The latest First Look viewer (58603) has been released, and is available for downloading right now. What is currently the First Look viewer will become the official viewer sometime very soon. You owe it to yourself to check it out ASAP, if you haven't already, while there's still a window for more bug finding and fixing.

This branch of the First Look browser contains numerous stability and performance improvements to the new rendering pipeline and caching architecture. Some people report as much as a 200% performance improvement with the First Look viewer. Others report no performance improvement at all. A lot will depend on your hardware and setup.


Another pile of bugfixes in this one, revolving around texturing and lighting (and an important animated texture fix for you Slingo players!), however if you are used to texturing selected faces of an object, you'll find that that is broken in this release. Several old, deprecated script calls have been removed, notably: llMakeExplosion, llMakeFire, llMakeFountain and llMakeSmoke. You shouldn't have been using these for a long time. Not for most of two years. Overall, this one's feeling a bit faster and smoother than the last few.

The First Look browser is a beta-test browser that runs against the main (agni) grid. If it eats your inventory, your files and your dog, that's at your own risk. You can download the First Look viewer from the usual place. This browser is a foundation to getting Second Life running under Windows Vista. Note: If you run Windows Vista, you may not be able to run Second Life at this time.