Idea Time. Mobile viewer only shows avatar.

[Bree Giffen]

Why not have a mobile viewer that only shows one avatar? By default it would only show your avatar but a top down map will show your surroundings and you could select another avatar to view. There would be a chat interface much like mobile messaging and player inventory would also be available to change clothes and things. You move around and teleport with the map. Maybe you could also select a single object (like a chair) on the map and view it. It could encourage users to go into the desktop SL for the full experience.  Would this be possible to develop?

[Rob Huntsman]

1 hour ago, Bree Giffen said:

Why not have a mobile viewer that only shows one avatar? By default it would only show your avatar but a top down map will show your surroundings and you could select another avatar to view. There would be a chat interface much like mobile messaging and player inventory would also be available to change clothes and things. You move around and teleport with the map. Maybe you could also select a single object (like a chair) on the map and view it. It could encourage users to go into the desktop SL for the full experience.  Would this be possible to develop?

They'd first have to fix the viewer for SL to run properly on computers. The only reason why things look nice in SL is because of the creators. However, due to creators "Exploiting" on making textures look nicer = Lag. I couldn't even imagine this issue on a smartphones... However, they'd need to tackle that issue first before even attempting SL going mobile for weaker graphics card, and ram.

[Pixie Kobichenko]

There is an inworld group for the now broken & noncompliant Android viewer Lumiya.  It has a barely functioning 3D view right now.  There is a number of residents within the group wanting to approach LL with a request that the lab create an actual LL mobile viewer.  Personally I don't think the lab is going to invest the resources necessary to accomplish this because the mobile client user base is so small.  But you can join that group and start the conversation up to find out who it is that is going to approach the lab and ask for your ideas to be mentioned.

Edited August 1, 2019 by Pixie Kobichenko

[Bree Giffen]

3 hours ago, Haselden said:

I couldn't even imagine this issue on a smartphones... However, they'd need to tackle that issue first before even attempting SL going mobile for weaker graphics card, and ram.

I think most phones can render one avatar at least. Unloading and loading the resources of one avatar at a time seems like a good way to manage bandwidth. Also, phones are usually held vertically which is enough to show an avatar nicely. On your other point, a mobile SL client shouldn't require improvements to the desktop client.

[Bree Giffen]

2 hours ago, Pixie Kobichenko said:

Personally I don't think the lab is going to invest the resources necessary to accomplish this because the mobile client user base is so small.  But you can join that group and start the conversation up to find out who it is that is going to approach the lab and ask for your ideas to be mentioned.

Didn't know about this group. Thanks! But maybe this could also be a 3rd party client like Lumiya was.

[Evah Baxton]

I wish that Lumiya was still being developed.I still have an old version installed on my Galaxy S9+.

Heres a screen from my Samsung S9+ running in Dex mode via an HP Lapdock...

 

Edited August 7, 2019 by Evah Baxton

[JoJo Aurelia]

On 8/1/2019 at 11:30 AM, Pixie Kobichenko said:

There is an inworld group for the now broken & noncompliant Android viewer Lumiya.  It has a barely functioning 3D view right now.  There is a number of residents within the group wanting to approach LL with a request that the lab create an actual LL mobile viewer.  Personally I don't think the lab is going to invest the resources necessary to accomplish this because the mobile client user base is so small.  But you can join that group and start the conversation up to find out who it is that is going to approach the lab and ask for your ideas to be mentioned.

Why is it defunct? I use mine still. 

[Pixie Kobichenko]

@Faye Feldragonne

My best guy friend only has access to SL via lumiya on a tablet.  He has cleared his cache.  Now he can not use his inventory and he does not see animations on his screen. 

Your copy of Lumiya is working likely because you have not cleared your cache.  If you were to do so, or to delete and reinstall a clean copy- your animations would no longer work.  

To quote from a conversation I had with someone in the group (their words not mine, as I am not techy):

People who experience full functionality, it's because the animations and so forth are cached. Lumiya cannot communicate with the asset server at all

On the technical side, the reason this happened is simple. LL stated they would be turning off some old APIs connected to inventory retrieval. Most viewers switched to the newer APIs. Lumiya and Singularity didn't, so those two viewers both broke down

In laymans terms, Lumiya itself is no longer compatible with the LL inventory server

**and so far as it being "defunct" as I put it- is because no one has heard from the developer for months (at least in terms of Lumiya) - she's not logged in since March 18th this year.  Lumiya is not open source, so no one can just go in and tinker with it.  Someone would have to create their own android viewer from the ground up- her code is not accessible- you'll also notice that lumiya was removed from google play- tho the reasons for that i'm not totally sure on unless the viewer no longer met google parameters- it was removed from the 3rd party viewer listing in the linden labs wiki in 2018 or earlier.

Edited August 7, 2019 by Pixie Kobichenko

[Evah Baxton]

Quote

People who experience full functionality, it's because the animations and so forth are cached. Lumiya cannot communicate with the asset server at all

This explains why some of the animations in my AO won't work.

Hopefully the developer will go open source. Right now Lumiya is limtied to 96 meters and does not communicate with neighboring regions. There must be some way to render just the first few meters of neighboring regions so that you can at least see it and walk into it. This way (after reading the neighboring regions) you are only talking to one region at a time. I don't have any idea how the API works so this might be impossible.

It seems to me that LL would have better success supporting mobile rather than VR / AR.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

4 hours ago, Evah Baxton said:

It seems to me that LL would have better success supporting mobile rather than VR / AR.

I'd be concerned about LL making a mobile version and stopping development on the desktop version. My man used to play a train related game and about 6 months ago they discontinued the computer version and concentrating only on the mobile.

Edited August 7, 2019 by Kimmi Zehetbauer

[Evah Baxton]

Quote

I'd be concerned about LL making a mobile version and stopping development on the desktop version. My man used to play a train related game and about 6 months ago they discontinued the computer version and concentrating only on the mobile.

Valid concern. I wouldn't want that either. Lumiya got it right in that it added touch control where needed and converted the floating windows into pages, but didn't try to change the way the 3D space looked. It was also ready for things like Dex and Tablets with different aspect ratios & resolutions.

It's disappointing that the developer didn't include an advanced mode where a person could crank up the settings and see just how far their device could go. As it is I have all the highest settings set in Lumiya and the observed framerate / download speed is great.

I have an HP OMEN that does fairly well with SL but I love to run SL on my Surface GO. I used to run it on my Samsung TabPro S Gold (Windows 10, 8GB model) before it melted and that was like 3 years ago. I feel like the higher-end mobile devices are ready to start handling SL in it's entirety for those of us who turn down the settings or are willing to deal with a lower framerate. After all, SL has always tried to be accommodating to older machines. That could translate to mobile devices today.

I feel like the sacrifice should be made by the user.

Unfortunately as everyone piles on the 1 star reviews for "Terrible framerate, total garbage", it encourages exactly what you fear Kimmi.

I guess what I am asking for is an Android / IOS viewer with a mobile interface that doesn't try to change the way things work. The suggestion I made earlier about viewing the first part of neighboring regions could be an option in all viewers, but I don't know how it all comes together so that could be totally impossible.

As was said above, it's a niche thing right now and just doesn't have the userbase to support it. I get that. I FEEL like it could be a bigger thing in the future though as more people realize that their mobile phone is as powerful as their laptop and by docking their phone in a shell they essentially have a laptop. And once hardware catches up they will start putting video cards in the laptop shells so that the mobile becomes a gaming laptop ... blah blah blah ... MSFT starts punching themselves in the face because they invented, and then immediately gave up on the next best technology in order to put more focus on ........... github?   Anyways you know the story. This post is long.

[Qie Niangao]

15 hours ago, Evah Baxton said:

Hopefully the developer will go open source.

That would have been nice, back when there was a developer, but she's been AWOL for a long time now. It seems Lumiya has no future now and it's time to face it and find other options.

The Lab is going to iOS first with their mobile client, supposedly because that direction was set back when Lumiya still served the Android base. It would be an obviously disastrous idea to switch horses in midstream now.

I do wonder if some pure web, pure text client wouldn't be a viable stopgap. It wouldn't be anything like Lumiya and so some existing Lumiya users would still be out of luck, but it sure would be nice to have one supported way to connect from any browser, come what may in operating systems.

(I can imagine a range of architectures to support a web client. It would be harder to do for a third party developer because the client would need to use the existing viewer connection API, sorta like a browser-based bot. If the Lab did it, they could streamline the connection, or run an intermediating service to support a simpler browser client.)

If they had that, I wonder how much additional work and computing capacity would be needed to expose web images rendered as sequential snapshots, like a maximum 0.1 FPS, perhaps for a premium fee. 

Ultimately of course they need full mobile clients on both iOS and Android+Fuschia.

I never got Lumiya's VR mode to work, but to write off SL VR for lack of framerate is to ignore trends of massive gains in graphics, CPU, and memory on phones. The market trend at the moment, though, is shifting from phone-based VR back towards dedicated HMDs -- meaning no broad market for VR any time soon.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

38 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

The Lab is going to iOS first with their mobile client

Every time this is mentioned, it's also worth pointing out that the iOS client will be text-only. No in-world view.

[Bree Giffen]

Text only? Where's the fun in that? Having an avatar visible would be much more entertaining. LL should look at mobile games that are in the hero collector genre. A lot of the game is just admiring your heroes.

With an SL avatar on a mobile client one could use them like emojis or just share images to friends over social media.

But there's some good info I never knew about in this thread. Thanks all for that.

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

Text only? Where's the fun in that? Having an avatar visible would be much more entertaining.

No doubt, and although they've been extremely cagey about plans, I've heard rumors that the Lab intends the iOS client to eventually be a limited-features 3D viewer perhaps analogous to what Lumiya was on Android.*

To the original proposal, though, I don't really think the one avatar view is a very likely path because it seems it would be special development effort to limit the world view to just one avatar. I could imagine the default graphics preference set to just one non-imposter avatar, though, which is kinda the same thing.

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* Minus any VR functionality, which they've "proven" to themselves is impossible for SL because the frame rates are too low for VR and everyone knows there are never advancements in computer hardware and networking.