Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Official Viewer Update

Second Life 3.2.5 (247236) is here! As usual, I had to uninstall the old viewer before installing the update. For some reason, incremental updating stopped with the Official Viewer some time ago, but I can live with that. That also means any Windilight settings I add go away, but I've become adept at copy/pasting them after any install.

Normally I don't comment on updates or new releases, but this iteration has some changes worth noting (read the full list here):

  • The Recent Speakers list now pauses when the mouse hovers over it. This makes life easier when trying to adjust Voice chat volume for individuals or for grabbing profiles.
  • All UI floaters are now available via menus. This also means that items buried in sub-menus are also faster to access, such as Region controls, which are now two clicks, not four.
  • For some reason, "Edit Terrain" has been removed from the Options tab in About Land. As a land owner, I rather liked that feature. I was able to quickly set the land so non-group members could help with the terrain. No, I didn't do that frequently, but often enough that it was handy.
  • The "Move" toolbar button has been renamed "Walk/Run/Fly" which should make life easier for noobs. That's just one of several name tweaks you'll notice though out the UI.
  • Emoting in Main Chat now longer shows names twice.
  • "Ocean" water elevation now matches the elevation of region water, so when you visit places with"sea levels" higher or lower  than the standard 20 meters, the
  • horizon is continuous. You can see this at JDC Dive Charters (SLurl), where the sea level is 51 meters.
  • Moving the Main Chat entry bar to the bottom left, where it traditionally can be found, no longer covers the chat read out. With v3.0 the proliferation of window panes like we had in the v1.x viewers this concession to simplicity is welcome.
Since I can't seem to write a blog post without a picture and I didn't feel like making one specific to any of these points, here's a gratuitous shot of the Mouse Club, one of the many "rezzer" clubs that the Lesbos Event staff can call up depending on the event theme.

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