required download??

I'd like to echo Winter's sentiments: it is a VERY good idea to use the patched viewer... upgrade! While there's a low chance you'll ever get a computer virus or malware on any given day, how many people here have gotten one at some point? Even though there is a low probability of this happening, it is happening occasionally; why risk it? The consequences to this exploit are the worst I've seen in an exploit that can be actively demonstrated.

Regards,

-Flip

See, the issue is, there are a lot of us who *can't* actually use the upgrade, even if we wanted to. My middle-of-the-road system starts to heat up after 10 or 15 minutes with 1.20 and I'm NOT going to melt my computer because LL can't be bothered to patch a non-WL viewer.

You know, I swear I read a comment from Prospero or someone claiming that they would be supporting 1.19.0.5 'indefinitely'...what happened to that? I really don't think it should be up to 3rd parties like Nicholaz, Boy, Henry, etc, to ensure that LL keeps their lower end customer base.

I hate you....

ok.. not really

if its an overheating problem, maybe get a couple of case fans installed? they run about $5-10 each and if your not comforable putting them in yourself most computer shops will install them for free.

Use the custom settings instead of just the slider. You can turn down features you don't want or need. Like the draw distance, which I think the sliders set way too high.

Windlight is the atmospheric shaders. Turn them off, and you're non-Windlight again.

Even turned down all the way, a Windlight Viewr just doesn't work well enough to be usable on my machine at least. It's is slower, and understandably the sky and water become awful, much worse than the non WL sky and water. I spent a whole day fiddling with it. I simply can't use Windlight on this computer.

Some of the older Mac users are really screwed by this. The older viewer was the only one that worked on Mac OS 10.3.9 and earlier, so there's some people howling that now they have to get an OS upgrade to stay in SL...

I'm all for making SL secure, so if this exploit does exist, by allmeans it needs to be fixed.

*The conspiracist in me wonders if this is also a great excuse to get all the holdouts who don't use Official Viewers to be pragmatic and conform, part of M and M's plan to make SL more "Relevant".

/me gives Brenda a tin hat.

I have. Doesn't matter.


No, you're left with the options of being glowing orange, having ugly blotchy shadows all over your av, or walking around in the dark. The default lighting is atrocious in terms of avatar appearance and Advanced Sky in the Environmental Editor doesn't become available unless I set my overall graphics level to High...my 'recommended' setting is Mid. So, I set it to High, click the Custom box, and slide all of the sliders except sky and avatar back to the left into the Low to Mid range. My draw distance is at 96-128m, particles at 2048.

10-15 minutes later, my computer starts to overheat.

I'd give it a try, with the following advice; I used to have overheating problems with my laptops. There's a command line option you can give to stop this from happening, called cooperative. After each frame is rendered, the client will yield, thus preventing overheating. Read more on "-cooperative" here; you can try different values, perhaps start with 100 milliseconds. This will slow down your frame rate, but also the resources SL is requiring. It worked for me; more information here:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Client_parameters

In addition, tweaking windlight settings as mentioned above is a good idea. Turning off "classic clouds" will also give you a much better framerate, allowing you to yield more if necessary: World -> Environment Settings -> Environment Editor -> Advanced Sky -> Clouds -> Uncheck "Draw Classic Clouds" -> Save.

I hope this helps!

Regards,

-Flip

I guess they get to join those who can't use Windows 95 & 98 anymore, nothing lasts forever in the computer world. Some of them may even upgrade their machines and find out what they are missing.
There may even be a few that make money from SL that may see why their sales drop if they can't use a current machine to compare the quality of their product against others creations. And people who have made money from SL have no real excuse for not investing some of that into updating their equipment.

Ann, I've installed the Non Windlight Cool Viewer, it's 19.0.5 based, and in the little while I was online it seems to be about as stable and quick as the BEw is. Intrface wise it is the same s well. You might want to try it.

Hmmm, must be nice to have enough disposable income that 'upgrade' becomes a simple solution.

At least some of those people making money from SL actually need those funds to live on...they don't have a lot of extra to be throwing into a new system. And, hey, what about the SL consumers who can't afford an upgrade right now? If they can't play, they can't pass funds to the content creators; enough of that and the content creators can't afford to work in SL anymore, let alone upgrade their systems, and the economy takes a nosedive. Awesome.

Which is the main reason I upgraded my own Mac last December. I could see the writing on the wall pretty clearly back then, that my existing Mac wasn't going to be able to run SL in the near future. Ten months later, that day is here, and if I hadn't upgraded, I would have been toast by now.

Thanks, but did I mention that I'm not techie? The clouds I can probably handle, but I'm not sure about the rest...


kk, I'll look at it when I get home...I didn't think LL had released the code for the new security update yet though?

I've never made money from SL. My computer heats up to the point where my fingers start to burn. Of course I try to turn it off before it gets there, but that occurs after about 5 minutes in SL. A fan keeps that from happening, but the fan, while still functional, is not an option now for health reasons (odd, I know).

Guess I'm left out in the cold then. Don't have the money to upgrade. Have the money to do what I'm doing now, but not to upgrade.

Funny, really, SL is forcing me to start watching television again. Hadn't in about a year, regularly I mean.

Oh, and I rather dislike WoW.

Is there anyone out there doing non-windlight viewers for MACs?

No Kool Aid for you.

The current version has at least the update posted last week, and will be fully updated a soon as possible I believe. I'm just keeping the media streams off, which I never use anyway. So far, it' looks pretty good.

But I'm with you on the tech stuff. I don't want to spend time fiddling and tweaking just to use SL. I want to turn it on and play.

Well I have disposable income because I worked hard in my trade when I was young, and skipped a lot of other luxuries too, and having no kids, no car loan, no credit cards,, and a reasonable paying job gets me by ok, but I'm not rolling in money by any means.
I took me 10 weeks buying my next PC part by part. I picked up the CPU and Vista64 for it today and have to finish assembling it this week so I can give it a go on the weekend. My current PC still handles SL ok, but nowhere near as well as it did 2 years ago when it was 12 months old, it's also showing it's age trying to run newer games and upgrades to CoH and other online games.
I suspect a lot of people who can't afford to upgrade their computers probably aren' putting money into SL anyway, people who have disposable income are probably the main contributors cashing in to the money pot. I guess it's a case of everything has to be reduntant someday, there are still good 3rd party viewers like Nikolaz etc, but will they still be providing the same viewer to use when the avatar mesh grets upgraded or the next things like sculpties or flexy is introduced. Should we still be devoting Lindens resources to keep support for people with systems that couldn't handle Sculpties and Flexy prims too?
The writing has been on the wall since 1.19 and earlier really that machines that struggled and overheat running 1.19 without Windlight weren't going to keep being adequate for another 3 years.

I have disposable income, but I have a whole list of things I can spend it on rather than replacing a perfectly good computer that serves my needs quite well otherwise. For me it's just a case of I'm not going to do it just to play a game.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of hardware are people having trouble with the Windlight viewers using? Are they all laptops?

QFT

I did upgrade mine nearly a year ago but only because my RL requirements demanded it. For just SL I would have lived with what I had or just found something different to do with my "free" time.

No. I have a Del Dimension 8400 desktop. It has 2.5 Gigs of Ram, a P4 3.0, and a Radeon X300 video card. That is where my problem is. WL gives the video card fits.