One of the viewers growing in popularity is the Singularity Viewer. As Phoenix nears the absolute end of its useful life a number of its users are switching to Singularity. Often those with older computers prefer to go with Singularity for faster frame rates. Plus it has the look and feel of the SL Viewer 1.23, the V1 user interface.

Build 4114 is the version with SSA, Server Side Appearance, the avatar baking change planned to fix bake fail. All versions before this one will soon stop working, well stop rendering avatars. They will appear gray. So, this is going to be a required upgrade for all Singularity users. That’s required in the sense of, if you want to see avatar clothes then you have to upgrade. If you don’t care about that, never mind. 

Installing

If you have a copy of Singularity installed, the developers advise you UNINSTALL it before installing a new version. This does NOT clear the cache in C:\Users\[Windows_User_ID]\AppData\Local\SingularityViewer\. It does trash the Singularity settings in C:\Users\\[Windows_User_ID]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\user_settings\. It leaves the chat logs and other shared common SL files alone.

Use

If you cut your SL teeth on a V3 user interface, you are in for a frustrating time. All the nice stuff from the SL V3 viewers is in Singularity, well… may be not all, but, certainly most. This means one is going to have to do some digging to find where things are in a menu system building on the V1 user interface.

If you are familiar with the V1 user interface then you will be in good shape. You’ll still have to dig to find new features in the menus.

I get around 65 FPS once a region has downloaded.

This is still a 4 setting graphics style viewer; Low, Mid, High, and Ultra. But, it has Advanced Lighting Model and Shadows. With those on I slow down to about 40 FPS.

Appearance to XML is grayed out on my install. I say this because I happen to be working with this feature for other reasons in other viewers. It is a feature used with exporting your shape for use in Avastar, which may not matter to you.

I suspect a memory leak. If I start flying across regions the memory use steadily climbs and never comes down. If I stay in one place it tends to go up and down but never down to the start values. I won’t know until I spend more time with the viewer. It may just be caching a load of stuff as I have yet to get it over 2gb.

Crossings are surprisingly smooth and fast. Considering I was wearing a hair do I have yet to strip the scripts out of that was impressive. That is probably more server side updates than viewer updates. But, they work well together.

Texture loading is pretty good. I couldn’t decide if it was slower or faster than the SL Viewers I’ve been using. I suppose that makes them about equal.

Summary

If you like the V1 interface or have an older computer this is probably a good upgrade choice for Phoenix users that do NOT want to give up the user interface they know.