First Look: Render Pipeline Improvements
Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 4:28 PM by: Steve LindenI would like to introduce a new terminology for test viewers that connect to the main grid: First Look. A previous example would be Focus Beta, however in order to avoid confusion with test viewers that connect to the beta grid we have changed the name.
The next First Look Viewer will be Render Pipeline Improvements. This version of the viewer has no new features, but represents a significant redesign of the graphics and texture pipelines. The purpose of this first release is to measure stability and performance. We are not expecting huge gains on most systems, however the overall experience should be generally smoother and hopefully more stable.
You can help us out by downloading the First Look Viewer and running it against the main grid. We will be tracking frame rate and crash statistics from these viewers, so please submit any crash reports. You can also post comments here and join the “First Look” group in Second Life. As we gather data and tune the new render pipeline, we will post updated versions.
Release Notes for Second Life 1.13.1(56671) January 11, 2006
Changes:
* Texture Pipeline Architecture
** Significant redesign of texture pipeline
** Improved texture caching
** Unlimited texture cache size
* Render Pipeline Architecture
** Significant changes to render pipeline
** Introduction of Vertex Buffer Objects for improved stability
** Better batching of geometry for improved render performance (on some systems)
** Alpha sorting changes to improve performance
** Better particle system limits
January 12th, 2007 at 4:35 PM
termonology? How about a spell checker for the blog
Just saying
January 12th, 2007 at 4:37 PM
omg…..finally! the ability to actually test something on the main grid before it gets released!
whoever made this happen….THANK YOU!!!
January 12th, 2007 at 4:39 PM
Bah, everyone knows programmers can’t spell!
January 12th, 2007 at 4:40 PM
January 12th, 2007 at 4:49 PM
If you guys want to see a neat little feature in this new client, go to Client -> Mouse Smoothing (toward the bottom) and go into mouselook. Looking around may not feel as accurate (don’t try playing gun games with this) but it sure feels a lot nicer.
January 12th, 2007 at 5:01 PM
Very happy with this so far. I’m seeing VASTLY improved memory usage and better framerates, especially when sitting still.
Overall smoother and faster. Kudos to the devs!
-Z
January 12th, 2007 at 5:03 PM
@Sabin
Very subtle, very cool! I never used mouselook much before, this is much nicer
@Steve
Great idea, “First Look” viewers. This should tie in nicely with the whole open source thingie.
Cheers folks!
January 12th, 2007 at 5:05 PM
I’m seeing improvements in overall render, and this is the first viewer that I didn’t have to reset the Affinity on my dual-core AMD to make run smooth. Excellent work.
Couple of glitches, though:
-items on my HUD are not resolving
-Sometimes, instead of typing in the chat window, the client acts as if I’ve pressed the Control key and it starts giving me menu items.
I’d say that if you can fix those things, you’ll have a winner on your hands.
January 12th, 2007 at 5:06 PM
Yes that was me.
January 12th, 2007 at 5:15 PM
…oh, [b]wow[/b] - the difference is like night and day!..
…i’ve just finished taking it for a spin and the performance is [i]profoundly[/i] improved…probably the only real glitch i’ve noticed so far is that particles are a lot less smooth, more jittery, but the overall res time is like a fraction of what it used to be, and far more significantly: i’m not plagued with multi-second frames anymore!.. ^_^
January 12th, 2007 at 5:19 PM
Ok, Thank YOU GODS!, Amazing, Frame rate is much much higher and smoother! i am on a laptop with a shared Memory Video card.
Pulling a good steady 40 or so instead of 16!
Also i can see it hit 80 or so sometimes, Still watching and observing but! so far Its very very very pleasing to me.
January 12th, 2007 at 5:19 PM
Again, the Linux users get left out. Does it really take that long to run scons on that part of the tree?
January 12th, 2007 at 5:27 PM
I’m really excited about using this viewer after work and then hopefully onwards as my regular viewer, like I did with the Focus Beta one.
Live and play in Second Life.
Great to have ya on the blog, Steve; from what I understand, he and Runitai have been working really hard on this! And yeah that really was Sabin, I’m getting him set up here.
I also dig the new terminology of “First Look”, it’s easier for me to remember.
January 12th, 2007 at 5:39 PM
unable to exit edit appearasnce mode but the rez time is super fast. (will file bug report)
January 12th, 2007 at 5:41 PM
Downloading it, taking a fly through the City Sims, which are some of the lowest-fps sims on the grid (due to the double prim nature of the sims, content is doubled on your screen, essentially). Still had to do the affinity trick with dual-cores.
With a dual-core Pentium and a 7600 NVidia, I’m getting around 15 fps in Grignano at 256 draw distance. Delicious.
January 12th, 2007 at 5:53 PM
feels only a little peppier in my normal environs, noticeably better in Midnight City.
LINDEN LAB WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE LAGGY SL I HAVE COME TO LOVE I AM A LANDOWNERZOMG U HAVE TO RESTORE THE OLD CRAPPY SL
kthx.
January 12th, 2007 at 5:59 PM
Can’t be certain - seemed great at first, then I bought some demo item in a store for $1, every texture went grey and started re-drawing, and inventory started downloading all 128,000 of my items - after 18 minutes inventory is at 6,000 items downloaded, and I’m able to see maybe 10% of the (probably) 800 textures in the store.
Might not be related to new viewer, but something is very, very wrong on my Intel Mac….
January 12th, 2007 at 6:02 PM
Testing in the Ahern Welcome Area I do not see any difference, unfortunately. Same settings (maxed sliders), same spot, same directional view - across both viewers. I’m on an old nforce2/radeon 9800 pro system here so that’s probably why. heh.
Thanks to the devs though for their hard work.
January 12th, 2007 at 6:07 PM
Thaddeus: uh, might wanna check into your inventory there… inventory size has a huge impact on viewer fps, for some reason. 128,000 objects is, uh… insane. I’ve been using SL for 3.5 years and have maybe 4000 objects.
January 12th, 2007 at 6:09 PM
What! No Linux client? Please tell us it is on it’s way.
January 12th, 2007 at 6:14 PM
Sweet. Seems much faster and smoother so far, even in Limbo sim, which is often laggy. Yahoo!
January 12th, 2007 at 6:17 PM
Just one quick thing I’ve noticed. I can’t right click on the person’s name tag to bring up their profile. I have to click on their person. If I click on the name tag..it clicks whatever object is behind them. It’s only inconvenient in a room full of dancing people where it’s hard to get a fix on the body you are trying to click.
January 12th, 2007 at 6:26 PM
I don’t see any kind of change in FPS on my system (amd 3700+, geforce 6800 GS 256mb), either in my home sim or in the welcome area. Maybe this client only shows dramatic gains on lower-end systems?
January 12th, 2007 at 6:27 PM
A very noticeable improvement for me and my dinosaur 1.7 Gig CPU running an ATI Raedon 9800 Pro.
Thanks all!
January 12th, 2007 at 6:29 PM
Huge improvement to FPS. Trees render improperly though, and I’m getting the same odd menu trigger behavior when typing in the chat field that Doodles reported.
Bug reports filed.
January 12th, 2007 at 6:42 PM
my review of the new viewer is mixed. right when i log on n such i get really good fps, same as if i was standing in aroom walking in one direction, how ever as soon as i start to pan my camera around my fps drops from 60+ to 4 or 5 and shutters. i tested it on many differnt draw distances and it still doesnt help. it also seems to have the most issues around prims with high quality textures on it. :/ videocards: 1 gig vide ram geforce 7900 w/ SLI.
January 12th, 2007 at 6:49 PM
It feels smoother, but I don’t have framerate data to provide. One bug thing I did notice while in the Thomson sim is when I create a prim and it was still the default plywood texture I tried to change the color of the entire prim. Even though “apply immediately” was selected the color I chose was not visibly apparent until I either moved, resized, or rotated the prim.
January 12th, 2007 at 6:57 PM
I like it!
January 12th, 2007 at 7:07 PM
ABSOLUTELY Brilliant!
Flying around at 30fps, complex stores at 36fps 8000 particle fog machines not a problem!
This is an absolutely awesome upgrade!
(We have a fog machine in the club and the fog machine looks incredible…)
I’m really impressed…
Particles seem to have very little effect such as clouds… etc. Also massive improvement for using vehicles in SL.
(Did I say I’m impressed already…? OMY!) This is so good I wanna swear while i talk about it (aussie thing).
THANKS LINDENS! BRILLIANT!
*PS Your new method for shading is beautiful a massive improvement for ’shine’ surfaces and more!
January 12th, 2007 at 7:07 PM
Improved performance from what I see. I crashed twice, but I was doing something a bit exotic; I was trying to get to a particle source embedded within another object, and had particle beacons turned on, along with Hide Selected (i.e., select the outer object, hiding it, and then select the inner object that is the real target). Kerflooey, twice in a row, when I tried to select the outer, obscuring object. I let the automated bug reporter do its thing.
January 12th, 2007 at 7:11 PM
It’s nice progress! At first I didn’t notice much change, but I think there is improvement (Think! It’s subtle!).
The Smooth Mouselook is also nice. Changing it from a Boolean to a Float may give for some more tinkering fun with camera effects. I’ve been playing around with Debug Settings -> ZoomTime and found it to be a neat little unfeature (as well as Freezetime!).
January 12th, 2007 at 7:12 PM
this client is so much better the other client was so hard on my pc i always frozed up, crashed, hardrive constantly swaping generating enough lag that i cant even move but with this it done it for sure i can move more once again i dont freeze up so bad as i use to and more fps increase then before even for windows 2000 (i know im using an older os but i hate xp) its alot better for sure keep up the good work (still havent found bugs id know of yet ill report as i find some)
January 12th, 2007 at 7:13 PM
Well, well. The first impressions were awesome. My old 2003 PowerBook G4 managed 20 FPS on several non-empty sims. Wow.
It takes some getting used to. The renderer is now so fast, and it gets the “right” textures in such an uncanny way, that I was almost frying my poor G4 CPU, and had to throttle the network bandwidth down. So I raised the network cache instead… and… surprise, surprise… now it goes above 1 GB!
The “new” mouselook is simply fantastic! Now it seems it might become useful again
Sure, there were some slight details. One HUD rezzed properly, the other didn’t. There are some issues in typing — a fast typer will sometimes call up the menus instead — which is annoying, but, I think that might be an easy bug to fix.
Everything seems so strange, now. Things simply rez at the proper places now — no “greyness” at all! And I’m sure I’m not insane when saying that the occlusion thingy is working way better than before. Sure, that leads to a huge overload of my poor CPU and much higher fluctuation on the FPS — ie. I could go down to 2-3 FPS when walking/flying, or turning the camera around, while the SL client was downloading insanely amounts of textures… and then… “poof”… after a few seconds of “hiccups”, everything suddenly appears, crisp-clear, with all textures loaded — and FPS rises back to 15, sometimes 20.
Wow. 15 FPS on densely packed shops. I haven’t seen that on my poor Mac since… well… 2004!
Oh, people will naturally complain about the many quirks. I even managed to crash once (something that happens so rarely on my Mac that I wonder what people are doing so wrongly!). But overall, I think you’re definitely on to something. The improvements — and the strange, weird way to deal with the way things load now — will probably take some time to get used to, but — I can see where this all leads to
I hope that more and more people are able to test this out and feed you their logs and settings, so that you can tweak the whole system. I definitely look forward to the “finished” version, once it is released. In the mean time, being stubborn, I’ll stick to this “beta” viewer (like I did with the Focus Viewer), since I think that the advantages far outpace the few annoying quirks.
A faster SL in 2007 than it was in 2004! Who would believe this magic?
January 12th, 2007 at 7:17 PM
First off, let me say Kudos! I am glad some work is finally being done on the graphics performance. I was very encouraged by what I read before I actually got in and used it. I am using a bit of an older setup as well. 2.0 GHz Centrino with ATI Radeon 9700.
Here are some actual numbers:
Test __________________ FPS - Normal - First Look
Starring into empty space at 500: 40 — 30
Starring at single prim wall at 250: 28 — 25
Walking around in skybox at 250: 23 — 23
Standing in complex environment: 12 — 15
My actual impressions… Well, although the FPS are not as high in most cases, it might feel a little smoother, but textures seem to take a LOT longer to load. If I TP to a new area, everything seems to stay gray MUCH longer. Unless I stood still and waited, mousing over different things, it seemed to take forever to load. On the positive side, avatars seem to look better. Once they finally load, they seem to stay sharp, and not fuzz out as quickly as they did in the normal client.
Well, keep at it, hopefully this will lead to great improvements, just please keep in mind that some of us are using older ATI hardware, and not the latest and greatest nVidia cards.
January 12th, 2007 at 7:18 PM
Good job on the First Look release.
Initial testing shoes no frame rate increase, even a slight decrease, but I have only just installed it, so may be a passing thing. Will do more testing.
I like the Compressed snapshot to disc feature
First issue? I have my chat history window open all the time. When I go into mouselook, up to ~30 lines of the chat from either log on or last mouselook (whichever is shortest) is shown in the mouselook view as if it has all just been received, and then it fades out. If I do not use the history window, and then go into mouselook view, it works as normal.
January 12th, 2007 at 7:20 PM
s/shoe/show/ read through that twice, and still missed it lol
January 12th, 2007 at 7:31 PM
Ok, this thing is less stable than George Bush! It has crashed a number of times on me, I sent in the reports. But it happened while sorting textures, while chating, and while actualy standing doing nothing.
January 12th, 2007 at 7:39 PM
*pokes the FPS*
Are you sure this is accurate? It sure seem better than just the 7-10 FPS it show me. Textures loads in just a few seconds now too!
It would be nice with a setting on choosing the location of the cache now, with the unlimited cache size, one could dedicate a whole hard drive to it.
It seem if someone changes the skin texture, it does not load with this viewer or at least having trouble to. Confirm this bug?
Oh, what’s the ‘Reload Personal Setting Overrides’ in Client menu?
January 12th, 2007 at 7:39 PM
@Arthur Fermi
Your input and bug reports are appreciated! Keep em coming! Thank you!
January 12th, 2007 at 7:54 PM
Help -> Bug Report appears to have gone away. Guess I can’t report bugs anymore?
January 12th, 2007 at 7:58 PM
# Huns Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 7:54 PM PST
Help -> Bug Report appears to have gone away. Guess I can’t report bugs anymore?
—-
Bug report under Tools menu now. Guess some things went into this viewer from the one that didn’t got released this Wednesday.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:01 PM
I likewise am not seeing a significant FPS upgrade. 2 FPS at best just standing around. Oddly enough at 700m up in the air in a 20m wide box I get 15 fps with the camera inside it and 30 when I swing the camera outside and zoom it around a bit. Texture load times seem oddly skewed, some textures load almost immediately while others seem to take a few minutes (the transparent texture on my multigadget’s “sphere spear” has yet to load up, and I’ve been online for almost 20 minutes now. o.o; ). Overall system performance seems better, I can multitask to a browser now without serious caching. More testing is required to see if future uses will load up textures faster (i.e. more coherient caching), or if this long load time thing is going to be a bug.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:01 PM
Ok, so I downloaded the client on my OS X Intel mac, got a couple of incoming IM’s, went to answer one, and crashed. I sure would like to know if there were any performance improvements from this client, but I’m going to need to be able to stay up longer than five seconds to see them!
January 12th, 2007 at 8:05 PM
Addendum:
To clarify the texture issue, MOST textures will “load” at least the minimum mipmap, but seems to take forever and a day to load the full size image in some cases. The mg’s “sphere spear” using the transparent texture was the only grey surface that lasted more than 2 seconds. And for clarification, the “sphere spear” is the many overlapping spheres that are attached to Timeless Prototype’s multigadget to give it added “umph” for super speed flight.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:07 PM
Working great for me, FPS in the 30’s most of the time. Seems to actually be using both my processors now too. I am seeing the particle jerkiness, but otherwise textures load super fast.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:11 PM
@Huns
Tools -> Report Bug
January 12th, 2007 at 8:11 PM
Something you might wanna look into. Whenever I look at the contents of an object I crash.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:12 PM
Turning VBO on makes mud turn into water! It’s awesome!
Obviously, this client is also still buggy. It seems that eventually textures don’t want to load anymore at all. But I assume that’s all fixable eventually.
Overall, aside from issues, it ‘does’ seem to be a very good improvement FPS wise.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:35 PM
quick eval: alpha (xytext) took forever to load, fps where slightly faster in mouse look with smoothing on, and a tad slower on 3rd person view. some textures took much longer to load than with orginal client even after both had cleared caches.
will do more testing this weekend when i’m bored.
system: p4e (3.4), 2gb ddr, radein 512 x1600 video.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:36 PM
Are we going to get a better way to view the web blog? I really getting sick and tired of scrolling ( that don`t know how to sumup simple points ) thu junk from a few posters here!
As for the current state of the viewer, It seems teports are no stable and with little problems reguards crashes. I hope the we see a ( mustly Bug free client inthe coming days
looking forward to the new views……….a load hands together for steve linden! 
January 12th, 2007 at 8:50 PM
wow nice job frames i can see my charitor move exelent frames persecond and loading nice job linden labs getting back to the old frame 41 per second instead of one or 2 frames per second
January 12th, 2007 at 9:01 PM
Ok, I tried it a second time, and had much better results. Overall it seems to be pretty good. I went to Midnight City and walked around, and got very decent frame rates for such a busy place. Looking forward to seeing these performance improvements in the regular viewer.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:20 PM
This is great! I’m seeing particles from a bit farther away and slight improvements in fps though vast improvement in texture download and application rates.
I’ll test more extensively over the weekend and report best settings for my config. It is kinda funny that y’all’ve broken your own trees.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:22 PM
“Jesse Malthus Says: Again, the Linux users get left out. Does it really take that long to run scons on that part of the tree?”
“msersen Says: What! No Linux client? Please tell us it is on it’s way.”
Linux is so much better than Windows that it doesn’t need it
Maybe the developer just doesn’t have Linux?
Which could be the opposite problem later when Linux developers don’t provide Windows versions.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:42 PM
OK - Initial impressions in an unpopulated area showed faster loading of textures… so I decided to take things to the Elbow Room, which is regularly packed with 25-30+ at peak hours.
I am currently sitting in on about 27 people in sim… most of them within the immediate 6m radius. FPS is sitting at 1.1FPS…. not surprising, i guess…. but i did notice that av rezzing is working much better. The annoying invisible avatar bug (group related) is no more, as far as I can tell. I will keep an eye on this for further reference.
I have also noticed that if I pull up a chat history and expand it to full screen, then suddenly close it, chat in the room sometimes fills the entire screen, despite not having spanned less than my current 40 second setting.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:44 PM
Gah, the texture console got a makeover - and I was just making progress out of figuring it out!
Curiously, the console collapsed down to a single entry after a while of watching…is it supposed to do that? o.O
January 12th, 2007 at 9:45 PM
PowerBook G4 - it all looks the same as before (except for the new bugs, of course). No improvement. Going back to the released version until the next time.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:48 PM
“** Unlimited texture cache size”
This is incorrect. I attempted to set my cache to 50GB and was capped at 10GB.(65GB free space)
January 12th, 2007 at 9:49 PM
aki that deoends mainly when one system specs. If you less DDR in your system and a below spec Graphic card that might be your case.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:51 PM
Also now that we are doing live testing there should be a bug report category lableled “First Look” that groups all bugs specific to the testing and expedites them being processed.
January 12th, 2007 at 10:06 PM
I have a cople of problems that i have seen, first, report bug is not showing screen shot. which makes it hard to report the alpha texture sorting is worse than normal viewer. I am seeing not alpha textures through opaque alpha texture at ceratin angles, give the house i am owrking on a sense of no privacy:}
January 12th, 2007 at 10:09 PM
Usagi> I am running on a Mac Powerbook G4, 1.67, 1.5GB RAM and a ATI Radion 9600 XT.
January 12th, 2007 at 10:13 PM
aki you seem strong enough….maybe more DDR might me the answer.Sometimes those ATI GC are not very friendly when using sl client.
January 12th, 2007 at 10:17 PM
After being in FIRSTLOOK i seeing a little slowness in dl textures. With touches of pocketloss.
January 12th, 2007 at 10:23 PM
Any chance to get a Linux version of this client ?… Or even the sources ?… Stability is a HUGE problem on Linux with ATI drivers (SL works just fine in LInux with Nvidia card and drivers, but ATI is a nightmare, to say the least)…
January 12th, 2007 at 10:24 PM
Were particles in another region visible before? They don’t seem to be now..
January 12th, 2007 at 10:39 PM
First thing I’ve noticed is that r-clicking on nametags goes “though” it and you click on whatever might be behind it, rather than getting the pie menu when you r-click on your avatar.
January 12th, 2007 at 10:43 PM
Great performance but crashed many times while performing a number of different tasks. Still needs a lot of work to make it production capable.
January 12th, 2007 at 10:57 PM
Hmm, impressive! Went from 17 to 30 fps with several people around (all stationary, same number of avs).
Elsewhere 30 fps increased to 40… Not bad.
GeForce 8800 P4 3.4gig.
January 12th, 2007 at 11:05 PM
Does anyone know how to get open source secondlife started. I have edited the code now how do I get it started to see it? This is confuseing. I have tried fourms, wiki and websites. This is all I can reli (Wrong Spelling) on now
January 12th, 2007 at 11:13 PM
Haven’t had much chance to test thing sout but I did crank up al the graphics options for the most part (maxed LOD, turned on VBO) and so far its running smoother than the normal client which had some of the LOD sliders down to half because of client lag when turning and having things render.
One request (and may be too much to add at this point but in the future) with the now unlimited cache size could we finally get an option to change the cache location? Having the cache in my user profile folder on Windows hurts as I don’t have much free space on that drive (the drive SL is installed in though has about 10GB free).
January 12th, 2007 at 11:25 PM
One thing I notice alot of linux users complaining about is being left out…
…didn’t you move out? I mean, yeah, Bill Gates is the evil overlord of software corporate greed but…
…you moved out! Come on! it was all about open source, you could all do it yourselves, Linux is so much better and there is such a huge community that you’d never feel the sting of leaving Microsoft. Everything was going to be warm and fuzzy and stable and work right.
This was the pitch I kept getting from glassy eyed Linux advocates. Do yourself a favor Linux users…if you don’t like getting your version worked on after Windows version and after Mac OS, Get Windows (or a Mac). If you’d rather have the “superior because it’s open sourced and you can do it yourself” OS, then pay the price.
oh wait..Linux is free isn’t it?
Is it considered hypocricy to complain about complaining? Or just redundant?
January 12th, 2007 at 11:29 PM
The cache limit has only been expanded to a petty 10GB. I filed abug report. I truely wouldn’t mind giving SL a terabyte of cache, even if it meant adding another few gigs of ram.
January 12th, 2007 at 11:34 PM
I do still have the Dual-Core bug, so still have to set affinity. HUD transparency is off, untill one uses the attachment, some textures refuse to show, ony after selecting the object and releasing it again, it will update the texture. Backface culling seems to work, I think they need to set a distance for it to be applied tho, as textures in a room next to the one I am in, do not seem to load, and walking from a fully textured room into a grey one, is quite erhm, a strange experience. Small thing, flexi-prim handling isnt quite there yet, cant put my finger on it, but I notice jerky movement in the prims. Particles otoh run smoothly for me.
Sounds much like I do not like this version, but overall I prefer this version over the “regular” viewer. It handles much smoother than before.
I am happy with the performance, 60+ FPS
January 12th, 2007 at 11:56 PM
Nikki, they already automatically flag any bug report from the First Look client so they can tell them apart. Same with the preview clients. Since they’re watching framerate stats closely with this client, I bet they’ll also be watching those bug reports, so classify them as you would normally to save them time
January 13th, 2007 at 12:32 AM
I’ve plunked a Linux build up at:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/firstlook-secondlife-com/SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_56675.tar.bz2
But beware - this has had absolutely no testing. None. Zip. Zilch. I just typed “scons” and crossed my fingers. Let me know if it works and (if so) I’ll add links from the main download page. And if it explodes in fireworks… well, I warned you!
January 13th, 2007 at 1:29 AM
Nice! Finally some imporvements! but, i found something in the Client Debug menu that makes my FPS about 2 times faster than before
but i don’t know what the initials mean LOL what’s VBO?
January 13th, 2007 at 1:29 AM
oh, and my computer was SLOW on Second Life…. about 8 FPS in my everyday Second Life O.o
January 13th, 2007 at 1:30 AM
(on the main viewer before the option was enabled)
January 13th, 2007 at 1:35 AM
had frequent kernel panics on my imac 24″ nvidia for the last 3 versions.
With this new beta, i had the most stable session in weeks. about 3 hrs straight without a crash or kernel panic. I will cross my fingers on this.
January 13th, 2007 at 1:52 AM
My viewer just crashed when rotating the camera, when i saw an “invisible ball” attachment is a big white ball now lol Does someone have the same problem? maybe alpha textures don’t work correctly on it?
January 13th, 2007 at 1:53 AM
other than that, Textures and FPS is MUCH better…. Textures load on the sec i finish logging in, and FPS is about 5-8 frames faster O.o
January 13th, 2007 at 1:55 AM
Editing crashes the viewer (:O everytime i select Edit… or when i use Camera Controls while editing… it crashes. P.S.: the position markers are MALFUNCTIONING.
January 13th, 2007 at 2:18 AM
Joshua:
thanks for providing the Linux build. I’m going to give it a try right now.
Sameer Anand:
some info about starting the self-compiled client:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Compiling_the_viewer_%28Linux%29#Testing_the_result_from_inside_the_tree
see also
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Common_compilation_problems
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Portal
if you’re going to build the sources on Ubuntu you may want to have a look to
http://signore.wordpress.com/2007/01/08/compiling-the-second-life-viewer-source-code-on-ubuntu-edgy/
Xs Andree:
I’d consider your behaviour to be “trolling.
January 13th, 2007 at 2:22 AM
Running a 3G P4 with 1G ram, XP, and a PNY 7600GT (256M). Firstlook loads textures *much* slower, even when I’m standing right in front of the object, and trying the ‘edit trick’. Flying around Spaceport Alpha is jerky and hard to control. If I was thinking, I’d have checked frame rates, but it seems way under the 40-some I’m used to.
January 13th, 2007 at 2:26 AM
@Joshua
The Linux client you put up isn’t working(at least for me). When I start it up, the login screen background is completely grey(I believe this may be the HTML login feature that hasn’t fully been implemented on Linux) and it crashes before even allowing me to type in my credentials. If you use the old login screen, then I bet it would work just fine.
January 13th, 2007 at 2:43 AM
Feature or a bug?
When pointing the mouse below the top set of menus (File Edit View Tools etc.) the first letter becomes underscored.
Inventory annoyingly slow to download (4600 items)
fps greatly improved.
Possibly a coincidence but (time ms) improved on home sim, this is normally 22.4 - 22.8 once settled, is now 21.5 - 21.8. Arriving in locations uses far more bandwidth and takes longer to settle. (Images time) goes as far as 35 on a sim on arrival which when settled has a 0.0 (Images time).
FPS improved certainly.
Only pain so far is inventory download. Not had many conversations so far, but will report back if I receive the same problem as others have reported.
No bug reports filed.
Oh, and overall thanks
Have a great one.
January 13th, 2007 at 2:54 AM
Another bug: when I right-click on an avatar’s name, I don’t get the avatar pie menu (Add Friend, Rate, Send IM, etc), I get the regular pie menu (Create, Edit, etc) as if I clicked on whatever was behind the name. I did submit a bug report in-world.
January 13th, 2007 at 2:55 AM
Due to limited drive space I have my cache set at 500mb. For over a year now it has crept to as high as 575mb. I of course delete it manually,but it always creeps upwards.
Now… my cache shows 112mb and SL is drawing in at a phenominal rate (for me). This viewer is making my humble 128mb ATI card seem like it’s operating in the 1.4 simpler days when I first started SL. Most Excellent job as my friend Bill and Ted use to say. Hope to see further improvements.
January 13th, 2007 at 3:27 AM
Well…
the main change as stated before seems to be: much better memory management. while with 2ghz cpu and 2gb ram on the laptop using outlook in parallal to SL was impossible before and brwosing the internet very slow, no it´s not a problem at all.
seems to be the right way this code went… hopefully changes will be merged in the next regular version…
cheers
Ralf
January 13th, 2007 at 3:35 AM
Hi guys, good work on letting us test somthign on the main grid.
1) - It does appear to be smoother.
2) - parcel crossing seam to have improved
3) - Textures take a lot longer to download (although very impressed by being able to set my own texture cache
I think this should be merger on the 17th (or was that the plan anyways Steve, Josh?)
Nice work Guys
JP
January 13th, 2007 at 3:43 AM
Another point to add - Is there any perticular sys spec program you guy woould like us to use so that we can send over some detailed spec sheets, to compare performance against?
Just a thought
JP
January 13th, 2007 at 3:46 AM
Joshua Linden, thanks for the GNU/Linux build to test! I couldn’t get past startup either, trying various combinations or LL_GL_BASICEXT, LL_GL_NOEXT, or neither of those two, combined with either empty ~/.secondlife or an edited settings.xml from the Windows version, containing the most minimal graphics and audio settings. I managed to get a few different errors at different stages of startup and tried to capture at least one of each for crash log submission. Hope they help!
Antonius Misfit, I tried the suggestion to get around that here (http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?p=1325282#post1325282), which works when running the Windows version in WINE, but it didn’t change anything with my First Look crashes.
January 13th, 2007 at 3:48 AM
My usual FPS, when lurking around my home is around the 35-42 range; under this client, my fps sat in the low-to-mid forties, and occasionally broke 50! - sweet!
My skybox store usually runs at around 60+fps, no noticable improvement there under the test client (if anything, it was a _tad_ slower than normal…).
Texture loading is a _lot_ snappier though - and that’s what most users are going to notice. If this performance holds up when everybody else is using the new render pipeline, you’re going to regain the faith of a *lot* of currently-unhappy users. Nice work!
January 13th, 2007 at 3:58 AM
Just to confirm a few findings other folks have had
*FPS up
*Textures load in quicker, and seem more intelligent about when they should load
*Had the “ctrl sneaks into keyboard input” a couple of times, confused the hell out of me when i was suddenly requesting admins status lol
*Also Tinys comment about mosuelook and the chat log rings true, if you close the chat history window in mouselook the main viewer screen fills with chat.
*Avatar rendering is much better so far, and high quality skins and clothes seem to render much more crisply altho maybe my cataracts are just taking the day off lol
*Increased cache option an unexpected bonus - thank you for this and can I echo the calls to finally be able to set our own location too ?
My system:
AMD Barton 2.8/1,5gig ddr/ATI X1600 Pro 512mb
2meg cable connection, hard cabled
And thank you for something I feel positive enough about to finally break my blog virginity - excellent release IMHO
Tangle Le Twigs
January 13th, 2007 at 4:06 AM
i must say, what ever you guys are doing in there at LL, the game’s running “quick”, You guys must be on top of something good, great work you guys, unreal speed in game at the moment, extreamly low lag in higher lag areas, great gameplay, *4 thumbs up*
January 13th, 2007 at 4:13 AM
I’ve been using it, and have had no problems other than rebuilding cache. Texture loads are generally faster.
I am not sure that this is common, but it seems to me that if an object has an alpha on it that it is slower to rez other textures on the object. I’ll try recreating it a few times, and if it is consistent I’ll write it up.
Overall, good job on the viewer.
(Shows us the code deltas, hobbitses?)
January 13th, 2007 at 4:28 AM
The VBO switch in Prefs/Adv. Graphics is brilliant. I have a GeForce 6600LE card with 256Mb and I’m getting an extra 5-10 fps depending on the location.
Ooh ooh and ‘Client/Compress Snapshots to Disk’ is great also!
Luverly!! Thanks guys
January 13th, 2007 at 4:28 AM
First Look and my results………..Ok i have major problems………
Crashing due to rotation of the camera
Crashing with choosing from Inventory
Crashing Due to teleporting
Crashing Due to Using the Debug Menu
January 13th, 2007 at 4:54 AM
/me afraid to try it. Crashing hurts.
Sounds like this new viewer has promise but is a ways off from prime time with all the crashes. Am excited to see what it looks like when it’s more stable.
January 13th, 2007 at 5:11 AM
@Joshua Linden: The linux build works but doesn’t like the KDU libraries. When I copy them to the lib/ nd bin/ folders, it starts up with KDU but then throws an exception even before the main screen comes up.
stack trace:
0: ELF(do_elfio_glibc_backtrace()+0×200) [0x96fe880]
1: ELF(viewer_crash_callback()+0×15f) [0x97053ff]
2: ELF(signal_handlers(int)+0×1f2) [0x96f2a32]
3: [0xffffe500]
4: /home/zi/SecondLife/FirstLook/SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_56675/bin/libllkdu.so [0xf440f1a4]
5: ELF(LLImageJ2C::encode(LLImageRaw const*, char const*, float)+0×22) [0x98067e2]
6: ELF(LLImageJ2C::encode(LLImageRaw const*, float)+0×19) [0x9806819]
7: /home/zi/SecondLife/FirstLook/SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_56675/bin/libllkdu.so [0xf4410a3d]
8: /home/zi/SecondLife/FirstLook/SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_56675/bin/libllkdu.so [0xf4410f8c]
9: ELF(LLImageJ2C::decode(LLImageRaw*, float, int, int)+0×10c) [0x980705c]
10: ELF(LLImageJ2C::decode(LLImageRaw*, float)+0×1b) [0x980677b]
11: ELF(LLImageWorker::doWork(int)+0×73) [0x980f143]
12: ELF(LLWorkerThread::WorkRequest::processRequest()+0×22) [0x9b8cd02]
13: ELF(LLQueuedThread::processNextRequest()+0×389) [0x9b624b9]
14: ELF(LLQueuedThread::run()+0×5b) [0x9b6288b]
15: ELF(LLThread::staticRun(apr_thread_t*, void*)+0×1c) [0x9b86b6c]
16: /home/zi/SecondLife/FirstLook/SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_56675/lib/libapr-1.so.0 [0xf7a116e6]
17: /lib/libpthread.so.0 [0xf7272112]
18: /lib/libc.so.6(clone+0×5e) [0xf74962ee]
Thanks for putting up the build, though, we appreciate you not forgetting us
January 13th, 2007 at 5:33 AM
I’ve only had a chance for a quick spin, but the differences are really noticeable.
My system: AMD Athlon 64, GeForce 6800XT, 2gb of RAM, running with WinXP.
Lag is rarely a problem for me in SL, so I usually run with preferences set to the max values. When I do encounter lag, I drop my draw distance below 200 and that usually clears it up.
Immediate difference with the new viewer was the slow texture download rate. Some textures didn’t load for over a minute, with trees and plants being the most obvious to take a long time. Doesn’t usually take this long.
But once they did download — Whoaaa! The result feels like a graphics card update. There’s a noticeable increase in texture detail and vibrancy. I walked around Svarga just for the sheer fun of seeing one of my favorite places looking even better than I had imagined.
Skins texture and quality is better: smoother, more subtly highlighted and shaded.
Since lag isn’t a problem, I don’t pay much attention to the stats. But I did hit 45fps when flying around, and I idled at just under 30fps. My impression is that rate is a bit faster than before.
No crashes, no malfunctions, but I wasn’t doing much more than flying around. Haven’t tried building or anything complicated.
Overall, a VERY promising viewer to develop!
January 13th, 2007 at 5:39 AM
I tried out the client for a bit - running pretty good, texture & geometry loading was rather snappy, no problems with editing things or moving the camera around. Fps was pretty good too, I was able to walk & fly around Caledon with draw distance of 256 or 512 - using the regular client, I have to turn it down to 128 or the client will lag like crazy. Unlike some other people here, I didn’t notice improvements on region crossings.