The Imprudence project has released version 1.2 of their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and after some months in beta (and a couple of false starts), the latest release version of this viewer is available.

There are some user-interface changes this time around, the ability to backup and restore your own intellectual property, an improved radar/minimap, improved third-party simulator support, RLVa support, optional vertical IM tabs, double-click go-to and teleports, more world map data and a host of other tweaks and features.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.2 viewer for Second Life

Imprudence 1.2 viewer for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:00:00 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.

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.

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.

"Zirn Left Unguarded, the Jenjik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerly Dead" -- Robert Sheckley

Trinity Coulter (formerly) the Second Life fifth anniversary (SL5/SL5A/SL5B, pick one) organizing committee's main organizer has left (or been kicked out of) her role, only a scant week or so after replacing SignpostMarv Martin in that capacity. Group logs indicate she was ejected from the group by Dusty Linden. Coulter said that 'it was determined' that it would be in the best interest of SL5 for Coulter to 'step aside', when asked.

According to SL5's Art director, Shosana Epsilon, Linden Lab's new position is a blanket ban where a child and an adult are pictured together in the same image, nor images of children near beds. So, no images of family outings, or implications that children sleep -- the image above would be right out, we presume, even though neither figure is a child avatar. Linden Lab staff previously stated that the Lab was afraid of legal restrictions that could partially or wholly shut down the Second Life service.

Continue reading SL's fifth anniversary epic [updated]

SL's fifth anniversary epic [updated] originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jacek Antonelli, whom you already likely know as the creator of the Blender BVH animation exporter for Second Life, has released an excellent tutorial on getting to grips with Blender and the exporter, so that you can get into this excellent free tool for creating animations.

Her tutorial is simple, straightforward, witty and well-illustrated. If you create Second Life animations, but don't use Blender -- or you want to get into creating animations for Linden Lab's virtual world, you owe it to yourself to take a look at this.

Jacek Antonelli's special blend originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 07 Jun 2008 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jacek Antonelli has released a new version of her Blender animation exporter that allows use of Blender's sophisticated (and free) animation suite to create animations for Second Life.

This release focuses primarily on the user-interface, improving the layout to make things a whole lot easier for those who are not already Jedi-masters of the Blender package; and a mighty good change it is, too, as you can see above.

Continue reading New release: Blender animation exporter

New release: Blender animation exporter originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

One of the more sophisticated animation tools out there is Blender, a cross-platform, free suite of 3D creation tools. Blender allows a lot of animation tricks that are normally only found in packages costing hundreds or thousands of dollars.

The eclectic, artistic, and highly-animated Jacek Antonelli has released a script, scene and animation skeleton that allows users to create and export high-quality animations from Blender into the BVH format used by Second Life.

Continue reading From Blender to BVH via Antonelli

From Blender to BVH via Antonelli originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Over the course of the weekend, two patches have appeared to allow the creation of megaprims in 1.19 series Second Life viewers (Able Whitman), and 1.20 series viewers (Jacek Antonelli). This all predicates on Linden Lab continuing support for the creation of megaprims.

Nicholaz Beresford apparently has been working on another edition of both his Bleeding Edge and Eye-Candy releases. As a part of the patch-set, an option to create megaprims has been included, as well as increased-height building. Bleeding Edge has reached revision W, while Eye-Candy is at revision F.

Continue reading Mad Patcher provides megaprims

Mad Patcher provides megaprims originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 12 May 2008 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

At one of Linden Lab's recent Second Life server updates, it appears that they have disabled (or expanded) the constraints on prim sizes. As a part of the Havok-4 project, there was considerable discussion about bringing large prims back into the picture again, so we think this is an intentional change, rather than an accidental one.

Whether or not Second Life users were supposed to find out about this or not at this stage, they certainly have. Simple packet-injection gimmicks have spawned whole new packages of the so-called megaprims in the last 36 hours, many of which are freely available. Indeed, we've been sent lots of them.

Continue reading Megaprims on the loose again

Megaprims on the loose again originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 10 May 2008 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Cinemassively: Rouge en Bulle originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In response to the security issue with the German language viewer, Linden Lab yanked both Second Life viewers today (although they didn't actually say why - Jacek Antonelli has her own take on how she feels the situation should have been handled).

Both Second Life viewers are now available for download and login again with fresh updates - updates you'd be well-advised to obtain, if you use the German language version.

Continue reading Windlight and release-candidate viewers updated and available

Windlight and release-candidate viewers updated and available originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 29 Dec 2007 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.