Massively^™

The 1.21 series of Second Life viewer release candidates has come to an end and has "gone gold" as they say. The 1.21.6 viewer today replaces the 1.20 viewer as the official Second Life viewer.

As yet, Linden Lab has not announced the update, nor provided release notes for the new viewer, but that's alright, because we've got that information for you. The list of changes from 1.20 is quite a long one. Seriously. Hang on to your hats, because nearly every part of the viewer got some loving from the Lab engineers. Everything from group chat moderation to some long standing cleanups of text that was literally years out of date.

Check after the fold for the the full release notes (as nearly as we were able to assemble them, in the absence of a final set from the Lab), and download links to the new viewer.

	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.

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?

	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.

Joshua Linden tells us that the rollout of the new 1.21 simulator code (intended to do a number of things, including supporting the new land store) to one rack of servers has not gone so well (again), after reports came in about attachment failures that were traced back to improper permission checks.

The affected simulators have been rolled back to 1.20.1 pending code fixes that are expected no sooner than tomorrow. We expect Linden Lab is pushing hard at this to get the land store back up and running as soon as possible.