Catznip 12.1 (+Animesh)

[Coffee Pancake]

6 minutes ago, KT Kingsley said:

Hmm. Yeah, I guess dismissing Copybot as a silly toy isn't compatible with promoting the integrity of other SL-related software.

Initial intent and actual adopted application are rarely the same.

[animats]

It's important that copybots are possible. It allows for an exit strategy in the event that SL is shut down.

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, animats said:

It's important that copybots are possible. It allows for an exit strategy in the event that SL is shut down.

Because the rights-holders of most of the assets of Second Life made since 2012 didn't make them in an outside pr....

Oh, wait...

[Alyona Su]

On 2/19/2019 at 2:12 PM, CoffeeDujour said:

Next up .. maybe possibly, perhaps, potentially, probably an OSX version ... wish us luck.

This. Please, this.

As to whatever the thread has turned into with all the geekspeak... okay.

But I will comment to the OP: The new Catznip is FREAKING AMAZING performance-wise. Even 2018's Catznip outperformed Firestorm *for ME* and this new 12.1 is blowing that one away.  And why LL and others haven't implemented the inventory-management features is totally beyond me. It seems like a no-brainer as it is a killer feature. Being able to choose where incoming folder and object go is an amazing time and stress-saver.

Well, my new response to whiners of "lag" will now be "turn your graphics settings down or try Catznip". Hahaha

Edited February 25, 2019 by Alyona Su

[Willow Wilder]

10 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

And why LL and others haven't implemented the inventory-management features is totally beyond me. It seems like a no-brainer as it is a killer feature.

Are you familiar with The Toddler's Rules of Property Laws? It's much like that, but with lawyers. 

Also, this one. 

 

[Coffee Pancake]

On 2/25/2019 at 1:51 AM, animats said:

It's important that copybots are possible. It allows for an exit strategy in the event that SL is shut down.

What ? .. No.

If (and when) SL ends, you can choose to either be at the big party making plans to carry on friendships elsewhere, OR roaming the grid alone thieving everything in sight ... these are mutually exclusive, pick wisely.

[Candice LittleBoots]

I've been wanting an alternative to (the bloated) Firestorm for some time and finally got around to trying Catznip.

I really like many things about it, but some fundamentals stopped me using it almost instantly. The following are not criticisms, purely observations, as otherwise I truly like Catznip's cleanness and leanness.

In descending order of acuteness: - 

#1 - My absolute #1 show-stopper has now been confirmed as an ongoing show-stopper, having read the latest release notes, as follows:

Quote

Mouse Walking

• In WoW holding down the left mouse will orbit the camera around your character without changing its orientation while right-click holding will orbit and rotate your character as well. In Second Life the left-hold-orbit has already always rotated your avatar around so I didn't want to touch that, secondly context menus are always supposed to open right after the mouse goes down so instead I had to use the middle mouse button to allow you to orbit around without actually turning that way.

.. Is there a reason this cannot be made optional in preferences?

#2 - No built-in AO. I missed that immediately.

#3 - Preferences backup. Maybe it does exist, but I couldn't find it. Hopefully we're not expected to do it manually.

#4 - The minimum size of the chat box is still enormous, to my eyes.

#5 - No 'Area Search'.

Otherwise, really nice job! .. But I can't use it because of reason #1. That alone makes it unusable for me as that method of movement (orbiting) is ingrained within me and used constantly.

[NiranV Dean]

On 2/20/2019 at 12:31 AM, Ansariel Hiller said:

What about the source code for this release? 😇

I had a good chuckle at that.

Coming from the Viewer that has the most suspicious backstory out of them all.

Then i realized, wait isn't Kitty technically on your Team as well? Does this mean you are distrusting your own members? But then wouldn't that be okay again since she's technically part of your team and thus suspicious like you? Is the Emerald story going to repeat soon? Will RLVa turn out to be a cryptominer? Does this make RLV a cryptominer too and why is a cryptominer based on another? So many questions.

[Coffee Pancake]

9 hours ago, Candice LittleBoots said:

#1 - My absolute #1 show-stopper has now been confirmed as an ongoing show-stopper, having read the latest release notes, as follows:

.. Is there a reason this cannot be made optional in preferences?

Quick single handed camera control was developed with accessibility in mind, middle click anywhere makes that your camera anchor. Holding middle mouse orbits about that point (side to side), middle mouse + right pans, middle + left orbits up and down. With a little practice you can shop an entire event without needing to touch the keyboard. 

Left click & hold on yourself / name tag rotates the camera and your avatar, use with WASD or cursor and you have all the fine avatar control you could ever need.

Right is reserved for the context menu.

9 hours ago, Candice LittleBoots said:

#2 - No built-in AO. I missed that immediately.

We tried, but in part due to round trip latency we couldn't make it work acceptably. It looks ok to you ... it can be very janky for everyone else.

Script based AO's are also more flexible and offer more possibilities for interaction , eg a collar that switches your AO off when it has control. etc.

9 hours ago, Candice LittleBoots said:

#3 - Preferences backup. Maybe it does exist, but I couldn't find it. Hopefully we're not expected to do it manually.

It's on the todo list, we do however keep the number of prefs options to the bare min preferring to run with sane defaults. More is not always better. In terms of features .. we're far from lean, we just don't put a dozen tick boxes in for everything we do.

9 hours ago, Candice LittleBoots said:

#4 - The minimum size of the chat box is still enormous, to my eyes.

Wait till you see the next one 😇

9 hours ago, Candice LittleBoots said:

#5 - No 'Area Search'.

World > My Objects lets you search items on your own parcels, which is the only legitimate use case we were ever presented with when seeking feedback about how such a feature should work. It's fast and very low impact on the region.

No, we won't add something like FS area search that literally beats the tar out of a region just so people can cheat at hunts. It's not just bad, its 'OMFG, IT DOES WHAT?!' bad ... 

9 hours ago, Candice LittleBoots said:

Otherwise, really nice job! .. But I can't use it because of reason #1. That alone makes it unusable for me as that method of movement (orbiting) is ingrained within me and used constantly.

File a feedback from the button in the viewer detailing exactly how you would expect it to work and how it would replace the default Catznip behavour. Do not say "like viewer X" ... Feedback submission get auto inserted into our Jira.

[NiranV Dean]

3 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

World > My Objects lets you search items on your own parcels, which is the only legitimate use case we were ever presented with when seeking feedback about how such a feature should work. It's fast and very low impact on the region.

No, we won't add something like FS area search that literally beats the tar out of a region just so people can cheat at hunts. It's not just bad, its 'OMFG, IT DOES WHAT?!' bad ... 

*notes* another reason for me to dislike everything FS does. I should really start making a list of these...

You got more of dem sweet things i should know FS does very bad? For... ehm... scientific reasons!

[Willow Wilder]

How did a thread announcing a release - something to be celebrated - turn into...into...into all this? 

[Candice LittleBoots]

4 hours ago, Willow Wilder said:

How did a thread announcing a release - something to be celebrated - turn into...into...into all this? 

Are you being obtuse?

When designers /creators /developers are surrounded by sycophants all they receive is praise. From time to time the tabling of constructive commentary highlighting issues non-sycophants note may lead to changes /alterations /improvements which may otherwise have taken an unnecessarily long time to either stumble upon or acknowledge.

By all means have the last word and take the thread even further off-topic. Out of courtesy to the OP, I shall not respond to you.

[Coffee Pancake]

12 minutes ago, Candice LittleBoots said:

When designers /creators /developers are surrounded by sycophants all they receive is praise.

Ha! We wish!

If all goes to plan, we hear nothing.

If we ask for feedback about a potential feature, we hear nothing.

If we don't make it work just like someone expects, or there is a bug, it's chaos.

[Phil Deakins]

5 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

If we ask for feedback about a potential feature, we hear nothing.

and a few hours earlier...

14 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

World > My Objects lets you search items on your own parcels, which is the only legitimate use case we were ever presented with when seeking feedback about how such a feature should work.

Just sayin'

[Qie Niangao]

FWIW, I'm a fan of Catznip and quite like the new release. I have my frustrations with Firestorm -- I only let my masochistic alt use it, mostly for testing -- but that's the thing: whatever I get used to, when another viewer lacks those particular features or puts them where I don't know to find them, I'll go back to familiar territory before I grow accustomed to using any special features of that other viewer.

Before I got addicted to Catznip's Quick Preferences Folder -- which I still think is the best viewer innovation ever (and I think better than Firestorm's "Favorite Wearables" follow-on) -- I'd always end up back on whatever Linden viewer was testing a new feature of interest. Now I hurry back to Catznip where everything works they way I expect, where I expect it to be.

(I'm now also super addicted to "Open Folder In... New Window" but I don't know if that's a new thing or just a recent discovery for me. Whichever, I can't imagine how I ever navigated my Inventory without it.)

[Coffee Pancake]

6 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

and a few hours earlier...

Just sayin'

Cheating at hunts is not a legitimate use case. Finding a certain vendor at an event might be, but not if you understood what is required to accomplish that using only the viewer. The only acceptable solution is to have LL add region search capabilities on their end and expose the relevant interfaces.

Any use case which helps people breach each others privacy, undermines an SL activity or mini games, or presents the region with unacceptable resource use are simply not acceptable (We recently had to roll back a feature because our assumptions about LL's backend and expected user application were wrong).

[Phil Deakins]

@CoffeeDujour

I haven't got a clue what you're talking about. I simply pointed out that first you said that you only got certain feedback about something, and a matter minutes later you said that you don't get any feedback. It was a tongue-in-cheek comment, designed to make you smile

[Alyona Su]

7 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Before I got addicted to Catznip's Quick Preferences Folder --

Wait until you try the inventory management preferences. Set WHERE you want incoming folders and files to go when you receive them. I have a couple that I set up like so:

#Purchased
#Demo
#Miscellaneous

First I (right-click then) set to "System Folder" - so they pop to the top and cannot be accidentally deleted, then I set them as destinations for incoming stuff. THEN I set the naming template to create a folder with region name and date. Now I go demo-shopping and every time I buy something I choose #Demos to put it in. Later I go home and inside my #Demos folder, there are the folders with region names and dates and all the stuff I bought there inside.

THEN when I unpack by rezzing, wearing "attachment" or HUD - I choose "Object Folder" as a destination. Now the new unpacked folder is always in the *same* folder as the box/HUD/unpacker object.

Never ever have I lost (as in difficult to find) inventory ever since.

THIS is the killer feature of Catznip. All the rest are just icing on that cake. The zoom-zoom performance of this new version is a serious cherry on top.

Edited March 7, 2019 by Alyona Su

[NiranV Dean]

18 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Ha! We wish!

If all goes to plan, we hear nothing.

If we ask for feedback about a potential feature, we hear nothing.

If we don't make it work just like someone expects, or there is a bug, it's chaos.

You have been long enough in Viewer development to know that this is how it works.

You never get any feedback to things you want feedback for.

Try reverse psychology! Say you don't want feedback. Boom. Problem solved.

Don't know what to do about things breaking on live release tho.. maybe forever call it Beta?

[Qie Niangao]

11 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

Wait until you try the inventory management preferences. Set WHERE you want incoming folders and files to go when you receive them.

Even though I haven't set anything up explicitly, I do like that it prompts me about where stuff goes with a good enough default each time, and somehow unpacks purchases grouped together with the unpacker object. Or something like that. Obviously I haven't paid much attention. Anyway, it's better at keeping stuff tidy. At least that's true compared to the Linden viewer; with Firestorm, honestly, who even knows what comparable features one could enable somewhere in that maze of menus?

To be honest, though, my Inventory is still a colossal mess; I just don't think about it, instead relying on search and filters and using the Recent tab more than not. Way back when Gmail was in beta I learned to never sort email and I treat my Inventory almost the same (although I will delete SL inventory but almost never delete emails).

One thing about Catznip: When enabling "Allow Multiple Viewers" it fusses "Running multiple Second Life viewers is not supported. It can lead to texture cache collisions, corruption and degraded visuals and performance." It does it anyway though. I run multiple viewers often, although I've taken to running a different viewer for each account: while I'm on Catznip, one alt might run the Linden viewer, or another runs Firestorm. I certainly have violated that "different viewer" rule... and, historically, I've had cache corruption enough times that I've wondered what the anti-cache-clearing zealots are smoking, but I never particularly associated those corruptions with running multiple instances of the same viewer (as opposed to network disruptions). But maybe.

 

[Alyona Su]

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

with Firestorm, honestly, who even knows what comparable features one could enable somewhere in that maze of menus?

Nothing like it there at all (the inventory management feature) - I've looked. As for that "maze" I agree. FS has always felt like a pig-in-a-poke to me. When I've asked, most people on FS have never bothered with most of them and just go with the defaults. They say they use it because someone told them too. Herd mentality, I suppose.

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I've wondered what the anti-cache-clearing zealots are smoking

I so agree with this. Techno-nerds are borderline insane sometimes. For starters, I find 2048 MB to be optimum for fastest rezzing at new places while not having to rerez much. And I clear cache all the time, rebuilding it is no trouble at all and seems to make things snappy again. Sometimes the counter-intuitive things seem to work best. They call clearing cache the "last resort" because they presume everyone maximizes the cache size (BAD IDEA, FOLKS) and so it takes forever to refill it.

What I've discovered (based solely on my experience and nothing technical or official) that the larger your cache, the longer it takes for the viewer to startup (verifying textures) and the LONGER IT TAKES TO REZ stuff - because, I suspect, it takes longer to search that bloated cache, looking for possible pre-existing textures before attempting to download them. So the bigger the cache, the longer it takes your computer to search it while it waits before downloading (rezzing) a region. I don't know that it works this way, but if feels like it works this way. Another reason I have ultimate success at 1500 to 2048 MB cache size. It seems to be the sweet spot.

I couldn't care less about any of the technical stuff, I only care about my viewer experience.

But I've only been in SL 13 years, what do I know about any of it?

[Phil Deakins]

21 minutes ago, Alyona Su said:

When I've asked, most people on FS have never bothered with most of them and just go with the defaults. They say they use it because someone told them too. Herd mentality, I suppose.

That was always the case with FireStorm's predecessors - as your mere 13 years in SL will no doubt have known

[Alyona Su]

37 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

That was always the case with FireStorm's predecessors - as your mere 13 years in SL will no doubt have known

Yes, yes! I was always wary of Emerald (I didn't trust the devs who were known hackers at the time) but even way back then it was the same story. I don't know how they make money, but they do. So the more people using it, the more money they make. So be it.

Edited March 8, 2019 by Alyona Su

[Phil Deakins]

2 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

I don't know how they make money, but they do. So the more people using it, the more money they make. So be it.

That's news to me. I always thought that 3rd party viewers were a labour of love. They don't put advertisements in the viewer or forum, do they? They could make a little bit that way, but I don't think they'd make enough to write home about.

Edited March 8, 2019 by Phil Deakins

[Whirly Fizzle]

7 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

One thing about Catznip: When enabling "Allow Multiple Viewers" it fusses "Running multiple Second Life viewers is not supported. It can lead to texture cache collisions, corruption and degraded visuals and performance."

That warning actually comes from the LL viewer code.

3 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

I so agree with this. Techno-nerds are borderline insane sometimes. For starters, I find 2048 MB to be optimum for fastest rezzing at new places while not having to rerez much. And I clear cache all the time, rebuilding it is no trouble at all and seems to make things snappy again. Sometimes the counter-intuitive things seem to work best. They call clearing cache the "last resort" because they presume everyone maximizes the cache size (BAD IDEA, FOLKS) and so it takes forever to refill it.

The viewer cache is a special little snowflake & has some odd problems.  LL actually have a project in the works that totally rewrites the viewer cache system, which should improve matters.
On systems that have a very slow hard drive but a fast connection, you can actually get better performance just not using the cache at all.
Also never underestimate how badly real time scanning of the viewers cache by antivirus software can slow down the times it takes to load stuff out of cache. Always whitelist the viewer cache folder in your antivirus software.
For systems with a fast hard drive/SSD, especially if you have a slow connection, you should absolutely use the maximum cache size available.

2 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

I don't know how they make money, but they do. So the more people using it, the more money they make. So be it.

The only way Firestorm makes money is from having adverts on the website & on the wiki. A lot of people use adblockers these days too, we don't make much from the adverts tbh.
The ad money barely covers the cost of the server fees & Jess has to often pay out of pocket.
When funds get short to cover running costs, we do a donation drive, but this doesn't happen very often. Each time we have done a donation drive though, the response from our users has been amazing & we have had to shut down the donations within a couple of days as we have more then enough money.
Firestorm also pays for a KDU license which is incredibly expensive.  I'm not sure I'm allowed to reveal how much this costs per year but it's well into a four figure US$ sum.

"The Phoenix Firestorm Project Inc." is a registered not for profit organization. No-one on the team makes any money from the viewer, all ad money & donations from users go towards running costs.

38 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

I always thought that 3rd party viewers were a labour of love.

Yes, exactly this.

Some TPVs receive Patreon donations, but the amount they earn per month is tiny for the amount of work it takes to develop & run a third party viewer.