What happened to Kirstens Viewer?

I was wondering if any other viewer out there has as low a machine footprint as Kirsten's did? It also rendered graphics much faster for many people. I am sure the Cool Viewer and others like it are good products but basically they're an advanced gui and a few stabilization patches over the same old SL engine which eats up a computer's resources like nobody's business. Kirsten's viewer was stand alone with no need to install over the official viewer and on the edge of performance balanced with a marked reduction in the use of computer resources making it possible for many with older or lower powered machines to have a step up in performance. For those with up to date and high performance machines it was still a bonus which after getting used to that level of use, will be hard to do without once the last release becomes too outdated to be useful on SL any longer. So, if anyone out there has a nominee for the Kirsten's Viewer replacement please reply.

That's pretty much a misunderstanding. Even the highly acclaimed Nicholaz viewers were "installed over the official viewer". Simple reason for that, save bandwidth and download time. If you look at Kirsten's viewer, it is using the same code base or "old engine" as all other viewers but distributes all the files the official viewer comes with too. It's not a standalone viewer but a standalone installation. Nice for inexperienced users, but no performance or footprint gain from it.

Suggest you look at Nicholaz Old School 1.18.0.6 (discontinued) or CV 1.19.0.5 which both are not using windlight rendering and are faster than Kirsten's on older hardware. The same time they do look much better than lowered settings in windlight viewers as officially suggested on slow hardware.

Hope that helps

so let me summarize...

She stopped because as an openlife grid programmer she isn't allowed anymore to release the soucecode of the openlife grid client or else peoples might write clients compatible with openlife? (wich openlife seems to want to prevent)

but at the same time put herself in violation of the GPL?

@Kyrah

Thats the official answer from Sakai:
http://openlifegrid.com/Forums/tabid/323/aff/2/aft/262/afv/topic/Default.aspx

Let's see if this is also just an empty promise as so many before. The one week he mentioned has passed without anything provided by OLG.

i hate being right sometimes -_-

I love Kirsten's viewer too, much faster than the SL client and I never have had to do an 'end task' on it, unlike the SL version.

I have had a problem the last couple of days... when I log in I can see I've got IM's, when I click the communicate button it won't open and I can't read them. I also can't IM anyone by using their profile. Anyone else had this?

So OLG tries to make open source software wich they took from someone else and make it closed source then???

Not only this. The latest coup was Sakai pretending to have invented a feature that already exists for a while in Opensim, their declared enemy (besides SL): growing trees.

OLG: http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=721
Opensim: http://justincc.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/this-week-in-opensim-dev-week-ending-saturday-7th-february-2009 (trees module r8202)

Pretty much lame cheapo car dealer behaviour .

The other question regarding the viewer source code I renewed today.

http://openlifegrid.com/Forums/tabid/323/aff/2/aft/262/afv/topic/Default.aspx

He promised as so many times before and fails to deliver...one wonders if that's out of being incapable or if it is intentional. Whatever the reason is. It is a continued licensing violation and LL should possibly react. If OLG wants to go closed source they would have to acquire a (paid commercial) license for the basic viewer source code from LL (as Onrez did before), and this would not allow them to use many opensourced patches as they do by now. The ball is in OLG's court.

.... Default.aspx... says it all.

Pity - I have always preferred KL viewer over LL's one ..

Last I got was S14 .. is there a copy of S16 floating around for a down load any where ???

Thnxs

Some people created a mirror. Anyway, it will be obsolete soon with 1.22 becoming official.
http://cid-9d11b674b52213d6.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public/KirstenLee%20Cinquetti%20Viewers

At what point will my Nicholaz 1.19 EH version really become obsolete? And which viewer should I switch to? I really like Nicholaz for stability and for how it does the Communicate and Friends tear-offs.

Those tear-offs have been standard for a long time - since the Friends list was incorporated into the Communicate box, if I'm not mistaken. Unless the N. viewer does it differently, it's just normal SL viewer stuff.

The Cool Viewer 1.19 is a step beyond the Nicholaz in that it is updated further, but still is non WL and runs great on low end systems. You may want tio try it out.

Basically you have two choices. Non-windlight and windlight rendering. The non-windlight version is the less resource demanding alternative and should run faster on not only older hardware. It also looks better than a windlight viewer with lowered / disabled graphic settings. Windlight viewers are all the recent offical viewer versions.

Non-Windlight viewers (recent versions with security fixes):
Nicholaz Old School 1.18.0.6 (discontinued)
Cool Viewer 1.19.0.5

Windlight viewers
Official Linden 1.21.6.0 or RC 1.22.9.0
Cool Viewer 1.21.6.0 R16 or RC 1.22.9.0 R1
Imprudence 1.1.1 (1.21.6.0 codebase)
Hippo (1.21.6.0 codebase)
KirstenLee's S16 (1.21.6 codebase with some additions from other branches)
Marine's RLV (added Restrainedlife features to the official viewer)

Everything else I'd consider obsolete by now. Please note that all other (older) viewers based on anything before 1.20.17 codebase do not include important security fixes (the above listed ones have those fixes backported and are safe). Please add if I forgot something.

Just wanted to say thank you Boy for the updates you've been doing here but also for your viewers. Don't think most understand just how many hours you are putting into the builds, hosting the files at your cost and helping the community, all without compensation.

Hope a thank you every now and then helps.

Nicholaz 1.19.1(4) EC-H, the version I use, does Windlight. The question is, should I keep using it or are there reasons to switch? And which should I switch to?

And yes, I really appreciate the work you and others do on 3rd party viewers!! I've sent Nicholaz $L for using his viewer. I'd send free clothing to anyone else if I switched to their viewer. )))

@Snickers

If you like it and it works stable for you no need to change. Newer versions add some more features like Mono for instance. Unless you need that, I'd not necessarily change. Especially as there are currently a lot of texture loading issues (slow, grey...) in the official 1.21. Look out for 1.22 when that becomes official. Or try the RC, CV has a 1.22 version with the old UI same as Nicholaz .