Ansariel Hiller

Well... Maybe it's time to step up and volunteer for the open position as Starlight skin maintainer? It's not that you have to start from scratch - the Starlight skins are still there as base to start with. I had to fix those skins or try to add new features from the LL viewer for the majority of the last decade when merging LL's code - I am just tired of doing that and won't do it any longer. Since the Hitomi Tiponi, the inventor of the Starlight skins, basically vanished and if nobody else will take over, then Starlight skins will be going. Easy as that - well... except if you want to continue using unmaintained skins that may lack features or even cause the viewer to crash in the worst case. What's certainly not going to happen is that I am going to put any more work into them.

But then they also might have come with proper detail levels so you don't have to crank the LOD in the viewer up to 1,000,000... So called "creators" often leave out lower and medium detail levels to cheat the LI system so they can advertise "all this great stuff and only 5 LI" - and add a notecard telling people to just crank up the LOD value to have their content "viewed best".

Wrong question! The correct question would be: Why are content creators creating crappy content and not providing proper detail levels other than high detail?

I wouldn't say the CPU is chilling. Based on the screenshot it's an i9-9990K which has 16 cores (incl. the 8 hyperthreading ones). 8% CPU load on this machine still means that a single core can be running at 100% (6.25%) - which I guess it is. Since the rendering in SL is still single-threaded and it's basically still using OpenGL rendering techniques from over 15 years ago, this means that SL is CPU-bound. And the required calculations for rigged meshes (so basically all avatars and their clothes nowadays) have a lot of impact on the overall performance - the more avatars being rendered, the slower it gets. This should get better with the performance project viewer, but that is still in development and a buggy mess, so it's still months away from release. Now David will say again "but it's faster in Alchemy" - well, of course it is because has a) a lot less options to take into account and b) its developer spends hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours - did I already mention hours? - on micro-optimizing everything. Nice for him, but people on the Firestorm team have actual jobs and no time to do that - beside the fact that this already resulted in their viewer being broken beyond repair twice already. So what actually helps is: Don't use full reflections on everything, don't set avatar render limit to 16 and if there is something that requires an LOD of 3, I would burn it right in front of the creator of that thing and replace it with something properly made.

Nobody said Firestorm is perfect, but apparently one person here in this thread jumped the gun and immediately blamed Firestorm for the OP's problem based on a vague description and a single screenshot - seems like this person gets immediately triggered and starts to blame without knowing all facts. The single example of performance improvements you mentioned in your essay (cache improvement) is already in the current Firestorm release. In fact, LL had to use a bunch of my fixes for that to actually get it into release state - man, what an outdated codebase! That Firestorm is slightly slower than other viewers is a) that it has tons of options because otherwise somebody is always whining why this and not that and this is bad and yaddayaddayadda. And b) we tend not to apply a wholesome of micro-optimizations that might backfire gloriously as they did with Alchemy already - I wonder, why there haven't been a formal release for ages already... Maybe they should call their "agile" viewer "AgileHarakiri" instead - we all know what will happen one day. Oh, and c) we aren't people without jobs that can spend 10 hours a day on the viewer - well... maybe if you pay me at least 6 Grand per month... The actual only cult I can see here is the "David Venter rants on Firestorm" cult. If the official viewer or "AgileHarakiri" runs better for you, then for the love of god use it - but please also bugger their developers constantly as well.

I see you can't stop telling nonsense. There have not been any significant performance improvements in the LL release viewer in the last few months - the performance viewer is still in development and as such a project viewer with a lot of bugs still and shouldn't be used as your daily viewer. And then you also present a list of random issues you might have experienced and declare that as problems everyone will experience! But hey, please continue using Alchemy that has been "optimized" broken beyond repair and had to been rebuild from from scratch twice already! 😂🥳 At least you were able to diagnose the problem based on a vague description and a single screenshot without even knowing the OP's system specs since it gave you another chance at ranting about Firestorm. That packed shopping events with 40 avatars and everyone wearing tons of mesh and most likely a lot of it badly optimized turns into a performance grave shouldn't be any news - and affects every viewer out there. This will only improve with the performance viewer, but still won't mitigate all the performance degradations caused by unoptimized content - and that viewer is still in development and months away.

So you have a 4GB graphics card and force the viewer to use all of it for textures, leaving no room for anything else like VBO, framebuffer, other applications running and the OS itself and forcing the OS to swap video memory, you set 256m draw distance and running a LOD of 4 - and you are really wondering why stuff keeps freezing??? 🙄

Not sure what OpenJPEG version or package you used, but 1.5 and the newer 2.x versions until now don't support partial decodes, hence textures will be broken. There is a years-old pull request on the OpenJPEG repository to add partial decode support, so if you try to build an OpenJPEG package yourself, you will have to include the changes from the pull request.

I didn't know you could establish VPN connections to LL's network - or are you talking about these "super secure" VPNs offered by companies like NordVPN that try to fool people claiming their data would be magically secure just because you connect to their network? The only thing those VPNs are good for is somewhat masquerading your IP address to circumvent geolocks - websites however will still be able to identify you due to a number of other ways.

It's because of:

The default viewer skin with the large empty areas in like every window? I bet not! And like I said: You can take over maintaining the Starlight skins - then you can also adjust the negative aspects of them or make them more defaultviewer-ish! Instead of fabulating about applying apparent web design principles (which I personally feel became utterly insulting ugly in the recent years), you should just grab the Starlight skin design and come up with an alternative design. Don't want to do it? Fine! Me neither. But then stop complaining about the sheer ugliness or simply use the default LL viewer and bug them on their JIRA to add the Firestorm features you would like to see in there.

If you like the Starlight skins so much, you just qualified to maintain those since nobody else wants to do it.

You better uninstall any viewer immediately then - all programs made by idiots not respecting the principle of deleting user data on uninstall! Quick! Before you might end up keeping personal data on your computer!

Exactly! Firestorm doesn't own the chat logs the user may want to keep. So it's in their own interest to delete the logs by themself. This is the common practice - or have you seen other applications silently deleting your data? Like: Uninstall Word: All your documents deleted. Uninstall Blender: All your models deleted. Uninstall some other game: All your savegames gone. Uninstall your mail client: All mails gone. Not sure why you advocate such a brain-dead behavior...

Because a) this is inherited behavior and b) you might want to keep your chat logs, right? If actually reading the details shown in the (un)installer during the uninstallation process, you might notice a message saying "This uninstall will NOT delete your Firestorm chat logs and other private files. If you want to do that yourself, delete the Firestorm folder within your user Application data folder."

You insist? 🤣

Are you using an Intel GPU? If yes, check if you have the latest video driver installed. Older Intel video drivers can cause this issue.

How much money are you willing to spend?

The new cache only affects assets - grey are the textures and they are not affected by this change.

It usually happens if there is more than one WiFi access point and they all think they are responsible, duplicating the network messages.

Yeah, they did? Magic!!! 😂

I didn't know some languages use the Unicode garbage alphabet...

For the love of Dke9ujfpe! Only Dke9ujfpe knows what will happen on the various databases if you put anything beside normal alphabetical symbol into usernames. But I'm pretty sure hardcore name-fashionists don't mind the risk of totally breaking their avatar... 😇

As I said: It was never part of the official viewer - it was only TPVs that added it.