New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC13)

Linden Lab has released the fourteenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

If an overall 50% lower crash rate, measured across-the-board doesn't appeal to you, or improved quality texture decoding, how about the fact that the silver skin can now be disabled and replaced with an original recipe UI schema. Okay, so there's still a couple little glitches with that, but you can do it. Also it defaults to the familiar blue UI, which will please a lot of users.

Linden Lab are watching your choices as well. The viewer now reports which skin you have loaded so that information can be pulled out of log-files (or, so a web-site or web-service used by the viewer can offer you HTML skinned in a compatible set of colors) -- We think it's more the latter than the former, but it'd be silly not to gather usage data on skins.

• The viewer installs with a default classic grey color of the User Interface. This can be changed in Preferences > Skins (It requires a restart of the viewer to take effect.)

Fixes:

• Fixed: VWR-7893: create a Classic skin for the viewer

• Fixed: VWR-5059: add option to switch between a Classic and Silver theme from within Preferences

• Fixed: VWR-3529: WindLight: Saving snapshots to disk crashes viewer

• Fixed: Assign user agent strings with the name of skin in the internal Mozilla browser

• Fixed: The user-agent string in the browser is not HTTP 1.1 compliant

• Fixed: A new debug setting 'SkinCurrent' is used to persist the chosen skin, to avoid crashing older builds

Release candidate viewers access your live account on the main Second Life grid (Agni). Potentially they may cause hair-loss in pets, and should be always be kept out of reach of children. The downloads are served by Amazon's S3 service and we use and recommend the use of a download manager to keep your download times to a minimum.

Notably, while they're called release candidates, they're actually beta (and occasionally alpha) releases. The reasoning behind calling them release candidates has never been made clear.

You can download this viewer from the usual place for Windows, Mac and Linux.