EricCastanea

It depends what your requirements are, I admit. If you participate in an activity that requires fast response and low lag times, V1 viewers are still a better choice.

If you go to a sim where there is combat, racing, or similar competition, you will see that the overwhelming majority still use Phoenix, CoolVL, or another V1 viewer. That's not by coincidence.

Beezle Warburton

I think LL should strive for the same framerates I get in UT2004. It's just a sign of their incompetence that this is not possible.

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Argent Stonecutter

If building was restricted to professional game designers and limited to the functionality available to UT2004 modders, that would be worth shooting for. I don't think it'd be Second Life.

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Argent Stonecutter -- Skyhook Station -- Coonspiracy Store

"And now I'm going to show you something really cool."


The previous is a cybernetic datum published - in direct contravention of DoD Regulation #229RR3X3 - as being conducive to the physical, psychological and/or social well-being of the population.

ShrugDangle

I agree with you there. I'm speaking from a photography/machinima standpoint but I also ride motorcycles and other vehicles a lot.

In my case I've got pretty high-end hardware and I actually get better framerates in V3 with everything turned off than I do in V1s, but the real difference comes in when I turn on all the eye candy which fortunately my machine is fast enough to run all the time.

With that being said, I run CoolVL for Inworldz, and I'm helping a friend do motorcycle testing over there. I can't turn the quality up as high (well I can but my framerate tanks) so I end up turning my draw distance up as high as it'll go so I don't have to load up assets every time I turn a corner while on a bike. It's been very satisfactory for that purpose but I wouldn't want to shoot pics in it.

So I say do what works best for you and the job at hand, but a lot of it is dependent on your hardware. V3 will work better for some people, worse for others.

Nebula

I will now endorse firestorm. I may still disagree with some of the devs being on the team, but hey code is clean and it is running well. I compile and added in the things I like from my 3.* build. It is pretty and running 10 fps above the regular viewer. Great job to chalice and the others

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I used to program once, then I took an arrow to the knee.

Sione

Nebula

Hey most of the team should have been purged after emerald.

Leah Mayo

I think Sione was punishing you for putting Chalice into the Firestorm team

Sione

Yeah I was just pointing out the irony with those two statements. On one hand you say you don't agree with some of the dev's in the team and then you name an ex Emerald dev who left before Phoenix even existed.

Penny Patton

I have to agree and disagree with both of these comments.

Argent is right in that pretty much all the content in SL is made by hobbyists with absolutely no idea how polygon counts and overuse of textures bogs down framerates and SL simply cannot have framerates comparable to professionally made games as long as this is the case.

On the other hand, there is a number of things Linden Lab could easily do to encourage more efficient content from the community, things that would not restrict our creative freedom. Some things that would actually open up more possibilities for us.

Things like normal maps. There's the old argument that this would mean yet another texture to download....which is absurd when you realize that to get around the lack of normal maps people fake those effects as best they can with additional geometry AND textures, which makes the work arounds even more of a resource hog.

I've long pointed out how building to scale helps people create larger, more detailed environments. In terms of performance, this was a bigger issue up until the maximum prim size was upped to 64m, because building oversized forced people to use more prims, and so more geometry, than they otherwise would have needed. Still, SL will suffer for years with legacy content built this way. Even tho I used lots of megaprims, I'm still finding regular old prims doubled up where the right size megaprim wasn't available. Or multiple 20x20m prims where a single 64x64m prim would work. Building to scale does still mean people don't need to set their draw distance as high to see as (relatively speaking) far, and it reduces the number of sim crossings, which is its own problem. LL could have avoided this issue entirely by providing better camera defaults, better made starter avatars and better made Linden environments.

I haven't had a chance to play with mesh in SL yet but I've heard a number of professionals mutter about the lack of limits on mesh polygon counts, citing plenty of content uploaded to SL with obscene numbers of polygons.

LL could also put more soft restrictions on textures, to guide people towards being more efficient. What if a 10204x1024 texture cost more to upload than a 512x512, and a 256x256 was cheaper still?

LL should also be leading by example with their own content. All Linden environments and Library content should be professional quality in terms of both appearance and efficiency. Starting content creators pretty much always begin by tearing apart content they have to see how it's made and that often means the Library content.

LL could have set up very basic guides in the sandboxes, not to mention a much needed "builder's tutorial" that explains building more in-depth, talking a person through the steps of making an object, while making a point to show how to do things more efficiently.

None of this would have been difficult, and none of it would have been as costly as ignoring the problem has been.

Sure, there'd still be plenty of inefficiently made content, there always will be in an environment like SL which relies on user created content, but there'd be far less of it.

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The Digital Pasture - SL from a cow's point of view. When the cow is also a designer.

Beezle Warburton

I really should have put a </sarcasm> on my post.

Kadah Coba

Chalice does her own things but gives us patches sometimes.

Most (possibly all, but I can't remember) of the currently active devs on FS weren't involved with Emerald. Sometimes I forget that Emerald was big and at one point or another someone would join and be gone a short bit later, either kicked out or left after seeing how it was. Its was almost as bad as the number ex-lindens.

Penny Patton

In my defense, I was poking at the forum half awake before running out the door to work. c___c;

And also I see so many people making those arguments in complete seriousness that it's become impossible to tell if someone is trying to be silly or not. >__>;

Roderick Vaughn

Does Firestorm yet have access to read and post on the profile feeds? Last time I tried it, it didn't. I'll try it again when it does.

Inhandra

It does, but last time I tried it the web profiles were sorta broken-ish. There's an option to enable them in the preferences somewhere, but they won't quite look "the same," and when you try to resize it to profile size, it'll affect your web/search size too.

When I reported this in a previous thread, essentially, no one gave a shit and I was instructed to use another viewer.

No idea if this released fixed any of that or not.

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Chalice Yao

Mmmh..Jessica of course. She rageforked it into Phoenix. And LGG. Liny was part for a very short while during the middle of it but got bullied out. Aside of that...I really don't remember. Too many people with Wolf in the name in SL
I think the rest is new, or only submitted patches to Emerald. So yeah, basically none of the persons people complained about during Emeraldgate ever were in the Phoenix/Firestorm team.

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"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" - George Carlin

Sione

What cracks me up is that people are raving about a viewer at the moment made by someone who was an acquaintance during both Emeraldgate and CDSgate, while focussing intently on the Phoenix team. It's just something I have observed over the last few weeks and found amusing considering the lynching that went down at the time.

Kadah Coba

Last time I tried to use web profiles the servers were down, again.
The next version (the one with FUI) will have a switch to either use the original v3 web profiles or new legacy profiles. I'm in the process now of completely redoing profiles for FS and I'm making them as separate as possible from LL code. I'm also planning on having the option from web profiles to popout the web profile in to its original window.


Jess doesn't code
LGG and Liny havan't been active in many months
And I agree with that there are too many Wolf's, I can't seem to keep them sorted out :S

Emerald's goal was "hide our evil". Our goal so far as been "improve the crash rates and fix this shit UI"

Inhandra

Have you poked at Kitty's Catznip? It has a switch, that WORKS. The profiles work exactly like they should in either form, but for some reason the switch in FS doesn't, as I described before.

Good to know you'll be giving it a looksie though, I can appreciate that. It goes a little bit towards making me feel better about the viewer.

Kadah Coba

I'm redoing profiles from a stock V3 point. A workable switch is easy, just put a settings check in the call that's used to open a profile and keep the web profile to its own floater. I'm also going to expose being able to open either type from the other manually.

ShrugDangle

Speaking of the FUI, when are you guys going to make the FUI repository available again?

Andromeda Rage

It's all been merged into the main lgpl branch.

Kadah Coba

It was merged in to LGPL last week o.O

ShrugDangle

Oops..I totally missed it in the changelog.

eighthdwarf Checchinato

I gave the LGPL version a try tonight. And I must admit: I really dislike the FUI of this new one (even with the Vintage Skin), and love the "Phoenix Mode" of the Release Version.

Is there gonna be a chance that the next version of FS will keep the "Phoenix Mode", or even gets an alternate skin/UI that resembles the Phoenix UI as close as possible?

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