- Will stick with V1 interface
- Will add support for mesh, media-on-a-prim, server-side baking and export permissions
- Will continue to support OpenSim
Work is resuming on the Imprudence viewer, the developer team announced this week.
Imprudence is a popular old-style viewer for Second Life and OpenSim and uses the old-style interface, which many people are more familiar with and prefer. It is the recommended viewer for several grids. It is considered one of the most stable viewers, and is very popular with builders. It also supports XML-based import and export functionality for individual objects, which is used to share creations on sites like OpenSim Creations and LindaKellie.com. Imprudence is also the default viewer for New World Studio because of simpler licensing issues.
However, the last stable release of the viewer came out two years ago, and the viewer is missing many modern features, such as outfits, mesh support, and media-on-a-prim.
“Imprudence has a lot of catching up to do,” said viewer developer and Australia-based computer programmer David Seikel — also known as Onefang Rejected in-world. “We are working on mesh and MOAP [media-on-a-prim] at the moment, server side baking comes later.”
There are no current plans to change the look-and-feel of the Imprudence interface since users like it, Seikel told Hypergrid Business.
“There was a great deal of work done by the Imprudence developers before I joined the team to make the Imprudence user interface make more sense,” he said. “I like the work they did, and I would not want to throw it away.”
Imprudence is also missing new proprietary Havoc code, as does its sister viewer, Kokua, which uses the modern “V3” interface. Viewers who add the code have to agree to restrict access to OpenSim grids.
Most viewer developers chose to accept the code and cut OpenSim access. Firestorm developers decided to have two versions of the viewer — one for Second Life, and one for OpenSim.
“We decided for Kokua to not pursue havok sub-licensing with the rationale that a small sub-set of users actually were involved and other viewers such as Second Life Viewer could meet the requirements and be a better choice.,” said viewer developer Nicky Perian, a developer based in the Texas area. “I know this is counter what most other viewer projects are doing, but we wanted to keep command line parameters for loginuri and login available to our users [which allows OpenSim access]. In future that could change based on input from users and additional volunteers to maintain and support second parallel releases.”
When this issue was discussed, Imprudence was too far behind to even consider adding the Havoc code, Perian told Hypergrid Business.
Imprudence will, however, be adding support for the new OpenSim “export” permission setting, already available in the Singularity viewer but not yet fully supported by server-side OpenSim code.
“That new feature is not stable yet, and not in any OpenSim release,” Seikel said. “The last I heard Melanie [Thielker, OpenSim core developer and Avination grid founder] requested that viewer developers wait a while for it to settle down before implementing it.  So we will do the right thing and wait for it to be stable.”
- International singers gather on Alternate Metaverse Grid for first annual International Day - April 15, 2024
- OpenSim hits new land, user highs - April 15, 2024
- Wolf Territories rolls out speech-to-text to help the hearing impaired - April 15, 2024