Yesterday my SL sister Trinity Dechou mentioned the "Snowglobe" project to me, an open source approach initiated by Philip Linden. While the regular viewers are open source too, it takes rather long until fixes and extensions added by the community find their way into the official viewers. This causes quite a lot of frustration in the community and contributes to the perception of the Lab being "slow" or "uninterested", but basically has to do with the quality assurance procedures behind the scenes. The slowness of the Lab to adapt community fixes and expansions has led to a whole culture of alternative viewers for the more tech savvy residents: Gemini, Imprudence, Kirsten's Shadow Viewer and Rainbow Viewer among the most popular ones and even some old Nicholaz viewers still in use.Project Snowglobe tries to shorten this process and to establish a very close cooperation between selected open source developers and developers from Linden Lab. This is intended to basically implement quality assurance on a submission level and a planned/steered development process. Instead of checking submitted patches and see the impact, a roadmap for development is used.
I have not used an official viewer in ages. I think during the 1.12 or 1.13 viewer release I switched to the Nicholaz Viewers which I would happily still use if not for the annoying sculpt bugs. So after that I switched to Imprudence, the viewer I liked best so far. Imprudence uses a very strict no-3rd-party-components approach, and as a consequence the graphic library used is significantly slower than in any other viewer. So reluctantly I switched to Boy Lane's Rainbow Viewer (previously known as Cool Viewer) - the viewer I primarily use these days. I have yet to check the Gemini viewer, which gets advertised for power users and has some promising features.
Getting back to an official viewer (or at least a Linden Lab released viewer) after that many months is strange. The viewer feels odd, and a lot of known functionality from 3rd party viewers is missing. However during my test-run I did not run into any issues.
What I can tell is that this viewer is fast. Right now Snowglobe has two major areas of change compared to a regular viewer: texture download via HTTP instead of UDP (and thus making textures being cachable in the net infrastructure itself) and a completely revamped map interface. The map is blazingly fast. The island screenshots come up in full resolution in instants. The reason for this is that the map tiles do not get queried from the SL servers, but gets cached on the worldwide internet backbone of Amazon (yes, the book guys). Texture rezzing seemed very fast as well, however I have no idea how much of this is the effect of a cleaned cache - I have to run experiments.
The overall impression was good, and I will certainly test it a bit more. It's too early for me to give a final verdict, and I am dearly missing some features I get with CoolViewer. But I encourage you to try it for yourself.
You can download the Snowglobe viewer from the project website.
7 comments:
hmmmm. I may have to check it out. You know offhand if it has (free) temporary texture uploading?
hmmmm - I am going to try this viewer but I am so depending of the worn tab. Oh, well...
I didn't knew about Snowglobe or Gemini viewer and I recommend you give a try to the Emerald viewer which has some very cool features.
When you mentioned fast on Plurk I had to try out Snowglobe and much to my delight it is, indeed, fast. Some other observations.
As it seems to be tied directly into updates of the Official viewers it cannot be run for concurrent resident log-ins on the same computer. It is possible to run Snowglobe or an official viewer with others such as Imprudence without changing any settings.
The same relationship means that most (if not all) current features in the official viewer are present in. For example, if you hover your mouse over the resident dots on the minimap in the Snowglobe viewer, a tooltip shows the resident name just like in the RC viewer. The mini-map can also be zoomed in to an extreme degree versus other viewers.
The Snowglobe release notes mention that large textures (no specifics given) can de-focus and appear fuzzy. I found this is true with 90% of all textures making me believe anything over 256x256 is "large." Also, graphics load faster, but like with the RC any texture with an alpha layer rezzes last and is more quickly forgot when it is not in view. For example, if I turn my avie to look behind me then turn back, textures I had previously seen are gray again.
My frame rates are consistently higher, often 3x-4x faster than with the current official release viewer.
Open an image from your inventory and the preview pane allows you to set aspect ratio constraints. None are for portrait orientation (say, 9:16 versus 16:9).
Log-ins seem faster.
Linden trees don't sway (I'm guessing they started with the RC viewer) and Linden grasses no longer fight with ground textures.
I am interested but think I will wait to hear a bit more
Thanks Peter for posting this.
To be fair to yourself you really should try the Gemini viewer too - it's fast and stable and has some great new features and has squashed that really annoying thing where your PC stops and the hard disc thrashes away - which always happens at some curcial point.
The only thing it doesn't have is RLV support (which I use for for Rika's Mystitool plugin) - if it had that it would be perfect.
I actually tried Gemini yesterday and intend to post a report here. While I liked some of the features, I disliked others and my experience was very unstable too.
Now you got me curious to try SnowGlobe, 1.23 sometimes is really slow to me.
I think the Linden Tres sway can be turned on in the debug settings in the RC client, so maybe the same applies here
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