General Discussion Forum

[Jerry00Devou Honored Resident]

I just want to try a third party viewer,what do you advice me ?

 

[Tex Monday Member]

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Jerry00Devou wrote:

I just want to try a third party viewer,what do you advice me ?

 

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Personally, I like Phoenix. I think the controls are easy to use and it's pretty user friendly for the most part. Someone did mention in an earlier post that it's old technology. I hear good things about Firestorm too.

[Echo Hermit]

Firestorm is currently the most popular third party viewer, but it's all a matter of personal taste. I personally prefer Phoenix, because the user interface and extra features suit me, as a previous 1.23 viewer user.  I do like Firestorm, because it is highly customisable, and because I can upload photographs directly to my Flickr account.

I believe with Exodus you can also do this.

Imprudence has fabulous lighting settings, and is great for photographers.

It really depends what you like to do in Second Life, what features you need.

I would suggest you try one or two of the third party viewers for yourself and have a good play with all the features and settings.

[Teagan Tobias]

Some viewers take more “horse power” to run. I use Nirans viewer on my desk top but it will not even start on my lap top. There I have gone to Catznip and it works great. Go to the TPV list and it tells you what each viewer is attempting to make better. Nirans says “Viewer aimed at High-End Machinima and Photography.” I love it, love it, love it.

Try a lot of them and you may just find one you can't live without.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Opinions on "best" viewer are a dime a dozen. Your best bet is to just try them out yourself: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory

There are a few viewers which are not listed in the TPV such as Cool VL Viewer. While most of them comply to the Third Party Viewer rules, I'd stay away from them unless you know it's a legitimate viewer.

When trying out different viewers it's also a good idea to wipe the cache and settings when switching. Or if you know what you're doing, move the cache to a separate directory for each viewer. Newer viewers do that anyay on their own.

[Jadeclaw Denfu]

My Experience with the viewers is:

Phoenix Firestorm for stability and additional features especially in Object information,

Singularity for performance. The Framerate is 50 to 80% higher than Firestorm or the default viewer.
And less stuttering on texture load from the server.

Dolphin is like Firestorm, but has a nice feature in the minimap: It shows property / sim borders,
active scripted objects and uses the worldmap textures for the minimap.

Exodus is similar to Firestorm, with additional features to make combat a bit easier
(tagging for friend/enemy tracking and some other stuff.)

CoolVL Viewer & Phoenix viewer (not Firestorm!) had rendering issues with Linden trees on my system - flashing effects.

Basically, you wont make a mistake in going with Firestorm for normal use and/or Singularity,
if your Graphics card/CPU is on the lower end of the performance spectrum.

[Coby Foden Advisor]

Actually we cannot say what is "the best third party viewer" in general.  There are many great third party viewers available though.  Many of them have been mentioned in this thread.

What is best for each individual depends on:

1. User's hardware
2. User's operating system
3. User's preferences: what viewer features the user likes the most, what the user finds the easiest to use, etc.

If you have a fast modern computer with fast graphics card then you should be able to run any viewer pretty well with good performance.  There are differences between viewers even with fast computer though.  My preferred viewer at the moment is Firestorm (I would recommend to stay away from Phoenix viewer as it will eventually die out with no updates).

Occasionally I also use the latest Linden Lab beta viewer, to see what they are up to.  Just a few days ago I did so again, and the newest beta was a pleasant surprise as it was pretty fast as they have done enhancements to the graphics performance.  Eventually those enhancements will find their way also to third party viewers.  Which is great!

To sum it up:
The only way to find out what runs best in your system and what viewer you like the best is to try different viewers.  When doing so (having many viewers installed) take care that each viewer has its own cache location.  Then the viewers will happily co-exist in your computer and will not mess things up.

Happy experimenting to find out the best one for you.

. . . Hey this looks really cool!

[16]

official linden V3

oh! wait

sry i thought you was ask for the best 3rd world viewer

[Teagan Tobias]

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16 wrote:

official linden V3

oh! wait

sry i thought you was ask for the best 3rd world viewer

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If he is from the US then V3 would be very fitting.

(I am an American and I approve of this message)

[Krystara]

You should definately decide if you are looking for a 1.x viewer for performance, or a more modern viewer.  Generally the 1.x viewers will give better performance on weaker machines, but lack features compared to the v3 viewers.

For 1x viewers, pheonix was the popular choice, but they have announced plans to stop updating reliably, so CoolVx or singularity are popular alternatives.

If you have a machine with the horsepower and are ok with the newer interface, you probably want a V3 browser, firestorm generally being the most popular here, though I have been using exodus lately and enjoyed it.