KirstenLee Viewer S19 (407) Released

KirstenLee has posted an announcement about the release of a new version of the viewer: S19 (407). See: What dreams may come! In this post KirstenLee explains why version S19 is being used. Basically because this is the version of the viewer KirstenLee likes working with and using.

KirstenLee Viewer S19 (407)

KirstenLee Viewer S19 (407)

This is not a cutting edge viewer. Basically it is a V1 viewer being adapted to V3 three features and recent SL system changes. It is easy on hardware. So, I would class it as being in the same field as Singularity and Cool VL Viewer; V1 interface viewers.

I am not digging  into the code so I can’t say it is behind, equal to, or ahead of the others. Nor is there any way for me to know the time being put into the viewer.

With the new features coming from Linden Lab, I think this viewer will continue to fall behind. But, it appears KirstenLee will be updating the viewer as time and mood suits. Henri, the mover behind Cool VL, has shown it is possible to keep up and pass the Lab’s code pace. So, KirstenLee may do the same. Avoid speculating and try it for yourself.

I see this as another niche viewer for those that like the V1 interface.

 

9 thoughts on “KirstenLee Viewer S19 (407) Released

  1. Obviously, S19 is a fork of the Cool VL Viewer (same UI, down to the Advanced menu layout) with a different skin… I just downloaded the sources and saw the custom libraries it uses: they are mine !!!… It won’t bother me, if only I was given proper credit !

    I got to ask for a few explanations to Kirsten…

  2. I can confirm that S19 is just a *slightly* modified Cool VL Viewer: once the skin files and other non-source files removed from both S19 source tree and the Cool VL Viewer v1.26.9.2 source tree, and once the sources files stripped off their license header (LGPL vs GPL) the diff (excluding spacing changes: “diff -BwurN” was used) between the two viewers is not even 750Kb large ! This barely represents the diff size between two Cool VL Viewer releases for a productive coding week (on less productive weeks, the diff is usually only half that size), and that’s not even excluding the simple formatting changes (I’m anal with code formatting and tend to run macros and formatting filters on each file I edit, even slightly: there’s however no functional change whatsoever resulting from formatting changes).

    I IMed Kirsten and requested explanations about the total absence of credit given to me, and as to why every mention to the Cool VL Viewer (from my own comments in my own code !) was stripped off the source of S19…

    A word of warning too: S19 being forked from the Cool VL Viewer v1.26.9 (the experimental branch with materials support), people using it should be VERY CAREFUL when editing assets: the experimental branch got bugs in materials editing that can (and will) corrupt the faces of the primitives when material is applied to any of their face !

      • Maybe it’s just the other way round: CoolVL is a clone of Kirsten’s S19! Remember how Kirsten invented shadows or brought back the pie menu and everyone else copied it from him… 😉

        • The pie menu was NEVER removed from the Cool VL Viewer. It existed even before the pie menu was removed from v2.

          It has been over 6 years that I have been developing the Cool VL Viewer (I started developing it as soon as LL opened the source of their viewer !) and I always dutifully and carefully credited ALL contributions (even one-liners !) for code I borrowed from other viewers, something I would really like to see reciprocated for all the borrowing of my code by other viewers, let alone pure cloning !!!

          Also, here are diffs I made between the Cool VLViewer v1.26.9.2 and Kireten’s S19:
          http://sldev.free.fr/misc/CoolVLViewer12692-to-KirstenS19-diff-raw.txt (raw diff on the source files, after filtering through “indent” and removal of License headers): only 600Kb…

          /root/websites/SLdev/misc/CoolVLViewer12692-to-KirstenS19-diff-functional-changes.txt (manually cleaned up diff showing the actual code changes: you will notice that half of them are just micro-optimizations that Kirsten did not backport): less than 450Kb (i.e. worth the amount of changes I do in a single week between two Cool VL Viewer releases).

          *FACT* is that Kirsten S19 is a re-branded, re-skinned Cool VL Viewer with stereo view and post-processing shaders added.

          • I know, Henri! I was pointing at the fact that Kirsten often enough gets acknowledgment for features released in his viewer although they were created by somebody else.

            BTW: The diff for llprivatememorypool.h even shows Kirsten’s is nothing but a simple clone of your Cool VL!

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