Uncheck “Drama” in Preferences

I tried Emerald back before Emerald was cool. Before breast physics or inbuilt animation overrides, I took the viewer for a spin. It wasn’t bad, really. I didn’t care for the way it implemented radar, preferring a HUD onscreen to needing to keep a window open to monitor nearby activity, but otherwise, I liked what I saw. My favorite thing was having direct access to Windlight settings from the main viewer screen. I used that constantly.

But even way back then, drama seemed to follow Emerald. I sat at live music events and watched people who criticized the viewer mysteriously crash when Emerald developers showed up and moved into the region where they sat. Rumor surfaced from what I considered reasonably reliable sources about some of the extracurricular activities of some of the project’s developers, even as other people who I respect deeply started joining the team.

I looked hopefully around the Emerald preferences panel, hoping there was a check box labeled “Drama,” but there simply isn’t. So I gave up the handy tools, uninstalled Emerald, and went back to Snowglobe. I dragged the Advanced Sky Editor window to the bottom of the screen and treated it like a built-in pop-up menu of Windlight settings. Adaptation wasn’t as hard as I expected.

Since then, I have been able to watch the drama from a distance:

• A catalog of IP addresses of Second Life users collected by Emerald developers was released, containing information allowing the connection of avatars to their alts.
• Some of the members of the Emerald team began the “Onyx project.” Leaked source code revealed it to be a copybot viewer. At one point, this project requested that information about current exploits be submitted to them rather than as security JIRAs to Linden Labs.
• Emerald began using a .dll to encode .jpg files that included potentially personally-identifying information inside the baked avatar images uploaded to Second Life. The code for this file is not available for inspection by potential users of the viewer (or by most of the development team). When confronted, the developers released a fix which they claimed no longer leaked this data, but actually just encrypted it.
• Emerald’s login page was used as a DDoS attack, causing every Emerald user to become complicit in their attack on a detractor every time they logged in.

This last transgression appears to have been the breaking point for some Emerald users, and social media yesterday evening was abuzz with people  looking for the Drama check box, too.

All this makes me wonder about the future of Emerald. After all,  only a fraction of Second Life users are plugged into SL-related social media. Those casual users don’t read the official blog, much less the blog postings, tweets, and plurks from other users. Emerald’s did not gain mainstream acceptance until they introduced breast physics, and that was through word-of-mouth of the new feature. Word of questionable behavior of a viewer’s development team doesn’t seem to travel anywhere near as quickly as word of full-motion body parts, so it will be interesting to see whether drama overcomes the average user’s inertia.

I’ll be watching with curiosity from the cheap seats of my LL-issue viewer. I may not have the bells and whistles, but at least I am not trying to uncheck the “Drama” preference.