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The Second Life viewer dev team has been working furiously away for some time now, and you may be forgiven for wondering where the fruits of that labor are. It has, after all, been some time since we've seen a new viewer other than emergency security fixes.

There are lots of little things in this viewer, mostly bug-fixes. What is particularly peculiar is that whispering seems to be back. Whisper was a short-range chat option that was discarded from the Second Life viewer back in 2005 due to it being confusing both conceptually and in the user-interface. Whispering has a 10 metre range and while it has been a deprecated script function for years is still available to scripted objects.

Well, at last we know what all the fuss was about with all the sudden software updates over the last week for the Second Life servers that caused so much disruption during the last few days. It appears we were on the money with security fixes, and exploitable vulnerabilities have received urgent attention.

As a result a new Second Life viewer is available for download now -- that's 1.20.17(98669) -- and you can expect a new Release Candidate viewer (RC5) very very soon. Both are likely to be mandatory updates.

So, what's all the fuss about?

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A new Second Life viewer is available. Not a release candidate, but an update to the 1.20 series -- what's generally referred to as an 'official' or production viewer. The version number for this release is 1.20.16 (97603), and only contains one listed change over 1.20.15.

The lone change appears to be security-related. The text of the change (not yet available in Wiki release notes) is "Discard messages sent over UDP that should not be trusted."

It isn't clear exactly which messages those are, precisely, and whether they might be sent from servers or spoofed from other hosts (or if they should simply be being carried on another transport protocol) -- however if it was important enough to release a fresh production viewer with just this one change, it is likely to be an important upgrade for users.

The new viewer is available for download now for Linux, Windows, or Mac (universal binary). We assume that if you've had problems running the 1.20.15 viewer, 1.20.16 will not work any better for you.

Linden Lab has not yet announced this release on any of its blogs.

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Linden Lab have been working very hard to attempt to bug-fix and stabilize the SLS-1.24 Mono-enabled Second Life simulator server software (try saying that three times, fast). Since Monday, the 8th of September, we've counted no less than 19 distinct versions of 1.24.5 that got far enough along to test.

Right now, the top candidate (and the version that has been rolling out onto the Second Life grid) is build 96115. A test rollout of build 96378 was attempted, but was somewhat crashier than 96115, so it was replaced with the slightly earlier build. There are several later builds already being tested and assessed as candidates for the next rollout, the latest being build 96505. There's quite a list of fixes, almost (but not entirely all scripting related). Notes for builds up to 96378 are available, however it isn't yet clear what any more recent builds might contain.

While all this is going on, the viewer team has managed to crank out a new release-candidate (1.21-RC2), which runs on the Mac PPC, and for those of you who were having that nasty crash-or-freeze-every-minute-or-six problem, or issues with sculpt textures, there's a fix for those too.

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

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.

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Linden Lab has released the fifteenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

This release looks like the final release in this cycle, unless something quite nasty appears. Mono is expected in viewer 1.21, and SLS1.24 (SLS1.23 is deploying this week) -- thus, there is nothing particularly earth-shattering in this release.

Linden Lab has released the fourteenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

If an overall 50% lower crash rate, measured across-the-board doesn't appeal to you, or improved quality texture decoding, how about the fact that the silver skin can now be disabled and replaced with an original recipe UI schema. Okay, so there's still a couple little glitches with that, but you can do it. Also it defaults to the familiar blue UI, which will please a lot of users.

Linden Lab are watching your choices as well. The viewer now reports which skin you have loaded so that information can be pulled out of log-files (or, so a web-site or web-service used by the viewer can offer you HTML skinned in a compatible set of colors) -- We think it's more the latter than the former, but it'd be silly not to gather usage data on skins.

Linden Lab has released the thirteenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

We're not sure if this is the RC with the least number of changes or not, exactly. Aside from a localization fix where the viewer was still talking about First Land, the remaining three items all seem to constitute code reversions -- essentially undoing what has been done.

User-Interface skin switching isn't in this release. We're going to go out on a limb and suggest that you won't see that for a couple weeks at least.

Linden Lab has released the twelfth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Linden Lab says this release candidate cycle will be extended, and some of the skinning project that was slated to come after 1.20 is being moved up, so that users will be able to switch the UI skin before this becomes the official viewer, rather than in some unspecified future release.

So, there will be a couple more release candidates before 1.20 becomes official, and it is pitched to take a bit longer between them.

This edition fixes some more crashes and freezes, but still has that nasty buffer-rendering offset glitch that afflicts snapshots, among other things.

Linden Lab has released the eleventh 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Linden Lab says that it is aiming for 1.20 to go live by the end of June, which suggests only two more release-candidate iterations -- so what you're seeing is very close to what the official viewer will be in a couple of weeks. Release notes are not included in the installer. This version apparently fixes the crash-on-startup with the Mac PPC, and fixes some of the snapshot problems: The UI is no longer silently included in the snapshot when written to disk, but the black bar (and occasional random pixel garbage) down the left-hand side is still there.

The thread-watchdog has been disabled for the rest of this series of RCs, the first-login-fails-with-Vista also appears to have been corrected, and pixel-garbage around avatar imposters has been fixed. There are an additional six crash fixes.

Linden Lab has released the tenth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Release notes are not included in the installer. More fixups with the thread-watchdog, fixes to flexi-prims to make them work more like existing viewers, a bunch of crash-fixes. However this version will not work on Mac PPC at all. Maybe the next RC will do so. That puts us at least one more RC out from a full-release.

Linden Lab has released the ninth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Release notes are missing again. Maybe they've chosen to stop including them with the installer. Changes primarily involve emasculation of the thread-monitoring system to solve a lot of situations where the viewer was intentionally crashing itself, fixing purchases via the Linden, and fixing up tooltips.

Three particular issues have turned up with the new Second Life 1.20(RC7) release candidate that you should know about. Two are relatively pedestrian, but the third is quite serious and appears to be an intentional feature. While the RC7 candidate has been withdrawn, those of you who are using channel gimmicks to use it anyway need to know about these.

One is the crash on login/connection (also on taking snapshots - or any other intensive activity that can take some time). Particularly for those of you that are either on slower hardware or who are further away from the Second Life servers in network terms. You'll need to disable the thread watchdog to work around this, as described here.

Linden Lab has released the eighth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

For those of you worried about the Dazzle UI being hard on the eyes (around two thirds of you), 'We plan to release Skinning Phase 1 (which will allow residents to install custom skins and switch between them, e.g. switch to a "classic" skin) before we make 1.20 mandatory,' says Steve Linden, '(hopefully well before-- we are trying to keep mandatory updates to a minimum), so we will support switching skins before imposing this release on everyone. However, this is the look we are planning to support going forward.'

Note that that does not mean that Viewer 1.20 will contain it (skin switching) at release, or necessarily that it will appear in viewer 1.21 or 1.22 -- we're only promised that it will appear before support for 1.19 is dropped.

This release-candidate (which is not intended to be final, so really, there should be a less confusing name for it) contains 46 assorted fixes, plus other changes -- and a few known bugs. There's also user-contributed lip-synching for voice, and what appears to be the new Ruth in there. Bonus: The vanishing skirts problem finally seems to be fixed, and users are automatically unmuted if you interact with them (pay them or their objects, send an IM or inventory to them).

If you use a Mighty Mouse or 3DConnexion Space Navigator, apparently 1.20 will continue to make your life unpleasant.

Linden Lab has released the seventh 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0. This is accompanied by a new download page for all versions which appears to be designed to make Mac and Linux users feel like poor cousins.

Mighty Mouse users, while we were told that your problem was fixed in the last release candidate, it appears to be an open issue again. Perhaps it wasn't fixed at all. The nasty message from the smartheap library are supposed to be gone, and the way property lines have been glowing through objects has been changed. (There doesn't seem to be any indication that the vanishing skirt issue has been fixed -- April Fools' Day is long past, boys)