First Look viewer: Are you using it?

I love it, Well thats until about 1 hour ago. I keep crashing now without any warning..

FPS is great so is all the other features. If i can keep this system stable, I going to be very happy!

Well, I'll go on record as admitting the FL client (currently 57575) greatly improves framerate in most places I hang out, in some cases, doubles it... System is a P4D/2.8Ghz/2GB ram/GF6200-256MB. The Windows version seems pretty stable, but the Linux version crashes regularly, and doesnt just exit to the desktop, but locks up tight, where a kill -9 on the process is necessary, and no offer to do a crash report upon restarting.. One thing that irks me no end is the fact that the mirror feature is tied to the texture/shiny setting. I have a build that uses shiny extensively, and the first time I walked into the build with "dynamic reflections" turned on, it was like walking into a funhouse "hall-of-mirrors".... Hope they change that before rolling the FL features in the regular client....

Tas

I use it sometimes....

The latest version fixed the "avatars don't move with stuff they're sitting on" problem, which is huge. I still have problems with particles not showing up.

On my laptop (1.2GHz Pentium-M, equivalent of a Radeon 7000 graphics card with 16MB of RAM), I can sort of be in Second Life using the Linux alpha client. Textures never fully render, but usually stay low-rez. I have to have terrain setting to low quality. However, I can be in, and generally get 2-3 fps. With the FirstLook client, I get 7-8fps on the same machine. That's huge!

My desktop is a PIV-3.2GHz with a Radeon 9250 128MB, again using the Linux alpha (and the open source graphics drivers). The normal client gives me 7-10 fps, the First Look client gives me 15-20 fps (and more sometimes).

At the moment, the firstlook client usually seems to hang when I try to long in, so I'm not using it much. But I'll probably go back at the next version.

-Rob

I went and downloaded the FL viewer and was so excited to get a chance to try it after hearing everyone's reviews in this thread. But I installed it and the stupid thing crashes while detecting my hardware. I can't even get it to run.
Anyone else totally unable to run FL?

My RL-er installed First Look - on the main Dell computer it installed and ran OK but reports are that frame rate etc. were about the same as normal SL. They also installed it on the laptop, which is lower power, and it crashed before login every time.

Tried it for a little while today, was massively underwhelmed, and deleted it from my hard drive after less than 15 minutes.

It was slow on my Mac. Frame rates about 1/3 what I get with the normal client. The 'actual reflections' were interesting, but VERY buggy. A flat 'mirror' had heavy ripples in the reflection, and the angle of incidence and where the closest thing that would show in the mirror was were all wrong. Like, with the mirror touching the floor, the closest point reflected in it was as far away from the mirror as the observer/camera. Things closer to the mirror didn't reflect at all. I stood in front of the mirror, and to see myself and my reflection, I had to be at an extreme oblique angle, rather than straight over my own shoulder. All told, there was little rhyme of reason as to what was reflected where.

All that was in a skybox, with a fair number of prims to reflect locally, and nothing else at all close to me.

On the ground, water looked completely wrong, even with reflections and shiny turnrd off. I was getting some completely unrelated texture smeared across the terrain surface below water level.

Definitely not at all ready for prime time.

My experience on my Mac iBook G4 running 10.3x (I know, wotta dinosaur) with the First Look viewer was AMAZING. It made a complete difference for me, enough of a difference that I may return to the game regularly now. I could see textures within seconds instead of minutes. I could see TREES. I could get my avatar to move without maddening delays. In short, AMAZING.

What happened? I downloaded the 1-13-3-57575 FL client last night. I don't know what LL did, but this version is more crash prone than the last one. With dynamic reflections on, shiny goes away. I also find that trying to toggle reflections on and off in debug crashes the client. My GeForce 7800GT was able to do reflections with two earlier FL viewers. Its not all bad though. The current FL viewer does still give me a boost in FPS as long as I leave dynamic reflections off.

You will be happy to know in the Next Update they will be addressing your problems, From now on you will Crash every hour WITH warnings.

I'm sure the Crashes are just teething pains, Someone in another thread suggested clearing the Cache at each Log Out to avoid it. I'm going to try. The new Update will be soon anyway.

Angel.

/me laughs with Angelique

Tried today's FL viewer. Frame rate was better. In fact, at one point in a 700M skybox I went from 9 FPS on the normal viewer to as high as 16 FPS! Woo hoo! Results were inconsistent, however. On the ground and in many other places the frame rate was no better than the normal client, thus far. About 3 to 6 FPS. (I'm on an OS X 10.3.9 Mac Mini with a crappy built-in and non-upgradable video card, and only 32 MB VRAM.) It seemed my frame rate did improve if I stayed in one spot for a while - as if it was successfully caching at least some of what was around me, and not always recalculating everything.

Textures did load noticably faster, and I was able to see detail on trees for a longer, but still limited, period of time after logging in.

Camera went crazy if I attempted to camera zoom while looking at a tree. Crashed three times in just a few minutes, mostly when camera zooming.

Guess I will play with it more today on my lunch break.

I've been trying it on a Apple G4 Sawtooth, a computer I'd largely given up runnin' SL on. I was surprised to see an improved framerate and stuff. Also fixed was a longstanding trouble I've had with trees and people textures coming in fuzzy. This made me *very* happy.

Mari

I stick with PC because all my games are for it and don't usually have mac ports. Although i do like mac better since i used it back when i was in high school. I basically LEARNED about computers by using a mac. Anyway my opinion on the first look viewer, i think it's overrated to the extreme. When i use it, i see no difference in my FPS, but i do notice things take much longer to rez up. The new mirroring feature does not work for me, and i can't seam to see any other differences at all.

i find it great for regular things....but building with it can be tricky and i havent crashed yet with it.. (5days now) "crosses fingers"