The end of an era?

So what you are saying, Nic has wrote his own viewer and it solves various issues.. It didn't even occur to me that I could use SL without the products supplied to me by SL - LL.

I never experienced the teleport problems. I did have problems with the SL provided hair and just did away with it. I'm wearing a Santa Hat in SL but I'll soon have to replace it with something else. Maybe a John Deere baseball cap.
Awesome!!

... AND it fixes the inappropriately named "Communicate" window.

Restores the classic GUI in terms of the IM window that you can scale reasonably.

Technically speaking he just adds his own stuff to the official LL ones.

There are other ones out there as well btw. His seem to be the most widely used alternative viewers.

ya know, not that ya mention it
I have not had shoes or hair etc, up my butt in a few weeks now
(and yes I have been teleporting hehe)

and I only use SL viewers, no third party ones, do not want to hand out my password to other than SL. (yes paranoid)

using the Windlight viewer (Most recent) i had it last night =( but it fixed itself somehow after about 10 minutes of just standing there...

Let's just PRAY that LL doesn't hire him and completely water down his future contributions.

My hat is off to Nic, I have been using his viewer for months and I will never go back to an LL viewer unless forced to do so.

Hi everyone I am totally new and more than a little confused.

Here is what I did manage to sort from this thread.
Someone that is not Linden Labs has a way to access the SL world that fixes alot of the major bugs.

Three Qusetions
1. What is it?
2. Is this legal to use?
3. Where do I find it?

Thanks so much and my apologies for being clueless.

Hi Darien, I'm reposting this explanation.
Your answers:
1. See below.
2. Yes, absolutely.
3. http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/

Back in the day (like last month) it wasn't uncommon to teleport somewhere and find shoes, hair, jewelry, or other attachments randomly detached from their proper spots and somehow attached to the bum area (aka "stuffed up my ass." I haven't seen this in a LONG time, so maybe LL has fixed it to some extent.

There's a website called JIRA

https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa

Where SL residents help to compile bug reports, new proposals or suggestions, and the like. LL programmers sit down once a week (in meetings called "Triage" and look at these bugs/suggestions. One triage per section, i.e. they'll do a triage meeting solely on website issues. Anyone can participate in JIRA; just login with your SL avatar name and password.

LL released the Viewer (aka the Client) portion of Second Life to open source about six months ago. They are talking about releasing the Server portion to open source as well, but that's in the future. Any one can fix bugs or edit the Viewer, and submit new bug fixes to LL for inclusion in new official LL releases.

Nicholaz Beresford is a whiz-bang kick ass programmer who has gone a step further, and has released his own Viewer, with some totally separate bug fixes and some features from older versions of the Viewer that some people preferred. You can download his Viewer and use it just like you would the LL official release viewer.

The OP has said that Nicholaz is claiming to fix the attachments up the ass bug. We'll see. I personally continue to run the official LL release because I prefer the Communications window over Nicholaz's old individual windows for Friends, IM, etc.

That's the basic rundown of it.

Good questions, Darien. A lot of us tend to forget, not everybody has heard of Nic, the Mad Patcher, yet.

1. It's a patch for the standard SL viewer. You install the standard viewer, download the patch, and drop the unzipped files into you SL Program directory, per instructions provided on Nicholaz' website.

2. Yes, it's legal. LL made the viewer part of the software (the part that lives on your computer) open source. Anyone can download and modify the code.

3. You can find the latest Nicholaz viewer(s) at http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/

[EDIT. Aw, Oryx beat me to it. ]

Thanks so much to both of you that answered my questions.

Those nicely detailed explainations went a long way to demurkifying things for me.

Very interesting that Linden Labs has open sourced the viewer and is actually listening to residents to help fix things. That's a pretty fantastic thing when you think about it. Most online worlds (or at least those I have been in) resident involvement ends at the bug report and most bug reports go ignored. Kudos to Linden labs for that.

Even better are residents stepping up to the plate and making an interface that makes sense to them. BIG Kudos for that.

I do wonder about security risks and alternate viewers. Seems to me Linden Labs has opened a can of worms with that one. I suppose time will tell if long run hte benefits outweigh the disasters.

Well enough rambling from a long time online player that has just stumbled thier way into Second Life.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

Don't get too excited. We still rail at LL a lot for not listening to us.



You are right to worry. There's a version of the client out there that's popular with griefers, and another one that's designed to let the bot runners run an army of zombie avatars from a single computer to build up a location's traffic numbers.

How many clients do they make that handles SL?

Well don't forget that the server code isn't open source yet, and the servers still live at Linden Lab. All Inventory, Account Balances, etc live on the servers. The client (aka "Viewer" just interprets all the information coming from the server. Nothing important lives on the client. You can totally delete all of SL from your home machine, and still have your full account, inventory, etc available on either another client or after a re-install of SL on your machine.

I suppose there could be security risks with alternate viewers, but then that's why they're alternate viewers. LL does scrutinize and approve all patches and code submitted by open-source programmers, so that nothing scary gets installed into LL's official release.

The bottom *snicker* line is that now I have to return all those butt combs I got to hand out at xmas?

My collection's not complete, but I have the current release, the Nicholaz patch to the current release, the latest Release Candidate, and the Windlight First Look viewer.

Let me see...which way to crash shall I choose tonight? Hmmm....

I've actually recently experience a bug where the top half of my body bends 180 degrees and my head is in my ass literally.

I believe its server side since I haven't changed my client in a while and have only begun to experience this bug.

Still nice to see that a resident can do something LL can't.
(Well LL can't do much anways... )

That is this bug:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-248

In fairness, Nick also incorporates fixes from other developers in his viewers. It's not TOTALLY a solo operation.

LL did some work recently on the communicate window as well, have yet to try it out.