How to set up the new Second Life viewer for the adult content changes.

If you haven’t downloaded the new viewer yet (1.23.4) here’s a quick guide to how you should consider setting it up.

Don’t do the auto install from the log in page, if you do this you won’t be able to go back to your current viewer if you find the bugs are unacceptable.

• Go to the download page and download it to your hard drive.
• When you install it, create a separate folder for it and name it something you can find again.
• When it has installed, there will be an icon on your desktop, find it and check properties.  If it points to the folder where you just installed it then rename the icon to something that tells it apart from your current viewer.
• Start it and log in as usual.

Once you’re inworld, there’s a few things you need to do to set it up properly.

1. go to preferences > general and towards the bottom of the page you’ll see a dropdown with the maturity settings.  Set that to your choice.  If you don’t, then you won’t be able to search or go to the adult continent.

2.  Check your settings there are still as you want them as some of them have reverted to default.

Once you’ve done that, save and close preferences and open search.  You should see three boxes for the different maturity levels and should be able to tick any or all of the levels you chose.  If you can’t, go back to the preferences and check that it did save your selection.

Now you’ve saved and checked your settings you don’t have to continue to use the viewer if you don’t want to.  Your maturity preference is saved to the server so you can go back to your current viewer if you want to.  You won’t be able to search for adult content using the old viewer but you will be able to use  landmarks or the map or be tp’d to Zindra.

If you want to do a few more tweaks to the new viewer then read on.

• You’ll find that walls and prims won’t appear to rez properly with the new viewer, this is because they have changed one of the settings to a number too low to be useful.

To fix this you need to go into the advance menu (cntrl-alt-d for those of you who can’t see it up the top) and select “debug settings” in the box you’ll see type “rendermaxNodeSize”   and then set it to anything over 6000. It seems that 8192 will give you good results without reducing your frame rate.    Thanks to Ann Otoole for highlighting this fix.

• You may also have noticed that sculpties haven’t really been rezzing properly for a while now in any of the viewers.  Since you’re in the debug settings if you want to fix this type “RenderVolumeLODFactor” and change the number to 4.  It seems it can go higher so you can tweak it until you see your sculpties the way you wish to.

and if you’ve downloaded the new viewer over the top of your old one and want to go back to 1.22, you can download the old viewer here and follow the steps above to install it separately.