Alpha Release of Third-Party Thin Client for SL
SLeek is a third-party client for the virtual world of Second Life built from the open-source client code released by Linden Lab in January built around code developed in the libSecondLife project. What’s special about it is that it’s a thin client, “useful for situations where you want to be in-world, but don’t want to have the huge overhead of the graphics engine.” I have no idea what this looks like, as I’m still in Austin on my Mac, but it sounds like you can do a small amount of communication and account management but not building, and possibly not more complex interactions with other avatars. I’m not clear from the project page whether rezzing objects in SLeek is possible or not. According to the site: “SLeek has the ability to send and receive chat, send and receive IMs, do people search, teleport, read inventory, write inventory (create and delete folders), follow avatars, and display LL’s web-based login page.” A few of us have been talking for some time about the need for a thin client for SL, and SLeek could be a nice first step in that direction. [UPDATE: Intolerable Ginsburg has posted some screenshots.]
For most SL users, there’s not a lot of reason to support functions like building, for instance, while they’re in-world. A thin client of stripped-down functionality could do a lot to improve the SL browsing experience. It sounds like SLeek is stripping out graphics functionality to improve framerate. Again, I’m not sure what this looks like. But if this is a step toward a client that will eventually allow a range of communication and account management functions — the kind of things you might want to do on the fly without needing to be immersed in the graphical element of the world — we’re like it. There’s no reason I should have to dive into SL when all I want to do is pay a Herald writer, for instance.
Let us know if you’ve got SLeek running on your machine. We’ll be interested to see where this goes.
Feeds
Been running SLeek since last weekend. It’s useful for one of my laptops that doesn’t have the gfx capability to run SL. The version I have doesn’t support rezzing objects, but I can see how that would be useful for running scripts, etc.
To be clear, SLeek currently doesn’t have any graphics capabilities. The experience is more like irc than anything else.
Additionally, I think its developed in csharp around an extension to libsecondlife rather than the open client source….
I’ve been testing SLeek on and off since October (before the SL client was open-sourced) and it works as advertised; nicely done.
Second Life as MUD?
We won’t have graphics capabilities until Linden Lab resolves some of the legal issues behind Open Source SL client. (e.g. jpeg2000 et al)
Wow. Yet another lowered diffusion barrier.
I tried it briefly a couple of times at work. I seem to be able to log in and shuffle my inventory about (more than I can do with the official client sometimes!) and receive IMs, but my attachments don’t seem to respond to voice commands.
Also, I would have expected to have had some offline IMs in two days, and it didn’t show any, so I think there may be an issue there. I hope I’ve not lost any or people will think I was ignoring them… well, I _do_ ask that people send me notecards rather than offline IMs.
It’s definitely a good idea though, very convenient. Some sort of IM bot that connected to it would be even better!
[…] I caught the post regarding SLeek on 3pointD, so gave it a quick whirl, and grabbed a few screencaps, which are below. […]
First off, stuff like this has been happening since well before open source. This is what libsl was made for.
Can’t someone (that’s not me since, you know, I work on this stuff all damn day and I don’t have time anyways) branch off the viewer libs and do a C/C++ version so we can use this as a plug-in/library architecture to already existing programs?
I mean, I know how much fun and ease C#/.NET brings as a language/platform, but I feel like we’re sitting here inventing interfaces versus mashing things together in a useful (albeit somewhat painful) way.
Hiro: Please. These legal roadblocks exist only in your head. SLeek supports textures right now through the OpenJPEG wrapper I wrote (openjpegnet), try previewing a texture in your inventory in the 0.20 release. Sceneviewer is/was an independent, graphical viewer for Second Life written long before any open source release of SL and long before anyone was whining about the licensing implications of the viewer.
qDot: People have been mashing things up with code reuse, pluggable architectures, and idea mashups for quite a while in the C#/libsecondlife world. Not everyone is happy with the move to a new language but I think one of the only reasons libsecondlife has come this far is by avoiding the pain of C/C++. I also think it would be faster to port libsecondlife to C/C++ then trying to take pieces out of the viewer and make it in to a library, but that remains to be seen.
jhurliman: Well, you can go at it from two directions, really. Watch what’s been done with libsl while ripping llmessage/the init and run loop from the viewer for reuse. It just takes someone with a familiarity with both platforms and the patience to deal with the… tough love of C/C++ (the latter of these two is tougher to find, I think).
I had a dabble with SLeek a few weeks ago…. ideal for my laptop which has non-existent graphics capability. As the posts say, it is more an IM tool. Profiles don’t work, nor does it report who’se on line correctly. I blogged it at http://slmascot.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-it-feels-like-to-be-blind.html
AS the blog entry says - using SLeek is like being blind - you can hear people around you, but you can’t see where you are, or what you are doing.
My advice if using SLeek is to put your avatar in a “safe” locaction (where it is not going to look stupid when you can’t see what is going on around you) & stick to IMs
[…] Via 3pointD. Gracias a Intolerable por le Screenshot. […]