Viewer 2.2 Available Today!
Viewer 2 (Version 2.2.0) has been released today as the main Second Life Viewer! This is an important release for us because it marks the first big release using the Snowstorm process. A few months ago, we formed the Snowstorm Team as a dedicated Viewer team who works with the open source community and entirely in the open to make user experience improvements to the Viewer. We've been holding almost all our meetings in public, working with open source developers to integrate their work, sharing our backlog with the community, and releasing daily development Viewers which are available for anyone to download.
Over the last few months, we've improved the velocity of our teams and shortened the release cycle. The Version 2.2.0 release today comes after a three-week beta cycle during which we released Betas weekly and focused on stabilization and crash fixes on the Beta Viewer. Your feedback, crash, and bug reports during our beta cycles are crucial - so thank you to all who participated in that process.
Version 2.2.0 introduces some new features, usability enhancements, and crash fixes. Here are a few highlights:
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Sidebar Panels can now be undocked and turned into regular floating windows: Simply click on a Sidebar Tab and drag it away from the Sidebar to undock it. You can also click the undock icon in the top right of a panel. To redock a sidebar panel, click the redock icon in the top right of the panel. Once sidebar panels are undocked, they behave like any other floating window in the Viewer.
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Buttons on the Bottom Bar can now be reordered: In the last Viewer release, we added a few optional buttons to the Bottom Bar. In the 2.2.0 release, you can now reorder buttons on the Bottom Bar, so they’re arranged just the way you like them.
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Right-click on your avatar and select “Sit Down” to sit anywhere: A great feature that came to the Viewer, by way of Snowglobe, allows you to right-click on yourself and select “Sit Down” from the context menu to make your avatar sit anywhere. To stand back up, just click the “Stand Up” button or right-click on yourself again and select “Stand Up” from the context menu.
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Parcel Property Icons are now on by default: Parcel property icons indicate what users can, or can’t, do on a particular parcel. The icons can be found in the Location Bar and are now on by default. If you’d like to turn them off, you can do so by right-clicking the Location Bar and unchecking “Show Parcel Properties” from the context menu.
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Selection Beams are working again: In Viewer 2, there was a bug that hid selection beams. This made it hard for people to see when you were building or the object you were currently editing. This has been corrected!
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Language translations in local chat (via Google Translate API): Another great feature that came to the Viewer via Snowglobe is local chat translation. Simply click the “Translate chat” check box in the upper left hand corner of the local chat window. Language preferences can be set at the bottom of the Chat tab in the Preference window.
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Group permissions now work in Snapshots: This corrected a bug in Snapshots which prevented you from sharing a Snapshot texture with a Group.
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Turn off scripted particles and lights: This feature allows photographers and machinemists to turn off scripted lights by accessing the Debug Setting, “EffectScriptChatParticles” and setting it to FALSE. To turn scripted particles and lights back on, simply go to the Debug Setting window again and set “EffectScriptChatParticles” to TRUE.
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Builders can more easily align textures across linked prims using planar mapping: This feature allows builders to align textures across faces so that several prims can look like a single prim. Simply select the faces of a set of linked prims, then open the Textures tab of the Build tool, make sure your Mapping setting is set to “Planar”, then click the checkbox labeled “Align planar faces.”
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View profile inspectors via the Mini Map: When you hover over the little dots (people indicators) on the Mini-Map, you’ll see the familiar “i” icon pop open with a user’s name. Clicking the inspector allows you to view that user’s Mini Profile.
- Pan the Mini-Map with shift-drag: If you hold down the <SHIFT> key and then click and drag on the Mini-map, you can now pan the map to view other areas.
As I mentioned in the blog post announcing the Version 2.2 beta, many of the features included in this release come directly from Resident contributions - via the Snowstorm process, as well as through past contributions to the Snowglobe project. Thank you to all of you who have contributed code, testing, and commentary. Please keep it up!
The Viewer 2 (Version 2.2.0) release is not a mandatory upgrade at this time, but will be the default download for the Second Life Viewer on the downloads page.
You can view the full release notes for Viewer 2 (Version 2.2.0) here.
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