Snowglobe

Yes, but only on the Macintosh version.

When I first used it I got a very slow frame rate. Tried again and it's normal, but the land disappears except in a very narrow angle of view forward. i can turn in a circle and see the land appearing in the middle and disappearing to the side.

Very weird. I also haven't noticed any faster texture loading. I may need to update the video drivers.

I just tried Snowglobe on a good modern laptop which can do WindLight and shadows.
With shadows off, Snowglobe seemed a bit slower at rezzing than the normal viewer (I'm still using 1.22)

With shadows enabled it seemed about the same as the 1.23 Release Candidate viewer.

I'm trying Snowglobe and right now the only differences that I've noticed between it and the current RC viewer are the fact that I haven't yet had any Group Chat errors with it (which is a good thing), and the fact that you can zoom the minimap in pretty much "all the way" (which isn't useful, or really even "neat", in my opinion). My frame rate and texture loading times remain the same.

Haven't tried shadows yet.

I've tried Snowglobe on both my ancient laptop with integrated Intel graphics, and my desktop with 8800GT card. I don't see any particular difference in performance on the desktop, but on the lappie the texture load performance is MUCH improved. Incredibly so.

I see nothing in the release notes that would explain this, other than some handwaving about changing things under the covers in rendering PREPARING for HTTP textures - but they say they are actually using them only on the maps. So, I see no reason why my lappie texture load is so improved, but it is.

Because of this, keyboard response is much improved as well, as is CPU utilization. FPS remains about the same.

Ahhhh, I THOUGHT I saw lips moving! How weird! How do you turn it off?

And yes, I've see the naked-on-upload (system clothes only, attachments rez) problem, but I've also seen it in 1.22 (sans transparent dialog boxes).
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I really wish that one of the benefits I got was no more group chat errors.

I like to keep my mini-map sized about 2"x2" and up all the time. When I get to a crowded location, the green dots can jumble together and make it much more difficult to find a decent walking path. The super zoom function helps a ton with this.

Someone mentioned this briefly up above, but I think the answer is buried in the wiki on snowglobe.

The post about the Map rendering faster got me to try it.

Textures popped in somewhat quicker. The map loaded up faster. Even Scultpy Prims seemed to come into view faster.

Still gonna check the Frame rates.

I did notice though, that upon going AFK, when I returned & tried to move my mouse, I got the "Not Responding" from Windows. It stopped doing that after about 10 seconds.

Speaking of the map, I got to do what I tried to before. Fully load the entire map:



My how SL has grown!

[Waves] I see you down there.

I had no idea there were so many islands!. More private then mainland it seems.

For over a year, the ratio of islands to mainland has been 80% islands (all of which are resident-owned) to 20% mainland (much of which is also made up of private estates which rent land).

It is difficult to assess how Zindra coming online has affected this, since LL took their land statistics page away at the start of the OpenSpace debacle, and T. Linden's economy blog postings are chiefly taken up with resident polls (marketing).
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It the lips moving people are referring to controlled by Preferences / Voice Chat / Lip Sync Mouth Animation / Enable lip sync animation ?

If they could enable another "lip sync" the whole adult industry would love SL even more

I so did not need to read that over my breakfast tea and toast O.o

Yep, now I have to clean coffee off the monitor and desk again

i havent seen this happen to myself, but when i am using snowglobe i have seen bri render in a similar manner.
i think it effects only what you see.

I've been using it as soon as I saw it was available.

Mostly it works for me. There are still glitches in the texture loading...especially when the Texture memory is set to 256 on my machine.

And occationally I can't move after a TP and have to kill it and relog.

The faster maps, higher magnification are ok. The push to allow bandwidth from 2000 to 5000 hasn't done anything for my load times. (I have a 30Mbit cable connection.)

I'm not terribly impressed with Snowglobe. The textures load noticeably faster, but I can't tell if that is because it is actually improved, or because the main client has been truly horrendous in that regard. I noticed a soon as I 'upgraded' to the latest main viewer that textures took about three times longer to load, and Snowglobe seems to load about as fast as before that 'upgrade', perhaps slightly better.

I don't notice any significant change in FPS, but I recently upgraded to an NVIDIA GTS 250 so I'm not really suffering from low FPS at the moment anyways.

Two things really annoy the hell out of me with Snowglobe:

1) Can't drop attachments, even after enabling the debug menu. I use this a *LOT* when iterating changes on a new product, and without it I just get continually frustrated.

2) Prims disappear when I focus on them closely. I think this is related to the "too many vertices in scene, I'm not going to render any more prims" feature that was recently introduced. That is the most jacked up piece of crap feature I've ever seen, and it's not specific to Snowglobe. Who in the hell decided that the prims that don't get rendered will be the ones directly in front of the camera, which you are currently the most focused on, and which are (when building, at least) the most important prims in all of Second Life at that particular point in time? wtf. I'd rather they not render anything outside of a five meter radius than have my build's prims randomly appear and disappear.

Overall, I see no compelling reason to use Snowglobe, and I'm not exactly thrilled about the direction the client seems to be going.

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the drop function (and out of inv 'wear') has been the bane of the grid for years. it has caused more problems for more people than it will ever be worth. my only fear is how i will transport things i cannot take into inv due to technical scripting reasons.

It seems to freeze up a lot more than 1.22 and 1.23 do.