SLiteChat 1.6.3

SLiteChat is an open-source instant messaging client for the Second Life world. Use it to talk to your friends without having to load up all of those heavy graphic goodies. Useful for those at work times.

What it is:

SLiteChat is a lightweight client which allows you to connect to the Second Life system and perform local chat and instant messaging with avatars in-world.

What it is not:

SLiteChat is not intended to be a fully-functional in-world viewer for Second Life. If you are looking for that, check out instead the Second Life wiki.

Motivation

Developer commentsWhy another text-only client? Well, for one, this is something I’ve been wanting to do since I first got into Second Life. One of the issues was not having to invoke the fat client (viewer) with all the wiz-bang OpenGL stuff just to make a simple IM to my friends in-world.  Secondly, I love open source software, and this is my way of giving back. Thirdly, I want to understand the SL codebase and this was a great way to accomplish that!
Architecture

I based the UI architecture around a new C++ library I created called LLChatLib. This library provides a façade class which wraps and hides LL libraries used to create the main open source viewer. The libraries I extracted are:

- llcommon
- llinventory
- llmath
- llmessage
- llvfs
- llxml

with a few class files taken from the main viewer code (newview). The idea is you have only one easy to use interface which allows you to connect to the in-world chat/IM facility.

The UI itself is a light wrapper around LLChatLib. It contains a listview window of friends, a local chat window and tabs for any IM conversations you create. See this post to see a screenshot.

SLiteChat runs under Microsoft Windows XP+, GNU/Linux and Macintosh OS/X.


Product's homepage

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· This release patches a major bug that was introduced on the 1.6.X line--when SLiteChat loses connection to the server and times out, a dialog pops up informing the user that the connection was lost. However, in previous versions, that dialog would pop up so many times recursively that it was shown that this crash could render the user's computer completely inoperative.