Whats Hot and Whats Not. [ Firestorm Vs. SLViewer]

[Madeliefste Oh]

I use V3 and Exodus. Mainly V3.

[Ansariel Hiller]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Do not edit the bridge... you can screw things up and be forced to do a clean reinstall.

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Messing up the bridge does not require a clean install. The bridge can easily be recreated from the "Avatar" menu.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

i was told not to mess with it in the group as it could screw things up..

[Ansariel Hiller]

It may affect distance readings in radar or double-click teleports, but nothing that would require a clean install to fix.

[Locke Nider]

V3 mostly.  My Ubuntu(Linux) doesn't seem to like Firestorm or Phoenix for whatever reason, so V3 works well for me.

[Celebee]

I use the SL Viewer. The last time I tried the Firestorm Viewer, I ended up lagging so badly that my chat was affected. But that was some time ago, and I didn't find the need to switch viewers because I quite enjoy using the SL viewer, and because it seems to have all I need to make my second life enjoyable.

 

Though I would be significantly happier if I didn't crash once every hour...

[Nova Convair]

Firestorm is the most stable viewer, is customizable in a wide range and has alot of functions and extras, so a good choice. There is a bug though that cost alot of fps if mousepointer hovers over the world. Not everyone is affected but I see quite some complaints about performance. I switched to catznip because loss of 25 fps in Firestorm is a showstopper and not tolerable.

However - the linden viewer is no option if you build often. Nearly all tpv's offer alot of improvements related to building.

[Ansariel Hiller]

The fps drop is not a bug but a side-effect of a crashfix when selecting certain mesh items. However, in the next release, the crash fix has been reworked and doesn't cause any noticable performance hit anymore.

[Rin Tae]

Firestorm for me as well. I started using it when it was in beta and quickly moved to it from Phoenix and stayed with it. I enjoy the features, the support in the group and the UI as well .. much better then the old v.1 UI in my opinion and I used viewers with that one for a long time too.

[Nova Convair]

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Ansariel Hiller wrote:

The fps drop is not a bug but a side-effect of a crashfix when selecting certain mesh items. However, in the next release, the crash fix has been reworked and doesn't cause any noticable performance hit anymore.

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It has nothing to do with selecting mesh in my case and of course it is a bug - I dont care if it's the result of a fix since it's a showstopper and it's there for quite a while. So for people with this bug Firestorm is not recommended the others should give it a try.

[solstyse]

I use Catznip, after trying several other viewers.

CoolVL and Singularity just "look" too old for me. I used to love Phoenix, but even that looks old, and now support is gone. There's less flexibility with the ui with these viewers than others.

LL's CHUI performed better than others as installed, but when I looked at the settings, they were optimized more for performance than for eye candy. And SL still didn't look ugly.

Neiran's viewer, Exodus, and Catznip viewers, when installed, are optimized for looks. Putting the perfomance to the levels that the CHUI viewer comes with makes them perform MUCH better, with the degrade in looks being barely noticable. The advantage they have is that the windows for chat, inventory, etc turn transparent when not in use. That's a feature I can't live without.

Firestorm has the best ui. I like that local, and IM chat are in the same window. The problem is that it is by far the slowest of the bunch on my computer. Adjusting the settings just doesn't seem to have the same effect. If the firestorm people would make it just a hair more responsive in medium settings, I'd trade in Catznip for it.

[Ansariel Hiller]

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Nova Convair wrote:

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Ansariel Hiller wrote:

The fps drop is not a bug but a side-effect of a crashfix when selecting certain mesh items. However, in the next release, the crash fix has been reworked and doesn't cause any noticable performance hit anymore.

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It has nothing to do with selecting mesh in my case and of course it is a bug - I dont care if it's the result of a fix since it's a showstopper and it's there for quite a while.

So for people with this bug Firestorm is not recommended the others should give it a try.

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But you're not the only person running Firestorm and there are quite a number of people having crash issues because of this, justifying this fix. Maybe you should start using avatars from Yabusaka Petites.

[Nova Convair]

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Ansariel Hiller wrote:

 

But you're not the only person running Firestorm and there are quite a number of people having crash issues because of this, justifying this fix. Maybe you should start using avatars from Yabusaka Petites.

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I choose what works best, as posted b4 and I dont care what others use or what avatar you prefer. LOL

[Orca Flotta]

CoolVL and Singularity just "look" too old for me.

 

I use and love Sing because it looks old. Everything is there where I need it and where it always was. What's wrong with it? No hidden IMs, they appear in your chat box. That's the way to communicate! No clutter on my screen. And much better fps than most other viewers, and that's still the most important feature.

[Suki Hirano]

Firestorm > Viewer 3 in every way except: stability/memory usage. My friend has pretty much the best possible gaming rig right now and she lags like crazy randomly and crashes every other day. I have a pathetic laptop and funnily enough lag and crash at the same frequency as her.

We both used V3 and it's much more stable and consumes less memory. But it lacks tons of features.

[solstyse]

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Orca Flotta wrote:

CoolVL and Singularity just "look" too old for me.

 

I use and love Sing

because

it looks old. Everything is there where I need it and where it always was. What's wrong with it? No hidden IMs, they appear in your chat box. That's the way to communicate! No clutter on my screen. And much better fps than most other viewers, and that's still the most important feature.

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Both are good viewers. They're just not stylized the way that I personally like, that's all. Nobody can call you wrong about the fps. But once I tried the flexible UI, I got hooked. I think that's what happened for many of us. We got used to the newer viewers, and just found it difficult to go back.

[Innula Zenovka]

I don't dislike Firestorm, but my viewer of choice is Catznip, which is close to the Official Viewer in look and feel , except it's also the RLVa development viewer and, in addition,  has some very pleasing tweaks, particularly with outfits, IM history and the mini-map.

Firestorm's wide choice of features leaves me a bit cold, I fear, because I so rarely use most of them.   It's good that they're there, and when I need to, for example, use area search, then I'm happy to log in with Firestorm.   Similarly, I find that uploading mesh is, generally, far better done on the latest Official Viewer than on either Catznip or Firestorm, so I use that to upload mesh, or if I want to take pictures I'll log in with Niran's viewer for a bit.  

But generally, Catznip has almost all the stuff I want for daily use and a couple of things I can't get elsewhere, and runs well on my system, so that's what I like to use.   

It's all a matter of personal taste, though,and you use SL.  RLVa is very important to me, since I use a it lot, and script stuff for it,   If you don't use RLV, though, then that's irrelevant.

 

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

There's very little any third-party viewer can do with the rendering engine which is the basic foundation of how we see SL; at least the Phoenix/Firestorm team can't and they say so in so many words. Major changes to the rendering engine have to come from Linden Lab and other viewer makers have to incorporate them.

Lately the Lab has been making major improvements to the engine of the mesh viewer and these changes will always show up in a Lab viewer first. Depending on how different a TPV is it will take those developers more or less time to integrate the changes.

Right now on my computer Viewer 3.4.5 is SPECTACTULARLY faster than its predecessors, inclucing TPV's based on earleir code. On my computer, with a current mid-level Nvidia card, (640GT, available for less than $100 if you look around) my frame rates are at least 20% higher than any other viewer.

It's even faster than the non-mesh version of Phoenix despite running higher settings.

Firestorm has forked quite far from the LL code, mostly to make it look and feel closer to Phoenix. As I've never liked the old V1 interface these changes do nothing for me and delay the integration of the new rendering tweaks.

Personally my favorite viewer WOULD be Dolphin, which is very close to the LL viewer with a number of useful tweaks but I've been having crashing problems that may be due to the fact that it uses OpenJPG instead of KDU and certain textures make it freak out.