Whither Exodus? Why, heads down and busy!

Posted on by Inara Pey

There have been questions and comments on Exodus floating around in various places, with people wondering what is happening and when the next release might come out. As an Exodus user myself, I fired-off an e-mail to Clix and the team recently to see if they’d be willing to shed a little light on what’s going on.

While the reply was a little shorter than I’d hoped – but then I did ask a couple of questions on releases that the team may not want to commit to, date-wise – Clix did provide a little update:

The team has been busy with personal projects and real life commitments. Naturally this has slowed down production. In addition we have been submitting code upstream to Linden Lab that has been accepted and rolled out in the most recent official viewer release.

Exodus is being actively worked on and will feature a wide range of fixes, performance improvements as well as some neat new features. Our next release will address any and all license concerns. We will continue to produce the best TPV for gamers and visual artists in Second Life. Stay tuned for new feature announcements!

The license concerns mentioned potentially refer to J2C / KDU usage issues. Whether or not this is the case, it is fairly clear from comments passed elsewhere that there has been strong cooperation between LL and the Exodus team in sorting any problems out, which has to be seen as being a good indicator when it comes to LL / TPV cooperation in general, something that has been grumbled about by some commentators following changes to the TPV Policy recently.

One thing is very certain: given the popularity of Exodus amongst users, that the Viewer is being actively worked on will come a good news to many, so keep an eye on the Exodus blog page.

Published by Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

12 thoughts on “Whither Exodus? Why, heads down and busy!”

  1. Good to hear, and thanks for tracking them down.

    I’ve flipped over to Zen for the time being, but I had a run of zero crashes on Exodus for 2 months until some glitchy Mesh stuff (not solved by raising the debug setting) caught up with me.

    I’d love to hop back to it though, because Exodus had a Phoenix-like quick settings pad that was great for windlight, as opposed to the bulky official viewer menu that you have with Zen.

    -ls/cm

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  2. He is probably referring to their decision to re-license their viewer GPL, which has caused their distribution to become illegal (cannot link closed source libs with GPL binary). It has also caused a lot of bad blood withing TPV community because it meant that (and it was designed to) make it possible for the Exodus team to take features for other V3 based viewers such as Firestorm, but the other direction was not possible.

    Another one of their more dubious decisions was to install SSL root certificate on Windows machines of the people that install Exodus. That means that they could issue certificate for say paypal.com and the users of Exodus would be none the wiser since their machines now trust all certificates issues by their team.

    They also don’t have a public source code repository which is a prerequisite for getting listed on Linden TPV Directory. Hopefully with the new release we can see changes to some of these questionable practices by the Exodus team.

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    1. They also don’t have a public source code repository which is a prerequisite for getting listed on Linden TPV Directory

      — Exodus has always had a public source code repository its on the download page and has been there since day 1 release

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        2. Yeah, those are just source drops, take a look, one commit per version:

          https://bitbucket.org/Exodus/viewer/changesets

          That’s not open development. They are only giving the source of the release which they have to anyway because they’re using (L)GPL code.

          In order to comply with TPV policy, actual commits have to be made public.

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        1. So that’s something new. Last time I asked them (about a month ago), I was told that in the combat community you don’t develop in open. Also this newly public repository is not linked from anywhere that I can tell. The source link on Exodus download page only mentions http://hg.exodusviewer.com/viewer which doesn’t resolve at all.

          In any case, a good development towards more transparency.

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  4. Pingback: Exodus and Niran’s Viewer appear on the TPV Directory | Living in the Modem World

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