Viewers

General Viewer Information

Firestorm Support Island Opening

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I received an announcement today that the Firestorm/Phoenix Team has created a support island that will be opening on August 25th. The island is for use of the SL community. The team is encouraging RHN, White Tiger Mentors, Mental Mentors and others to use the island for training and support. I get that other support groups are welcome too.

Update 8/25 – Now Open: Second Life’s Firestorm Support Island by Firestorm/Phoenix

Update 7/2017 – Photobucket has disallowed use of their hosted images on 3rd party sites unless I pay them. Images are here.

Obviously the island is designed to assist new Firestorm users and for the team’s support crew.

FS Landing
FS Support Island Landing Point

The island has a landing point that starts new users on an educational path, a literal path as you can see in the images. It is designed for those using the Firestorm Viewer.  So, people using other viewer may be a bit confused by the images of what to click. But, confusing new users by showing multiple user interfaces might be worse.

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Retrained Love Viewer 2.8.3.4 Released Review

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Image by AlannaRalph – Flickr

I seldom cover this viewer because I don’t use RLV to play in Second Life™. Marine Kelley makes the viewer. This is the type of viewer we used to have when I first came to Second Life. I started using the Nicholaz Edition because it had more bug fixes and crashed less often. Nicholaz was all about making things work. In this release that is what Marine seems to be doing, making it work.

RLV is currently in last place in the list of Third Party Viewers. They are ordered from the most stable to the least stable. So, with any luck this release will start to change those numbers.

I found Marine’s discussion of the problems and crash sources interesting. Again it is the open source JPEG2000 library that is to blame for most of the problems. Marine has been working to make the viewer and its use of the JPG2000 library more robust.

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OpenSim Viewer Drop Out

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With the inclusion of Havok code in the viewer to handle Pathfinding’s Navigation Mesh (Navmesh) things had to change. The Havok license restricts its use to the Second Life™ grid. This means the Lab is removing support for the command line options: –loginpage, –loginuri, and –helperuri. That effectively prevents the Linden Lab™ viewer from being … Read more

Interesting Debug Settings

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Strawberry Singh has a post on her blog titled Debug Me. Whether you follow her blog or Plurking you know she does some great pictures, which is an understatement. In Debug Me she is explaining some of the Debug Settings she uses to improve her pictures. You’ll have to visit her site for her settings. I’ve written a little about the settings from a performance aspect.

  • RenderGlow – This is mostly a visual change with little impact on render time. The viewer has a number of glow settings that do affect performance. So, you can control glow in most any scene of visual and performance aspects. Use your web browsers page search/find on the Debug Settings page to find them all. Some improve the rendering of glow at the cost of a slower render, but it is not a big performance factor.
  • RenderVolumeLODFactor – This changes how objects in SL are rendered. It has an impact on performance, but the amount of impact depends on the scene and camera location. So, you won’t see a 1-to-1 relationship between the setting value and performance. Berry gets good results with the value high, but that is in photos. If you are exploring SL, a setting of 1 or 2 is going to improve rez time and FPS. But, you will see the distorted sculpties and mesh objects that change shape as you get closer or move away. Higher values stop that changing. For photos a large setting can solve the problem sculpties looking funny.

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