Sunshine havoc - The Viewer 2 Legacy, Long live Viewer 1?

In the past I have been pretty outspoken about how Linden Labs insane changes to SL are detrimental to how SL itself works. However, like many other users and creators on SL, it all got to a point where trying to talk some sense in to Linden Labs was beyond a joke, and I gave up, settling myself in to just inworld grumbling, however thanks to “Project Sunshine” which has now been rolled out grid wide, I have felt the need to sit down and grumble in public again.

First off, I think I should, from a users perspective actually quantify what project sunshine is.

According to Linden Labs

Project sunshine take the baking process away from the viewer and the user, and does it server side to speed things up, and cut out the “blurry” avatars.

To understand that though, you need to understand what baking is in the first place otherwise for all you know, making cheese toasties are now done server side rather than with the user.

Baking is a process of making a combo pack of the various textures you are wearing, and creating 3 images of it.

So... you have a skin on (3 textures), a shirt (1 texture), Pants (1 texture), alpha masks (upper and lower body – 2 textures), a Tattoo (3 textures).

So... with that you are wearing 10 textures. Each of those textures will need to be downloaded by anyone who sees you in world. Obviously thats a hell of a load to work with.

This is where baking comes in.

When you first wear an item of clothing you will see it appears on your avatar. Roughly 30 seconds later, the avatar goes all blurry and then comes back. The blurry bit is you actually baking.

After a set time, your viewer (as in the one on your computer) takes the 10 textures you have on, and merges them in to three – the Head, Upper Body and Lower body.

It then uploads those textures to the Second Life Servers as a temporary bake files.

Now, when someone sees you in world, they only have to load 3 textures, rather than 10.

I use 10 as an example because its convenient, but its not unheard of for some people have to have 30 or more textures on their AV, so the benefits of baking are very apparent.

Now... where does sunshine come in to this?

Well, the basics of Sunshine are, it takes you out of the equation.

When you wear an item of clothing now, rather than your viewer doing the baking work, a server at Linden Labs bakes the textures and stores them. The result is, things are faster, and less bandwidth and errors will occur. In addition, this is supposed to speed SL up, as there is a database of items that will take various textures, and store their bake permanently so if you and another user have the same outfit on, it wont need to bake – you get the texture.

Sounds great doesn’t it.

However. What really are the benefits of Sunshine?

SL to me has worked perfectly for years – never had issues and even with sunshine, I am still seeing half baked people.

But, what about this faster database of stored bakes?

Yeah... thats just about as dumb as it gets. How many times, realistically, do you see someone wearing exactly the same skin, with exactly the same clothes as you?

Answer is never. There will always be something slightly different about you.

In fact there is only one occasion when this will help.

You can now see noobs faster.

Now, lets cut the crap here. Project Sunshine is a step forward, but is it the brilliant thing its made out to be. I would say not really.

This is sadly typical Linden Labs – big project, big noises, little inworld impact and massive inconvenience to users.

Which does kind of neatly bring me back to the point of this article... why’s Hemi on the soapbox this time?

Well, it all comes back to one of my other major gripes about Linden Labs over the last three years. The next generation viewer – also known as Viewer 2 / 3 what ever it is this week.

I remember the utter disbelief and backlash against Linden Labs when they proudly showed off Viewer 2 to the users.

Basically everyone with a few small exceptions hated it. Passionately.

I remember vividly though the comments posted were not rude, unfounded or harsh. In fact they were very constructive, and tried to help.

Linden Labs after this consultation and testing of the new viewer then said effectively “thank you all for your comments, we don’t care, its going ahead as it is”.

In fact I know of at least 5 personal friends of mine who actually said “If this is the future of SL, then I don’t want anything to do with it..” And shortly after, they left SL.

Sadly Linden Labs didn’t back down on the new viewer format, and it was taken on board by Third Party viewer makes to try desperately to clean up the mess Linden Labs made and produce a viewer that people could use, rather than what LL’s were forcing down their throats.

In fact today, its almost laughable that the current Official LL’s viewer is being beaten in to the floor by TPV projects like Firestorm.

About a year ago, with new features being pushed in to SL, and with the official Viewer 1 from LL’s getting the chop, as well as the sad news that viewers like Phoenix getting axed too I decided as Viewer 3 was now almost useable, to move on to Firestorm.

It was a move that unsettled me as I tried to get my head around some of the serious building usability issues that had been pushed in to Viewer 3 such as the mental methods of skin and clothing construction that increased the production time by three (yeah – I timed this. If you took at day to build something, with Viewer 3, it will take you 3 days).

However, I bit the bullet... and forced myself to get used to Viewer 3, although technically working on clothing and skins, I continued to use Phoenix.

I have to admit by this point I had almost resigned myself to the fact this was SL now but I still had options.

That is, until Sunshine arrived.

As Sunshine changes the way the viewer behaves, unless you are on a Sunshine capable viewer, you cant see SL. Just lots of grey people.

Well... shouldn’t be a problem. Just update Firestorm.

That is kind of where my problem started. I updated Firestorm, and by the end of the day I had to roll back to Version 4.3

The viewer was effectively unusable for me.

So, what was the problem?

First and foremost was the viewer throwing a fit every time it saw an alpha texture. Not the actual rendering of it, but if you cammed on to it.

The viewer would for no reason at all, freeze solid for 10 seconds.

My first reaction was, check my graphics card driver software – I did, updated it.

No fix.

I then went on to the Firestorm Wiki, and spent over an hour running through ever single graphics glitch hotfix I could find... nothing worked.

The only solution I found for the problem was unacceptable. Setting Graphics to Low cured it.

However working on a PC that has been running on Ultra on 4.3, sorry – not putting up with Low.

So in the end, I had no choice but to roll back, and hope that Firestorm would release an update before it got critical.

Well, Sunshine went live on Tuesday, and with no update, I had to put back the glitched release and in fact I found even more issues since the reinstall.

1/ Loss of connectivity – effectively without warning, sim ping times were in to lag out mode, with 1500ms being the average. This was all sims too.

2/ Avatar blinking in and out – the avatar would just disappear for a second without warning.

3/ Freezing on camming around a sim – as the viewer tried to load in the sim, the whole thing would freeze up regardless of first load, or even being at home with everything in cache.

4/ Menu freeze up – open inventory, preferences, etc, and the viewer would freeze up for 10 seconds or more.

5/ Cam to semi transparent object would freeze the viewer up for anything from 10 -20 seconds.

Which I suppose brings me back to Sunshine.

Which is better for your company? A viewer that allows users to actually use Second Life, or improving Second Life’s loading times and making a viewer that is at least for some of the population, unusable.

In a laughable way though I found a solution to the problem though.

I have moved back to Viewer 1.

Over time, while the better known viewers like Phoenix have perished, a small hardcore group have continued to push viewer 1, and I am very thankful that TPV’s like Singularity decided to stick with Viewer 1 and build software that can offer what is for people like me, essentials.

Singularity is fast on my PC – in fact it seems to be running circles around Firestorm in terms of FPS rates. It also is much kinder to my PC – its operational load cost on my CPU and memory is a third of Viewer 3.  Its also stable – everything that should work, works flawlessly.

Its more useable for builders – as it still has the older Edit Appearance system, it means faster production times for clothing and skins compared to viewer 3.

It seems to have all of the “unique” features that viewer 3 has.

The only thing I really still have to test and work on is mesh uploading, however I assume that these issues have been cleaned up since I last used it.

Well. This is awkward as I think its about time I asked a question here.

Way back when Linden Labs unveiled their amazing Viewer 2 we were told by Linden Labs that this new viewer was the way forward and that it was a necessity as the technology Linden Labs was developing for Second Life in the future required this new viewer.

Today in near enough three years on from that. The new technology Linden Labs was developing, is mostly here now and there new viewer has gone through massive development in that time.

But as a user of Second Life, all I can see that has happened is this.

The new viewer is still an overweight, cluttered, messy design with a GUI that has had to be adapted to look like the original viewer in order for it to work right. Its memory and CPU over intensive and has from my point of view, become an untenable and unusable piece of software thats throwing out multiple errors all the time.

The irony of this though, is that viewer 1 base systems like Singularity, based on tried and tested software is faster, more stable, less memory and CPU intensive and gives equal or better FPS rates than the new viewer does.

And here is the serious point. We were told the new Viewer was a requirement due to the new technologies coming. And yet, today, Singularity has effectively integrated ALL of those new technologies in its build and seems to be running circles around the new Viewer.

I don’t really have much more to rant about so I will sign off with this.