Viewer Skins/Starlight
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Important! |
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Use caution when installing these skins, as modifications to your installed software files are not officially supported by Second Life support |
| By: | Hitomi Tiponi |
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| Viewer Version: | 2.0 - 3.3 |
| Information: | Starlight 2.0.1 - 3.3.0837 |
| Source: | Various |
| Image: |
About
StarLight is designed to provide a colourful, versatile and practical alternative to the default skin for Viewer 3. Hopefully it will improve the usability, and promote increased usage of the viewer - all Full and Beta versions of Viewer 3 have a StarLight version produced to work with them.
StarLight consists of a number of previously published viewer tweaks - produced by various residents (see credits in the downloaded 'Read Me' file or in the 'StarLight Skin' tab of the viewer 'About' floater), together with a continual addition of new ones. In addition there is a slight re-skinning to give the interface a lighter feel and several colour variants (called 'Themes'). It should hopefully benefit those people who have no wish to edit the XML code themselves, yet wish to benefit from a number of tweaks made by other residents, without using a third-party viewer.
Over 15,000 downloads so far!
Major Features at a Glance
- Colourful - Five different coloured themes plus two that you can customise yourself
- Versatile - Masses of extra preferences, toolbar options and an extra 'Film' menu
- Practical - Changes to various floaters/panels to make it easier to see and enjoy the world
For fuller details see the 'Major Changes to the Standard Skin' section
Downloads
It is VERY important that you always use the version of StarLight for the appropriate viewer release. Always use the appropriate version from the table below of all supported versions.
ALWAYS DOWNLOAD THE CORRECT VERSION OF STARLIGHT IF YOU SWITCH VERSIONS OF THE VIEWER
StarLight is normally updated here within a couple of hours of Linden Labs issuing a new version of the Viewer (and sometimes before a new version is officially released)
| StarLight Release (all OS's) | StarLight Easy Installer for Windows | Designed for Viewer 3 Release | Date Added | New Features / Notes |
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| StarLight 3.3.0818 | StarLight 3.3.0818 | Viewer 3.3.2 (3.3.2.258114)* | May 30th 2012 | Note that the pathfinding options available in this StarLight skin are not yet activated in this viewer - Release Notes |
| StarLight 3.3.0838 | StarLight 3.3.0838 | Viewer Beta 3.3.3 (3.3.3.259197) | June 11th 2012 | Note that the pathfinding options available in this StarLight skin are not yet activated in this viewer - Release Notes |
* Main Viewer downloaded from the Linden Lab web-site is in bold - to see which version you have look in "Help->About Second Life" in your Viewer
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Beta Versions of StarLight
Occasionally new releases of Starlight are added here to test or see the reactions to new features.
| StarLight Beta Release (click to download) | StarLight Beta easy Installer | Designed for Viewer 3 Release | Date Added | New Features / Notes |
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| none currently available |
StarLight for TPVs
Versions of StarLight are also available for:
- Firestorm - modified versions of StarLight are included with the latest Firestorm Viewer
Discussions, information, support and questions
To discuss StarLight and get news of changes/versions/bugs etc. please visit the Viewer xml and Skinning Forum.
Problems, issues and new feature requests can also be entered on the StarLight JIRA (which is kindly hosted by the Firestorm team).
StarLight is assembled by Hitomi Tiponi, who may be contacted through the aforementioned forum or by IM or notecard in-world.
Major Changes to the Standard Skin
Colouful Changes
Six preset coloured "themes"
- Original Orange - A dark theme with a touch of orange to brighten things up.
- Nostalgia Blue - A theme with buttons and other layout changes to remind you of Viewer 1.
- Silver Blue - A 'dark on light' theme that lifts the gloom from the Viewer interface with cool blue.
- Silver Pink - This 'dark on light' theme is very popular and gives your world a hint of candy-floss.
- Mono Teal - A classy high-definition theme with black text on a light grey/white background and 'teal green' buttons
- Original Teal - LL's original colour scheme for those that love the simple 'teal green' on black look, but with slightly improved contrast.
Two new customisable coloured "themes"
The StarLight Colourful User Interface (CUI) enables full control of many of the colours of the interface - see the CUI Guide for instructions and examples.
- Custom Dark - Ideal for using with a backdrop of a black, navy blue, dark red etc.
- Custom Light - For a brighter, vibrant look this option is ideal for integrating black text with a lighter theme.
Versatile Changes
- Draw Distance slider added to Top Bar (between 32 and 992 metres)
- Comprehensive Shadows, Rendering, Depth of Field and Local Lights settings in "Graphics" *
- Revised Preferences panels - with LOTS of extra options to control graphics, chat and many, many other features *
- More buttons available in the toolbar 'toybox' to drop on the UI toolbars *
- Film menu, for photography and machinima fans *
Practical Changes
- Camera control made smaller than the standard version (similar to the Kirstens Viewer approach but smaller)
- Ability to slide across the World Map to fill it's floater, also with ability to shrink the floater more than at present (useful when driving/sailing) *
- Removable Favorites Bar
- More profile information available in the avatar inspector
- Much smaller Environment Settings Floater
- Better formatting of tabbed IM window (tabs larger and no icons in them)
- Smoother movement of camera and while in mouselook NEW in 3.3 versions *
- Undocked windows are resizeable to a smaller size than Viewer 3 allows
- Tweaks to the skinning and usability (more transparent panels, resizing columns, increasing glow, realigning text etc.)
'*' indicates that these StarLight features are unavailable in the Firestorm version of StarLight (though in some cases there are similar features available)
Recent Release Notes
StarLight 3.3.0838
- Changes to some World Map icons (except nostalgia blue) to make them match the Viewer 3 theme better and slight resizing.
- Slimmer control panel buttons for IM container
- ‘Show controls’ button moved down to IM entry line (credit to Catznip for this idea)
- Revert to white compass directions on World Map for all themes
- Realigning ‘Shop’ and ‘Buy’ labels (bug fix)
- Change ‘color picker’ to ensure that colours are standard across all themes (bug fix)
StarLight 3.3.0818
- Changes to way Grid Option preferences are brought up (separate button at top) to enable longer 'Snap' combo
StarLight 3.3.0803
- Amended for Pathfinding floaters
- Better button colouring for ‘on world’ buttons in CUI ('Quit' at startup/tp and 'Stand/Sit/Stop Flying')
- Preferences text readability improvements
StarLight 3.3.0791
- Camera Position Smoothing included as standard (but much less than Nirans Viewer's setting)
- Slider to adjust Camera Position Smoothing added to Preferences
- Mouse smoothing added for smoother use in mouselook
- Camera Constraints disabled as default
- Special 'no entry lines' for the Silver skins
- Option to stop showing 'no entry lines' added to Preferences
StarLight 3.2.0778
- Inclusion of two sliders in Glow & Derender tab of Graphics prefererences enables visual muting (derendering) of avatars with a certain number of bytes or a certain surface area of attachments (using the RenderAutoMuteByteLimit and RenderAutoMuteSurfaceAreaLimit debug settings recently provided by LL). Switching on this feature initially sets it to low value - simply slide the slider to set to a suitable limit.
- Renamed a texture that was causing the 'Environment settings' toolbar tab to be grayed out even when active in Linux (thanks to Nedrae Messmer for the tip-off).
- Added two check boxes in Setup preferences to enable switching of CurlUseMultipleThreads and RunMultipleThreads, with slight reformatting to allow for their inclusion.
Installation Instructions (all OS's)
INSTRUCTIONS FOR WINDOWS AND LINUX USERS
- Log out of Second Life Viewer 3, if you are using it.
- Go to the directory you use for Viewer 3.
- Copy across the contents of the 'skins' and 'app_settings' folders into the Viewer 3 folder at the same level as the existing folders with the same name, making sure you accept any overwriting of existing files.
- NOTE: This will NOT delete the existing 'skins' folder - it is essential that the only change to the existing 'skins' folder is the change to these two files as well as the addition of the new StarLight skins.
- To uninstall rename the 'panel_login_backup.xml' file to 'panel_login.xml' in the /skins/default/xui/en sub-folder, and 'commands_backup.xml' file to 'commands.xml' in the /app_settings sub-folder.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAC USERS
- Find the Second Life Viewer 3 application in you Applications folder.
- Right click on the Second Life Viewer 3 application icon. You will get a menu.
- Choose "Show Package Contents" from that menu.
- Open the "Resources" folder and scroll down until you see the "skins" and "app_settings" sub-folders of StarLight.
- Make sure you are not actually running Second Life Viewer 3 as you do this.
- Copy the files from the folders in StarLight into the Second Life Viewer 3 application folder - this will add in the new skin elements and will overwrite some files.
- To uninstall rename the 'panel_login_backup.xml' file to 'panel_login.xml' in the /skins/default/xui/en sub-folder, and 'commands_backup.xml' file to 'commands.xml' in the /app_settings sub-folder.
Installation Instructions using easy Windows Installer
Simply download and run the associated file and follow the simple instructions. Ensure that when asked you select the appropriate directory to download StarLight into (this is the one into which you installed the Second Life Viewer) - the installer makes a guess at this but may not be correct.
Activating a New Skin
- Start your Second Life client, but do NOT log in.
- In the log-in screen, select the skin from the drop-down list - it is next to the "Login" button"
- Restart your Second Life client and log in. The new skin should now be active.