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Features

What Slipstream adds on top of a standard Second Life viewer, and where to find it.

Rendering

  • GPU-driven Vulkan renderer. The graphics card culls, sorts and draws the whole scene, so busy places (clubs, events, crowds) stay smooth. Avatar skinning and most avatar animation also run on the GPU.
  • Ray-traced shadows for the sun, moon and spotlights on RTX / RX 6000 and newer. See Graphics & performance.
  • AMD FSR 3.1 upscaling and TAA for high-resolution monitors.
  • Translucent, coloured shadows from glass, contact-hardening shadow filtering and god rays.
  • Smooth terrain, hex-tiled terrain textures and seven tone mappers.
  • Ray-traced reflections (Reflection Detail → Raytraced) on supported cards.
  • Planar mirrors, reflection probes and screen-space reflections.
  • Sim-surround objects (weather domes, horizon rings) render correctly at any distance.

Video memory

Slipstream keeps within your graphics card's memory by stepping detail down temporarily when it runs short and bringing it back afterwards, instead of stuttering or crashing. Texture compression, a GPU-ready texture cache on disk and a Texture memory option keep memory use low. See Video memory.

Sound

  • Sound cache: sounds you've heard are kept between sessions so they play straight away, in their own folder with a size limit you choose. See Sound cache.

Photo Studio (Me → Photo Studio…, or F1)

A photo and look studio in up to four panels: colour grading (colour wheels and curves), tone mapping, exposure, film grain, vignette, depth of field, sky effects (aurora, meteors, stars), shadow and scene settings, and scopes (waveform, vectorscope, histogram), with undo/redo, saved looks and Find. See Photo Studio.

Poser (Me → Poser)

Pose yourself, your animesh or any avatar near you, joint by joint, seen only by you. See Poser.

Camera and movement

  • Third-person shooter camera: Preferences → Move & View. The mouse steers the camera around your avatar, WASD moves relative to it, and left-click acts like mouselook. Right-click or Esc releases the mouse. The Avatar faces camera direction sub-option keeps your avatar turned the way the camera looks.
  • Camera tools from Black Dragon: bone camera, head tracking, depth-of-field focus modes, camera recording and playback, and right-click-drag orbit.
  • Skip the pre-jump crouch (Move & View).
  • Clicking my avatar keeps camera, Left-click never sits me and Turn to face what I select stop the camera or your avatar doing things by accident. See Camera and clicking.

See Look and feel for skins, fonts, pie menus, hover tips and Quick Preferences.

  • Slipstream skin in blue and purple (the default), plus Alchemy, Heretic, Ionic and Second Life.
  • Hover tip options: turn in-world hover tips off, show them on all objects or on land, and set the delay (Preferences → Advanced).

  • Freeze World (World menu, Ctrl+Shift+F) pauses the world for you only, for photos.

  • Pie menus (Preferences → Skins → Pie menus): the classic circular right-click menu, as an alternative to the list menus.

  • Custom fonts: Preferences → Skins → Add Font… takes a .ttf file, installs it and switches to it. Font and size changes apply immediately, without a restart.
  • Import from Another Viewer (Me menu): bring your chat history, settings, key bindings, toolbars and more over from Firestorm, Black Dragon, Alchemy or the official viewer. See Importing from another viewer.
  • Chat bar with optional nearby-chat toasts alongside chat bubbles.
  • Report a bug from inside the viewer (Help → Report Bug), with system details, a cleaned-up log excerpt and a screenshot, no account needed. See Reporting bugs.
  • Discord status: show on your Discord profile that you're in Second Life, optionally with what you're doing, your name, region and a "Teleport to me" button. See Discord status.
  • @mentions in nearby chat suggest everyone in the region, not only those in chat range.
  • Chat window in mouselook, Enter shortcuts for shout / whisper / OOC, MU* poses and a chat channel selector. See Chat extras.

Avatars

  • Refresh Animations fixes an avatar stuck in a T-pose or a frozen animation, and Refresh Textures re-downloads an avatar's or object's textures. See Fixing stuck avatars.
  • Gesture Sets save groups of gestures and switch between them in one click, from a window or the status bar. See Gesture Sets.
  • Outfit folders organise My Outfits into folders, with automatic grouping by name prefix. See Outfit folders.

Building and content

See Building tools for details.

  • HUD zoom while editing: scroll to zoom the HUD layer in for detail work or out to find lost HUDs.
  • Pivot at root prim, a Level of detail table for meshes, and a Links tab listing every link and face.
  • Local Assets (Build menu): preview mesh, animations, textures and materials from your computer before uploading.
  • Area search (Build menu) and teleport history (Me menu), from Firestorm.
  • Particle editor (Build → Object → Edit Particles).
  • LSL preprocessor in the script editor, from Firestorm.
  • Flexible prims bend smoothly (skinned on the GPU) and stay selectable while they move.

Snapshots

Snapshot presets go up to 10240 × 4320 without needing a custom size.