[sldev] Client detection and official viewer signatures.

[Maya Remblai]

There is truth to the breaking compatibility breaks content argument, 
but as you yourself said, it should be up to the user how they want to 
view the world and its content. LL has done far worse in breaking 
content lately, whereas the third parties have worked to fix it and add 
to it. It's not hard to see why I side with the third party developers 
on this one. ;)

That said, it's also true that the third party viewers don't necessarily 
do it right, like the IM spam from Emerald. But the few users who know 
about it seem to feel that it's better to have that, AND be able to see 
the world/their builds/their avatars the way the creators intended, as 
opposed to using an LL viewer that does neither.

As for Snowglobe, I've said it before and I'll keep saying it as long as 
the status quo is maintained: It doesn't do anything the end-user can 
see as different, currently. No new features, no new bug fixes. Under 
the hood work is needed of course, but it can't be pushed as a good 
alternative viewer until it does something special that end users can 
actually see that makes it different from the default viewer. Besides 
having a different name and icon. That's why third party viewers are so 
popular, they DO stuff.

Maya

Nexii Malthus wrote:
> Emerald has moved over to Client-to-Client communication via Instant 
> Messages. For client detection every single agent that comes into 
> presence gets spammed by Emerald 4 times to test for the presence of 
> the c2c communication API. (Not sure why it spams 4 times, even though 
> I never ever had a IM packet lost so far)
>
> Snowglobe won't be getting exotic features like this any soon, since 
> they are all basically hacks designed to circumvent the slow progress 
> by the propietary simulator code development.
>
>
> Back on topic, breaking compatibility IS breaking content, the same 
> way if you render a HTML tag somewhat differently you might be 
> breaking millions of websites. Websites can adapt though because they 
> can see use the user agent, we just don't have that luxury in SL yet.
>
> - Nexii
>