I have discontinued work on my custom viewer with visibility muting support. Instead, I'm focusing on making smaller, incremental improvements to the viewer. You can follow my latest work at my blog.
Taking a page from Nicholaz Beresford's excellent playbook, I'm releasing a private build of the Second Life viewer with some enhanced functionality to help address visual spam in Second Life. The new features in this viewer are primarily intended to help reduce visual spam in Second Life. The viewer is already able to mute the chat from object or avatars that spam the public chat channel. The Able Edition viewer also allows objects to be muted visually, so that they either appear much less intrusively or disappear altogether.
I discussed this idea in a couple of entries on my blog:
Please read the download and installation instructions below to get started with the Unofficial Able Edition of the Second Life viewer.
This viewer is the Second Life Viewer, Unofficial Able Edition, created by Able Whitman.
It is based on the official 1.18.0.6 release, but it has several new features included. It also may contain several new bugs as well, although I have worked hard to minimize any potential problems caused by my changes.
If you experience problems with the Able edition of the viewer, please DO NOT CONTACT LINDEN LAB. They will not be able to help you, since this is not an official viewer release. Instead, please contact me, Able Whitman, either inworld via IM, or via email at "able.whitman@gmail.com".
Please carefully review the latest release notes, especially the "Known issues" section, so that you are aware of known bugs in this test release. Thank you!
Second Life® and Linden Lab® are trademarks or registered trademarks of Linden Research, Inc. All rights reserved. No infringement is intended.
Note that the Able Edition installer will not overwrite any existing files, and it will create a separate preferences configuration file so that it will not overwrite your existing Second Life preferences. This means that when you first run the Able Edition, your preferences will be reset to the defaults.
Please note that currently the Able Edition is available for Windows only.
The Able Edition viewer adds new menu options to the pie menus that appear when you select an object or a parcel of land in Second Life.
When you select an object, one of the menu items in the pie menu that appears is labeled "Mute Visibility", located next to the existing "Mute" menu item. You can select this to visibly mute an object, and select it again to visibly unmute an object (and restore its appearance to normal). You can also unmute an object by removing it from the Mute List (accessible via the View Menu > Mute List).
When you select a parcel of land, one of the menu items in the pie menu that appears is labeled "Mute Parcel". Selecting this item will visibly mute all of the objects that are contained within the parcel, regardless of their altitude. You can restore a parcel to its normal appearance by selecting the "Unmute Parcel" from the same menu, or by removing it from the Mute List.
Important Note on Parcel Muting
Currently, parcel muting does not work properly for non-rectangular parcels. If a parcel is not rectangular (that is, if a parcel has more than 4 edges, or has a "jagged" side), muting that parcel will mute all objects within the bounding rectangle for that parcel. This means that objects which are not strictly inside of the muted parcel may also be muted.
The Mute List will list all objects, residents, and parcels that have been muted. If the name of a muted object cannot be determined, the object ID will be listed instead of just leaving the entry blank. The mute list can also be filtered by mute entry type, so any combination of object, resident, and parcel mutes can be displayed together. For objects, the "Highlight" button will highlight in a white outline the object that is muted, as long as it is within the draw distance of the viewer. For parcels, the "Highlight" button will highlight and objects muted in that parcel, as long as they are within the draw distance.
If you have a resident muted, and you IM them, pay them L$, or offer them inventory, they will automatically be unmuted and removed from the mute list.
The Able Edition also adds a new submenu to the Client > Rendering menu with the following items:
Similar to "Hide Selected", this will cause all visibly muted object to temporarily become completely invisible. This is useful when taking snapshots where you don't even want the "ghosted" objects to be visible. Note that even though you will not be able to see the muted objects, if they are non-phantom, your avatar will still run into them.
This will visibly mute or unmute any objects that you have currently selected with the Build tools.
This will visibly mute or unmute the parcel your avatar is currently standing (or flying) in. This is useful if you cannot directly select the ground inside of the parcel and can't open the Land pie menu.
This will highlight any visibly muted objects visible within the your current draw distance, whether the objects are explicitly muted or muted because they are inside of a muted parcel. To unhighlight the objects, simply move your avatar.
Visibly muting an object, either explicitly or implicitly through a parcel mute, has the following effects:
For muted parcels, all of the above effects are applied to all objects within that parcel.
Thanks to Nicholaz Beresford for the initial idea, encouragement, and help with testing, to Dale Glass for his help getting the installer to work properly, to Duckling Kwak and McCabe Maxsted for their valuable help with testing, and to all the folks on SLDev for putting up with all my questions.