Singularity Viewer 1.5.5 Review

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A new release of the Singularity viewer is out. The Singularity Viewer download instructions and link are on the Singularity web site. Details of changes and the release notes are there too. Also the viewer has made it on Linden Lab’s SL TPV List. The viewer is in the second set of viewers where they are listed alphabetically.

Download & Install

Download file size is about 28mb. The instructions say to uninstall any currently installed version of the viewer. The uninstall program in version 1.5.3 does not clear the cache or remove the Singularity settings files. I chose to manually delete those files. The settings are in a file at and named: C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\user_settings\settings_singularity.xml

The cache is located in: C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Local\SingularityViewer\

The Program Files folder for Singularity is removed.

The install is quick and no options are offered, so it is as simple as it can get.

However, the install associates SLURL’s with the Singularity Viewer. There is no option or choice, it just does it.

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New Browser Based Worlds

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New Virtual Worlds - Jibe
New Virtual Worlds - Jibe via Reaction Grid - Browser Based

In October and November (2010) Second Life was testing browser based viewers… or saying, replacing the viewer with your browser, may be more accurate. See: Second Life in a Browser. Today New World Notes has an article (Jibe, a Unity/Web-Based Virtual World from ReactionGrid) about another Linden Lab alumni opening a new virtual world. This world is a Reaction Grid world and uses a browser in place of the specialized viewer we normally use.

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Second Life Viewer Update Week 11

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I messed up the publish dates on the post and the one below it… So, this is older information on the SLV2.6 viewer than in the article below it.

Changes to the Second Life Viewer are always interesting to me. Today I just downloaded a new copy of the SLV Development version 2.6.0-224080. Some of the changes and coming changes follow.

Viewer Performance

This 2.6.0-224080 is getting 40 to 60 FPS in my little cottage. In Celtic Myst, a complex region I like to test viewers in – plus I like the magic jewelry, I get 28 to 35 FPS. I think the viewer had memory leaks and other problems. Closing the viewer appears to fail to clear all memory used. I have to restart my computer to get something like 20% of my machines memory cleared. Also, once memory in use gets to about 85% I risk a computer lock up. I’ve been getting computer locks with the Development Viewer since 2.5.1.

Viewer Evolution Group

This is new user group. You’ll find it in the SL Wiki under Viewer Evolution Group. It is for those that want to work with Linden Lab to improve the SLV2.

The viewer still does not allow removal of the SPEAK button. The chat field can be resized. Search is still slow and sucks.

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Second Life Development Viewer 2.6.1 Update Review

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Write a viewer update and the next day something new comes out…  This is about the new SL Development Viewer, the nightly build viewer. No claims of stability are made for this viewer. You may find it buggy. It is the generalized bleeding edge viewer from Linden Lab. So, use it with trepidation.

Viewer Modes

The 2.6.0 Beta viewer I was looking at yesterday does not have ‘modes’. Only the 2.6.1 Development version has modes. For now there is a BASIC and ADVANCED mode.

SLV2.6.1
SLV 2.6.1 Login Modes

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Second Life Server Upgrades Week 11

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We have our new roll outs for the week. The Release Candidate areas have seen several roll backs as some tenacious problems persisted. One weeks old problem with the Sever-Maintenance upgrades by Andrew has been found and fixed. So, the feature is rolled out again in this round of Release Candidate area updates.

There are two similarly named but different projects named server-maint and maint-server. I’m unclear on the difference between them. The projects are about a group of fixes and enhancements for the simulator servers. Some of the more specific and interesting items follow.

Asset Delivery Path and Caching

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Mesh Update Week 10

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This is Week 11, but the information is from Week 10… I’m lagging a bit.

Runitai Linden had this t say about mesh cost:

Upload costs aren’t finalized yet — you can be pretty sure costs are going to go up in general, the hold up right now is a reworking of the sim rez pipeline that will make the costs the simulator reports more reliable. Once the reports are reliable, we can get accurate measurements on whole scene polycount vs whole scene prim cost and tune accordingly. As it is, we’re more or less tuning blind, and the client doesn’t have enough information on its own to determine the cost of the whole scene without a major reworking of the mesh streaming pipeline (the client only downloads the parts of the mesh it needs, but the whole mesh asset is needed to determine streaming cost).

…upload fees are a completely different issue…

This gets confusing. The L$ upload cost has not been decided. The prim-equivalency is not even set. Runitai is talking about prim-equivalency. The values one sees for upload cost and prim equivalence in the Mesh Viewer are there for debugging and testing. The actual cost and equivalency have not been decided.

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