Many Second Life users are looking for an alternate third party viewer in the wake of the Emerald implosion, and a lot of them have turned their interest to Imprudence, a TPV with a stellar reputation and little Emerald-esque drama surrounding it. Nalates Urriah has a good write-up of Imprudence's features, which even include similar physics-enabled décolletage that helped make Emerald so popular. Full disclosure: As a Hawaiian, I have a bias for Imprudence, since its logo is the "shaka" hand sign beloved by Hawaii locals, surfers, and President Obama. (Maybe the Imprudence team can work him into the logo?)
Post a comment
Your Information
(Name is required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)
The Cool VL Viewer (http://sldev.free.fr/) is also fully TPV-compliant (even if not listed in LL's TPV directory for privacy protection reasons. Being listed is *not* a requirement anyway).
It also offers some unique features, such as inventory links support, and exists in three flavours (v1.23.5, v1.25 based on SNoglobe v1.5, and v1.19.2 for old computers).
Posted by: Henri Beauchamp | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 01:02 PM
Ooooh, I must check this out.
Also, best avatar name EVER. :D
Posted by: Marx Dudek | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 01:36 PM
Way to pimp a viewer and not take a single moment to try it out yourself. Imprudence is, quite simply, the slowest SL client I have managed to find to date. Even LL SL2 out performs it by a decent factor.
Posted by: Trinity Dejavu | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 01:47 PM
@Trinity
I've been using Imprudence since the Emerald mess started and it has been quite speedy for me.
Good to see Imprudence getting some spotlight! :)
Posted by: SoyaKnow | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 02:00 PM
Trinity, Imprudence is by default using the OpenJPEG library which is known for having performance and stability issues. One way to solve that is to use Linden Lab's LLKDU binary instead. Please check the following tinypaste to see how to do that, since it's a non-redistributable component. This should make it perform much better.
http://tinypaste.com/0ec988
Posted by: CodeBastard Redgrave | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 02:02 PM
Imprudence is plenty fast. I've been using it for months.
Posted by: bodzette Coignet | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 02:02 PM
Trinity: Every system handles every viewer differently. For me Imprudence has been the fastest ever while Emerald was the slowest ever. For others that may differ. It really depends from System to System, not only the Operating System but also the Hardware components.
Posted by: Chandni Khondji | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 02:10 PM
Imprudence, I've long said, is faster for me that Emerald, though not as fast as the Official viewer or Kirstens viewer. I use it mostly for photography, but it also has the best Mini Map of *any* viewer.
Thanks for the tip, Codie!
/me runs to tweak her iMac ...
Posted by: Uccello | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 02:45 PM
@ Hamlet: Maui no ka oi - no exceptions!
Funny, I bailed on Emerald some time ago and wrote this up three weeks before the "implosion". For me it was all about performance and Emerald just always felt rather "bloated" to me. Don;t get me wrong: I agree Emerald *is* a good viewer. However: most popular does not equal "best". And of course everyone's experience will be different based on a myriad of variables.
http://ariblackthorne.com/2010/06/sorry-folks-but-emerald-viewer-meh.html
Posted by: Ari Blackthorne | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 02:56 PM
*Kailua* no ka oi, bruddah! But yeah, Maui's up there too. :)
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 03:02 PM
Prudence indeed would dictate... OK, sorry, I couldn't resist.
Seriously: I love Kirsten's SL client for the graphics, but lately it's been behaving horribly for me, grinding to a crawl after not very long and chewing up huge amounts of RAM. I tried Imprudence (which has a 64-bit version--eh, eh, nudge, nudge, other SL client makers!!!), and it was far faster and less RAM-hungry, at the expense of that srizonified bug that makes alpha textures pop in and out of view if you have shadows enabled.
Posted by: Melissa Yeuxdoux | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 03:48 PM
@Trinity
I use Imprudence with graphic settings set to ultra and shadows enabled and I get between 15 and 25 fps. It works well for me.
Posted by: Indigo Mertel | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 05:23 PM
I loved Emerald. period. stop.
But I'm convinced that the people that ran that viewer have some serious ethical issues.
(and we all are aware of those so I'll not ponticate.
Emerald seemed faster (for me) but Imprudence loads textures extremely fast (for me).
I have read about moving the LLKDU binary from, in my case, 1.23.5...and got some technical "how to" from my friend Lalo T.
I'm not sure how Lalo came about the info... but it's the same info supplied above by CodeBastard Redgrave. Many thanks to her.
http://tinypaste.com/0ec988
I'm looking forward to adding that file as soon as the latest Imprudence viewer is out.
That is supposed to fix my only complaint with Imprudence...random crashes.
Posted by: brinda allen | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 06:25 PM
Thanks for the link Hamlet. But, décolletage? lol
The boobies bounce...
As to speed... I sometimes see 100FPS w/Imprudence. The Imprudence viewer is optimized for SSE2. This means if you don't have a CPU that supports it, you will have problems. Core2 CPU's and newer will handle it. One has to look up earlier CPU's as some do and others don't support it.
Posted by: Nalates Urriah | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 07:22 PM
Anyone who tried Emerald on OSgrid had to dump Emerald to go there anyway. I think the emkdu was the reason everyone on OSgrid had so many problems with Emerald there anyway.
Imprudence is a great viewer, and McCabe and Jacek are great developers to talk to about anything viewer related. Imprudence is the most highly regarded and widely recommended viewer on OSgrid, despite the "official blessing" of Hippo on the website. Unfortunately, I can't use it on my preferred Linux distro because of a specific set of crashes which I dutifully reported to the devs.
Henri's Cool VL Viewer linked above works well on both LLgrid and OSgrid, and has been my default viewer, despite fooling with Emerald and Imprudence. For 2+ years Cool VL has been consistently the most *stable* running viewer I've ever used and anytime the grids get shaky, it keeps me online while everyone else crashes out every few minutes (based on friends list online/offline messages). Henri has good reasons behind the choices he makes for it, including not self-listing on the TPV directory. But, for anyone looking for a new viewer, Cool VL should be in the set you test to find a new one.
As far as Emerald goes - the emkdu and DDoS were simply the latest in a string of abuses (Emerald Point? beta 2439? Login data leak?) and its obvious now why ThugLyfe was based on it. The youtube videos of the devs at play certainly do not inspire trust. Personally, I doubt I will ever download or use Emerald again, at least not without an exhaustive diff of the source trees and blocks from the viewer contacting any Emerald-related backend server... and maybe a year under new management without yet-another incident.
I think it would be better for everyone for LL to carefully review each Emerald feature and move them into Snowstorm. Its obvious Emerald features were what a significant portion of the LL userbase wants (30% using emerald, 70% hating viewer2?) and if that isn't a "User Story" for the Snowstorm backlog, I don't know what is.
Emerald was a rocket, it rose fast, and was pretty, and has now crashed to earth. Let wiser heads prevail.
Posted by: Allen Kerensky | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 09:05 PM
Trinity: not all configurations work for all people. If you're experiencing slowness in Imprudence, often just copying over llkdu.dll from an SL 1.23 install will dramatically improve performance. Would we love to be able to distribute llkdu? Of course we would. We want to give people the best experience we possibly can. But we also play by the rules, and that means respecting the Kakadu license. Everything in Imprudence is opensource and transparent, even down to our libraries. I don't need to remind you what might happen when when that's not the case.
Posted by: McCabe Maxsted | Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 08:07 AM
@Hamlet:
I relate; I grew-up in Kailua until about age 10 - then it was off to Maui. Maui no ka oi, Oahu pilau, bradah!
(Just kidding) :)
BUT, keiki aloha ku'u home-o, kaha'a lu'u
(For those crossing there eyes: "I love my home as a child, but can never return" is a loose translation).
Posted by: Ari Blackthorne | Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 09:26 AM
Excellent, Ari!
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 11:46 AM
Am I the only one claiming Oahu as home? I guess in every group there's that 10% who are openly an idiot.
Howzit! \m/
At any rate, I have to agree (and have received some assistance from) Ari regarding Imprudence (humorously titled "Impotence" by a few friends). Even with OpenJPEG I've still had better performance compared to the latter.
As a side, don't expect every emerald feature to be incorporated. The developers have already stated that there are some lines they simply won't cross.
Programmers with morals...who knew?
Two thumbs up from me.
Posted by: Viorel Daviau | Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 04:09 PM
I'm actually from Kailua on Oahu, Viorel, not Kailua-Kona on the Big Island! Where you at sistah?
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 09:27 PM
Ditto on Kailua, Oahu. -Shaka braddah, shaka tita- But mMaui no ka oi always. -winks-
I agree with the idea of Developers with morals. In truth I learned of Imprudence a year or two ago when Tateru Nino wrote about it being the only one of all the TPV she (an Massively as a publication in general) endorses because they (Imprudence team) are the only ones with true transparency and strict adherence to licensing. So much so, they even announced that they would stop building-in Agni access (SL Grid) because of the TPV policies a while ago.
Apparently: that's been cleared-up and I'm happy about it.
I think Emerald is a *good viewer* with regard to it's useful features. I am not dissing on anyone who uses it. But in fact: I have not found a single useful feature in Emerald that I miss by using Imprudence; and all the important ones are already in there anyway (right down to bouncy primtits - which I frankly dont care much about anyway).
I think it is a sad thing that all those brilliant minds - including Fractured Crystal - haven't steered that energy into something good and actually profitable for them. If Emerald was on the up-and-up like Imprudence: would you have paid say L$1000 to use it? L$5000? Even if just a donation? A lot of people would have.
The way I see it now: The "Emerald" franchise is damaged property and broken goods. I really don't think it will ever recover to what it's former self was.
Posted by: Ari Blackthorne | Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 02:51 PM
LOL I not wahine. It's a man's name, I swear!
In hanabata days I was in Makiki, but we moved to the north shore. Most of that time was in Hauula (Kahuku grad).
I went to check out a few of the island sims halfway expecting to find Professor Fun gestures (which I hesitantly admit I would have bought) but alas, none really captured the true essence of life in the islands.
Not a single manapua truck. Can you believe it?
Anyway...
I recently posted this on SLU (this being the short version) that Emerald should do to at least win back some of the faith:
1. Silence that cow they have as a front woman.
2. Stop trying to save face. Just say "we fucked up and we're fixing it".
3. Shitcan Phox.
4. Get back LGG.
In all honesty though, I think the damage has been done & wrong decisions are still being made.
Imprudence has MORE than enough features (as well as a VERY great team). The biggest challenge folks have now is adjusting to change. There's a little bit of a learning curve when you first try it out, but once you spend a little time using it, things that irked you quickly come transparent.
I honestly can't see using anything else.
Posted by: Viorel Daviau | Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 03:06 PM
I agree with Chandni's point. On my Mac, Emerald was always slower and less stable, Snowglobe 1.x was fastest, and Imprudence is fast too - since I take a lot of photos, the Windlight settings right in the main window is *fab*!
Posted by: Valentina Kendal | Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 07:59 PM