Does anyone know what the viewer is supposed to do?

[arabellajones]

A couple of times, recently, I have had occasion to ask whether something that happened with a viewer was supposed to happen.

There seems to be a lot of guesswork by users. I was advised that the only way to find out whether something was supposed to happen was to see if it happened in the official Linden Lab viewer.

I was a little surprised that nobody seemed to know.

I downloaded the Linux version of the viewer.

It keeps crashing. I was told it isn't supported, it's a Beta.

This is all starting to seem less than competent.

I don't even know if what happens can even happen in the LL viewer. Going by what I can find, no parcel boundaries are shown by the LL Viewer, but the documentation, such as it is, is horribly out of date.

 

[Whirly Fizzle]

To display parcel lines on the LL viewer, go to World -> Show -> Property lines.

If you mean displaying parcel boundary lines on the minimap, then the LL viewer doesn't have that feature.

What was the original problem you were having?

[Nalates Urriah]

The Linden viewer has over 3,000 controls. It has the ability to render well over a petabyte of user made content. Those controls affect how the content is rendered. The data is transferred over an error correcting network used by over a billion people. But, packets get lost. Computer operating systems and various programs have memory leaks, video drivers have different ideas of how things should be done as well as bugs...

The viewer has something like 6 million lines of code. I don't know the server side's size. A comma or unbalanced parenthises out of place can cause random problems...

I haven't started to talk about the people that are trying to take down the global network or the social misfits attempting to crash your viewer and the servers...

Plus all the various operating systems the viewers have to support... times the various video cards, sound cards, memory speeds and sizes... time how we configure our computers...

You might be premature in questionnig the Lindens' competence...

[arabellajones]

They've been doing this for thirteen years. That, I am told, was long enough for America to put a man on the Moon.

[SappadilliDallagio]

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arabellajones wrote:

A couple of times, recently, I have had occasion to ask whether something that happened with a viewer was supposed to happen.

There seems to be a lot of guesswork by users. I was advised that the only way to find out whether something was supposed to happen was to see if it happened in the official Linden Lab viewer.

I was a little surprised that nobody seemed to know.

I downloaded the Linux version of the viewer.

It keeps crashing. I was told it isn't supported, it's a Beta.

This is all starting to seem less than competent.

I don't even know if what happens can even happen in the LL viewer. Going by what I can find, no parcel boundaries are shown by the LL Viewer, but the documentation, such as it is, is horribly out of date.

 

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Linden Lab announced in May 2015 they were no longer actively supporting the linux version of their viewer as a primary platform. They stated they would continue to release a viewer as something akin to a "best effort" release with help from the linux community third party viewer developers. However, having recently installed the latest linux viewer (as of Jan 2017) I was shaking my head a bit at the woeful state of that viewer on a modern 64-bit linux system.

LL only releases a 32-bit linux viewer. This is usually not a huge problem for modern 64-bit linux distros as they all have the ability to let the user install 32-bit multi-arch libraries. However, because it is 32-bit code,  the LL viewer does not have the ability to even display user profiles, play any audio (streaming or ambient/sound effects), or display other parts of their various floaters that rely upon HTML-accessed content (such as the aformentioned avatar profiles).

The 32-bit linux viewer used the old QtWebKit HTML engine which was replaced with the CEF kit. That works great for viewers designed for 64-bit platforms, such as Windows or macOS but CEF is not designed to run on 32-bit operating systems. It is newer than 32-bit. So, in effect, LL completely took away QtWebKit, which worked on 32-bit viewers and replaced that functionality with... nothing. Thus, the LL 32-bit linux viewer is pretty much useless for some pretty basic use.

Of course, one might be able to revert to an older 32-bit LL linux viewer that still has the QtWebKit engine in it but that invalidates a reason why one would use the LL viewer in the first place... to see if a feature is working or not (since the older viewers may not have even had some features in the first place).

As for LL using the contributions of the linux community developers, I wonder when they will be seen in the LL viewer. Singularity, a non-Bento ready viewer and the Bento ready linux viewers of Firestorm and Kokua are all written for 64-bit linux and work reasonably well. Alchemy's non-Bento linux viewer is 64-bit too but they have yet to release a new linux version of their beta Bento viewer. Either these community built viewer projects have not offered their 64-bit revisions to LL for inclusion in the LL viewer or LL is dragging their feet on working them in. The end result is a LL linux viewer that is crippled and in some basic uses.

I would not call that incompetence, per se, but it does seem to me to be one way of simply letting an operating system platform die in a slow and painful way.