Review the View: Part Two (GreenLife Emerald)

<3 Emerald Stole My Heart <3

If you haven’t seen Review the View part one, please check it out so you can get a better idea of what I’m doing here. In that post, I said I’d add more viewers as I experiment with them. Well, Emerald turned out to be so great, I thought I’d write a post dedicated just to it.

Some things I noticed about Emerald were:

1. The option to change your draw distance being displayed right on the main tool bar. So you don’t have to go to preferences every time. I also love that you can lower it all the way down to 24 m. If you’ve tried playing Second Life on a connection as slow as mine and with a computer as cruddy as mine, you know why. :-)
2. The fact that Emerald also offers RLV. (Again, I’m not going into what this is, but if you have a need for it, you’ll know.) I was afraid that I would lose RLV features if I stopped using Hippo because I had never heard anyone mention it in relation to Emerald.
3. Temporary upload of textures. You can upload for FREE and do tests to make sure it’s right. If it’s not, just adjust it and do another upload. Don’t worry about wasting L$10 every time you want to test your designs.
4. Channel selector button next to local chat bar. Maybe this was offered with other viewers, but I don’t remember seeing it.
5. Key and group member options in group chat windows. (I realize you can’t see the picture, but in an attempt to save the flow of this list, I made it very small. Just click it to be redirected to a larger version.)
6. A key on every profile page (just above the name), avatar’s age in days (next to birthday), and pop-out profile picture viewer (works on both 1st & 2nd life pictures).
7. A Radar button right on the main toolbar on the bottom of your screen. The radar gives you information about nearby avatars.
8. Double-click/point-to-point teleport. Just double click on the ground somewhere and TP right to that spot.
   
9. Double-click “wear” items from inventory. Again, just double click and they will attach to your avi.
10. Worn tab in inventory. Shows all items your avi is wearing (including attachments and HUDS).
11. Crazy amount of skins options for your viewer. (15!!!)
12. Selection beam particle effects. (Rainbow beam and 19 different particle effect options.) Just go to Edit > Preferences > Emerald > Avatar.
13. Enhanced zooming. Emerald allows you to zoom in on objects and avatars to a much higher degree than other viewers. You can also zoom in much, much, much more on your mini-map. Please see this image. The difference is amazing.
14. More detailed edit menu. Other viewers generally allow you to edit an object’s size, position and rotation up to a thousandth of a meter. (0.000) Emerald lets you edit these up to a ten thousandth of a meter. (0.0000) You can also edit flexible values and textures with more detail. And you even have a larger “shape” list within the object tab, so no more object manipulation just to get a basic shape. :-)

These are just the first things I noticed and I’ve only been using Emerald for two days now. I’m sure there’s more that I’ve yet to discover.

Oh! I almost forgot to mention. I’ve yet to have Emerald crash on me. I liked Hippo, but it disappeared on me often. So if you’re in the market for a stable viewer, give GreenLife Emerald a shot. :-)

*Items in orange are also present on Hippo.

Review the View: A Review of Viewer Alternatives

Yup, yup. Viewers. It took me months and months to even learn what a “viewer” actually is, so if you aren’t familiar, don’t worry. :P
Anyway, I’m going to go over a couple that I’ve tried, and give you a list of some others if you want to give them a shot.

First up, the SL default. Due to recent research and calculations, I have come to the conclusion that 127.82% of the SL community has at one point used this. This is what you get when you sign up for Second Life and get their downloads. What is there to say about the default viewer? Well, I’m not really sure. It’s pretty generic, in my experience. You have the basic functions that you need for everyday SL. If you’re in-world to explore and you don’t really need a veiwer suited to a specific role (for instance, a viewer designed for a builder), then I would just stick with this one. I’ve seen plenty of complaints about crashes and glitches, but I haven’t yet found a perfect viewer, so you just have to grin and bear it.

Next we move on to Hippo. The Hippo viewer is the second I’ve tried. It has a few things that the default doesn’t offer. The biggest difference being the ability to connect to other grids–and being able to do so while you have one already running. (So you don’t get that “Second Life appears to already be running.” memo when you try to open the second one.) Hippo also has RLV functions. I’m not going into detail about that here. If you don’t know what RLV is, just search for it in-world. You’ll get lots of hits on it. For builders, Hippo allows you to escape the limits of Second Life. You can build past the 10 meter limit and to a height of 10,000 meters. Of course, SL’s restrictions still apply within the SL world. But you can use Hippo to build on another grid, and if you’re crafty, you may be able to find a way to bring those builds into SL. (Read down for more info on that.) The downside to Hippo is that it sometimes disappears on me. Yes, disappears. One minute I’m TPing to my favorite dress shop, and POOF! Hippo’s gone and it’s taken my Second Life with it. Aside from being an inconvenience, this hasn’t really caused any problems. Just open Hippo and relog. As I said earlier, I’ve yet to find a perfect viewer. To look at all the features of the Hippo viewer, go here.

Now, let’s talk about Meerkat. I discovered Meerkat after a recent forums raid. Someone mentioned something that I just couldn’t believe, and so I just had to try it out for myself. The Meerkat viewer actually lets you transfer builds from one grid to another–for free! Best of all, you don’t have to log on, log off, log on to another grid, and so on and so on. You can teleport cross-grid right from your map! :-O  I know, I couldn’t believe it either. I was even more shocked when I tried it and it actually worked! I’ll admit I haven’t used it much, so I can’t comment on crashes or lag, etc. But for builders, especially those who like to bend the prim size limits, Meerkat is definitely something worth checking out. It’s totally free, so you don’t lose anything if you don’t like it. :) The nice people at Meerkat have even posted a video explanation of how to grid hop. But be warned, Meerkat only lets you transfer things you create. So if you have a scripted item that you created, but the script was written by someone else, when you transfer said item you’ll only have the shell. The script will not transfer. That’s the only downside I’ve seen, but it makes sense. We shouldn’t be peddling others’ work all over the virtual universe.

That’s all of the viewers I’ve tried, so far. Here is a list of others I’ve heard of. If I try any of them, I’ll update this post with reviews on them.

Snowglobe

GreenLife Emerald

Nicholaz’s Viewer

For the Never Ending List of Viewers, get it straight from LL.

Update: For a review of Greenlife Emerald, click here: https://kinaniexonar.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/review-greenlife-emerald/