Second Life Client Gets Big UI Upgrade: Customizable Icons & Toolbars, Basic & Advance Modes Merged, More

This week Linden Lab released SL viewer 3.2 with some pretty significant updates, which you can read about here. Among the changes: the "Basic" and "Advance" modes have been merged, and you can now customize your controls with draggable icons and toolbars. I haven't had a chance to check it out yet (hopefully next week), but here's an extensive review by Inara Pey. To be sure, Tateru Nino has some rants about the upgrade, which you can check out here. Among them: apparently the new viewer has more failed teleports that lead to disconnects, and trouble with some graphics cards. My NVidia-powered Alienware didn't play nice with the last version, so I dread the update. What's been your take thus far, NWN reader?

Comments

[Inara Pey]

Thanks for the link!

I'm on a slightly older system (Q6000 quad core & GE9800 GT) overall, the new V3 Viewer has performed adequately for me. I've not had and teleport failures, although Viewer-sde performance is still sluggish compared to some TPVS (which I can run with shadoes enabled, etc., with relative ease).

Ironically, one thing I have found is that the three flavours of the Viewer (release, Beta and Dev) all run *a lot* more smoothly in the Linden Home regions than can my default Viewer - Firestorm - which invariably crashes in these regions within 15 minutes of my arrival...

There's potentially a lot more that can be done, UI-wise, and there are three JIRA already open in relation to it that I'm aware of. It's going to be interesting to see what the various TPVs do with this new approach!

[Corcosman Voom]

Once someone told me how to customize (Me menu > Toolbars) and, being right-handed, I moved the side buttons to the right hand side, it seemed to "look" better to me.

Crashing seems to be up just a bit for me with the last few viewer releases. The crash logger does not seem to be working, at least according to Windows. Hope that does not lead someone to conclude things are better than they really are.

Farewell, old sidebar. Thanks for all the drama; I doubt anyone will miss you.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

Huge steps forward! Word on the virtual street is LL is actively working with qarl on the parametric mesh deformation capability.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

Oh and the destination guide in world shows the number of avis in the region. (Sadly this is already being abused by bot runners that LL needs to wipe out)

[Orca Flotta]

That new viewer misses so much functionality, it's really unplayable in it's default mode. Where are all the tools one needs in daily life? Like media and music, snapshots ...
Oh, I know it's all there, cleverly hidden somewhere in the menu system; but why go thru all the hassle just to get back on a normal level of functionality, speed and ease of handling?

Will LL ever find a balance?

[Amanda Dallin]

"Like media and music, snapshots "

Media is in the top right hand corner like it was in the later V2s. snapshots is one of the customizable buttons. They are "hidden" anywhere you wish to place them and are actually as easy or easier to find than in any version of V1.

The snapshot window is too large poorly organized. LL should look at the snapshot window Firestorm uses to get the idea how it should look. There are adjustments that need to be made. The stand button when your sitting is too high on the screen and blocks some hover text info huds on some of my sailing ships. I'm sure there are many minor issues like this that can and will be fixed but over all it seems to be the best viewer LL has produced.

[Canoro Philipp]

im gonna miss the sidebar...

[foneco zuzu]

As i never used a LL viewer, pointless but to see Tpv's develop it much further and better!

[master shake]

"Will LL ever find a balance?"

There is no balance to find. Functionality, or ease of use. No middle ground.

[shockwave yareach]

Hooray! Death to the Sidebar and it's world gobbling ways. Going back to floating boxes allows me to put out only what I want, and where I want. Which is important as no two users will want the same organization.

This is wonderful. Thank you for finally doing something mostly right (the media controls are still stupid).

[Ajax Manatiso]

Now after reading all this I am reluctant to give it a try. More crashes with the new viewer? Since I switched to Singularity about a year and a half ago, and now I don't know what a crash is anymore. Think Ill stick with Singularity.

[Jessicka]

It's a small step in the right direction, too bad they took such large leaps and bounds backwards. Really not the 'big' update people are looking for..

I don't even know what "basic" and "advanced" modes are (why they were created, why they were ever separated).

There is still a bunch of things wrong with the viewer (mostly stumbling blocks added by LL of daily/average usage), and is still not as user-friendly.