About

Why Slipstream?

Second Life has grown up a lot over the years. The way viewers draw it mostly hasn't. Slipstream is our answer to that.

The problem

If you've ever walked into a packed club or a big event and watched your frame rate fall apart, you've seen it. It happens even on expensive gaming PCs. The graphics card is sitting mostly idle while the rest of the computer struggles to keep up with everything on screen.

What we did about it

We rebuilt the part of the viewer that draws the world, using a modern graphics engine that hands the work to your graphics card. Busy scenes stay smooth, and it frees up room for nicer lighting, better shadows and features that weren't practical before.

In our own testing in a busy scene, Slipstream ran at about 90 frames per second. Every scene and every computer is different, but that's the kind of smoothness we're aiming for.

What it's like to use

It's still Second Life, with the same world, friends and inventory. Your existing account works as-is. Slipstream chooses graphics settings to suit your computer the first time you run it, looks sharp on high-resolution screens, and runs on both Windows and Linux. We've also added the kind of conveniences people ask for, such as a frame rate limiter, a third-person shooter camera and more flexible controls, and we keep adding more.

Where it's at

Slipstream 1.0 is out: the stable release is ready for everyday use, and the beta channel gets new features first. Bug reports really do help. You can file them on our issue tracker, and the help pages cover installing and common problems. For questions and help from other users, join the in-world Slipstream Support group (web profile). Slipstream is free; if you'd like to help pay for its development and servers, see Support Slipstream.

Credits

Slipstream builds on the work of the Alchemy team and Linden Lab's Second Life viewer. It's free and open source under the LGPL 2.1. Second Life is a trademark of Linden Research, Inc.; Slipstream is not affiliated with or endorsed by Linden Lab or the Alchemy team.