Gavin Hird
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Everything posted by Gavin Hird
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Yes, you can't have VS required to build the viewer coexist with another version. I build the Windows version of the viewer in a VMware virtual machine that is set up for the specific purpose. (VMware Fusion on macOS) -
Microsoft only provides the Linux subsystem in an attempt to lure corporate IT to purchase Windows systems for their Linux developers. It is a pretty crippled Linux when it comes to it, and far worse than the BSD Unix 3 certified subsystem in macOS. Building the viewer in the Cygwin command line or in macOS terminal is pretty identical once autobuild has generated the build project for you. Sure it is a mess of cmake and py files, but it works reasonably well. Frankly I don't think it is any different from building it on Linux, where the only real difference is the compiler involved: gcc on Linux, Clang+LLVM on macOS and VS on Windows. Somebody said they have VS issues building FS, but you have to use the Community Edition at minimum and the required features are only available once you have logged in to a MS account and registered the use of VS. One thing to be aware of is that FS for SL use paid for licensed libraries such as KDU, Havok and Bugsplat. Without these you most likely will have to untangle those from the code before it will build.
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I agree but what we have here is a TPV developer who totally misunderstand it's role. We are talking about the Firestorm users, who are users of the Firestorm team's product, BUT they are not their customers. They are Linden Lab's customers, whom this TPV developer tell to go elsewhere unless they change their kit. – Something I find outrageous. Obviously they don't want to fix an issue there is a fix for, but ask the user to either compromise their system security to work around the issue or got get new kit. The obvious, immediate solution would be to advice the user to use the official SecondLife viewer that does not have this issue. Very many Mac users don't want anything to do with Microsoft for a range of reasons, and have deliberately chosen NOT to run Windows. So there is a double insult from this TPV to these users and Linden Lab customers. FIN
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As long as you develop for the Apple platform, your statement sounds moronic. If you don't like or hate the platform, why do you even make code for it? The stupidest thing you can do it take it out on your users. Address your grievances in the Apple developer forums or at the WWDC where you actually have the opportunity to talk with the creators of the machines and system software.
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Firestorm voice not working Mac OS Monterey
Gavin Hird replied to ItHadToComeToThis's topic in Second Life Viewer
I posted yet another update to the preview viewer (build 48712) with more optimizations applied in addition to functional updates and fixes, including FMODStudio 02.02.06. Just replace previous versions with the one from the DMG. The preview is both signed and notarized with my Apple Developer ID. Minimum system requirement is macOS 10.14 (Mojave). -
Listen, if you develop for a platform you make the best out of it and stop crapping on its users. If not, make it easy for yourself and drop the support for the platform. Nobody likes a developer spitting on its users. (Another reason why FS on the Mac sucks) You sound just like Balmer crapping on Microsoft Office for Mac which is 100% developed by Microsoft. But do you know what the worst thing is? Not only are you crapping on your own users, but you are also telling Linden Lab customers they are inferior and should go away. A lot of whom are profitable customers for LL and SL content creators. If I was a Linden business manager or marketing manager, I would tell you to take a hike, despite your many contributions to the viewer code. Telling customers they are inferior is not valuable to anyone. – Not even to you.
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Go fix your viewer. It runs like *****! That should keep you busy for a couple weeks. 😎 To be fair to you, I am referring to the Mac version of FS. I have never used the Windows version simply because I don't own kit that runs Windows. Here is what it is all about: Macs have always shipped with weak GPUs (fact) and has not exactly been stellar in the CPU department either. Meaning you can't pile on functionality that loads on additional work on the GPU; you have to concentrate on rendering the basic scene as fast and good as you can. macOS does not allow any application to address the screen directly like Windows does, but your app has to render to a buffer that is composited to the desktop at 60 Hz/fps. Trying to drive the frame rate faster is pointless as 60 fps is what you get. All Macs since 2014 with built in displays (most of them) comes with what Apple calls a Retina display. This means that your app will have to render at 4X the resolution of the resolution perceived by the user. Combine this with the weak GPUs, and it is not really possible to drive an app like the viewer much faster than 20-40 fps with reasonable settings. Even if you render at normal settings (like you would on Windows), the compositor will upsample it to screen resolution, meaning it will look somewhat blurred. To a Mac user FS feels like a badly ported Windows app that hardly has been tested on a Mac by the developer. Unless you are a Mac user you probably don't understand what I am talking about, but Mac users get it immediately. It is not unique to FS, but quite common for "cross platform" development, where the cross means a bad, unoptimized port and UI that reeks foreign. The fact that you have built the viewer with a deployment target of macOS 10.11 (El Capitan released Sept 2015) means it is linked with libraries that probably were the worst ever for the viewer. 10.11 was the first system version with the Metal desktop compositor and all viewers crashed badly on it. It was not till 10.12.6 (Sierra) that Apple had made changes to the kernel that made the viewers run stable. (I worked with them for 1 1/2 years testing and reporting). Building with such an old target also hides a lot of deprecations and removals from system support that must be fixed for the viewer to run as best as it can on currently supported Apple kit. It won't compile at all in the latest Xcode 13.3. It also makes it impossible to sign and notarize it. Finally: What with the LSL bridge? – It is creepy.
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I'd rather trust LL stats to the extent they exist, because they should have a better chance to unique the logins. A possibility I assume FS does not have.
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Well, on the Mac there is no limitations to what you can install or do with the machine. The consumer machines are pretty locked down in terms of HW these days. Tim Cook has been a disaster in that respect. I just call him Timmy. On iOS it pisses me off to no end the limitations Apple tries to impose on you, but they are not unique at all. It is pretty much how all US companies operate these days. Even LL does.
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OK, thanks. Better change that to macOS 😉 Oh, wow - jeez. - Gestalt cannot report system versions over 10.9. Cinder wrote a change to that years ago. Here is the commit I have i my viewer.
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Apple has not become particularly more proprietary now than it used to be with the exception they have now gone for a processor implementation that is not sold to anyone else. Apart from the special instructions added for Intel memory mode and scheduling of high performance and energy cores, the processor instruction set is out of the box ARM. The first Linux versions that can be installed and run on those processors are emerging and making good progress. Apple has even made changes to the boot loader recently to make it easier to load and run other operating systems on the machines. Large portions of macOS is still open source, while virtually nothing in Windows is, and even Android has a smaller share open source in it.
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Just out of curiosity, what is the identifier you use for the Mac users, because the system stopped reporting Mac OS X years ago. It will now report macOS if you query the system services.
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Just like your speculation on number of Mac users in SL. During an earnings call with investors last night (2022), Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed that Apple now has 1.8 billion active devices. At the end of 2021 it was reported that 1.231 billion iPhones were in active use. There is almost a 1-to-1 relationship between an iPhone and a user, so we can assume 1.2 billion unique users there alone. The rest of the 1.8 billion devices are a mix of Macintosh machines, AppleTV, AppleWatch and iPad; roughly 600 million devices. A large percentage of these are owned by people who also have an iPhone, but the match is by far 1-to-1. For the Apple Watch there is a 1-to-1 relationship because it is useless without an iPhone. Apple stopped giving detailed sales numbers in 2018, so everyone is operating with estimates. My estimate of 1.3 billion users is reasonably correct given the numbers Apple actually provides, stats from analysts and knowledge of product mix ownership of Apple products (I have worked in Apple product management).
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If the Lab wants to be a Windows only shop there is nothing wrong with that. Just tell the Mac users so we can go elsewhere. If to the contrary, it is not OK to have a VP who is a 100% Microsoft head as he knows nothing about Apple tech and probably don't give a hoot about these users. 😎 The other thing is that Microsoft does not have any mobile user base at all, and don't have any tech for that space, so going with Microsoft only solutions will completely leave the Lab without tech to address that market.
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The authoritative source would be an Apple press release in connection with quarterly results or a quote from Tim Cook in the financial result review call.
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I am sorry but he comes across as a 100% Microsoft head.
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There is also a potential legal issue by distribution via the App store because each App store is regulated by the consumer legislation in the country the customer is registered in. Meaning it would potentially apply to the SL Terms, which frankly don't pass muster inside the EU or most of Europe. While crypto currencies are regulated in the US, they are more or less completely unregulated in the EU, and L$ would be equivalent of game tokens there, which is also subject to consumer legislation. So...
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I think you are mixing apples and pears a bit here. Submission to the iOS/iPadOS App store is much stricter on all kinds of issues compared submission to the Mac App store. For the foreseeable future we are only talking about a macOS version of the viewer. It is impossible to run anything OpenGL on the other devices. Frankly I don't see any particular value on having the SL viewer in the Mac App store. I believe the distribution mechanism via their website is perfectly fine given the limited scalability of the grid. You don't want to expose it to a very large influx of new users, only for it to quickly run out of capacity.
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Ultimately there is only one way to find out and that is submitting the viewer to the Mac App store and see what they say. One thing it will fail on is the installer and packaging on the DMG. The App store requires a proper .pkg generated by Xcode and not the manifest mess generated version. Addition: Because of the above the entire installer would have to go, because the App store handles updates when a new .pkg is submitted.
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How is that different from purchasing all kinds of crypto currency in apps?
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https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review
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Technically most likely yes, as it already is notarized on macOS It would be marked 18+ (17+) because of the content available in SL. Signup should not be an issue – it is a free app with free signup. On macOS that certainly have never been an issue, and at least in EU there are very strong regulatory forces in action to break some of the Apple requirements. In Nederland they are fined every week for not allowing signups outside an iOS app. It is only when you start to use things like in-app purchase, AppleID signon, possibly iCloud signon for storing say your user prefs or storing passwords to iCloud Keychain or things like that they get more restrictive.
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To quote myself, but here lies the incentive to write a viewer using Metal, because – not all, but a rapidly increasing number of Apple customers have devices in their hands or desks with CPU+GPU+memory configurations capable of running a viewer. Mac desktops and laptops, iPhones and iPads all with M1 processors (A14 onwards are essentially the same). All these users can be addressed with the same renderer and core code. The UI will need different touch-up depending on device. But the market potential is massive. If you diddle around with something else – forget it for that entire customer base. Edit: In addition every Intel based Mac with current system support is Metal 2 capable.
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No. There are more devices. Most Apple customers have an AppleID so they have pretty good control on how many active users there are.
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