The development of the Kokua and Imprudence Viewers has been somewhat stalled for several months for a wide range of reasons, all of which are understandable given the voluntary nature of Viewer development in general.

At the end of January 2012, the Kokua / Imprudence team held an open meeting at which the future of both viewers was discussed, and following this, a blog update was put out summarising the conclusions reached, and which reads in part:

We’re going to continue to develop Third Party viewers with a focus on cross supporting Second Life and OpenSim/Aurora. However we’re going to focus on Kokua in the future, the ultimate fate of Imprudence is still undecided though as we may push for a final 1.4 release but nothing that takes up too much of our time. Kokua will use Second Life v3.2 as a base, we feel the LL code for v3.2 has matured greatly beyond v2 and v3 and we’ll of course make our own modifications to it to make it more “purple” in flavor. It is also our intent to finalize the name change from Imprudence to Kokua, Imprudence and Kokua are separate viewers and the project has historically been called the Imprudence project. The intent was to switch from Imprudence to Kokua as the next generation client was released but it has been dragged out for quite a while now and caused confusion, so we’re going to finish the change over to Kokua.

This is excellent news for the SL TPV / OpenSim worlds, as Imprudence has long had an outstanding reputation for usability and has been popular across the wider metaverse (may of us who bounce between SL and other grids find it to be our Viewer of choice when outside of SL). That the expertise that has made Imprudence so popular and so capable a Viewer is now being brought to bear on the V3.2 FUI and capabilities is good news and means that both OS and SL stand to gain given wider choice in Viewer options.

Of course, many will lament what amounts to the eventual passing of Imprudence – but again, all Viewer development is only voluntary, and teams / devs must move in the direction that they feel is most appropriate for them in terms of building and maintaining a viable Viewer and it would be unfair to chastise the Kokua / Imprudence team for their decision.

Work will, for the forseeable future, focus on Windows (32-bit) and Linux 32-bit & 64-bit), although it is hoped both Windows and Mac 64-bit options will be available “down the road” – with the further caveat that Mac development is dependent upon the team gaining a Mac developer. Sounds reasons are given for not focusing on a Windows 64-bit version from the off, although the 32-bit version will have SSE optimisation.

Alongside the core work on the Viewer, the Kokua / Imprudence blog & forums are liable to see an overhaul in the near future as well.

As well as the blog post on the subject, you can also read the full transcript of the meeting, if you were unable to attend.