Maybe a bit too Dazzling?

Being a tad geeky, as soon as the new Release Candidate was made available I was there downloading it. Over all, for me it's been great, I haven't had performance this good since I first logged into Second Life almost 1 year ago. Yeah, had to tweak a few graphics settings to get myself to a balance of performance vs decent looking graphics but it wasn't too difficult to achieve (see Torley's blog post and tutorial on how to tweak the settings here)

However......the Release Candidate also includes the Dazzle user interface changes by default. Now while I applaud the the viewer folks for trying to improve the interface, the color scheme they decided to use leaves a lot to be desired. I find that the colors are hard on the eyes after looking at them for a while and it gets hard to read (especially if you need glasses for computer work). And the new icons aren't very intuitive, I usually have to hover the mouse cursor over them to know which is which. Oh, they're nice, fancy little graphics, but they just don't work in this case.

But, the good news is that Dazzle was designed to be what's called "skinable" which means it's possible to change the colors and graphics to most anything you want. I'm sure eventually, there'll be all sorts of color schemes put up out there for download.

Right now, that doesn't help those of us that don't like the Dazzle interface.

Or does it? I was playing around with changing the color settings using the information on the Second Life Wiki page Skinning HowTo Basics and I noticed some links down at the bottom of the page, one in particular.

Skinning HowTo/Revert 1.20 to a Classic_look by McCabe Maxsted

Yes, a page with detailed instructions for how to switch the Dazzle color scheme back to the old style viewer look, including file downloads for the XML changes necessary and the graphics you need.

So if you don't like the Dazzle colors, here's your alternative. I found the instructions for downloading and installing the changes to be very easy to follow and it resulted in my having a more agreeable color scheme for my Release Candidate viewer.

Oh, certainly I'll keep an eye out for alternative color schemes to try and will give Dazzle another look when it hits the main viewer, but at least we have an alternative to the new interface right now for those of us who don't like the light blue color scheme.

And if you're really adventurous, study those two wiki pages and try to create your own custom color scheme. If you do one and make it available for download, leave a link in the comments here because I'd love to check it out.