jeudi 15 mai 2008

Alternative SL viewers

Making a video in Second Life poses some problems:
how to get interaction between two avatars without bothering your friends?
One solution is to run two viewers at the same time, but at the current state of the art of computers, this could be too heavy for your machine. It is for mine!
So i looked at some other viewers, which could be « lighter ».
This was quite interesting!

The main list is given in the Second Life wiki, but not all are listed.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Alternate_viewers

You can of course run 2 SL viewers (see the Torley tutorial on this)

Well, most of these viewers are not lighter.
There are the alternatives on the « normal » level:
OnRez for instance is quite the same as the normal latest viewer. A steady viewer, never posed any problems for me.
The Dale Glass Edition, was buggy.

Then there is the interesting « textual » viewer, this is really something else:
The Metabolt.
This is really light weight, you can connect and chat, and tp, and sit, but you don't get the image.
For making video's Metabolt is unusable, because in your main viewer the avatar, connected in Metabolt is only rendered in a primitive way. I cannot guess why. Sometimes the face stays gray, sometimes the skirt. Also, although you can touch objects (from a list) around you, i could not get it to do an animation, dancing for instance. (Always checking what happens in the « main » normal browser, because from Metabolt, you cannot see what is occurring « in world ».)
Maybe this will change in newer releases.

I also tried the RealXtend Edition
Looks cool: possibility to connect to « other » grids then SL only.
Unfortunately it was buggy. Most of the time, and pretty soon after connecting, it disconnected and disappeared without a trace.

Unofficial Viewer: AjaxLife
Then I ran across a browser viewer: running Second Life from an internet browser!
This last option seemed perfect to me:
View Second Life in the Firefox Browser
http://ajaxlife.net

the only things is: giving in my password on this browser viewer: can this be hacked easily. But ok, logging in the first time took so much time that i gave up trying to enter.
The second time i discovered you had to click on the grid button in the second screen???
And instantly it gives you your money, and inventory, avatars nearby.
It is a bit like the Metabolt.
I went in through the main SL to viewer to look at my alt there...
you can talk to each other and the one with the real viewer can see the Browser-viewer person.
But again this browser-viewer connection is not totally rendered.

The fact that you can connect without having a view yourself is suggesting possibilities, a bit in the direction of the actorbot, which lives on an external server.

I tried to have another browser opened and send in another avatar...
Yes, succeeded, this way one can finally make a small party of avatars on one computer.

Later on with Lolito Larkham we danced and I gathered my friends around us. But as already remarked, from these lightweight viewers I could not get these other avatars to dance. Chatting was possible, so making jokes coming from these “unknown” intruders in Five's tete a tete with Lolito was great!

Some people ask Five: why don't you make your own viewer? Haha, one cannot do it all!!!