Snowglobe 1.0 now available

News

We're proud to announce the release of Snowglobe 1.0! Snowglobe is a Second Life-compatible viewer, built jointly by the open source community and Linden Lab. As Philip Linden described when he first announced the project back in March, we set out to create "a widely-used, openly developed version of the Second Life client which is a compelling alternative for a broad set of users, and contains enhancements and development that then rapidly make their way back into the mainstream Second Life version." The viewer we're releasing today represents our first step toward that goal; getting some early features into your hands.

The biggest new feature is the new map. Zooming out is fast and seamless. The icons only show up when you're zoomed in close enough for them to be useful, and don't clutter the view when you're zoomed out. Map tiles load quickly with the right amount of detail for the view. In short, the map really works now.

Another fun feature: the minimap will now let you zoom ridiculously close in.   Handy for those large gatherings where all of the avatar dots just seem to pile on top of each other.  It's also more fun than you ever knew you could have with your scrollwheel.

There are under the hood improvements as well.  The changing of the map necessitated pulling in some work that we're doing to improve how textures get loaded in the viewer.  We now have an updated texture loading mechanism, along with some textures (just map tiles for now) being loaded via HTTP rather than over our custom UDP protocol.  Don't expect too many performance improvements just yet as the result of this, but expect bigger improvements later as we more heavily rely on this feature for future server releases.

C++ developers should find this release much easier to work with.  We've rolled out some work we've done with Kitware, makers of the popular CMake build configuration tool, which makes it much easier to compile your own build of the Snowglobe viewer.

Some things to look out for, though. This viewer is developed on a more rapid release schedule and less formal manner than the official Second Life viewer and therefore can be less stable. Snowglobe will typically contain new features, changes, or capabilities in SL which are not yet available in the official release. Some of these changes may be experimental and may or may not ultimately be included in official releases. Also note that Snowglobe connects to the live Second Life Grid. All user information, L$, content, land and other transactions conducted in this viewer are real.

If we haven't scared you off, then please, see for yourself! Download Snowglobe now, and visit the Snowglobe home page to learn more about participating in the development of Snowglobe.