Next SL Viewer Release to bring major progress

Besides facilitating the new adult content policy LL announced recently (which is also the reason this release will be out later than anticipated) the next release of the official client will incorporate features like shadows, flexi prims and bulk permission editing!

Boy Lane, developer of the alternative Cool Viewer, divulged on the forums along with posting a link to his pre-alpha Shadow Viewer 1.23 release:

"... It is purely meant as an early preview, perhaps to take some nice snapshots, and play around, but it is not meant for any serious work. It is something pre-alpha, it will crash. ...

Included features are:
Bulk permission editing (part of official 1.23 to come)
Enhanced building tools (part of official 1.23 to come)
Flexible Sculpties
Double click to wear attachments
Large Prims (only for Opensim grids)
Maximized Network Bandwidth
MUPose Style
Worn Inventory Tab
Teleport History
...and a number of more goodies and (hopefully) stability fixes. Too many to mention here ..."

Yummy.

Shadows over Second Life

Yesterday I finally tried out Kirsten Lee's shadow viewer SD5-R1, which I had downloaded just shortly before Kirsten decided to pull all her viewers from the public.

After installing the viewer there are a few settings to check in the advanced debug menu ... and then, if one is lucky, there are rendered shadows, and little side-effects. In my case there was a certain unnatural glow that hurt the eye, which makes this viewer not the standard choice.
But as you can see in the video above (focus on the large cocktail glass!), the shadows cast are indeed amazing.