Viewers

General Viewer Information

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 used with any grid other than the Lab’s.

Now the Dolphin 3 viewer is dropping support for OpenSim. You can read the announcement on the Dolphin 3 blog: Dolphin Viewer and support for OpenSim.

Basically it is too much work for a one-man team to maintain two versions of the viewer. So, version 3.3.19 will be the last version usable on OpenSim.

I’m bummed as Dolphin was my viewer of choice for OSGrid. But, I can understand Lance’s challenge.

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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Viewer Performance

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A resident by the name of Nala Spires did some testing to see what affects the SL Viewer performance the most. You can read about his test and the results here: CPU / RAM/ VGA what sl likes More ? ((attempting to answer that ! ))

Nala Spires

She used this viewer: Windows 7 professional 64bit firestorm Viewer v4.1.1.28744

She also used FRAPS to benchmark the performance. FRAPS slows my system so I would expect the numbers to be a bit lower than normal.

A lot of the numbers make no sense to me. Since it is FRAPS I assume they were FPS numbers. But jumping around between 200+ and 20 seems a bit beyond anything that makes since to me.

I did read her Conclusions and they are interesting. Nala concluded  memory speed had a significant impact on performance. Buying FASTER memory did the most for performance.

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Exodus Viewer Release Beta 8 (12.08.09b) Review

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Exodus has new version of their viewer out. If you like Exodus, this is a must have update. I think that this release is labeled a Beta as they plan to quickly provide a main release with the New Pathfinding Tools. I am guessing they are just waiting on the Lab to OK it. Or may be there is some last minute Havok Licensing stuff going on. So, the tools may already be programmed in.

Exodus Viewer – Exodus Preferences

It gets confusing which version is a test version and which is a production release version. The idea with production releases is they are feature stable and intended for primary use by Second Life™ residents. Production viewers only have approved features. Test or Beta viewers can have whatever feature set a developer is experimenting with. This release had some of the experimental features taken out, like the Mesh Deformer. So, I find the Beta designation a bit odd, but it makes a sort of sense.

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Groups Editing Update II

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Baker Linden gave us another update on how he is coming along with fixing group editing. There is hope but there are some issues to be solved too.

Baker said, “I’m in the middle of debugging the server code.

For announcements, I’m pushing legacy viewer support to the back burner.  The new group data format is similar enough that some things should show up in the group list (I haven’t tested that yet), but not everything  [will show up] ([i.e.,] currently group roles, and potentially other pieces of information).

 I could also be lying to myself about that as well; it may be totally incompatible — I’ll have to wait and find out when I get to the viewer side of this. This is why I’m pulling it off the list — if it works, fantastic; if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t.

I think it’s not worth the time spent to support legacy viewers; I’d rather ship the fix, allow TPV to support the new format and allow people to actually use this feature. It’s just a matter of reformatting the data, but that extra work means more time spent on it and not delivering the feature.

 I doubt it’s going to be that big of an issue.”

Remember. He is new.

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