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First Look viewer 59036The latest First Look viewer (59036) has been released, and is available for downloading right now. What is currently the First Look viewer will become the official viewer as soon as next week. You owe it to yourself to check it out ASAP, if you haven’t already, while there’s still a window for more bug finding and fixing.

This branch of the First Look browser contains numerous stability and performance improvements to the new rendering pipeline and caching architecture. Some people report as much as a 200% performance improvement with the First Look viewer. Others report no performance improvement at all. A lot will depend on your hardware and setup.

Not sure what they’ve done to the texture-handling pipeline in this release, but … wow. Very much faster on my machine than recent releases. Texture-heavy areas still take a while, but it looks like my rez-in times have been just about cut in half! Also there seems to be a lot less load on my system when gobs of textures are being fetched, digested and processed. One notorious bug from earlier releases was that paying child objects kind of didn’t work properly. Oh, you could pay them, but they didn’t think that they had been. Serious gaffe that. Aside from that, some texture animation fixes, and fixes to flexible objects.

My HUD attachments have this annoying tendency to move around between logins. Well, one of them does anyway. We’ll see what happens there.

Source code available!Bonus points: The source code for this release is available now.

The First Look browser is a beta-test browser that runs against the main (agni) grid. If it eats your inventory, your files and your dog, that’s at your own risk. You can download the First Look viewer from the usual place. This browser is a foundation to getting Second Life running under Windows Vista. Note: If you run Windows Vista, you may not be able to run Second Life at this time.

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