The Imprudence project now has its first release candidate viewer for Second Life available, and far sooner than we expected. It's impressive work for a first release candidate as well. We've not had such a fast and smooth viewer experience since Nicholaz "The Mad Patcher" Beresford's series of Second Life viewers. Indeed, many of Beresford's patches are also a part of the Imprudence project.

Imprudence necessarily replaces proprietary fonts with Liberation Sans and Bitstream Vera Mono, which look a little peculiar the first couple of times out, but score high on improved readability. There's no audio either, yet, as the proprietary FMOD audio system has yet to be replaced with OpenAL, but that is coming soon, we understand. As for the change from Kakadu/KDU to OpenJPEG -- this is supposed to be fractionally slower, but honestly, the whole experience was so smooth we never noticed.

Over the course of the weekend, two patches have appeared to allow the creation of megaprims in 1.19 series Second Life viewers (Able Whitman), and 1.20 series viewers (Jacek Antonelli). This all predicates on Linden Lab continuing support for the creation of megaprims.

Nicholaz Beresford apparently has been working on another edition of both his Bleeding Edge and Eye-Candy releases. As a part of the patch-set, an option to create megaprims has been included, as well as increased-height building. Bleeding Edge has reached revision W, while Eye-Candy is at revision F.

Nicholaz Beresford has released one final viewer. The EC-e "Eye candy" release is designed to run against 1.19.1(4). This version plugs a key memory and changes the viewer icon.

As one happy user said to us today, "The worst edition of the Nicholaz viewer is better than the best viewer Linden Lab has ever released." -- Many would find that hard to disagree with, including a few Linden Lab employees.

Nicholaz "the mad patcher" Beresford who maintains a modification of the Second Life viewer (which, we believe, can pretty much no longer be called a Second Life viewer if Linden Lab's policies go ahead) is widely regarded to produce the best Second Life viewer experience to be had.

Now that seems to be over. Beresford is pulling the plug on his much lauded (even by Linden Lab) viewer project.

Now that multiple versions of the Second Life viewer are available (since message liberation was implemented, last June in 1.18.0), Linden Lab is choosing to support two production releases of the viewer at a time. In this case, 1.19.1 and 1.19.0.

Users who are still using any of the 1.18.x series viewers will have to update from today to either the current 1.19.1(4) release from the download page or get 1.19.0(5) [links after the fold for those that need them].

Nicholaz Beresford, Barney Boomslang and Balp, between them, have released a U version of the Nicholaz Bleeding Edge Second Life client for windows, mac and linux.

All three of them add that this is an update that is very much optional, but seems to be quite stable. As with all other versions of the Bleeding Edge client the friends and IM windows are separated once again (pre-Chatterbox style). This particular version also adds the new search functionality. I have to say I have switched over, and having been initially a little cautious about it, I recently deleted my old versions of the client. I get stable, good performance, an UI I prefer and the new search all at once.

For those curious about the T-edition: it wasn't stable, although it is available for windows and mac if you insist.

I'm sorry, I don't have an amusing picture for this, much though I wish I did. However, most residents of Second Life will be familiar with attachments intermittently leaving their correct point and appearing attached to your derrière instead. Long hair gives an interesting tail look, shoes look positively uncomfortable, and if you wear other attachments, well let's not even go there!

About two weeks ago Nicholaz Beresford, the person who won a Hippo Award (and a new iMac) for his services to fixing bugs in the client code, announced he was of a mind to try and fix this. Today he announced he is 99% certain he has succeeded. I, for one, hope he is right, and his patch is rolled out to the Mac too. Until yesterday I hadn't seen it for a few days, yesterday, it seemed like every other teleport either caused a crash or shoes in the fundament. A big THANK YOU once again!

Tateru commented on Philip's blog post about the road ahead for Second Life, and generated some interesting thoughts. She is not the only one to so comment. Nicholaz Beresford, the "mad patcher" of the Second Life client, and the man indirectly responsible for most of my current viewer configuration (I also use the visual interface patch to have a green skin, it is restful to my eyes, and they mostly work well together) has also commented.

His thoughts? Well, speaking as someone with a strong daoist leaning, they make a lot of sense to me. Why do I like his patch? They focus on getting a lot of the little things right, right now. The Linden Lab developers are focussed on getting things right at some future date. Even things marked "resolved, internally fixed" on the JIRA take some time (at least a month as far as I can tell, sometimes longer) to get out of the internal fix into the main client. That means, for a month, we, the users, are still complaining, whilst the developers are saying "No problem any more." Of course there must be some delay for QA in the main client, but it seems like a way to distress the users unnecessarily. Read his thoughts, think you own, let us know. Should Linden Lab release more "bleeding edge" clients with un-QAed bug fixes so we can get that bug fix we really want at the risk of less stability?