[Originally posted 26-Aug-2010 here]
Well, I’ve been using Imprudence for a few days now.
I’m pretty impressed. It has a lot of Emerald’s features, and some are better resolved – I like the fact the client-side radar is much smaller and hung off the bottom of the mini-map. Although I’d like to be able to increase its size without increasing the size of the mini-map (ie. stretch it vertically)
It’s lacking Emerald’s hacky multiple attach points – the Imprudence developers are planning on back-porting proper multiple attach support from Viewer 2.0 and state that they are not interested in hacks and dodgy code. I rather like that attitude.
It’s also lacking Emerald’s spell checker and command-line mode (so you can’t type “dd 256” to set your draw distance to 256m). This means that the quick-rezz gesture that many of us use doesn’t work. However Imprudence appears to have a quick-rezz built in (I’m basing that on the fact there is a checkbox to turn it off in the Advanced settings).
Like Emerald, it is possible to hide your LookAt and PointAt beacons. However, unlike Emerald it is not presented in a nice friendly setup page. To, say, make LookAt private you need to go to
Advanced -> Character -> Private LookAt
Likewise it supports Emerald’s famous “Breast Physics” but the settings are all hidden away in the Debug menu rather than being in a nice friendly setup page.
Imprudence also support the new tattoo and alpha layers from Viewer 2.0 and I think that will interest a lot of people.
Emerald v1.23.5.1636 (the last version I used) didn’t have this, although I’m told the very latest Emerald does.
One feature I do like in Imprudence that I haven’t seen in other Viewers is the title bar of the Communicate window shows how many unread IMs you have. This is very, very useful when you get IM hell and the tabs go off the end of the window. No more missing an IM because the tab that is flashing is off the screen.
In summary:
Imprudence is a little rough round the edges, being only a Release Candidate rather than a full stable release, and did crash on me several times when changing settings. However, I think it has a lot of potential and I felt instantly at home with it. I would certainly recommend it to Emerald refugees like myself.
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Update:
I wrote the following in response to an nice email from someone and thought I would share…
“It’s true that Imprudence isn’t as friendly as Emerald – there are less whizzy menus and stuff is hidden away in menus more. However the Imprudence team do seem to be better on documentation and they have a FAQ on their Wiki that tells Emerald users where stuff is. You’ll find Imprudence has more features than you think.”
Nice review! 🙂 I’ve been using Imprudence extensively, specially because it supports Opensim so well. The “standard” Opensim viewer, Hippo, doesn’t seem to be getting much development lately, and OTOH the Imprudence team have had a number of meetings with Opensim people (see for example http://imprudenceviewer.org/2010/04/28/impdev-opensim-grid-tour-reminder-inworldz/) and have introduced several absolutely needed features (hollows up to 99%, megaprims, nanoprims, …) and also some shiny new experimental stuff like LightShare (see http://imprudenceviewer.org/wiki/LightShare).
I love the quick access buttons to the presets and the sky editor a lot, for example — this makes my life as a photographer and a machinimatographer a lot easier.
And I’ve found that Imprudence is pretty stable for me — I did never had such stability with Kirsten’s viewer, for example. Of course, YMMV.
I am using Imprudence and really like it ~ yes there are some things it doesnt have but am sticking with this one since the others I had a major problem with the voice issue….