It was a little more than a week ago on December 5 in which Linden Lab announced that Project Bento was now part of the official viewer. For those who don't know, Project Bento has been in development by the Lab for more than a year. The most significant update to avatar design in many years, it allows for more detail in avatar design, such as facial expressions and hand movements, and would allow for more flexibility in nonhuman designs.
Linden Lab is proud to announce that Project Bento is now part of the default Viewer! Bento is probably the single most extensive update to the avatar skeleton ever, and as a result of countless hours of testing, updating, reconfiguring, testing… you get the picture, we are now live. Now everyone can enjoy the extra bones creators have taken advantage of to bring you true quadrupeds, winged avatars, fingers, facial expressions and more.
Xiola Linden stated that the Lab was working on "Best Practice" documents, including tutorials, that would be available next year. For now residents could check out Bento's entry in the Knowledge Base.
With this much-anticipated update, Hamlet Au of New World Notes (and probably a few others) were predicting a number of Second Life's longtime users, whom as a group have an "overwhelming" preference for third-party viewers, would finally start embracing the Linden Viewer. But as it turned out, not many seemed to be downloading it. Apparently people were waiting for Team Firestorm, the developers of the most popular Second Life viewer to come up with their own Bento-integrated viewer.
The demand for a Bento-capable Firestorm Viewer has been overwhelming, to say the least! With over 8,000 people in our preview group running it, is widely regarded as faster by testers and is expected to be a rock-solid update.... Even if you have no intention of using Bento-enabled content or animations, you will need this viewer in order to see it properly on others.
Team Team Firestorm recommended checking out Inara Pey's blog entry on the Bento release, whom would also write about Team Firestorm's Bento viewer.
With The Firestorm Bento-capable viewer out, this means that many more residents will soon be able to see and use avatars making use of the improved avatars. Which means more content creators will be certain to build such avatars. Considering the variety of avatars already on the market from the giant Colossus, to micros, to taurs such as Chakats, and many others, it should be interesting to see what designers come up with in the coming months.
Sources: Linden Lab, New World Notes, Team Firestorm
Bixyl Shuftan
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