A better viewer than the recent Firestorm? (March21)

[RicDelMoro]

 

8 hours ago, Aishagain said:

  (    I get micro-stutters regularly.   ) ..........(   As a 10 year FS user /.../ I am puzzled at what happens.  EEP is a step-change in rendering, just as Windlight was all those years ago, but I did not expect it to hamstring my system as it does. So what am I doing wrong? )

(    I get micro-stutters regularly.   ) : same with me, very annoying /firestorm 6.4.21  .....................( So what am I doing wrong? ) IMAO: If you drive the same car ( ur PC ) in the same road (SL ) every day and you change the place you buy gasoline ( viewer), and now your car performance gets worse and the engine coughs, it's obvious what is the culprit : the gasoline ( your viewer).I feel there's a competition among the most popular viewers to be more sophisticated and show more features than the others...this might be good for those who have a strong and brand new PC, but for most users it is a waste.

[Aishagain]

@RicDelMoro: OK so You are placing the blame for the microstuttering squarely on Firestorm's interpretation of EEP.  I did not realise that it was not the same renderer as the Linden Lab viewer, I must admit I had assumed they had used the code as it had been provided by Linden Lab.

In which case...

@Beq Janus: what did you do ? 

If I am to assume that there is some difference, what IS different and please fix it!  I cannot belive that Firestorm is so changed that such an obvious flaw cannot be corrected.

[Extrude Ragu]

The trouble with open source development seems to be that everyone goes their own way and puts the things they personally care about into the viewer.

The end result is that we have like 6 different viewers, that are all good at one particular thing, but none that are good at everything.

Some viewers are really speedy, but ruin it by being too opinionated about UI, taking away choices.

Some viewers have all the choices in the world, but run like crap

And then there's the LL viewer

In the end all the performance improvements in the world meant nothing to me if the things I want to work don't. And thus firestorm won despite it's framerate issues lol

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

44 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

The trouble with open source development seems to be that everyone goes their own way and puts the things they personally care about into the viewer.

The end result is that we have like 6 different viewers, that are all good at one particular thing, but none that are good at everything.

I don't view it as trouble, I think it's a healthy situation. We get choices because there are differences. 

I've learned to appreciate the features and function variations in all the viewers available, with perhaps one exception. The enormously chunky camera controls in the V3-derivative viewers that won't let you collapse them to a convenient little block with just the three principal rotate, zoom pan controls.

I have yet to see the micro-stuttering others have mentioned, but as I posted earlier, I am concerned that FS doesn't seem to let go of RAM it's had to grab in one region when you TP to a quieter region. (This is on Linux, maybe it does it differently on Windows).

Edited September 11, 2021 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[Extrude Ragu]

6 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I don't view it as trouble, I think it's a healthy situation. We get choices because there are differences.

It is a lack of focus. When you split the efforts of people into too many products,  what you end up with is many mediocre products, that all take longer to develop. If you go into a supermarket and there are 20 different flavors of Jam, chances are they all cost more and taste worse than a store that just sells 3 good ones. Likewise you as the consumer are more likely to buy a jam from the store that sells 3 because too much choice is overwhelming and you just want a good jam, not a quirky jam.

Most of the viewers struggle to maintain a good release cycle, some going years at a time without a stable release. I think the developers have stretched themselves too thin for the sake of independence and the end result is nobody can deliver a viewer that does everything well. And when there's no viewer that does everything well there is a lot of viewers that do a lot of things bad.

My opinion is that if of those 8 different 3D viewers we have now, the developers should really be joining forces and focusing on delivering about three good viewers, they can contribute code from each others viewers and take the best from several and put it into one good one.

 

 

[NiranV Dean]

52 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

My opinion is that if of those 8 different 3D viewers we have now, the developers should really be joining forces and focusing on delivering about three good viewers, they can contribute code from each others viewers and take the best from several and put it into one good one.

Which is not going to work because you'll end up with Firestorm's situation again. You'll have too many people wanting too many different things in the Viewer and the Viewer will simply have no focus at all, a jack of all trades but a master of none. Quantity != Quality.

[KarraSue]

On 9/10/2021 at 6:03 AM, Lyssa Greymoon said:

In the graphics settings change water reflections to none, opaque water. You should get a significant performance boost.

 Where is this listed in version 6.4.13.63251? All I found was transparent water under graphics

 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

18 minutes ago, KarraSue said:

 Where is this listed in version 6.4.13.63251? All I found was transparent water under graphics

In 6.4.21 it's under the water reflections drop down. Dunno if its in 6.4.13, I don't have it installed anymore.

[Rowan Amore]

2 hours ago, KarraSue said:

 Where is this listed in version 6.4.13.63251? All I found was transparent water under graphics

 

It's only in the newest version.  It does make a difference for me.

[RicDelMoro]

Today I realized that we are demanding a lot from third party viewer developers, but we forget a simple question:
"Why the hell doesn't LINDEN LAB make a decent viewer for us?"
It's sad to see the absolute lack of some basic tools, like a resize of commands to move, or a simple built in AO.I bet with half dozen of useful tools many people would like to play with the official viewer again, at least sometimes.OK, you can say "what tools you would pick to put in without make a little monster like Firestorm is?" kkk....But it's a valid question, think about it...

Edited September 12, 2021 by RicDelMoro

[Extrude Ragu]

11 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Which is not going to work because you'll end up with Firestorm's situation again. You'll have too many people wanting too many different things in the Viewer and the Viewer will simply have no focus at all, a jack of all trades but a master of none. Quantity != Quality.

You see that as a bad thing, but in the end of the day as the end user Black Dragon is completely hostile towards me and Firestorm manages to do everything I need it to do, despite not necessarily being great at any one thing.

[NiranV Dean]

58 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

You see that as a bad thing, but in the end of the day as the end user Black Dragon is completely hostile towards me and Firestorm manages to do everything I need it to do, despite not necessarily being great at any one thing.

Which means you are either not demanding enough of a certain feature that both offer or you don't demand a specific feature BD offers over FS.

However, this does not change the fact that having more people do more inside a single Viewer will ultimately result in overall lower quality of each feature in question. A small focused team of like minded people can make a Viewer excel at a specific task, finding said people however is hard. For instance i could work with/for Firestorm, what stops me from doing it? Their entire idea of the Viewer and what it should be, everything i do and want contradicts what Firestorm does and wants. I could work with/for Singularity but its a V1 and i hate the V1 UI also i'm sure they don't want to touch the UI like i would want to. Same with Alchemy, we both share similar goals but i don't feel like my idea of an UI matches what Alchemy wants (a stock-style UI). Would you want me to touch any of their UI's? I suppose not. Working for/with any other Viewer would mean i'd have to take compromises, i hate compromises and avoid them at all costs but that's just me. I'm sure some other devs were fine with the compromises they had to make to join any of the other teams. I'm certainly not, especially if it involves one of the major things i do.

Edited September 12, 2021 by NiranV Dean

[bigmoe Whitfield]

I think with BD, all I want is the firestorm ui, no chui,  otherwise I'd have no isseus using the viewer,  looked at catznip the other day and I can not use it, because of chui.  

[NiranV Dean]

32 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

I think with BD, all I want is the firestorm ui, no chui,  otherwise I'd have no isseus using the viewer,  looked at catznip the other day and I can not use it, because of chui.  

I'd like no CHUI too. I want my good old chiclets back. Someday...

[Extrude Ragu]

What can I say. I can't make third party viewer devs make freedom compromises so that we can get more rounded viewers.

I just as the end user wish it were the case, at the end of the day I have to use one viewer as my daily driver. I'm not going to switch to Black Dragon just to take a picture,  then go to Catznip to use RLVa things then to Alchemy to get some performance gains and then back to Firestorm because I want to Teleport someone home from a context menu.

At least if some of these viewers banded together, there might be hope that at least one other viewer besides firestorm might have enough combined work put into it, to be a stable daily driver that is well supported and frequently updated and isn't just some isolated case of 'It's our viewer, we'll do what we want'.

As for user interface, Black Dragon is the only viewer I've ever had to close because it has caused me a migraine. Creature habit might not mean a lot to you, but it does to me. I'd rather not have to hit a brick wall for every single little task I try to complete in a viewer.

[NiranV Dean]

2 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

What can I say. I can't make third party viewer devs make freedom compromises so that we can get more rounded viewers.

I just as the end user wish it were the case, at the end of the day I have to use one viewer as my daily driver. I'm not going to switch to Black Dragon just to take a picture,  then go to Catznip to use RLVa things then to Alchemy to get some performance gains and then back to Firestorm because I want to Teleport someone home from a context menu.

At least if some of these viewers banded together, there might be hope that at least one other viewer besides firestorm might have enough combined work put into it, to be a stable daily driver that is well supported and frequently updated and isn't just some isolated case of 'It's our viewer, we'll do what we want'.

As for user interface, Black Dragon is the only viewer I've ever had to close because it has caused me a migraine. Creature habit might not mean a lot to you, but it does to me. I'd rather not have to hit a brick wall for every single little task I try to complete in a viewer.

But here's the problem already, everyone wants to do certain things and doesn't want the other things, every one wants the viewer to be something specific. All the people who don't care or have the same vision already work together (namely Firestorm). If it was that easy to just collect a couple devs together and make another Firestorm, it would have been done by now.

Edited September 12, 2021 by NiranV Dean

[Chic Aeon]

Might be a good time to reflect on the fact that we DO HAVE CHOICES --- and most (I can't think of another platform  that "I" have been on) do NOT have choices. You use their viewer or client or interface and that's that.  

 

There is no perfect viewer. There are good things and bad things about all of them and what IS good or BAD is mostly dependent on the people using the FREE products that many devs have spent lots of time working on FOR US. 

[Jackson Redstar]

fact is when designing a UI,  you design with use cases in the middle. The dumb people will never get anything so if you design for them the middle and advance users will hate it. If you design for advanced users the majority of the users will find it to complicated. That kinda sums up Firestorm it fits right in the middle where most of the users are. Beginners have the Linden viewer and advanced users can use a viewer like BD or a viewer specially catered to what you do in SL

As far as video/photos go, well post processing equalizes most everything anyways

Edited September 12, 2021 by Jackson Redstar

[Beq Janus]

On 9/11/2021 at 6:47 PM, Aishagain said:

@RicDelMoro: OK so You are placing the blame for the microstuttering squarely on Firestorm's interpretation of EEP.  I did not realise that it was not the same renderer as the Linden Lab viewer, I must admit I had assumed they had used the code as it had been provided by Linden Lab.

In which case...

@Beq Janus: what did you do ? 

If I am to assume that there is some difference, what IS different and please fix it!  I cannot belive that Firestorm is so changed that such an obvious flaw cannot be corrected.

😄 For the most part the shaders in FS correspond directly to those in LL. There are some cases where we have small tweaks and changes, typically to either fix a bug/problem that has not been addressed upstream or to maintain some feature or other that FS users want us to hang on to (and in fact the vast majority of those things tend to be outside the pipeline)

If there is a repeatable use case I'm happy to look at it. Raise me a Jira to chew on. Outside of hard fact I cannot investigate speculation, or at least it is not generally a valuable use of my time to try to. 

The biggest difference in shaders introduced with EEP is in the water rendering where the new refraction and reflection rendering is very costly in comparison to before (it is arguably also more accurate - but whatever) If you are seeing problems since EEP you might want to look at turning down the reflections in your settings and see if that fixes it. Try opaque water too.

 

 

[bigmoe Whitfield]

10 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

I'd like no CHUI too. I want my good old chiclets back. Someday...

your viewer is very stunning and beautiful and works so well, I'm not even kidding,  but yeah, that chui is the only reason,  it's the worst interface LL could of ever come up with,  even with me being a LL fanboi as I am,  it's the one item I can not back them on.

[Coffee Pancake]

12 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

I think with BD, all I want is the firestorm ui, no chui,  otherwise I'd have no isseus using the viewer,  looked at catznip the other day and I can not use it, because of chui.  

Catznip doesn't use CHUI (you can enable it and use it if you like, but so far no one has ever wanted to do that).

Catznip chat is written from the ground up and entirely unique to Catznip.

We just don't have the V1 style bottom chat bar.

[Rowan Amore]

12 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Catznip doesn't use CHUI (you can enable it and use it if you like, but so far no one has ever wanted to do that).

Catznip chat is written from the ground up and entirely unique to Catznip.

We just don't have the V1 style bottom chat bar.

I couldn't figure it out.

[Coffee Pancake]

2 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I couldn't figure it out.

Please let us know how it went wrong, what were you looking for or couldn't do.

[Rowan Amore]

23 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Please let us know how it went wrong, what were you looking for or couldn't do.

I couldn't figure out how to chat without having to have the chat window up.  As you said, you don't have the chat bar at the bottom.  I've only used the chat window for IM and group chat, never local so I was a bit confused.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

4 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Catznip doesn't use CHUI (you can enable it and use it if you like, but so far no one has ever wanted to do that).

Catznip chat is written from the ground up and entirely unique to Catznip.

We just don't have the V1 style bottom chat bar.

that looked like v3 of the SL viewer when it loaded,  I want nothing to do with that v3 ui, I thought catznip was like firestorm and ditched that horrid v3 interface.