Second Life release candidate viewer 1.21(RC0)
by Tateru Nino 
Aug 29th 2008 at 3:00AM
Filed under: Betas, Patches, News items, Second Life
Linden Lab have issued a new Second Life viewer release-candidate series. Starting with 1.21(RC0), this new viewer series offers support for the current rollout of Mono and touch-position scripting, among other things.
There's also new text colorization. It's configurable, but does rather go a long way towards invalidating a lot of existing tutorial and informational material that currently exists. That said, it is kind of visually appealing, if you have a compatible color set loaded. Look for those settings under Edit > Preferences > Text Chat.
If you're scripting in a non Mono-enabled simulator, you might want to pass on this release. Syntax errors are not reported for scripts compiled with 1.21(RC0) on a version SLS1.23 simulator. If all goes well, it will be a non-problem by the end of the week as SLS1.23 simulators are upgraded.
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Also, the link for the release notes turns up an empty Wiki page. For now, you'll have to guess what the release notes are, until someone at the Lab gets around to posting some.
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. As a result of the new communications policy, this was not posted to the Second Life blog, but to the grid-status blog where far fewer people will see it.
Update: Just a small caution, this release candidate is excessively crashy. Editing objects and switching IM tabs seem to be able to cause it to keel over quite smartly.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Garn said on 6:36AM 8-29-2008
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Release_Candidate/1.21
is the release notes hun :) you have a typo hehe must not be fully awake yet
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Tateru Nino said on 9:17AM 8-29-2008
Hah. That is not the link encoded into the viewer. The one in the viewer is the one that I put into the article above.
So the viewer contains the wrong link.
Skate Foss said on 9:30AM 8-29-2008
I'm so glad you're back Tateru! Always like to read your piece on each viewer update before installing. Thanks!!
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TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 6:36PM 8-29-2008
I hope they don't make the official client have the multimedia system load during login, that was making it almost impossible for me to login with the beta client cause it freezes for long enough for the server to give up letting me connect most of the times (the current main client has the multimedia system loading when the client itself loads instead of only after the login process has started, so the freeing isn't an issue like that)
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Jay said on 4:02AM 8-30-2008
Not so much alpha as in the past.
In response to the issues with 1.20 the Lindens have formed the Battery Street Irregulars, a groups of residents (some highly respected and knowledgeable) who test the nightly builds and report bugs before it is even released to the general public.
Experienced guinea pigs so to speak.
Generally this RC0 is far better than it would have been using their past practices. The improved sculpt load priority is fantastic.
Now if we could just get their UI people to ask residents about their changes rather than just doing them problems like the tools menu would never happen.
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Tateru Nino said on 5:10AM 8-30-2008
There's no doubt that the pre-RC0 testing via the BSI has done a lot of good. I've had my hands on those versions myself.
It looks like there's a fault somewhere in the UI code that's leading to the extreme crashiness of this RC -- the UI code's my best bet at the moment. Possibly heap-corruption.