Cool VL Viewer 1.26.2 (17) Released

There are not many changes in the last two versions. But, the experimental version 1.26.3 has an important change for me, which is the addition of Qarl’s Mesh Defomer 0.2. Henri has done something a bit different in his implementation. In his words from the forum:

Second version of Qarl’s mesh deformer implemented (with a new “Force Mesh Deformer” advanced settings in Advanced -> rendering, to force the same behavior as in the first version, i.e. to apply deformers even to meshes which were not designed for them): the new default/normal behavior of the code is to apply deformers only to meshes which were flagged as deformer-compatible at upload time (with a new “Deform to avatar shape” option added to the “Upload Options” tab of the “Upload Model” preview floater).

This should give us the ability to see how the 0.1 and 0.2 versions of the Deformer differ.

Download

I found the download horribly slow. It basically ran at 150kbps taking 30 minutes to download. My connection will handle 31mbps according to SpeedTest.net. Other downloads were running well, so who knows…

Install

The Cool VL requires one to have the Snowglobe Viewer installed. Instructions are on the Cool VL Viewer site. Once Snowglobe is installed Cool VL installs are a simple install pretty much like any other viewer.

The default install uses the Second Life cache location. I’m not a fan of sharing caches. So, before ever logging in I change the cache location. Look in Preferences->Settings for the controls to change the cache location.

Experience

I can’t find the Force Mesh Deformer except in Debug Settings. The description there is “Force mesh deformer (tailoring) even on non-flagged meshes.” So, I’m not sure which does what. It seems to disagree with the forum notice. So, I’m missing something.

Enable the Deformer in Advanced->Rendering->Enable Mesh Deformer. The item is near the bottom of the menu list.

The deformer works. I have lots to play with now.

I can’t get the Mesh uploader to open… I suspect if my land group is not active when I login the Mesh Upload flag gets turned off. Whatever, I can’t get to mesh upload in this viewer. I had the same problem in OSGrid.

However, a group change and relog didn’t help. I wonder if Henri has seem some of my mesh builds and is sending a subtle hint… I’ll have to keep playing with it.

I do find the viewer faster than most of the ones I have been using. It runs around 25 FPS with Lighting & Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, and Sun/Moon Shadows enabled.

2 thoughts on “Cool VL Viewer 1.26.2 (17) Released

  1. “There are not many changes in the last two versions”

    Well, v1.26.3 also got multi-layered clothing support now…The Cool VL Viewer is the only v1 UI viewer to support it…

    “The Cool VL requires one to have the Snowglobe Viewer installed”

    This is not entirely true: without the Snowglobe archive to extract the proprietary components from, the Cool VL Viewer would lack voice and the faster texture decoder, but it would still work.

    “I can’t find the Force Mesh Deformer except in Debug Settings”

    It’s there, in “Advanced” -> “Rendering” (“Force Mesh Deformer” option), at the very bottom of the menu (it’s greyed out till you check the option “Enable Mesh Deformer” above it).

    “I can’t get the Mesh uploader to open”

    Alas, under Windows, mesh upload doesn’t work because of a bug in the VS2005 compiler. This is anticipated to be fixed after I will have migrated to VS2010. Under Linux (and MacOS-X) mesh upload works just fine.

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