Linden Lab releases Snowglobe 1.0 for Second Life
by Tateru Nino 
Jun 24th 2009 at 7:30PM
Filed under: Patches, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
A while back, Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale announced a new Second Life viewer development project. That project ultimately grew along lines similar to that of third-party viewer project, Imprudence, breaking down many barriers to user contributions, and adopting a more agile methodology. After only a couple of release-candidates, the result is already available.
One of the biggest developments you might see in the Snowglobe viewer is that the map is now an order of magnitude faster to load, rather than taking several fractions of forever, as is traditional. This is the start of a new texture-transfer pipeline, which we can reasonably expect to become standard in future viewers, and to encompass more kinds of textures, however there's a new caching architecture which should benefit all textures.
The downside is that it will crash sometimes on texture downloads, and large textures may appear blurry, the viewer may be too dark when running in fullscreen mode, and it may complain (incorrectly) that you do not meet the minimum hardware requirements.
What's new:
Below is a list of features new to Snowglobe 1.0, relative to the Second Life viewer version 1.23
- Faster in-viewer map using the Amazon S3 repository tiles. See Torley's demonstration of the new feature
- A new, general-purpose texture fetching and caching mechanism (see HTTP Texture), currently used most with the map (with more widespread use in future versions)
- Minimap changes (from Aimee Trescothick)
- Turned on voice/lip sync by default: VWR-10311 and VWR-13260 (from Mm Alder)
- Allow XUI to specificy tooltips for combo box list entries: VWR-13177
- Combo to preview textures at common aspect ratios: VWR-8008 (from Aimee Trescothick)
- 64-bit Linux fixes: VWR-12763 (from Robin Cornelius)
- For developers:
- VWR-12758 - Easier build system. We've rolled out some work we've done with Kitware, makers of the popular CMake build configuration tool, which makes it much easier to compile your own build of the Snowglobe viewer. See Get source and compile for more information.
Known issues:
- SNOW-2 - Snowglobe sometimes crashes fetching textures (problem in libcurl)
- SNOW-48 - Large textures sometimes appear fuzzy and not fully loaded
- SNOW-18 - On main login screen, when updates are available, the update and release notes are un-clickable
- SNOW-14 - Entering fullscreen sometimes makes rendering very dark/black. Relog corrects problem.
- SNOW-22 - False warnings for some platforms not meeting minimum spec
- SNOW-60 - Launching secondlife: urls (e.g. from http://slurl.com ) from a browser to a running Snowglobe instance fails on Mac
See the following for more:
- Full list of postponed issues in Snowglobe
- Release notes for the Second Life viewer version 1.23 - any known issues that apply to the Second Life Viewer version 1.23 will probably also apply to Snowglobe 1.0
Snowglobe 1.0 is available right now for Windows, Linux and Mac (universal binary), and can be downloaded from the Second Life website, where the test viewers live.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Loki said on 4:22AM 6-25-2009
I dont get it, aint this just another test viewer by LL?
Why dont they just use the third parties stuff in the main viewer?
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Opensource Obscure said on 6:36AM 6-25-2009
Loki:
the main viewer uses a less agile methodology because they need to do more / deeper testing on it before they release it.
Users would probably complain too much about new features, changes and inferior stability if third parties stuff was put in the main viewer. With Snowglobe you're warned that it "can be less stable" before downloading it.
Tateru Nino said on 8:45AM 6-25-2009
Technically, it's a fork of the official viewer. A second kind of official viewer if you like.
Yo Brewster said on 12:59PM 6-25-2009
I don't it - what is the sense of LL creating a second viewer? Are you sure Tateru the goal isn't for this to become the official SL viewer once all the bugs are worked out?
Tateru Nino said on 1:05PM 6-25-2009
The traditional viewer project has been criticized for being nearly impossible for anyone other than the Lab to get code and bug-fixes into. Pretty much every submitted patch was rewritten afresh by a Lab dev, we're told and only then after many many months.
The new one has a lighter contribution model, allowing direct submissions from users with a very lightweight review process.
Seems to me that the Lab can then cherrypick Snowglobe later for features and fixes that are demonstrated and working.
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Toirdealbach McDunnough said on 1:55PM 6-25-2009
It seems to run well on my PC, the textures load fast with even Toxian giving alright frame rates.
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