Greenlife Emerald Viewer (revised)

Those who know me know I’ve been a long-time fan of Boy Lane’s iteration of Henri Beauchamp’s Cool Viewer – still am, in fact. However, I’ve recently been trying out the Greenlife Emerald Viewer – and I have to say, I’m impressed!

This viewer has grown from the Open Source SL code and features contributions from some of SL’s leading lights of the coding world – for me, notably Chalice Yao and Zwagoth Klaar. It includes features common to the most recent “official” releases, features we used to know and love within the Viewer (but were done away with on the whim of LL) and many features developed by third parties that are either plug-ins to the official viewer or which have never been officially supported – such as Marin Kelley’s Restrained Life API (even if this is somewhat flawed).

Emerald is, from the outset, both comfortingly familiar and yet startlingly different from other flavours of the Viewer – and this in no bad thing. Even with the likes of Cool Viewer, things in Viewerland have become somewhat staid. We’ve all settled into a nice little rut of Things We Like within the Viewer that for the most part, we tend to load-up, sit down and make a few surface tweaks to the UI (set the skin, fiddle with the buttons, turn on various options / objects) and do very little else. We even tend to choose our Viewer based on the functionality we like to see there ready and waiting for us, rather than having to fiddle-fart: again, I like Cool Viewer not only for the “built-in” nature of RLV, but because it harks back to the good old days of the Friends list and boots the cumbersome Communicate into touch.

Emerald, on the other hand goes a lot further. It brings to bear a raft of options and tools that have clearly been designed to improve our SL experience (take note, LL), and which just beg to be used. Here’s a short summary:

• Double-click tp: simply cam anywhere you like in a sim (or even in a neighbouring sim, if visible), double-click, and ping there you are! (cannot override tp hubs, etc., however – this is an SL defined limitation)
• Disable the teleport screen – Yay! no more black screen and progress bar when Tping (note your avatar may appear to freeze during the tp process as all the sim-to-sim handshaking still needs to take place)
• Built-in radar system: no more need for radars and scanners that impinge on server-side resources to operate; click on the button to bring up a list of avatars up to 4096 m away, together with a host of resource buttons (IM button, Profile button, tp-to-avatar button, etc.)
• Built-in lag prevention methods – such as blocking spammed calling cards, etc.
• An auto-response system for IMs: automatically respond to those IMing you, and select categories of people to who you wish to auto-respond (e.g. non-friends, people previously muted, etc.)
• Ability to turn off the typing sound from others (Yay!): OK, so you have turned off the typing anim on YOUR avatar – but you still have to put up with the irritating clickety-clickety-click from those who haven’t – well, not any more!
• Command line capability: type a defined command into Chat and have it happen, gesture-like) – e.g. teleport to ground level or teleport to a given height or position sim the sim

The list really is quite impressive, and the options are so easy to access and set-up, thanks largely to the the care and effort put into the EMERALD tab in PREFERENCES.

EMERALD neatly lays out the majority of the viewer’s additional functions in a series of additional tabbed pages:

Teleport / Login: set-up your Tp and login options from here, including disabling various screens

Voice: set additional Voice options

Shields: select your preferred spam prevention, etc.

IM: set-up your additional IM preferences and auto-responses

Misc: set-up additional options (such as enabling Restrained Life functionality, disabling your typing animation muting the typing sound from others, etc.)

Cmdline: configure the chat-line commands you wish to use

Avatar: accesses some vaery useful tools for your avatar – tweak your selection beam particle effect from her or – with care – manipulate your Avatar’s bounding box (so you can raise / lower your position, for example, without altering your shape)

Build: a host of useful pre-sets for those of us who love to build.

Not only are these options available through PREFERENCES -> EMERALD, the more useful of them can be accessed via the EMERALD option on the menu bar of the Viewer – surely again, one of the most useful updates to any viewer. Cool Viewer could certainly benefit from the inclusion of a similar menu option rather than constantly diving into PREFERENCES.

For me, the killer aspects of Emerald can be summarised as:

• Speed – I’ve found it comparable to Cool Viewer for Windows (providing the “go faster” pack is downloaded and installed!)
• Stability – It has yet to crash on me, or even wobble
• Radar – true, it is a little chunky and eats into screen space, but the tools it provides are very handy; I just worry that due to its size, most will leave it off and still opt for lag-inducing in-world scanners and the like
• The build tools – this for me is a Godsend, and totally overdue in the “official” viewer. Kudos to the Emerald team for its inclusion. Just having the ability to quickly and easily specify default textures for created prims is a boon – I can now swap and play with my “placeholder” and “orientation” textures without having to create custom prims sitting in my inventory
• Double-click tp; speaking as an Estate Manager, this is marvellous: I can zap around checking things out and fixing things without all that tedious mucking about with flying.
• Protection tools: in line with the above, the ability to act on problem avatars quickly and easily without the need for additional tools or needing to be physically present, is simply great.

Emerald also have perhaps the smoothest installer going – not only does it slip into its own folder, providing you already have a Second Life Viewer installation, it’ll also go grab the non-distributable files other third party viewers need you to manually copy across. I was particualrly impressed with this feature because a) I only have Cool Viewer and Imprudence installed on my PC (nothing under “C:\program files\SecondLife”) – yet Emerald grabbed the required files from one of these other Viewers OK; b) It also grabbed some of my other preferences, such as my Busy response, and my preferred location to store chat / IM logs (something other viewers generally require you set-up manually yourself after installation).

If there are any negatives to be voiced about the viewer, they really come down to three things – at least for me:

1. The radar window issue mentioned above – again the button options that are included are certainly nice, but how many of them are actually going to be regularly used by the majority of users? Could the window just be made a little less intrusive to encourage its use?
2. Documentation – there isn’t really, as yet, any real documentation to steer the novice through the various options and features included in the Viewer other than the brief Features and New Preferences options of the website. More needs to be done in this area – and I’m half contemplating volunteering to help!
3. A small flaw in the RLV implmentation. RLV is designed to enhance the BDSM experience by making restraints harder to remove (they will in theory *not* detach in an RLV-enabled Viewer). This is a psychological boon to BDSMers as it increases the mental thrill of bondage. Emerald is supposedly an RLV-compliant / capable Viewer – BUT it fails to fully meet the RLV criteria. By dint of a menu option readily accessible through the ADVANCED menu – any locked restraint can be accidentally or deliberately knocked off. What is more, due to the IM controls in Emerald – it is entirely possible that the keyholder for such a locked item will not be informed the items has been either removed or replaced. This is something of a critical gameplay flaw, and one that does need addressing for Emerald to truly carry the “RLV badge”.

About the only thing that induced a “meh” response was the selection of skins included with the Viewer. While they are impressive when looked at in PREFERENCES, the majority are pretty eye-boggling from a graphics design perspective. Granted, there is only so much you can ever tweak and change in the UI, and so all skins are going to be limited in application and appeal – but it has to be said, the majority of those included in Emerald make even the boring default blue look interesting. I’ll therefore be sticking with the tried and trusted (and easiest on the eyes) Silver.

There are a couple of things I do miss from Cool Viewer, however – and would love to see incorporated into Emerald. These are:

• Allowing MU* pose styles, so that “:” can be used in place of “/me” to denote emotes (e.g. “:smiles” instead of “/me smiles”)
• Auto-close of Out-of-character brackets (i.e. automatically adding “))” to the end of all comments starting with “((” )

Both of these features within Cool Viewer are a major boon to role-players across the grid.

That said, none of the above are in any way showstoppers preventing the widespread use of Emerald. Rather, they are niggles – even if the RLV issue is one that particularly disappoints. And “niggles” brings me on to the last “negative” with this Viewer. Which is this: just why has Emerald been the victim of so much unfounded and downright inaccurate vitriol in SL?

People have been blabbing about it being “lag inducing” (it isn’t – it is perhaps the Viewer that has gone the furthest to try and reduce lag), through to the idea that the developers are hacks after your credit card details (utter nonsense). Yet the fact is, Emerald presents no greater risk to users than any other 3rd party viewer, whether they fully conform to the Open Source gpl standards (such as Hippo, CV, etc.), or have been tweaked by a creator who refuses to release the code back into the OS environment (such as KLee’s Viewer). Quite why Emerald has been subjected to more scare-mongering than its “rivals” is beyond me.

Maliciousness, perhaps, on the part of those simply opposed to Open Source? Who knows.

Anyway, the only true way of discovering how good (or bad) a Viewer is, is to try it for yourself. Right now, I stand convinced. I’ll even live with COMMUNICATE being back on my Viewer buttons and FRIENDS disappearing once more; Emerald will, alongside of Cool Viewer, now be my Viewer of choice.

But don’t just take my word for it – go take a look for yourself.