Linden announced a new & improved viewer 2.1 today. have you tried it yet?
of course, the comments on its blog post were largely negative, but almost anything on the LL blog gets flamed. is it true that graphics are dialed down to make better performance?
they also pushed the voice morphing with it. that makes sense because the voice packs mean a recurring subscription fee. and while $750L a month does not sound like much, keep in mind that LL makes $90-100K USD on the $10L image/texture upload fee! o_O
it’s hard for many companies to dump their latest software because they spend so much on R&D. i have no idea what it cost to develop the new generation of the viewer but something on the order of a million plus would not be outrageous. plus the move to the new architecture would have been based on research, demographics, and a lot of meetings resulting in a large emotional investment. people don’t like to admit they are wrong by scrapping something that just does not work
i’m not saying viewer 2 does not work; i have not used it – just reflecting what i have heard and the opinion of our Micheil Merlin. he stays on top of viewers and, as a builder, did not like viewer 2.0
maybe Linden Lab does not even need an in-house viewer?
third party viewers are used by many SL residents. after all, Facebook does not have a viewer, you can use any browser you like
what are your thoughts on V2.1 and what other viewers do you use?
You know… I was not a fan of the new viewer when it first came out. That said, it has grown on me. Not because it is a better viewer or has a richer feature set. It has grown on me because, for whatever reason, the 3rd party viewers I use (Emerald and Imprudence) have kind of stopped working since the new Linden Lab viewer was released.
Both Emerald and Imprudence take forever to display textures now (Imprudence seems a bit faster). I am not talking about objects and avatars rezzing, I am talking about texture I use to build with or photos. If I go to look at anything image-wise in my inventory it takes forever. Not so with the new Linden Lab viewer. For it, textures or photos display almost instantly.
Both Emerald and Imprudence seem to bog down in lag much sooner than the new Linden Lab viewer. This is especially true when I am in a crowded Sim. I can remain in the Sim longer (or even in-world…lol) if I am using the new Linden Lab viewer.
Lastly… The latest version of the Imprudence viewer, just crashes for no reason, sometime the minute I log and rezz. I never had that issue with previous editions.
My personal thoughts on all of this is that Linden Labs has crippled the 3rd party viewers performance-wise at the server level. This all started, for me, when the 3rd party viewers were required to be approved prior to the official release of the new Linden Lab viewer.
I have talked to others with similar issues. I could be wrong but I doubt it.
Alec Inglis
22 Jul 10 at 10:10 pm
My mileage (kilometreage?) varies. Though I spend a great deal more time in InWorldz now than I do in SL, I have no trouble using Imprudence in SL — in fact, I have to use it in order to export anything I’ve built in SL so that I can import it to InWorldz.
There are two reasons I still use Emerald at all: (1) Imprudence has a bug with certain streaming audio encodings, so if I’m going to be in a SL club I fire up Emerald; (2) Emerald’s native maximum draw distance is 1024, and I take lots of long-focus photos of entire SL sims for a particular project. Imprudence’s is only 512 (but I recently learned about RenderFarClip from our girl Ener :) )
[Both are the latest betas of each, btw: Imprudence 1.3.0 beta 5; Emerald 1.4.0.2270]
I tried the original LL beta 2.0 on its first release day, virtually vomited, and uninstalled it the next day. Won’t go back. Ever.
Lalo Telling
22 Jul 10 at 11:53 pm