Viewer Mania

Lludmila visits Kenjin.

Lludmila and I have been around the virtual world and "entertained"* many a viewer .  Among the third party viewers, I have used Emerald, Phoenix, Firestorm, Cool VLViewer, and the non-graphic interface Metabolt**.  I enjoyed all of them.  The killer was mesh.  I'm sure mesh is a lovely idea and all (I don't build, I don't understand the mechanics behind building or scripting, I just use stuff), but one day my two favorite viewers (I was actually getting used to V3 and relying on it as an alternative to Firestorm) stopped working.  And I blame mesh, although it used to work on both before the final update they made.  I log on to the V3 or Firestorm and crash.  I can't last more than a couple of seconds.  I have expunged them from my harddrive and done clean downloads and it doesn't change.  I was crestfallen until I found the Cool VL Viewer (thanks to the Virtual Vagabond blog).

Something is always happening that makes me think I will be stuck in RL(tm) forever, but somehow there's always a work-around, and Cool VL Viewer was it.  It has mesh and it doesn't turn me into Crashie Crashwell McCrashypants.  It's like Snowglobe (or "Showglove" as I seem to be trying to type instead), so I'm familiar with the format.  It's been wonderfully stable.

Ducky is rather small and can be set to wander.

But yesterday I put on my frowny face because I was trying to find a hunt item at Artizan (yeah, so I don't understand scripts - but I can find people who do!).  I was there to buy a script to help me find objects.  This is because, as referenced in a different blog, I had lost my rubber ducky.  For some reason, I was not tasked in group membership with locating objects from the land menu (and even if I were, I couldn't remember the name of ducky to search for it).  Cool VL Viewer doesn't have the cool Phoenix/Firestorm area search.  I had exhausted myself with wireframe, first trying to find my ducky and then at Artizan trying to find the hunt gift.  I eventually found ducky when I saw something moving on the minimap.  What the heck could that be? I wondered.  Five more minutes of camera zooming and then wireframe and I found ducky wandering under the prim beneath my house and down in the water.  But by then I'd just had it.

The red postbox.

I was at Artizan because I knew they sold an object search script - I'd seen it there when I was buying other things. [I love my red postbox!]  But I wasn't going to buy it until after I found the hunt objects (I mean, it was unlikely, but what if that were the hunt gift?!  Wouldn't I feel the silly-billy!).  I was in a quandary.  I went to my back-up files (on one of those back-up towers my husband bought me before the Great Harddrive Wipe) to see if there was some long, lost viewer I could use - but I had been too thorough.  I tried Firestorm three more times and then deleted it and its little dog Toto again.  I went to the website to try one last time to download it and I saw you could still download Phoenix.

I did.  It worked.  It has mesh.  I went back to Artizan, picked up the hunt items and I'm a happy camper again.  Now, if ducky gets lost again (first of all, I made sure he was labeled "ducky"), I can find him with area search.  Or, I can do what I had intended in the beginning, which was to find it in my inventory, get the commands from the notecard, and use those. ***





* This is a paraphrase of a friend from grad school who had "been around the world and [ahem] effed him a lot of women" - which he used as credentials to opine on something that had to do with neither.  I thought it was hilarious at the time.

** Metabolt is great if you want to run your alt at the same time and don't want to fry a fourth graphics driver.

*** 4Kittens of the Apocalypse has a prim retriever HUD that has my name written all over it.