Now That Enhanced Bento Avatars Are Part of the Official Second Life Viewer, Will More People Use It?

The official word: is here:

Linden Lab is proud to announce that Project Bento is now part of the default viewer. Bento is probably the single most extensive update to the avatar skeleton ever, and as a result of countless hours of testing, updating, reconfiguring, testing... you get the picture, we are now live!

Get the Bento-enhanced viewer here.

... Which brings up a very interesting question: Will Second Life's hardcore users, who overwhelmingly prefer third party viewers, switch to the official viewer so they can get all that great Bento goodness ASAP, such as amazing avatars like these, and incredibly articulated human avatars as this and also this?

The far more popular viewer, Firestorm, has plans to integrate Bento, but far as I know, has no ETA for that integration. (And who knows how well or soon it will be integrated into third party viewers, which will require a lot of QA support and development from all-volunteer teams.) My guess is when more users see avatars like this one above in action, more and more of them will make the switch. And if Linden Lab is smart, they'll keep enhancing the official viewer so these users don't switch back.

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Comments

[Harper Ganesvoort]

When they start producing Bento heads, then I'll probably finally give in and get a mesh head, and end up changing my appearance.

[Amanda Dallin]

Catznip already had a beta with Bento and will officially release it this week. I suspect other 3rd Party viewers will follow suit. The Catznip Beta looks good.

[Kitty Revolver]

Given the price tag for bento heads (don't know about the hands) and that FS doesn't have it, I am going to wait. I wildly prefer FS and moving to the SL viewer isn't in my plans.

[Chic Aeon]

Elephant (I had seen it before) is pretty spectacular but of course I don't want to be an elephant. Still :D.

I am not seeing why I would want the new avatar type. Eventually maybe but I am happy as I am with mesh body and Lelutka head. I don't even change my skin that often, so the announcement is not a big deal for me.

I think it is certainly a game changer for fantasy avatars, role play and other pursuits. None of those are my arenas though.

So no, absolutely not switching. If the new viewer code didn't get adopted into FS (almost impossible) I would still use it over the official viewer. There are way too many FS features that I use numerous times each day. Not giving them up.

[Adeon Writer]

> Which brings up a very interesting question: Will Second Life's hardcore users, who overwhelmingly prefer third party viewers, switch to the official viewer so they can get all that great Bento goodness ASAP

Yes, I will use official for the 1-3 days it takes Firestorm to update their Bento Beta to Bento Release.

[Clara Seller]

At this point, I don't think there is anything "smart" in giving the SL user base any reason to call it quits. LL should do everything it can to help 3rd party viewers incorporate updates and keep the family happy. Dredging up the old viewer argument is about as appealing as revisiting an old affair in a marriage or as popular as campaigning on gathering up the guns... out of my cold dead hands.

[JohnC]

It has always been a policy of LL to add advanced new features regardless of if they actually work well on the platform. Someone should have sued under the trades description act years ago. I have been exploring much more recently, hanging around all those places in the guide where other people go, especially at hubs where you can see what any significant numbers do to performance.
I have a decent setup, Intel i7-4790KCPU, 4.00GHHz 16GB ram GTX 980Ti etc, but everywhere I land all I see are loads of avatars made up of chunks of mesh clothing and body parts sticking out at various angles to an invisible body. And this remains the same for ages until slowly one by one they rez at some future point in time. Usually I cannot wait that long.
No other game does this. I was a long time user of Unreal engine way back in 2005 when I first came to SL and it seemed crazy to me back then that you had to wait for ages for the place you landed in to appear, if it ever did, and you did not crash while waiting.
Nothing has changed. But still LL and content creators create and develop products for a platform that can barley handle them.
There is not much point having an amazing looking avatar if only you can see it, and the only way you can truly show it off is in screen shots uploaded to Flickr etc. Or maybe that is the point.
I know, negativity again, but as always I just say what I see in the half empty glass.
The view from the half full side would be that SL has some of the best looking avatars in any game, and the possibility to change them at will in game at any time, is amazing. Trouble is, is there anyone else out there that can see just how wonderful I look, apart from me.Or do I look like an explosion in a jigsaw factory to a great many people who still run SL on glorified word processors.
So, no hurry to change viewers I would say.

[Avatar Headline Generator]

As long as it includes:

*OMG tier bill look of shock animation*

[Nalates Urriah]

Jesse was talking about releasing FS w/Bento by 12/18 at the Third Party Dev meeting. Oz Linden was pushing them for 12/12.

JohnC's lag is interesting. My Core2 Quad 2.4GHz w/GTX 560 was way slow rendering avatars. It could take 5 minutes in some places. ACI helped.

The new i3-6600K 4.1GHz w/32GB RAM and GTX 1060 renders everyone in an area w/LL Viewer and RAM Disk cache in 15 to 60 seconds. The RAM Drive helps too. I have FS using a SSD for its cache. I find it a little slower rendering avatars, say 30 to 90 seconds and both have the ACI at 350k.

[Avatar Headline Generator]

The big question of the day is though, are bento dicks out yet?

[JohnC]

they may well be available, but you will not hear about here.