Most second life users have favourite viewers, and surprisingly these often don’t include the official Second Life Viewer which you can download from secondlife.com. Here are mine, listing the three I personally use,because I wanted to track down the URLs to find them in the future. One of them has recently had an update.
Second Life Viewer 1.23
Actually, unlike many other second life users, I prefer the official version of the viewer. For me, on my own laptop and computer graphics card, it’s the most stable.
I have problems however, especially lately, where the drawing and rezzing is taking absolutely ages if I go someplace new, and since the latest server release, I have problems with seeing facelight orbs or boxes floating around as grey boxes around both myself sometimes, and around other avatars.
The Second Life Viewer is downloaded when you install Second Life itself from the downloads page. http://secondlife.com/support/downloads.php
Updates to newer versions normally appear as a message on the front screen of the viewer as these are released. Click on the link to download and run the upgrade.
SnowGlobe 1.1.2
Snowglobe is the opensource partnership between Linden Labs and the open source community. When it first came out I was quite impressed, however encountered some problems with draw distance. I went to view a skybox hoverdeck system which required a 300+ draw distance and despite doing everything conceivable at the developer’s request, in Snowglobe, the sides of the landscaping never ever materialised. And as for multi-media, I was unaware it existed in the room.
SnowGlobe has just been updated. The latest release, 1.1.2 (2584) Aug 1 2009 has a number of bug fixes towards graphics. My older version had the download link for the latest version on the front screen, but it was not operational. You can pick up the latest version of Snowglobe from the Test Viewer page at SecondLife.com – http://secondlife.com/support/downloads.php
Kirsten’s Viewer
KirstenLee Cinquetti’s Second Life Viewer is my third viewer. I went searching for this when discovering my facelight boxes-around-the-body problems. The Kirsten viewers are well-known out there, for open source coding, and also known for their stability, and implementation of some of Second Life’s more advanced lighting systems before the official viewers ever did this. (Although the official viewers now do this, it is under the advanced menu, and therefore unsupported features).
Kirsten’s viewer, for me, is a huge bonus because of the Worn tab feature for your inventory. How many times do I need to see what I’m wearing, just to take them off?
Kirsten’s Viewer can be downloaded from several points. I know that when I went looking for them, it was a bit of a search across the internet before I came across her blog, and then the actual download site. So here are the links below.
- http://kirstenleecinquetti.blogspot.com/ – this is the blog, where there is a comments place, and chat room, and links to the downloads.
- http://armyof4.com/Kirstenlee/Public%20Viewers/ – this is the ftp site, and holds both the latest viewers and an archive of the previous versions. This is where you can actually download and install the Kirsten Viewer.
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/kirstensviewers/ – This is the sourceforge site, for developers. But it also includes screenshots of the viewers.
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