project called Imprudence as a major fork of the Second Life viewer. Citing difficulties and delays within Linden Lab's own development and quality assurance pathways, Antonelli and McCabe Maxsted have created the basis for a community effort to rework the viewer's user-interface.

'The Second Life Viewer suffers from a stifling atmosphere of non-change. This atmosphere emanates from Linden Lab, whose attitudes and policies discourage all but the smallest and most superficial improvements. This is the result of the nature of Linden Lab as a corporation,' they write, listing lack of resources, burdensome QA that punishes change, and a paying customer-base that actively resists alterations.

Antonelli and Maxsted believe that a community project can overcome all of these obstacles -- and that if users do not choose to attempt it, the status will continue to remain pretty much quo for the foreseeable future.

	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.

Continue reading Imprudence for Second Life

Imprudence for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.