Help me pick a viewer.

[Roxas Yuhara]

I need to know which viewer is best for me.

I want something highly compatable, but more importatntly one that loads smoothly. I have good hardware but a crappy internet connection (I'm connecting from China) so it's hard enough to get playable speeds out of it. I quit SL for a while after coming to China because it was simply unplayable from here. I'm giving it a second chance now (2 years later), but if it's still terribly slow then I guess I'll just have to wait 6 more months until I'm back in America for good.

Any suggestions?

Okay, so here's my specs :

Model : Origin EON17S

OS : Windows 7 Ultimate x64

CPU : Overclcoked Intel i7 Extreme 2920XM 4.1 ~ 4.8Ghz

Memory : 16GB Dual Channel Kingston Hyper-X DDR3 SDRAM @ 1600Mhz

GPU : 2GB EVGA Overclocked NVIDIA GeForce 580M GTX (Core : 720Mhz || Shader : 1440Mhz || Memory : 1700Mhz)

Primary Drive : OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS SSD (6Gbps)

Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6230

 

My connection speed lingers around 1Mbps on a good day.

[Triple Peccable]

I am kinda glad I'm first, so that people can go ahead and unload on me, but I actually *like* the LL viewer. I admit I have a high end system and a good Internet connection, but the LL viewer works well for me, and I stay logged on 24/7.

 

[Roxas Yuhara]

I'm guessing LL is Linden Labs meaning that it's the "default" viewer, yes?

[Triple Peccable]

Yes, the one that is currently V3.3.

Your computer is great, and would handle it just fine. But with an Internet connection as slow as yours, loading of any sort of graphics will be very slow no matter what viewer you choose.

 

[Roxas Yuhara]

I've seen that time and time again. I was just wondering if any of them did have better performance than others.

 

Mostly, I have to use a very low draw distance, which sucks. I'll be happy when I return to the states and get cable internet. Currently, my powerful system is just bottlenecked by a slow connection so it's uttlerly pointless for online games.

[Roxas Yuhara]

Oh, and does SL have servers in China? What's their legal situation with China?

 

Just wondering, because if it's blocked in China then I'll have to use a VPN to connect to it (just like connecting to Facebook, YouTube, etc, which are all blocked here).

[Triple Peccable]

I don't think so. I think all of LL's business has been consolidated into the USA. As far as legal standings, I have no clue, sorry.

 

[Roxas Yuhara]

Kinda funny since it seems like it'd be a British company.

 

(the word Linden makes me think of London, as well as the style of it all).

[Pussycat Catnap]

I'm also on the official viewer.

No really reason not to be unless it fails to work with your system. Its very good at present.

I can get 30-80 fps easily, take very solid snapshots, and manage to run at pretty high graphics. On an iMac here. An older $350 Toshiba laptop also runs it decently well in low-mid settings.

I recall a few years back an avatar commenting on blogs that China had flipped the off switch on SL and they were now gone.

BUT a year after that I was in a strange 'be natural' event where everyone was supposed to come nude - and figured out from the singage, chat, and host profiles; that it was run as a project for some Beijing college students. Lots of propaganda for those Reds here and there. Never met anyone from China outside of that though.

 

LL's original office was on Linden road in San Francisco. Yeah, the name is that original...

[161488303349]

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Roxas Yuhara wrote:

Mostly, I have to use a very low draw distance, which sucks. I'll be happy when I return to the states and get cable internet. Currently, my powerful system is just bottlenecked by a slow connection so it's uttlerly pointless for online games.

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welcome to the rest of the world (:

where slow is normal

have only ever had a adsl connection to the rest of the world. on a good day then ping to USA = 250-350. on a bad day then can easy spike 3000-6000

sux to be me (: but i just go with it. mostly bc i never known anything else

[Jenni Darkwatch]

The best thing to do with a slow connection? Keep your draw distance low. 64m or maybe even lower. Experiment to see what works for you. Low draw distance means the viewer doesn't have to load piles of far away junk. In busy venues you'll get in trouble because a lot of people have very detailed avis - which tend to load slower than molasses for everyone, and often not load at all for people on slower connections.

Your PC will easily run anything SL can throw at it, and then some. Even at high settings with light&shadows enabled.

[Tracy Redangel]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

I'm also on the official viewer.

No really reason not to be unless it fails to work with your system. Its very good at present.

I can get 30-80 fps easily, take very solid snapshots, and manage to run at pretty high graphics. On an iMac here. An older $350 Toshiba laptop also runs it decently well in low-mid settings.

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Hi Pussycat, if you don't mind me asking, how old is your iMac? I have a 2009 model, 24-inch with Nvidia 9400 card. I can manage to get about 30 fps at the most in quiet areas. I have high speed connection and it's solid, so I'm just wondering  if the slowness is because the machine and graphics card are older.

 

[Qie Niangao]

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Jenni Darkwatch wrote:

The best thing to do with a slow connection? Keep your draw distance low. 

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Exactly right. The OP's situation seems to be entirely about bandwidth, so there's no real difference among viewers in how fast the bits will flow through the pipe, nor how much will compete for that bandwidth. (Well, except for text-only clients, I suppose.)

There are some viewers that make it easier to gradually adjust to a deeper draw distance as you rez in, but really, with this kind of constraint, you probably don't want to be pushing that out anyway.

Otherwise, about the only thing I can think of that would make a difference would be to always disable parcel audio and media (and voice, of course) except when absolutely necessary.

If you do have control over the environment in which you'll spend your time (like, if you're building a home), you can turn on viewing of object updates, to make sure there's not hidden stuff pushing to your viewer all the time. The worst for this is temp-rezzing, but it's also a problem with anything that moves around using server-side animation (as opposed to pure llTargetOmega spinning, texture animation, particles, etc.). The new-ish keyframed motion is bad, too, as it generates a constant, heavy flow of object updates from the sim to the viewer. (It's a relatively cheap function on the sim, but burns a lot of sim-to-viewer bandwidth.)

[Jenni Darkwatch]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

Otherwise, about the only thing I can think of that would make a difference would be to always disable parcel audio and media (and voice, of course) except when absolutely necessary.

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Good point, I totally forgot about that one... thanks for pointing it out. ~grabs tatoo gun and inks it onto her fingers~... theeere... won't forget it now.