Snowglobe
What is Snowglobe?
Snowglobe is an Open Source development project for viewers that connect to the Second Life Grid. Goals include:
- Encourage development of alternative viewers that create choice for Second Life Residents
- Encourage research and innovation of new viewer functionality
- Collaborate with the development community to incorporate patches that enhance the official Second Life viewer
Snowglobe (sometimes 'SG') is commonly used to refer specifically to the Snowglobe viewer.
Website: http://snowglobeproject.org/
Downloads
Release Downloads
These are well tested versions, recommended for regular users.
Development Downloads
These are more recent versions, but may be more buggy and less tested. Please report any issues you have with these downloads either to the JIRA, or to the OSDev mailing list.
[ Windows | Mac | Linux ]
[ Windows | Mac | Linux ]
For the very latest development installer downloads, look for build announcements on the sldev-commits mailing list.
License
Snowglobe source code is offered under the GPLv2 license with FLOSS exception.
Developers are encouraged to complete the Second Life Viewer Contributor Agreement. Submissions to Snowglobe cannot be included in the official Second Life Viewer without this agreement in place.
Get Source Code
The most recent source code for both Snowglobe and the SecondLife Viewer (viewer-external) is available through SVN. See Version control repository for information about where to checkout the source code from.
You can also download source packages for released versions from the source downloads page.
Build Instructions
The Get source and compile page gives general information about how to compile the source. For a quick step-by-step instruction for building on Linux, see Compiling_the_viewer_(Linux).
Features
- Current Release Cycle - information on features and patches pending for the current release cycle,
- Main features in Snowglobe 1.2 that are not in the Second Life 1.23 viewer:
- Media Rendering Plugin System - Plugin architecture enabling media of all kinds to render in Snowglobe.
- Interop Viewer Open Grid Protocol - Documents how OGP (now VWRAP) is implemented in Snowglobe
- HTTP Texture - Project to transition from custom UDP-based protocol to HTTP for texture delivery.
- S3 based viewer map - Utilizing HTTP Texture for the in-viewer map.
Development
- Commit mail and build system notifications: sldev-commits mailing list.
- Developers discussion: opensource-dev mailing list.
- Snowglobe Committer List - List of people with direct commit access who are working to build this viewer
- Snowglobe Development Process - Development practices for everyone working on the Snowglobe viewer
- Snowglobe QA - More details on the process we'll use to maintain high quality releases
- Open Source Meeting - Regular in-world meetings where residents and Lindens discuss Open Source development issues, mainly focusing on Snowglobe.
- Browse source: snowglobe branch in Trac - browse the source code we're working on
- Snowglobe 1.x Doxygen
- SnowGlobe 2.0 Doxygen
For an introduction to the goals of the Snowglobe viewer, see Philip's blog post: "Intensifying Open Source Effort" which describes our new approach to open source. See Philip's mail to sldev for a little bit more about the name.