Singularity Viewer Updates For First Time in Over a Year

By Bixyl Shuftan

Some good news for Second Life residents whom prefer to use the Singularity viewer. For the first time since March 2016, the third-party viewer has finally updated.

While most users of Second Life use the Firestorm Viewer, the official viewers from Linden Lab having fallen out of favor from experienced residents since it gave them an overhaul in 2009 with the less than popular V-2, there one of a number of viewers available to go about the virtual world (some of which can also be used for InWorldz, Opensim, and others). In the past, Singularity was the second most popular viewer. But recent statistics on it's current popularity are unavailable. The viewer was developed with the goal of preserving the general "look and feel" of the classic Linden viewer. Inara Pey classified it as a "V-1 Style Viewer" along with Cool VL on her list of Second Life Viewers.

Singularity was updated every few months up to February 27, 2015 with a "minor patch." But then the team was hit with problems. The big one was the death of one of it's engineers, Latif Khalifa had died, word reaching Second Life's residents in early March 2016. Singularity also stated another developer had left to "pursue other interests." So the team was "hampered in our ability to update and test the viewer by a lack of infrastructure and hardware issues." While they were able to get another engineer, Mika-Pyon, and they managed to solve most of their hardware issues, they had a long list of things to update. They are still in need of someone who can update their Macintosh computer viewer.

After downloading the upgrade and trying it out, the most noticeable improvement to me was that I no longer had problems listening to others over voice. While there were still problems seeing mesh items at a distance, I didn't notice the worst of the problems I had been having. It's fair to say the mesh problem on my viewer could be due to the old graphics card.

More details about Singularity version 1.8.7, and what was updated, can be read (here).

Source: Modem World , Singularity 

Bixyl Shuftan