Linden Lab Introduces SL Share

On Wednesday, LL introduced SL Share for their Release Candidate viewer. It seems like a nice option although I personally think the official viewer is already bad to navigate for starters. Not sure if this idea will be well received or if there are plans to introduce it in 3rd party viewers. The plus side would be that SL would get more exposure to the Facebook audience. Will it encourage more to join SL? Time will only tell. I am sharing the link to Inara Pey who blogs extensively about SL and you can follow the comments if you like and make your own informed decision. https://modemworld.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/linden-lab-launches-sl-share-and-a-look-at-the-viewer/

Lurking in the shadows

I am really enjoying my Second Life experience with shadows enabled.  I do seem to be crashing a bit lately though so I have to be a little careful.  I am still using Firestorm 3.3.0, but i may upgrade to 4.2.2 soon and see if things become a more stable.

Me and My Shadow

Enabling Shadows in Firestorm Viewer

One of the questions you have to ask yourself when new features are added to the viewer is -- Can my system still perform well enough when I use them?  I am still on Firestorm viewer 3.0, but hope to move up to 4.0 soon.  While I do enjoy being an "early adopter" I also temper that by waiting a bit to see what feedback has been given.

I already knew that my system could handle the "Ultra" graphic setting for some time now, but never took that one step further by enabling "shadows" in the preferences.  As you can see from these pictures, the addition of shadows adds so much more depth to the graphics.  I often admired the photos that I have seen taken with shadows and wondered if I could do the same.

I am happy to say that so far (fingers crossed), things seem to be OK.  I have heard that some users do experience lag with them enabled and I have experienced some of that in certain conditions, but overall, I have been pleased with this new ability.

Second Life Viewers

So much has happened recently in terms of what we use to access Second Life. There have been a lot of opinions, blogs, tweets, and plurks about it that I will not go into it here in this post. I will just say that I was a very happy user of the Emerald viewer for a long time. Over the past several weeks I have tried a few other alternative ones -- Kirstens, Phoenix, Emergence, Imprudence and yes even Second Life Viewer 2. My current viewer of choice has been Emergence. It seems to be the most stable for me (no crashes and good texture loading). So I will stick with it for awhile.

One thing users seem to forget is that of choice and expectations. We have a choice in what we use for SL and what works best for our specific needs. Some viewers are better for photography and machinima, and some work best for builders and content creators. This is why we choose certain brands of cars, soap, or computers over others. We are not going to find one that does it all.

We all want to know that the viewer we are using is not being used by certain people for malicious purposes. I also think that we would do well to remember that these viewers are provided to us for FREE and are always undergoing changes by the generosity of dedicated developers.

There are also lots of variables involved with computers (age, video cards, monitors, processors, etc...) Throughout all this, I think it's important to keep in mind that with any viewer -- "Your mileage may vary"