New Open Source Second Life Viewer With Invisible Avatars!

Nalates Urriah has an extensive review of the latest build of the Emerald Viewer from Skills Hak and team, who've been innovating new features to their open source version of the Second Life viewer, quite frankly faster and with more ferocity than the Lindens are with the official build, like they were making the punk rock of SL viewers. (Case in point: bosoms with physics.) Nalates reports the latest version comes with a chat text spell checker, an LSL script meter, and most punk of all, Stealth Appearance Mode. "This turns you skin, eyes, and clothes invisible. Your attachments how ever remain visible. Of course this is not intended for combat gamers but for those strange avatars that need to hide the regular avatar body." I can picture other, stranger ways that feature will be used, can't you?

Comments

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

This feature has been a bug in OpenSim virtual worlds for a while, I'm told.

I encountered it recently in Reaction Grid, when adjusting a hat I'd made while I was wearing it. Rather fun...I just need some dark glasses and I'll be Wells' Invisible Man.

[Kirstenlee]

Its a debug feature in SL, been exposed in graphics prefs of S18 & S19 for a while.Its actually quite handy to toggle on certain versions of the shadowdraft code, as it can force visibility of an avatar without doing a rebake which takes the composite textures and bakes causing you to go invisible on certain GPU's when running in shadows. VOAvatar code quite groovy but apart from faffing with texture baking , composite textures, etc etc for the purposes of testing no idea what other practical use it has.

[Doreen Garrigus]

It's for TINIES!! And dragons, and robots, and floating eyeball avs and...

I'm sure there will be an outcry and uproar from the usual suspects. Stay tuned.

[QueenKelle Kuu]

Um, this featureisn't new...I'm running an old version of emerald (months old) & it's been in there awhile. it's great to use to find attachments that disappear into your body when you attach them, or when taking photographs and you have embedded attachments like hair going into your shoulder that you want to fix in photoshop, etc

[Nexii Malthus]

Yes, that is nothing new. I think your a little behind the times, its been in 1.23 ever since it came out, under the debug setting "RenderAvatarInvisible".

It uses the new avatar baking system which allows alpha masking.

[Sidney Smalls]

I've had a device that's done this for years. Not sure if it's using the same principle or not.

[Tateru Nino]

The official viewer still does this by accident, if certain packets don't arrive.

[Caliburn Susanto]

There is nothing special about Emerald. It just gives up-front adjustment settings to users who can't/don't feel like discover(ing) them on their own. (yawn)