Viewer Wars

(cue stirring music)

A long, long time ago, in a virtual galaxy far, far away; Avatars fought wars over the right to view their universe in their own way.

There exist incredible tales of Hippo's dancing, the mighty Phoenix rising from the remains of a crushed emerald that once burned so brightly, and the Beatles sang Dear Prudence....wait....I mean some guys did a viewer called Imprudence. Meanwhile the Cool guys who thought they were all mad, distanced themselves from all of this and went and did their own thing.

Ok,ok...scratch the music ! Let's get back to (virtual) reality :)

Viewer choice is a very personal thing, and people swear by one or the other. Which is best ? The greatest ? Has the most features ? Well the truth is they all do things in more or less the same way with some differences.

Some of those are purely cosmetic, some are better for OpenSim and we'll focus today on officialy supported viewers for Island Oasis and a few others that are allowed to connect. I'm not going to go into lot's of details on each one or it'll take five minutes to scroll from the top to the bottom of this blog post ! Visit the respective links in the opening paragraph for a complete feature list and download links.

First of all, there are only two viewers at this time that are officially supported on the Island Oasis grid. they are; Hippo and Imprudence. Inworld you can expect that if you have any problems with either of these two viewers, or need help setting them up, then the Mentors ( the awesome team that provide help to new users) will be able to advise you on that. They are both also available to download direct from the Island Oasis web site and getting them from there means you have the fabulous,cool, lovely IO icon for the viewer.

Hippo, is designed for OpenSim. It has features not supported in that other well known grid that we are to afraid to mention. Well I'm not. The Linden gods cannot scare me ! Hippo is a modified Second Life viewer, It allows building up to a height of 10,000 m, scaling prims up to 256x256x256 m and other exciting features. It looks most like the original 1.23 viewer. I'd never used Hippo before coming to IO and it's a very nice viewer, even featuring a pretty good radar (that I only discovered it had very recently)

Imprudence has some other great features, notably the colour purple, full radar and one as part of the mini map.
It has client Id, where you see the name of the viewer someone is using and a look at feature with the name of the avatar displayed next to the crosshairs. It also supports different skins. My favorite is the dark skin. Dark is cool.
Incidentally, although Hippo doesn't have themes, you can copy one over from another viewer and replace the silver theme with it. All my viewers have the same theme (beacuse that's the way I roll)
Imprudence also has a built in AO, so you can save a Hud on screen and enhanced boobie physics. (I can't write Breasts, it makes me blush) Bear in mind: Imprudence has a stable and experimental version on their web site. The version from the IO site is the stable one. The experimental has more features but might be unstable. Having said that, I've not found any problems with the experimental client.

Now moving along to Phoenix. Phoenix does work in Island Oasis but it was designed primarily for SecondLife ! On opensim grids like IO important features don't work properly, or not at all. The map doesn't work well,and search is broken. In fact search works less well than it used to because the developers moved over to LL's new search system. Things that do work are chat command line options like calc, tp2cam, DD (draw distance) etc.. Enhanced radar, perhaps one of the best. Phoenix supports mesh on grids that have it and outfit inventory linking (again where supported) Please bear in mind that a lot of features, like enhanced build functionality don't work properly in Island Oasis because they were developed to work on the SL grid.


Cool VL viewer is an independant viewer developed by Henri Beauchamp. A really,really cool French guy. He does it all on his own, no team behind him. And I'm including Cool VL because Henri is famous in the virtual world devloper community.
If you ever look at the features of other viewers and their credits, often you will find Henri's name listed for some sort of contribution.
He was the first person to backport Mesh to V1 style viewer, when everyone else (including LL) said it was impossible!
He does have patches from other viewers as well, but suffice to say Cool has all the neat features you'll find in other viewers and then some. The menu and button layout is a little different, separate group and friend buttons instead of an integrated contacts tab for example. Cool VL also has an excellent grid list for most popular virtual worlds, including of course IO.
Overall, and this is just my opinion, this viewer works great for IO. Search and map works as expected and no problems with building or attachments.

Now a word of caution. *glares at you ominously*.. Island Oasis has hypergridding enabled so visitors from other grids can teleport in. If you log in from another grid using ANY version of Viewer 2, Firestorm etc, it will NOT be a good experience. Strange and weird things will happen and you might grow an extra leg, grow a funny mustache (not fun for the ladies) or start singing Seargant Pepper at odd intervals. OK, I made the last line up, but trust me. It will not work well so.......
Stick to the supported viewers. You will get help with them.
If you want to try the other viewers that can connect then feel free to try, some have nice features, but there is NO support for those.


List of viewers allowed to connect:
With Support

• Hippo
• Imprudence

If downloaded from the IO website you will not have to set these two up, the IO grid will be there for you. Download from anywhere else and you will need to set up the grid info manually.
Without support

• Meerkat
• Phoenix
• Cool VL (IO grid allready set up)
• Singularity
• Radegast (text viewer)
• Mobile Grid client (Android only)
• Pocket Metaverse
• Secondlife Inventory (for importing)

So there you have it. A long post and I didn't even get onto all of the viewers.

For the record, I'm "viewer agnostic" and I've tried almost all of them.

Once again, only Hippo and Imprudence are supported in IO but have fun testing the others if you decide to try :)

Thanks to Sugar for the list of clients approved for connection to the Island Oasis grid.