Prim Perfect’s Guide to Third Party Viewers: The Basic: Second Life 1.23.5

To begin our series on the various viewers available to Second Life users, let’s start with the basics – the latest incarnation of the original viewer put out by Linden Lab – now in iteration 1.23.5

It’s still the standard that most others build on or deviate from and is, I suspect, still used by a majority of long term Second Life residents who don’t want to learn Viewer 2, or are not seriously enough involved with Second Life to see the point of having a whole new viewer (this lack of engagement would also keep them from downloading one of the Third Party Viewers (TPVs). It’s very stable  these days, comparatively – which is why I use it when involved in TV production.

Let’s start by taking a look at it.

The layout focuses around the top menu bar and the lower menubar.  Windows can be pulled out and arranged around the screen to suit the user.  Here I have local chat open in one window, group chats and personal IMs in another, my inventory and my minimap (the last rather obscured).  Blue popups top right show incoming messages from groups; notifications that friends are online come in blue pop-ups bottom right.  One can have heads up displays(HYDs) too – on this screen I have camera controls, two AOs, a Mysti tool – and there’s also a small HUD to inform me how to stand up – it is a useful indicator that I am sitting on something!

We’ll see this arrangement repeated in viewers that draw on SL Viewer 1.23.5 – and there a lot of them.

Now let’s look at the facts and figures, courtsey of the excellent MCF Viewer Comparison Spreadsheet.

Figures courtsey of the excellent MCF Viewer Comparison Spreadsheet

What are the pros and cons of this Viewer?
This is the viewer that I use most often.  It’s basic and it’s usually fundamentally stable.  Because for so long it was “the” Second Life viewer, the functions that it allows have pretty much been tested to stability – at least as stable as anything gets in Second Life.

However, as The Lab pushes Viewer 2 more and more, this is likely to become increasingly unsupported and will, I suspect, wither and die as the code shifts in ways it can no longer access because no-one cares.  Like Windows 98, it will become obsolete. I had a foretaste of what this could mean the other day.  I was moving extremely jerkily and things were taking forever to rezz. I looked at the frame rate – View >> Statistics bar .. and fps (frames per second) is the top reading – and saw that I was getting 0.9fps which is terrible. There was nothing wrong with my bandwidth or ping speeds, and when I switched to Imprudence, my fps leapt to 43.  It occurred to me then that the way to urge people to upgrade toViewer 2 would be simply to cause problems with the frame rate until people’s experience became thoroughly unpleasant. However, I don’t think that this is what happened to me – I think it was more likely to be a random glitch.

I don’t think the time for obsolescence has come yet – Viewer 2 is still too problematic.  Bitter experience suggests, however, that 1.23.5 is likely to be phased out before Viewer 2 is quite ready – iun which case, looking for an alternative TPV may become very attractive.

~ to be continued ~

If you have thoughts and views on Viewer 1.23.5, please add them in the comments section below. We want to build up a useful resource for all users.