Blogs - Second living

The Linden Labs  Second Life  viewer is what most of us use when we are introduced to Second Life (SL). But you have other options, ways of seeing and interacting with this virtual world. Why change? There are other graphical viewers that work more efficiently, render graphics better, and provide more features than the Linden Labs (LL) standard viewer. In addition, some other viewers have bug patches and fixes sooner than LL produces them, or you may want to use a non-graphical viewer to communicate with people in-world while you stay out-world.

LL lists quite a few alternate viewers you can try out, graphical and text-based. I went through this list, and downloaded and tried them out. How each of these work on your system is going to depend on your hardware, so may be a bit different than my experience.

The graphic viewers are those that allow you to view, or see, SL just as you did with the LL viewer. Many people find that the LL viewer crashes frequently, doesn't render all of the graphics well, or has other issues.

It's worth the time and effort to try Emerald, the viewer I found to be the most efficient, and it has features the LL viewer does not. See this list for other features not mentioned here. 

Some of my favorite features are:

•   You can teleport someone you are chatting with without having to open their profile
•  Radar allows you to see all avatars on a given SIM, which also allows you to teleport to them, teleport them to you, send an IM, and many other options 
•   Teleport history provides you a list with the last places you have teleported to, much like bookmarks in your browser 
•  Ground sit allows you to sit cross-legged on the ground anywhere without having to put down a scripted mat or cushion

You'll also find that Emerald uses the same basic menus as you're used to with the LL viewer, and the drop-down menu Emerald has the features specific to Emerald only (shown here on the right). While I found the graphics rezzed quickly and sharply, some people I know found the graphics to be less crisp than the LL viewer. This may have to do with settings, or it may be a video card issue. You'll have to try it out to see how the graphics render on your machine.

Text Viewing

Very likely there will be times when you need to chat with someone in-world while you need to stay out-world. Maybe you are traveling with a smaller computer that can't handling the graphics, or are in the office and just need to exchange a quick conversation and read through your notices. There are several Text Viewers that allow you to log in SL, see which of your friends are online, IM anyone you need to, and some will even allow you to work with your inventory and view textures and graphics from your inventory.

SLiteChat is my favorite. It's lightweight, easy to use, and allows you to see at a glance who is online. Additionally, it allows you to see everyone in your Friend list, and send out IMs or chat with someone live. When you open the program, you simply log in with your SL username and password, and using the application from there is obvious:

You can also check your Groups, add a group, leave a group, or send a group IM. If you need features beyond this, you'll need to try one of the other text viewers, such as METAbolt.

 In addition to allowing you to chat and IM others, Metabolt also lets you  view and work with your Inventory, change your avatar's clothing, teleport to another region, create landmarks, and work with objects and scripts. You can do quite a lot in SL without entering graphically. But if for some reason you decide you need to go in-world in a graphical way, Metabolt allows you to launch the SL viewer.