CoolVL upgrade advice please

[rasterscan]

Hi. For a couple of reasons, (pbr and dev quality)  I am going to make coolVL tpv my primary viewer instead of my backup viewer. However. It will mean upgrading the version. I went to some trouble to place the install of the viewer and caches in their own folders, on a seperate partition, well away from C:\windows\blahblahblahblah\never find again. But that was over 2 years ago now. 🥵

Is there a dummies guide to such an upgrade ? I must keep my settings and stuff as they are arranged now. Thankyou for any advice.

Edited August 14 by rasterscan

[belindacarson]

@Henri Beauchamp

[Henri Beauchamp]

It's just a matter of looking at the settings in the ”Preferences” floater (”Network & web” tab, ”Disk cache path” setting).

But please, for questions and support about the Cool VL Viewer, use its dedicated support forum !  You will also find existing replies to most of your questions on the said forum (1800+ topics, 12K posts), via its ”Search” feature.

Edited August 15 by Henri Beauchamp

[rasterscan]

I'm back on CoolVL as my primary viewer. Just for now, I want a non PBR experience and for that it seems flawless. But I confess I still haven't upgraded from Cool VL Viewer v1.28.2.57. Every time I go to tinker my invisible friend whispers "Your going to fix something that isn't broke.What could possibly go wrong ? " My other invisible friend has no counter argument yet. Love the support forum thanks for the heads up ! I'll be there a while looking for that upgrade convincer 😍

Although Ethel has other plans ...

Edited August 28 by rasterscan

[Henri Beauchamp]

On 8/28/2024 at 9:09 AM, rasterscan said:

But I confess I still haven't upgraded from Cool VL Viewer v1.28.2.57. 

This is quite old a release... You are missing a lot of new features with it, including many bug fixes...

Note that the Cool VL Viewer's installer will not wipe out older branches when you install the current release, so you can keep several branches installed on you computer if needed or desired. I.e. you can perfectly install v1.32.2.x and your installation of v1.28.2 will stay untouched; this is also true for the debug settings, which are kept in per-branch separate files.

On 8/28/2024 at 9:09 AM, rasterscan said:

Every time I go to tinker my invisible friend whispers ”Your going to fix something that isn't broke.What could possibly go wrong ? ” My other invisible friend has no counter argument yet.

It does happen that new releases introduce regressions or new bugs, but as soon as I am made aware of them or as soon as I notice them by myself, the said regressions get immediately fixed and the fix appears in the next release, which means normally less than one week (at worst two weeks) later... and if the regression/bug is serious enough, I usually publish an emergency fix release the very day I fix the bug !

That's the advantage of a quick release cycle: less risks to see a lot of different things break in a new release, and regressions fixed faster.

Edited August 29 by Henri Beauchamp

[Kathrine Jansma]

+1. Regressions and especially (usefully documented, logged) crash bugs get fixed pretty rapidly.

In all the years i use Henri's excellent viewer, it never kept crashing for more than two weeks (and thats easily fixed by using the previous version, unless you are masochistic and like to collect crash dumps and stack traces like me...). Other bugs, well, if LL broke the design, there is only so much one can do to fix things.

It usually gets just better with new versions. Some minor hiccups may happen when major new features appear, usually in the unstable/experimental branch.

[JeromFranzic]

I can definitely recommend Cool VL for people who are having PBR issues. Reflections can be totally disabled in the latest version. That makes PBR run at minimum settings, no mirrors, no SS stuff... retains some of the PBR lighting quality. I have shadows fully turned on. Testing ATM somewhere in Open Sim (sorry SL, but I'll be back later  )

My PC right now is running as relatively cool as it usually does with ALM on most TPV's, which is about 70c for the CPU, and 55-65c for the GPU (GTX 1050). On the active cooling pad, of course.

Only thing missing for me is the dutch angles, but I'm not too mad about that, maybe someday Henri? lol

[Henri Beauchamp]

3 hours ago, JeromFranzic said:

Only thing missing for me is the dutch angles

With a few lines of Lua and Lua side bar buttons, you can have that (just make the code called by those buttons set the camera offsets debug setting)...