Second Life 1.19.0 Viewer new regular viewer 2-28-08

Yes, all of that, as well as huge improvements in the memory leaks most LL standard viewers seem to have.

I can give you a crisp, clean reason why *I* prefer homebrews over the LL client.. and yes, it's the communicate window.

I run a business in Second life. I'm not just here for chatting and hanging out, but I'm here to try and make my rent each month. Put food on the table, etc. That said, my business lives and dies on "Customer Service". as frustrating as it may be to handhold new users through using my products, the fact of the matter is that I only succeed if they tell their friends. THAT means hearing when they have a problem, and being able to respond in a timely fashion.

I'm also a builder. I'm not in SL to roleplay. Texting is only PART of my Second life. Mush of my inworld life is about inspecting texture alignment, finetuning prim positions, sculpting, and generally "making stuff" as such, I actually really need to USE the visible area of my screen. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not trying to build something. I know that my housemate spends most of her SL time in a single room, changing clothes and chatting in IMs.

This is what my screen looks like right now


That's SL on the left monitor.

I run 2 monitors at 1280x960. That's pretty generous really. I'm an old school graphic designer, and I like 72dpi. I know that really my window interface is closer to 96dpi.. but I like to be able to see pixels. it's important in photoshop, it's important to what I do, and it's important if I want to be able to read.

As you can see on the image above, the Inventory and build windows flank my view. The "Chat" window lives in the bottom left (filled with the unending march of friends logging on and off). The minimap that keeps me aware if people are in my store, lives in the top right. And the IM window takes up the remaining space along the top of the screen. There's room for about 8 IM tabs. On the average day, I will have about 6-12 such tabs open at any given time.. conversations I've left open, group Ims that have opened themselves, offlines I haven't QUITE gotten around to replying to, whathaveyou. I try to keep it to less than a screen-width, so I can be aware when a customer has Imed me.

I keep the IM window at about 6-7 lines long. many times I narrow it down to 5 lines. And as you may have guessed, I don't use voice.

Put simply, the same number of tabs wide, using the "official" interface, would eat roughly HALF my available screen space. Being forced to "click the arrows" doesn't solve my need to see the IMs when they come in. JUST like the crippling of the IM tab flashing.. these elements are CRUCIAL to getting BUSINESS done in SL.

I don't need voice. I don't like voice, I don't listen to it, and I don't have a microphone. Voice is disabled in my shop precisely because I can't support customers via voice. I didn't ask for this "feature" and I don't want it taking over my ability to do business.

Give me the ability to pull all those floaters onto the second monitor.. and I'll let you do anything you like with the sizes of them.

That's awesome Winter--we are all jealous, seriously. But I don't think, with a duel monitor setup, that the standard communication window would be a problem at all. You've got about 100 percent more real estate than most of us...

I'm confused. I can't remember which version I was running yesterday of the client but I met the red bordered box at login saying mandatory upgrade. I accepted it. I thought it said 1.19 something. I downloaded and ran the install. I didn't pay much attention to changes or numbers. It ran ok .. fine by me. Now I go to login, red bordered box telling me mandatory upgrade needed to 1.19.0.4. I check yesterday's download ... 1.18.5.(3)?!?!?

I don't think it's mandatory--I haven't had to download any of the recent viewers...I still log in with the older one.

and that 100% is USELESS for SL. it's great in terms of mutiltasking, staying up to date on emails, watching a movie, etc.. but in terms of SL, I'm all cramped down in that small "middle" part of the screen.

To me, sacrificing even 64px more of real-estate on that screen,... is unreasonable.

Well, I dunno what happened yesterday. Downloaded 1.19.0 now and installed to different drive. Works ok, turned voice off and made a mental note to upgrade Quicktime .. oneday

Oh, and -multiple works still .. for the parrr-tayy!!!

You're right Michael, wasn't compulsory but the red box does say the current version won't work. I'll go back to 1.18.5 to get the exact wording.

Update: Ha! they changed it within minutes! Now a yellow border and saying it's our choice!! LOL

Oh, and now running 1.18.5.(3) .... *AND* 1.19.0.4 together.

1. You can still get to preferences from the login screen. It's under the top Edit menu, which is the normal place to find Preferences in any Windows program.

2. You can disable Voice if you want. But a lot of newbies ask me "how do I enable voice", or "what is that white dot over your head"? I think having it on by default is good. Your mic is off, and you don't need to use voice. But it IS useful to be able to hear those who ARE using it.

It's not significantly better, IMO. LL has added a lot of nice features and usability in the 1.19 release. I think it surpasses Nicholaz' patches. Now, if he'd get busy and develop a patch version for THIS release, he'd jump back ahead in no time...

I don't hate it. I've been using the 1.19 RC viewers from the start. Well, except for 1.19.0RC, that one was crashy and generally unusable for me. But since 1.19.0.1RC I have used them. As I understand it, the new 'live' viewer is identical to 1.19.0.4RC which I'm still using.

I've grown accustomed to the recent change they made to the communicate window 'friends' panel (although I still dislike the communicate window itself -- I want Groups and IMs separate like they were once upon a time.) I dislike having the 'say' and 'shout' buttons merged into that silly dropdown - it makes it more difficult to 'shout' without giving us back anything in return. They should have added 'whisper' to the dropdown and that would have made it at least an even trade.

Other than that, I can't honestly remember what else changed - It's been too long since I started using the 1.19 series.

I will heartilly echo Winter's desire for more usable screen space. I too run dual-monitors (seriously once you've tried it you can't go back!) and it would be heaven to move all the stupid panels and floaters and stuff onto the second monitor. Sadly, I understand this is nigh impossible due to the way SL is engineered.

-Atashi

OR, alternately, LL could quit playing 'net nanny' and let US choose to run previous versions if we deem the need for an earlier version outweighs the risk of the security hole. The hole ONLY affects the local PC, not SL servers, so there was no real reason (other than 'we know what is best for you and your computer!') on the part of LL to require updates.

Too bad there is no QT alternative, or better yet, support for WMP. QT sucks, ended up having to uninstall it last night...newest version on vista hijacks .png playback and you CANNOT make it not do it, there were loads of complaints on the QT forum at apple. So, with it installed you cannot right-click save a PNG without buying QT Pro or uninstalling it so it releases the .png back to the system.

Thanks! Does it work without having to jack with the source code to fool LL's retarded version check?

He does that himself in the regular viewer, I think you have to do it in the Windlight version yourself.

I know. (See my post above.) Is there a NEED to go through multiple steps though? The button didn't hurt anyone. I don't get why they did away with it...



See, I won't hear them anyway because a lot of the time I run SL without sounds. I found that having sound off greatly reduces lag for me, so I only turn it on maybe ten percent of my online time.

And of course I will disable it. I am just disgruntled that a thing I and a whole bunch of other users refuse to use is forced upon me nonetheless, however brief.

For the friends list stuff, where some or all of your list is (waiting) or has been eaten by hippos, this happens to me maybe 1 out of every 7-8 logins.

I've never seen if fix itself - it says it's waiting (or hippoed) but you can leave yourself logged in forever and it won't change. (edit: and no, I haven't tried leaving myself logged in forever.. I've waited over an hour though, and moved around the grid to see if it fixed itself)

A relog has always fixed the problem for me, no cache clear needed.



I missed it too but it's really just gone from one mouse click to two mouse clicks.. Once I found it was still there in the edit menu, I was far less annoyed. I guess I don't use it very often.


/me too.

I received the notice yesterday that in order to connect to SL, I had to download the new version..........eventually it may be your turn!

So far I like it!

Seems a few memory leaks were plugged. Though the memory leak with enabling voice I have not tested to see if thats fixed yet.

A few changes I will have to get used to but no game breakers for me. Everything thus far seems to work as advertised.

It also seems as if they tweaked the network code. As while lag will almost be a issue from time to time, it seems as a whole a bit smoother on this level. But more use will see if that was a fluke last night or not.

Bottom line fairly pleased.

Can't really blame them (Speaking as a IT man not end user). How long do you expect them to support a almost 9 yr old OS? With that logic why not support win9x too as the last ver of that was released about that same time.There no reason win32/64 users shouldnt be on XP at this point.

Sadly thats price the you pay for not moving forward with technology, you in the end, get left behind.

Has anyone else noted we're now onto 1.19.0.5?!?!?!??!

Thats certainly not a fact. My friends list loaded fine. I'd suggest you fully uninstall it, reboot, clear out your profile temp folder then reinstall it fresh and see what happens.

You can still access the preferences button before you login, use the top pull down menu. They simply removed the button as it was redundant since you can still access it via the menu.

Unfortunately, yes. *drums fingers* I will never finish sorting my inventory, let alone get the duplicates out.

I had to download it as well last night, but the issue you are having with the friends list happened on the old version just as much as the new version. So I don't think it's a glitch in version, just probably in SL to begin with. You can log out and back in, that sometimes cures the problem, not always...but sometimes.