Try Out the New Viewer 2.4 Beta, Now Available
Today we’re making available the first beta release of Viewer 2.4. We’ve done a great deal of maintenance work for this release, with significant help from the Second Life open-source community, including fixing a number of interface problems, hunting down and eliminating some key crash bugs, and making several performance improvements.
A number of features and changes are worth noting with this release. For the most part, we consider the work we're releasing today to be intermediate steps on the way to a better future:
- A new auto-updater: Whenever there’s a new viewer release, the viewer will now download the new installer automatically in the background, and offer to install an upgrade when you next log in. You still control whether you want the new version, of course. We’ll continue to improve the auto-updater experience in future releases.
- Clearer preferences: We’ve reorganised several of the preferences tabs to make them more understandable (and to make it easier for us to create new preferences, should the need arise). We've added some colour and transparency options, and fixed some bugs too. There will be more work to come in this area as we strive to make the viewer more customisable.
- External text editor support: This is one we’re extremely happy about, as it's something Residents have wanted for a long time. If you’re a scripter, then you can now use your own text editor for scripting. The feature still needs a lot of user interface work, but as we work more on build tools in coming months, it will keep getting better and easier to use.
- Graphics improvements: We’ve also integrated some graphics improvements as we work towards integrating mesh import into Viewer 2. Our graphics systems are undergoing major renovation, and there have been improvements to anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and snapshots, with more to come in future releases.
So, although Viewer 2.4 is fundamentally a maintenance release, it has a lot of great stuff in it. Please give it a try and give us your feedback!
Download the Viewer 2.4 Beta today, try it out, and Twitter your thoughts using the #slviewer2 hashtag.
Helpful Links
- Download the Viewer 2.4 Beta (Version 2.4.0, Beta 1)
- Viewer 2.4 Beta Release Notes
- SL Forum on Viewer 2
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