Hands on: The Second Life SLim client is here
Filed under: Betas, News items, Second Life, Hands-on, Virtual worlds
Linden Lab's unannounced SLim lightweight Second Life client is available now. We grabbed it out of the starting gate and took it for a bit of a spin for an hour or so. It looks a great deal like Linden Lab needed some new feature or API in the SLS-1.24 server deployment to support this. As a result, preparation of the SLim software for release prior to an announcement at this year's Virtual Worlds -2008 conference in Los Angeles must have been awfully rushed.
We expected this to be the first purpose-designed client for Second Life to come out of Linden Lab since the original in 2002, but actually ... it isn't. The real story is rather more surprising.
SLim is a Vivox product and it connects to Vivox servers. Connection with Second Life and its grid and servers is only very peripheral. How much involvement Linden Lab actually had with any of this is debatable.
The short version: It does a lot less than you'd hope, and setup of the whole show is far clunkier than you'd like. On with the show...
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Firstly, you want to go to the SLim beta page -- Windows and Mac only. Linux users, you are out in the cold darkness. And then the ice-weasels come. Sorry. Make sure you're logged into the Second Life website, or later steps aren't going to work.
From there you will need a special First Look build of the Second Life viewer. You'll need to log into this at least once, and turn voice chat on while standing on some parcel with voice enabled. This apparently passes some sort of authentication token to Vivox that allows them to suck data (like your Friends List) out of the Second Life grid as they need it. If your viewer cannot connect to the Vivox voice servers, this isn't going to work.
Then you'll need the SLim client itself. Windows or Mac only. Linux users have all been devoured by the ice-weasels by this stage anyway.
Then you click on the button to "Create SLim account". You will need to enter an email address and create a password for using SLim. Don't use the same one as your regular Second Life password. Enter it, then a second time to verify, and finally press the Register button. Then run SLim and enter your avatar name, and the new password, and it should authenticate and connect.
And this is where things started to go sour.
The interface is, much as you might expect, plain and unadorned -- but the quantity of system resources that it uses are likewise trivial. A mere 40MB of memory for the Windows version, approximately.
Now... think of the very first Instant Messaging client you used. You know, back before they had any features. That's SLim. Voice and simple text messaging... and that's it.
Actually, technically it is even less than that.
My Friends List took about 10-15 minutes to load. Every now and again, a new name would pop onto the list. Each name is prefaced with an icon. The hand-and-eye associated with Second Life, or the SLim icon for SLim, showing which class of viewer the user is connected through. If the icon is greyed out, the user is offline.
This long loading (and names showing as base64 strings or as strings of digits) appears to repeat every time you log into SLim. Not heartening. Being logged in with the First Look viewer makes this go faster. No, really. Think about that. Obviously someone wasn't thinking things through.
With 25 friends online, SLim shows me... three of them. Also, it won't let me talk to any of them, as they are not using SLim or the Second Life First Look viewer -- apparently the person you are talking to must be using one of those two clients in order for you to communicate with them through SLim. Period. Also, you can more or less forget trying to contact anyone who isn't already on your friends list. If you want them to be, the only way to add someone is via the Second Life viewer.
Voice is, apparently, clearer through SLim than through the Second Life viewer -- probably because of the lower resource consumption.
SLim does allow logging and audio alerts, but the basic functional utility of being able to communicate with others is noticeably absent thus far.
As yet, there's no sign as to when (or if) Linux support will be forthcoming, or if source-code will ever become available for SLim.
Right now, we're underwhelmed by SLim -- almost shockingly so. Still, this is an early beta (we hope -- the version number is 2.1.3010.1755), and we presume that it will get better. Actually, it almost has to. It doesn't seem to have anywhere else to go.
UPDATE: Linden Lab has removed SLim and the setup process so that it is no longer available.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
9-03-2008 @ 5:11PM
Jacek Antonelli said...
So... download a client to enable a token to let Vivox grab your friends list. Then create another account and download another client and let it download your friends list for 10 minutes every start up. Then wait for all your friends to do all that, too. And then you'll get functionality almost as good as what you already have on Skype or MSN!
Phew! I was worried the process might be complicated or roundabout. I'm so relieved.
P.S. Pass me an ice weasel, will you?
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9-03-2008 @ 5:13PM
Tateru Nino said...
Note also, that the online help for SLim apparently isn't for SLim, but for Vivox Connector. It seems likely that SLim is largely a stripped down version of that software.
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9-03-2008 @ 5:18PM
Loki said...
Bloody pointless
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9-03-2008 @ 5:25PM
Marianne McCann said...
Yikes. Sounds like they pushed this one out as early as they could, to take advantage of VWC and SLCC. Definitely does not sound ready for prime time. It does explain why the viewer team has been chomping at the bit to get some new stuff out. They must be under pressure to introduce this code intot he main viewer!
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9-03-2008 @ 5:29PM
Dale Innis said...
I think Marianne nailed it: it's not ready, but they really really wanted to announce it at VW2008SLCC. There'll probably be a useful version sometime in the future. :) Gosh, I love the software business...
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9-03-2008 @ 5:31PM
IYan said...
You can actually IM somebody not on your list - enter his nick in the field on the bottom.
Oh, and TG-MG chat works, too.
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9-03-2008 @ 5:32PM
Tateru Nino said...
We tried the ad-hoc messaging with a dozen different names. SLim said that none of those names were valid. We checked them. Several times.
9-03-2008 @ 5:49PM
Ordinal Malaprop said...
Well, I shall have a try, but honestly it does sound rather terrible at this stage. Surely a lightweight client could have done this much better, and been open-source as well?
And where, perchance, is the fabled "Jabber to SL bridge" - or am I showing my age by even mentioning that?
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9-03-2008 @ 5:51PM
Tateru Nino said...
I haven't heard mention of the Jabber-IM bridge since the beginning of 2006.
On the whole, unless you're using voice, SLeek seems to do all of this rather better.
9-03-2008 @ 6:20PM
Ordinal Malaprop said...
Well, after the special viewer sat there for ten minutes before even popping up a window, leading me to force quit it twice, and after logging in and turning voice on for a little while, and then trying to sign up for an account and having Javascript popups telling me I hadn't put in a valid email address when I had, and then finally ticking and unticking boxes enough that it said I had signed up - or at least, that it had changed my options - and then trying the SLim client itself (a horrible-looking piece of work) and it telling me via error boxes including error numbers! that I had the wrong credentials, and then it telling me that it didn't even recognise my email address...
...I have given up. This really _is_ rubbish, I'm sorry. A beta is one thing, something apparently pre-alpha is quite another. I hope that LL have not paid Vivox any actual money for this.
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9-03-2008 @ 6:32PM
Matthew Dowd said...
I was expecting something similar to sleek, SLMessenger, Second Messenger or even SLIM (a product very similar to Second Messenger/SLMessenger that was available from SLExchange over a year ago but whose developer left SL due to health reasons) which all have the advantage of not requiring either you or the people you want to talk to running a special version of the SL client or creating a third party user account (I note that you can't use SLim to talk to someone not also using SLim or the SLim enabled viewer, but does the person who talk to also need to create a SLim account as well?)
I'm also a little wary about this SLim enabled client as it seems to be sending far more account information (e.g. friends lists) to a third party outside of LL - at least until LL releases the source code and we can see what it is up to!
Matthew
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9-03-2008 @ 8:45PM
Uccello Poultry said...
They Came. They Saw. They Ran Away. The http://secondlife.com/SLim/ URL was dead when I tried it. I guess they just wanted to say it got out then pulled it.
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9-03-2008 @ 8:47PM
Otenth Paderborn said...
And now http://secondlife.com/SLim/ is gone. Good riddance. I thought it said (a few hours ago, when I downloaded the whole shebang at work) that voice did not yet work. FAIL. Of course, none of the instructions on the page matched what actually happened when I ran the two apps.
I was able to IM someone not on my friends list, who may have been in SLim at the time. This was before my friends list loaded. I was later able to IM with an alt (on my friends list) running the trunk viewer on the same machine. But neither SLim nor the trunk showed correct presence, and it took a couple tries for the IM to go through. I had a successful conversation with me once it went through, however.
I also went to the help menu and was sent to the Vivox Connector help pages, which were of no help, of course.
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9-03-2008 @ 9:02PM
Evad Babii said...
I thought that one of the main benefits of SLim was that it was a lightwieight client that could be utilised without having the process-hogging overhead of an SL viewer running - doesn't sound to be the case unless I read things wrong.
You still have to be logged into SL to use it ? Sort of defeats the purpose if so.
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9-03-2008 @ 9:21PM
Jacek Antonelli said...
Looks like someone at LL saw this article and realized they left the barn doors unlocked. The SLim URL redirects to the homepage (as others have seen), and now we get a nice blog post:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/09/03/connecting-second-life-to-real-life/
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9-03-2008 @ 10:22PM
Pavig Lok said...
BREAKING NEWS!
http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/09/vivox-announces.html
Vivox is opening it's client and server code and releasing APIs etc... The curmudgeonliness of the SLim client may be a thing of the past once clever folk get their hands on it.
The move to opensourcing may explain why the system is such a pain to use currently, as allowing an opensource client/server framework would need more security handshaking to ensure the purity of it's precious bodily fluids than a closed system.
This may well be a wonderful move as it would allow voice and comms interoperability between open grid projects and SL main.
Pity about the demo tho:P
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9-03-2008 @ 11:10PM
Dedric Mauriac said...
Doh! I finally get home only to be redirected to the second life home page. I wanted to play!
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9-03-2008 @ 11:32PM
Patchouli Woollahra said...
"you are out in the cold darkness. And then the ice-weasels come" is the new "Eaten by a grue"!
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9-04-2008 @ 8:15AM
CoyoteAngel Dimsum said...
Well, if it worked, at all, it looks as though it would be teh sux0r. But, it doesn't. Didn't like my email, my password, never sent an update, and so far as I can tell, simply does not work.
Way to co-brand your rep, LL! Good luck there, bunky, yer gonna need it.
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9-04-2008 @ 11:14AM
Edward Artaud said...
You need to understand, this is not really an IM to SL grid bridge. It is essentially a separate IM network and client that just so happens to pipe the chat through the viewer UI, that's why the people you want to talk to also have to have the new firstlook viewer. This is something that LL easily could have added to the viewer without Vivox, they could have just integrated open source Jabber code into the viewer and had you put in your GTalk or Jabber credentials into the preferences. I guess that it seemed like a quick feature win that didn't require LL to do much work to get out the door.
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