Deepwire's Blog

As I’ve been talking about virtual worlds a lot recently, Second Life and alternatives, I thought it would be a good to briefly mention some of the Viewers used to access these worlds.  There are many available, with 3 of the more prominent options covered here.

Hippo is perhaps the most well known, recommended by both OpenSim and ReactionGrid, and is a fork of Linden Lab’s viewer, enhanced for OpenSim.  It can be used to access Second Life, with an easy to access Grids menu to let you choose an alternative, or enter details if the grid is not listed.  It still looks like the viewer from Linden Labs, with the same layout and menu options available, with the addition of the Grid and Hippo menus in the Preferences.

Another one often recommended is the Meerkat Viewer, again based on the original from Linden Labs.  With Meerkat, grid selection is easier still, using a drop down menu on the home screen, along with a Grid Manager to enter additional grid details if needed.  Again, its appearance is familiar, with the Preferences menu now including a Database and a Meerkat tab.  The Meerkat tab is quite in depth, having 8 more tabs of options to let you tweak your viewer to suit your needs.

Cool Viewer is less well known, unknown to many users I have spoken to about their choice of viewer.  It was however recommended to me by another Second Life user, and until recently was the one I used, before discovering the others.  It is available as a standalone viewer with the familiar looks, and in the most recent verion I used, as a patch for the official Linden viewer.  Along with the “Cool features”, this viewer is also adult compatible and  “Restrained Life”.

Each of these looks similar to the Linden Lab’s viewer, and offers it’s own added features and optimisations, so it is not really possible to say which is “best”.  Though I’m not doing an in depth performance review, I have done a few tests, configuring each viewer in exactly the same way, and visiting a selection of locations in ReactionGrid, to check the average FPS achieved.

Hippo and Meerkat both perform similarly, although I did find Meerkat to be unstable at times, something that had been mentioned to me by others who use it.  Cool Viewer performed well, but at each location I tested, was around 1.5 FPS below the other two viewers.  Of the three, I now use Hippo as my main viewer, as it performs better graphically than Cool Viewer, without the instabilities of Meerkat.  This doesn’t mean it is the best viewer, nor that you shouldn’t use Meerkat or any other viewer if you want to.  Another viewer has also recently come to my attention, the Imprudence Viewer (http://imprudenceviewer.org/), which I plan to test soon.

Hippo Viewer available: http://mjm-labs.com/viewer/
Meerkat Viewer available: http://meerkatviewer.org/
Cool Viewer available: http://my.opera.com/boylane/blog/
Imprudence Viewer available: http://imprudenceviewer.org/