Has anyone been keeping up with this latest eruption? It seems that just when the stink of one blowup has passed another erupts. Is this volcano going to blow or is it all just smoke and bellyaching?
This is a blog detailing some of the past history of these things. It does look like something’s going on as LL has removed Emerald from the TPV list.
eh, I’ll probably keep using emerald until they block it, then use it again once a way around that is found
i hate viewer 2
Looks like a storm in a teacup has erupted over one of the Emerald design team members (who has now been booted) misuse of the Emerald viewer. That and a “possible” exploit that the install pathway might, if you were stupid enough to use your full name as the drive location on your computer, be revealed to the Emerald design team if they do certai thing. Not access, just the install pathway. Maybe.
Viewer 2 sucks, and I’m hearing mixed reports about the Imprudence viewer. I’ll stick to Emerald unless they ban it.
(Anyone else think it ironic that LL is concerned with the security and safety of it’s users only when it comes to third party viewers?)
Not so much their customers security as their personal info, I’ll bet. LL wants to sell it off and they have issues with the Emerald team gathering it themselves perhaps.
Eh. Maybe too cynical? I wish I could be an optimist where LL is concerned.
I shall agree with Mr. Pease in the main. The Emerald team had a rouge within its ranks who has been summarily purged. They are in the midst of performing mea culpas and various forms of boot licking to LL to get back onto the TPV list. Will the Lindens ban them? I severely doubt it as Emerald stands head and shoulders over Viewer 2. Why would LL shoot themselves in the foot with a ban? They would suffer a huge loss of citizens to another virtual world if they did. LL is no angel either, as demonstrated by their “new” approach to the teen community, and an “enlightened” policy on where to drop newbies.
I also concur on the issue of the Imprudence viewer. I tried it yesterday and it ate my resources in a most uncivil manner. I immediately removed it and returned to my Emerald viewer.
In short, yes Emerald had a brainfart once again however it still remains one of most widely used TPV in the stable. Deal with it LL… *smirks*
I just started using Imprudence, and I must say it’s very peppy compared to Snowglobe and Emerald both. It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that Emerald has, but I don’t use those. I just need it to render things and let me move about.
Actually, with one or two very minor exceptions, Imprudence has all the bells and whistles Emerald has with the added bonus that it’s a bit faster.
I can tolerate a lot of things, but using my log in information for a denial of service attack isn’t one of them.
Apparently I am in the vast minority for LOVING Viewer 2. It makes my Apple happy. But I have used Emerald and I would hate to lose it as a backup.
*lovingly pets her Emerald viewer* And should an entire company be punished if one of its employees is a psycho? Especially, if they fired that employee once they figured out what he was up to?
heard Viewer 2 has been more popular with the apple crowd, no clue what would make it such a different experience.
personally my main issue with v2 has been the layout, everything in tabs, and the way IMs are handeled means I miss a good 10 of them before I realize someone is trying to contact me
Emerald developer(s) instigate a DDoS attack on a website that they don’t like. (This is against the law).
Guess who’s bandwidth they used to do this? Yep, ours (the Emerald users) bandwidth (which we have to pay for).
From what I read about the web the victim website had some 800GB of bandwidth stolen by the attack (which they have to pay for).
It is also seams somewhat ambiguous as to who exactly in the Emerald team instigated the attack, and we have no real guarantees that this sort of thing will never happen again (after all this is not the first time that the Emerald team have had a rogue developer problem).
So I think that I will withhold my trust from this project for now. I have also uninstalled Emerald and changed my passwords for good measure.
There are several other viewers available here if any are interested. Many are using the 1.23 or Snowglobe codebase. Imprudence is often mentioned in various forums as a good replacement for Emerald. I’ve used the Cool VL instead of Emerald because it’s almost 1/3 faster for me. Kirsten’s seems quite popular with those who like 2.0 as well as some who like the older viewer.
course I’m being told to that the new beta for emerald has a glitch of not rezzing cloting layers for others that is currently being ignored, so might want to avoid their beta
I’ve been a fairly die hard Emerald supporter for a while now, and have been generally quite happy with the latest version (though log in has been longer, and I don’t care for how it handles TP now), but this incident does trouble me. Regardless of who is ultimately responsible, this attack not only used us users in order to launch, it made us all unwitting accomplices in the commission of a crime. I’m kind of not ok with that.
Emerald is, hands down, the best 3rd party viewer out there, particularly for builders. I just can’t believe that they, as an organization, would have done this because they have everything to lose, and nothing to gain, were they to get caught. I am fairly certain it was the action of one or two individuals, not professional programmers, but probably script kiddies all growed up. Talented? Sure. But no sense of professionalism or work ethic. Too stupid to consider the consequences, and too arrogant not to consider that they might get caught.
Until this pans out, and the dust settles, I’m just not comfortable using Emerald. I’d like to, as I am quite attached to the extra building features, but I am going to wait and see.
I have been using Imprudence as a secondary for some time. It does most of the basic SL stuff just fine. It does have a few bells and whistles of its own, though the pale in comparisson to Emerald. Emerald’s importing function doesn’t seem to work, so I have always used Imrpudence for grid jumping on projects. Imprudence also seems to work better for me on other grids in general anyway.
I hope they get this resolved and soon. I’m still a big fan of the viewer itself.
i might try imprudence actually, if the preformance is better, emerald has been extremely laggy last few weeks
Just to offer a dissenting opinion, I’m quite happy with V2.1. It has gotten better with every release. The new way of organizing outfits using symbolic links to eliminate redundant inventory is outstanding.
I tried Emerald a year or so ago and, frankly, failed to see what all the fuss was about. As I recall it had some interesting features, but nothing that my Mystitool wasn’t already doing.
Indeed, much of the viewer controversy really boils down to personal prefference. I am always interested to hear what people have to say about this viewer vs that viewer.
I have tried to refrain from any conclusive judgment on v2 simply because I have yet to use it, and likely won’t until I have no other option. This is mainly because I understand that the new inventory management system (which I am all for, in concept) makes going back to v1, or 3rd party viewers difficult as it jumbles up one’s inventory. Since much of my work requires that I jump grids (and thus must use 3rd party viewers) that’s a killer, and one which I don’t have the time to tackle.
Many voice complaints about the interface being too radically different. While I have no desire to delve into learning my way around a new interface, it’s not really huge concern for me. I’m even prepared to come to like a new interface, but see it as just a minor inconvenience which I currently have the option not to bother with.
As for bells and whistles, I think most of the truly great ones are mainly only of interest to builders.
I really, really like the free temp upload option which Emerald and Imprudence offer, and really, really, really like the new option in Emerald which lets you apply textures straight off of your hard drive for testing, without uploading at all. For sculptie making, this is a life saver, and a wallet saver. Gone are the days of spending L$150 in upload fees in order to test a single sculptie.
Also, there is a new texture alignment trick in the latest Emerald which makse aligning reptetitive textures perfectly over multiple prims a litteral push of a button. For people like myself, for whom math is a cold, ruthless, child murdering adversary which must be pummeled and beaten senseless, and which fights back with vengful brutality, that trick is the proverbial gun at the knife fight for me.
Because much of the content work I’ve taken lately is on other grids, the import/export option is essential. SL is still the most stable grid, so for projects on other grids, I +do much of my building in SL and then export it over. Imprudence is the best for that, I’ve found, though milage may vary. It also has the best grid management system I’ve seen. That was one thing Emerald was late to the game on, and though they’ve improved their grid management system considerably, its still not as fucntional as imprudence.
These things, I have come to rely on. The rest, like being able to place the cursor over the dots on the mini map, even dots in neighboring sims, and have the avi name it represents appear, braoder draw distance range and the like are really only novelties, though I dig them.
I don’t think that any LL viewer will ever adopt these options, as they probably aren’t viewed as sound business decesions. Obviously, if you have to spend L$150 in upload fees to test a sculptie, they aren’t likely to adopt any tool which would take away that revenue (even though it is as lame a trick as those lack of use fees that banks and credit card companies have been dinging people with), and the last thing they would want to do is encourage users to use other grids, especially accessing other grids with their own product (you can use the LL viewer to get to grids, but its not a simple matter for the average grid user). It’s understandable. That’s business. There are currently other options, and, until there aren’t, I will take them. And if/when these options are no longer available, I’ll accept it, but I won’t cross that bridge till I get there.
I really feel badly for the emerald gal and her entire staff they are quite passionate & bottom line LL is just using this whole little mess to try and pull Emerald down further …mho
Truth be told I have a great deal of problems with LL Viewer 2, I have a fairly new system and I find viewer two to cause me to crash and just *sigh* it is not user friendly !
Where Emerald and Imprudence are .. I also use Snowglobe a great deal :)
I have been playing with Imprudence for a bit now
http://imprudenceviewer.org/wiki/Features
I’m not sure that what happened is even all that uncommon. One of my sisters works for an internet based company, and I’ve heard rumors of her boss “bombing” competitors websites to cause them to crash. Several years ago when it went around in the Deaf blog-sphere that an internet based company refused to accept relay calls (thereby discriminating against the deaf), my sister told me something glaringly simple that we could do that would crash that company’s website. A little trick she learned from said boss. Of course, I decided to take the high road, and didn’t do any such thing… I also didn’t spread that information around the deaf blog-sphere. *looks innocent*
I just noticed that Imprudence has the texture aliginment trick too! Yay!
Select the prims you wish to align the textures for, switch the mapping to Planar, then click the little check box below the mapping menu which says Align planar textures, and that’s it. You may need to roll the repeats back, like say, to 1.000, but that’s it. Done. Just make sure that you roll the repeats back evenly. They all need to be the same on every effected surface.
This is especially helpful on floors, walls and ceilings, where you have a repetitive tile texture over many prims of differing sizes and shapes. You can get your brick walls 100% uniform over the entirety of your build in the click of a button.
Happy happy!