As your login splash screen may have already told you, an optional viewer upgrade is available today… Announcing the Second Life 1.20 Viewer! It features improved reliability and a more flexible UI architecture so you can select the color of the User Interface. It also brings several improved features and many important bug fixes. Download it here! For those of you who’d like more detail on what’s in the new viewer, please read on.

This 1.20.15 version has finished fifteen weeks in a Release Candidate cycle of testing (with thousands of your reports & logs volunteered to our engineers). With more than 35 crash fixes in this version, you should experience better stability than the previous version 1.19.1. From all crash metrics collected to this point, we have observed an approximate 20% improvement in total crash rate in this viewer across all types of hardware.

One new feature is the ability to change the color theme (or “skinning”) of the User Interface. To do this, use CTRL+P to go to Preferences > Skins tab and select one of the options! The new Silver skin provides a refreshed color scheme for the UI and icons. This is the culmination of Project Dazzle, which was refined with residents in previous First Look and the Release Candidate cycle. Based on YOUR FEEDBACK, this new color scheme is optional in the final viewer: Second Life will install with the classic appearance until you choose to change it.

Finally, this viewer delivers some anticipated bug fixes as reported by you, our Residents… and a number of Open Source contributions. Here’s only a few of these from all which we are proud to include:

  • Fixed: VWR-2778: System skirt textures turn invisible on wearing
  • Fixed: VWR-2404: Lossless texture compression on small textures is not lossless
  • Fixed: VWR-2633/VWR-6889: Unable to interact with some Groups when role has no allowed abilities
  • Fixed: VWR-6800: Eliminate memory leaks in llcharacter/llmotioncontroller code
  • Fixed: VWR-4860: WindLight: Planar texturing renders incorrectly in version 1.19
  • Fixed: VWR-4580: Property lines are visible through avatar, objects and through ground
  • Fixed: VWR-1735: Directly interacting with a muted resident should unmute them
  • Fixed: VWR-6350: Word “Flycam” appears in Flycam Mode and does not disappear with UI
  • … and 104 more bugs as listed in the complete Release Notes!

There are plenty of small changes and improvements to explore — and you can find out where you can update your graphics card drivers (as we always recommend) — starting with this page on the Second Life Wiki:

» The 1.20 Welcome page «

Note: This viewer upgrade is OPTIONAL: You may still log in to Second Life with older viewers 1.19.0 and version 1.19.1.

Original post by Ramzi Linden