emerald-viewer
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Second Life's Emerald client facing obsolescence
Recent months have not been wholly kind to Second Life, and those circumstances don't seem finished just yet. The Emerald client, one of the most popular third-party viewers -- estimated to be used by as many as half of all players -- has fallen out of favor with Linden Labs and is no longer an officially endorsed option. Scott Jennings has posted a full rundown of the client's history, charting its progress from the earliest inception of the project to its current status of having fallen from grace. The short version (or as short a version as you can get for drama four years in the making) is that Emerald's coders included some rather... hack-tacular backdoors in the client's coding. This is a downside for reasons that should not need to be specified, but does add up to some major problems for the large playerbase still using Emerald. Second Life has had a hard time getting its users to switch to the 2.0 viewer, and about the only upside may be that the removal of Emerald will change that... but the overall drama isn't going to be kind for either the Emerald project or Linden Labs itself.
Fahy vs Linden Lab: This just gets weirder
The other day we covered a lawsuit by Corey Fahy (AKA Belial Foulsbane in Second Life) vs Linden Lab, various third-party viewer developers, content creators and others. While there doesn't seem to be any case to really answer (because you can't copyright a name, method, process or algorithm, and Fahy seems ineligible for legal costs and statutory damages in any case) things definitely took a turn for the weird last week.
Fahy vs Linden Lab: No case to answer?
Last week, on Thursday 8 April, Corey Fahy in Philadelphia filed a lawsuit against Linden Lab and more than 25 others, in the Pennsylvania East District Court (case number 2:2010cv01561, assigned to judge Joel Harvey Slomsky). Fahy alleges that an algorithm in one of his Second Life products has been subjected to copyright infringement, accompanied by the usual requests for damages, statutory damages, ten times damages, attorney's fees and all that. Where do we even begin? We'll spare you most of the cruft and go straight to the heart of the problems that we can see with this particular lawsuit.
Imprudence 1.2 viewer for Second Life
The Imprudence project has released version 1.2 of their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and after some months in beta (and a couple of false starts), the latest release version of this viewer is available. There are some user-interface changes this time around, the ability to backup and restore your own intellectual property, an improved radar/minimap, improved third-party simulator support, RLVa support, optional vertical IM tabs, double-click go-to and teleports, more world map data and a host of other tweaks and features.
New: Imprudence 1.2 beta viewer for Second Life
The Imprudence project has started a new release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and the new 1.2 beta contains a number of delicious treats. The new beta features a grid manager, new minimap radar with some useful features, optional support for Restrained Life (using RLVa), a selection of Emerald viewer features, object backups (for your own creations only), and a heap more. Our personal favorite is the option to have a draw-distance slider on-screen, as it is perhaps our single most-commonly used UI feature.
