As demonstrated in the recent "Relay Rap" article, it seems my Cool VL Viewer is having a harder time in Second Life these days, objects and people taking longer to rezz. Firestorm won't work on my Mac, for whatever reason. So I'm taking a look at the official viewer from Linden Lab, Viewer 3 (or rather, Viewer 3.4.5 as the latest version is called).
So far, it does rezz objects and people faster, sometimes. Other times, it can lag almost as badly. Although items rezz eventually, it seems more likely to freeze up and crash. The interface is quite different from Viewer One and similar Third-Party viewers. I had to look around for the minimap and movement controls for a minute. Looking for the map took time. I still haven't figured out yet how to shout a text beyond 20 meters. And multiple IMs can be a problem.
And oh yeah, if you log off V3 in one avatar, use another in Cool VL (and presumably Phoenix, Singularity, and others) and log out without changing, logging back into Viewer 3, you'll be wearing both avatars. Quirks like these can result in a few surprises.
Hopefully I'll be figuring this out soon.
Bixyl Shuftan
Yes, there's a difference from V1. But once you are used to it (just like we had to get used to V1) it's not a problem. For example, hovering your mouse over the volume control gives you seperate volumes and on/off switchs for everything -- like we had in V1 but inexplicably had removed in V2. And in Inventory, there's a upload button that's not hard to find.
ReplyDeleteYes, layout is different. But it's more logical now; it simply takes a little time to figure out is all. What I've seen over and over is people crying that a certain button isn't where they expected it to be, and they run back to their familiar V1 viewers without giving it a chance. There is much much improvement in V3 across the board. But nobody will see the improvements if they can stick with "old but familiar" instead of modernizing.
Part of this attitude is LL's own fault. I detested V2 with words that cannot be printed here. But V3 runs stably on my monster machine, and on my puny laptop too. Not too shabby and I'm glad to see LL do something right for a change, even if that something makes the program momentarily unfamiliar. Office became unfamiliar once too, but was worth it in the end.