You should definitely take the chance to check out the new Second Life Beta Viewer.

Its adding some huge improvements to the UI to not only make it feel more like the old 1.5 UI, but also making the UI extremely customizable so you can make it do exactly what you want it to do. Yes its still a Viewer 2/3 base, and YES it has mesh support. But its got pure UI customizability as well allowing you to set the viewer up EXACTLY how you want it.

Give it a shot, they can use all the feedback they can get!

I want to draw attention to the following extract from the recent Viewer 3.1 release notes.

This release changes the default mouse behavior. Clicking on most surfaces will make your avatar walk there, and dragging the mouse around your avatar works differently from older releases. If you prefer the old mouse behavior, pick Me>Preferences from the top menu, click on the Move & View tab, then change the Single click on land: setting to No action.


If you try to do CCS melee in Viewer 3.1 without making the change in Preferences mentioned, some or all of the mouse up and down clicks that you use to activate melee will be eaten by the viewer. This appears to me based on a quick test to completely wreck scripted handling of the mouse button, so that you end up in melee even though the left mouse button is up and in addition you slide around unexpectedly.

The solution is simple enough: switch the 'single click' action to no action as above.

Well as everyone knows we've got mesh on the grid now and people have been talking about the CoLA rebuild for quite some time. I originally got the CoLA replacement sim as an intention to rebuild the sim and replace it with a better prim build, but the news of mesh being in development came my way not too long after I bought the second class five sim so I was basically left with a choice, rebuild it in prims and replace it as fast as possible, or, swallow the cost of having the sim for experimenting on builds while waiting for mesh.

Well now mesh has arrived and after teaming up with Chaos Borkotron, after helping him with some copybot issues in CCS sims that the Lindens weren't helping him with, we're now on the cusp of the future of CoLA.

Some of you have seen what we're working on here but the last few weeks have been a process of getting the imagery right. This is, yet again the sewer network, but fully light mapped and rendered in SL.

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Update 10/11/2011
Just adding a new image to the article this is a seperate section of the sewer build. Now lightmapped and ready for public view.


Update 10/17/2011

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Effectively as you can see the overall environmental quality is going to go straight through the roof when it comes to detail on the future iteration of CoLA. Chaos and I both have very competent art skills and there are details he sees that I do not, and details that I see that he does not. Between us we've worked and reworked this piece to make it more like what you'd expect to find under ground in CoLA.

Notice the concrete damage and the cracked shifting of the tunnels. Look at the details of the lights and props and the sewer itself. Then boggle at it all when you realize that that area of the sim costs only 27 prims.

Far as performance is concerned I know a lot of people are worried about performance in mesh sims, simple facts are performance is affected by how many triangles per mesh are in use, and we've been extremely good about optimizing mesh elements down to the lowest amount of triangles without losing detail.

So after several reworks, we've finally hit the overall artistic vision of what we're trying to present. This aspect of the new CoLA will be part of every element from the underground all the way to the top of the highest buildings. And while we're doing what we can to try to get this done by Halloween, its entirely possible that this rebuild may take until the holidays to do right.

So no hard dates as yet, we're working as we go, trying to ensure that every piece and element of the new environment is visually sensible and logical and represents CoLA as it should be, in a modern game environment. Thank you for your patience while we work on this. I can't wait to have it done.