Why do you use a third-party viewer?

[Jaime Radium 0]

Apologies for cross-posting, first of all, but this thread is slightly more on topic.  I know people don't like surveys, so apologies in advance for this (feel free to ignore it)... but I have a survey about SL viewers for school.  It doesn't take long -- probably 5 minutes, and you'd be doing me a huge favor by taking it.

Feel free to let me know about your viewer prefs here, too -- do you use V2? Or Imprudence, or Phoenix, or what?  And why?

Jaime

[Jacki Silverfall 71]

Phoenix, Because its better.

[Lewis Luminos 602]

I prefer V2 over the old 1.23-style viewers (multiple clothing layers for the win), and so far the only TPV using the V2 interface is Kirsten's. This is my viewer of choice because I get a better framerate with it, but only using an older version (build 37). My graphics card is old and can't handle the newer Kirsten's viewers. I switch to the official V2 occasionally, mainly if I'm mentoring someone who is using the official viewer.

I'm not interested in trying out any other TPVs to be honest. I trusted Emerald once and look how that ended up.

[Jaime Radium 0]

Hey Lewis -- yeah, I was an Emerald user too, once upon a time.  Can I ask, do you do a lot of building/scripting, or machinima?

[Maureen Boccaccio 1,042]

I much prefer Phoenix to either of the SL viewers.   Much easier to use.

[Wildcat Furse 89]

PHOENIX *meows*

• no doubt the best viewer in the range, high stability, user friendly and built for second lifers that want performance!!

 

 

 

[Jaime Radium 0]

Haha, lots of love for Phoenix, I see ^^

[Paola Delpaso 0]

Well, every viewer has certain features that may or may not work for you. Luckily we have choice.

Personally I use Phoenix because I am accustomed to te V1 interface and like the functionality. A few functions come to mind:

• Long-distance radar
• Using ":" instead of "/me " for RP'ing
• Spam protection
• Phantom option
• Copy & paste for object coordinates (pos, size, rot)

I guess there may be a dozen more functions that I have become so used to that I would only notice if I don't have tem anymore.

Having said that, any viewer works which you get along with. Choice is the important thing!

[Govindira Galatea 1]

I use an assortment of viewers: Kirstens, Phoenix, Firestorm-alpha, and the official V2.x.  It depends on what I expect to have to do.  Sooner or later, one or the other irritates me enough with what it won't do well that I have to switch.  Assembling a new outfit in any V2.x derivative is very frustrating and tedious; IM in V2.x is frustrating, too, with all that box real-estate given up to stuff I know: profile picture, etc.  V2.x based viewers seem to have faster rendering technology and are now less bug-ridden, but have so few bells-and-whistles that I feel dumbed down and hobbled when I use them.

[Blot Brickworks 8]

I use phoenix and although I really do like the interface because it's simple I use it for music.I am a keen on film music and clasical stuff and phoenix puts out track information on screen so I always know who ,what and when about the scores.Everthing else aside this is the big winner for me.

[Jaime Radium 0]

Thanks Govindira and Paola -- this stuff is EXACTLY what I need.  If you haven't done it already, would you mind taking my survey (just so I have something official)?  This is awesome stuff.  I can't get my inworld friends to do it because we all use the same viewer for the same reasons (diversity fail, argh).  Thank you both so much for the replies!

[Catwise Yoshikawa 40]

 

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Lewis Luminos wrote:

I prefer V2 over the old 1.23-style viewers (multiple clothing layers for the win), and so far the only TPV using the V2 interface is Kirsten's.

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Phoenix have multiple clothing layers also ;-)

 

[Paola Delpaso 0]

 

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Jaime Radium wrote:

Thanks Govindira and Paola -- this stuff is EXACTLY what I need.  If you haven't done it already, would you mind taking my

survey

(just so I have something official)?  This is awesome stuff.  I can't get my inworld friends to do it because we all use the same viewer for the same reasons (diversity fail, argh).  Thank you both so much for the replies!

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With pleasure. Good luck with your studies!

 

[Govindira Galatea 1]

Your survey would be a self-selected survey, not a representative one.  I think that if you instead use the map looking for groupings of avatars, devise some way of randomly selecting which of the crowded sims to visit, visit and use Windows/MacOS screenshots to take names, then IM each asking for participation in a survey, you will have statistically more representative results.  You can at least use a viewer like Phoenix that tells you the viewer type used by avatars present.

 

But surely, Linden Lab know the usage rates of the various viewers: viewers self-identify (in a spoofable way, unfortunately) when they log-in.  What more will your self-selected survey participants tell LL about the use of TPVs?

[Daniel Voyager 1,541]

Phoenix rocks! :smileyvery-happy:

[Kabalyero Kidd 2]

Why I use a TPV?

Hmmm... I find some of them more stable, faster and use less CPU process than the official viewer. Oh, they have more shinies too.

My current faves are Cool VL, Imprudence, Ascent and, with the new PC, Kirstens.

[Hitomi Tiponi 7]

 

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Govindira Galatea wrote:

But surely, Linden Lab know the usage rates of the various viewers: viewers self-identify (in a spoofable way, unfortunately) when they log-in.  What more will your self-selected survey participants tell LL about the use of TPVs?

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LL do have stats of Viewer use but generally they only release them under conditions that they are not disclosed (but they haven't shown me so I can say what I want :smileyhappy:).  Basically Phoenix and Viewer 2 are the most popular with Viewer 1.23 and the others lagging behind.  If you use Phoenix you could do a bit more work on it by wandering around inworld and seeing what it claims people are using (though it is not completely accurate, e.g. Kirsten Viewer identifies as Viewer 2).

I use mainly Viewer 2 (official, beta and dev versions), Catznip, Kirstens S21 and Rainbow Viewer.  Some viewers are better for some tasks than others and LL appears to have a growing acceptance that a choice in viewers is a good thing.

[Jaime Radium 0]

 

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Hitomi Tiponi wrote:  [...] Some viewers are better for some tasks than others and LL appears to have a growing acceptance that a choice in viewers is a good thing.

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This. In fact, I am doing some inworld recruiting, but this survey is chiefly qualitative and is mostly laying the groundwork for the next phases of my study (which will involve a lot more inworld interaction).  Without giving away too many details, the survey is helping me get a very rough picture of strengths/weaknesses of different UIs.  Linden has stats on how widely used the viewers are and how much they crash, but I'm more interested in why people choose one TPV over another.  The main challenge right now is recruiting people who both have strong opinions about different viewers and who are verbose enough to tell me why (perhaps a self-selecting group right there, sigh).  At the moment, I'm not optimistic about having a large enough n for serious statistical analysis anyway, but I'll keep hoping...

[Medhue Simoni 515]

I use a third party viewer because I can't log in with the official viewer. No other reason, and I'm not happy about it.

[Nickle Bing 0]

The only thing I miss in TPVs is the radar.

 

2.5 has added most of the features that were first implemented in TPV such a double click TP and friend tag highlighting.

 

Also, they are more stable but that is probably just because 1.3 is more stable than 2.5

[Jean Horten 0]

 

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Catwise Yoshikawa wrote:

 

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Lewis Luminos wrote:

I prefer V2 over the old 1.23-style viewers (multiple clothing layers for the win), and so far the only TPV using the V2 interface is Kirsten's.

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Phoenix have multiple clothing layers also ;-)

 

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No, Catwise, Phoenix has got multiple attachments, but unfortunately no multiple cloting layers, the latter are a privilege of V2 based viewers, this function has been buried deep in the V2 source code ansd within more than a year, noone has made it to backport multiple clothing layers into a V1.x based viewer.

J.

[Jenni Darkwatch 63]

At this point in time it's a custom-built Kirstens for me. It's not anywhere near what I'd consider an ideal viewer, but it's certainly closer for me than v1.x. And it runs very well for me with shadows+projectors, almost making SL look decent.

To me, stability and decent performance on my OS of choice are most important. Looks are second, tied with usability. All viewers I ever saw flunk usability, big time. Whoever designed v1 and/or v2 really missed all UI design classes, or didn't learn anything new after 1995.

In the past I got burned by Emerald, which is why I won't touch Phoenix or Firestorm. Cool Viewer always has been a favorite of mine, despite an especially fugly UI/menu system. If Henri ever makes a v2 I might give it a try. The original LL viewer is always an option, too.

[Siobhan Taylor 1]

I use Imprudence Experimental (as a 1.2x version), and Kirstens and Catznip for 2.x... Catznip, though it has less options than Kirstens, is fast and supports RLV in SL2... And to me, that spells WIN!

 

[Porky Gorky 7]

I use Phoenix to build as it offers more functionality. Time is money for me when building in SL and Phoenix is a much more efficient building tool compared to v2 and marginally better than any other v1.x  viewer I've used.

I use V2 for all non building related activities, lots of my customers use V2 so I need to know it inside out to support them.

[Monalisa Monokarlsefni 0]

I use Phoenix because it has RLV built in and because of its fantastic radar, and also because it doesn't have V2's death slab (the sidebar), which is a convoluted little world in itself.

I also appreciate being able to find the features I'm looking for, which I cannot do in V2.

Text chat and group chat are easier in Phoenix -- V2 seems to be made for voice.

I try V2 every few months, but after a week I always give up out of frustration and because there is no upside to using V2: none of its new features interest me.

[Edited to Add:] I think the survey is well done, well put together.