Linden Lab Director Says Second Life Has 1600+ Active Versions of the Second Life Viewer - Hamlet Says OMGWTF

Tonya Souther caught an amazing factoid from an in-SL meeting with Linden Lab's Director of Open Development Scott "Oz Linden" Lawrence and many third party SL viewer developers like her: There are 1,635 different active versions of the Second Life viewer. "Active", as in, "reported to log into SL last week". If you're a masochist, you can watch this video recording of the meeting, where things get real at around minute 9:

Hundreds and hundreds of different versions of the official SL viewers, plus hundreds and hundreds more third party viewers. Tanya's conclusion to this news:

"That's beyond anyone's ability to test thoroughly. The combinations quickly grow well beyond insane to downright impossible." And therefore:

UPGRADE YOUR FUCKING VIEWER! NOW!!!! Really, people. There is NO EXCUSE any more for running older viewers that don't support the way SL works now. By now, you can even get second-hand machines for not a lot of money that will run Firestorm just fine. You're going to have to bite the bullet.

My conclusion is somewhat different: The viewer codebase has become impossible to manage and stymies Second Life growth. How can we expect to integrate new users into the user community when the user community is balkanized into nearly two thousand viewers that literally display a different version of virtual reality?

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Comments

[Amanda Dallin]

Won't server side appearance winnow out a lot of those old viewers?

[pininballoon]

Funny how she pushes Firestorm-when there are viewers just as capable that run a whole lot better-like Singularity for one.

Singularity will run on a low end machine and render mesh and all that stuff just fine, even has the SSB code. Firestorm? No thanks.

[Adeon Writer]

On the singularity dev branch it's normal to see a new build posted every 2 or 3 days.

Plus anyone who uses a nightly build on any viewer for more than one day would be a new version too.

The statistic dosn't surprise me. There are tons of incrimental versions out there.

How many isn't as important as how far behind.

SSA will clean the slate.

[Adeon Writer]

Amanda: yes. And from what I understand, there is no non-mesh viewer, so once SSA hits that's one less thing to worry about.

[ZZ Bottom]

What all seem to forget is that the code is avaiable as open source and any with some skills can compile and create its own viewer!
And yes Singularity runs pretty well compared to firestom but firestorm works pretty wel compared with.....
Im enjoying much more the fact that there are ppl working on viewers made for open sim grids and dont giving a fu... about Sl and still has big hopes on Pixie viewer!

[Walter]

I really don´t understand where the problem is. Each viewer can be identified and therefore the Lindens could just change the log in screen for outdated viewers to a warning message similar to: Your viewer is outdated. Click here to get an updated version...

[Galatea]

I suspect that this is really a count of unique client/version ID string combinations logging in. That's going to include more than just "viewers", every store model bot and home-grown libOpenMetaverse client is being counted in that too.

[Archangel Mortenwold]

I concur with pininballoon. Souther is being dishonest, as usual, in claiming the reason people don't switch to Firestorm is because they're too stingy to spend the "few" dollars it takes to upgrade to a computer capable of handling her poorly programmed viewer. It has nothing to do with stinginess. People don't like Firestorm because it's crashtastic, has a much lower frame rate, often won't run at all, loses people's inventories, gobbles up computer resources, and has an unnavigable user interface (all problems people who've posted on their blog have described). The fact is that viewers using the V1 user interface are no more V1 than Firestorm or the default Linden Lab viewer. They're V3 viewers that use the V1 user interface. Singularity has server side baking incorporated, a feature it had before Firestorm rushed out its own, incomplete version after having announced that the team would wait until SSB was officially rolled out before releasing.

Face facts, Souther (and you too, Lyon): A huge chunk of the grid just does not care for Firestorm, and you and your amateur programmers are a big part of the reason.

[DBDigital Epsilon]

There are alternatives to Firestorm that have all the features for a updated viewer. Singularity is one, another is Cool VL Viewer. Both of which use the V1 interface.

Also people need to understand that viewer count would not only be the common viewers (V3, Cool, Singularity, Firestorm, Phoenix, etc) and the different versions of it (many are updated weekly) then you add every different type of viewer which includes bots, text viewers, phone viewers, homemade viewers, etc. Then on top of that the different versions of them that people haven't got around to updating and you can see quite clearly it is not about people not updating to a particular version of a particular viewer. It is all about open source and the diversity that brings.

-DB

[Hitomi Tiponi]

We must remember that 95% of users will be running one of about a dozen viewers (and this figure will rise after SSA comes in and forces some to update). Many of the other instances are being run by developers (who have their own instances) or those who haven't bothered to update - but these viewers still run fine. I myself run 5 or 6 different viewers a week. So 1,600 viewers probably just translates into a small percentage of users who do not use a currently supported viewer.

[Tonya Souther]

pininballon: I guess you missed this passage: "If you don't like [Firestorm], fine. Get Viewer 3. Get Singularity. Get Exodus. Get CoolVL. Get something, anything that supports SSB, but do it now!"

Of course I'm going to push Firestorm. You think I don't want people to use the viewer I work on?

I know quite well that there are people who don't like Firestorm, for any of a multitude of reasons. The point of my post wasn't so much "get Firestorm!" as "upgrade your viewer!".

Archangel, I have no idea why you maintain your fetish for accusing us of lying, but as usual, you're simply wrong. I calls 'em as I sees 'em. And if you don't believe there's not a contingent of people who don't want to use Firestorm because their computers won't handle it, then I refer you to the comments on my previous blog entries where they've said exactly that.

To lie is to tell a deliberate falsehood, knowing it is false. I do not ever do that under any circumstances, including in my public blog postings. I consider that a matter of integrity and personal honor, and if there were still dueling in our society, you'd have faced me over a dueling field by now.

And Singularity's version of SSB was even more rushed than ours was.

And yes, Amanda, as Adeon said, SSB will clean the slate. My point is that when it does, people will need to upgrade to something that supports it, or else they're going to be SOL, and quite possibly in more ways than simply not seeing other avatars.

Hitomi, you're right about most of them, but as Jessica posted on the Firestorm blog, the user count of Phoenix is still well into five figures. Those folks, especially, need to upgrade to *something* current.

[pininballoon]

If Phoenix use is into the 5 figures, then that tells you that you and your team probably put your focus on the wrong project. You couldn't do an updated Phoenix because it was all kludge, amateurish hacks thrown together, but the advent of mesh sort of revealed that. Maybe a couple of you actually know what you're doing, but not much more than that.

I don't care if a million people use your shitty viewer, because a bunch of people doing the same dumb thing doesn't justify the dumb thing, ya know?

At least the Singularity people will admit when there is an issue they caused and try to right it. You guys just scream 'get a new computer'. Fundamental differences there, and yes, they do count.

[Mondy]

Currently I'm using 3 versions of Cool VL that get updated weekly, Singularity stable plus alpha builds, Lumiya on a tablet and phone, Radegast, Firestorm Release, beta, nightly as when they come out.
The reason is I like to test new fetures and help contribute to bug reports. I've helped identify and test fixes for Firestorm as part of the beta team and to Cool VL in the forums. I don't think there are any "shitty" viewers. It just boils down to personal taste or peference. I LIKE the V1 interface so I often use singularity. I like some features of FS so I use that just as often with the Vintage screen (as close to the V1 interface to make comments about other viewers UI almost negligible)
I'm not a programmer, but I know enough to file jira's, report on them and help.
I know people claim FS is slower and crappy, although I use it alot I can agree that performance wise it does seem slower, but guess what ? My laptop is two years old, only has a dual core processor and handles FS and every other viewer just fine. I had an issue recently with FS locking up when streaming but that's resolved in other builds w'ere testing. Actually had the same issue with Cool VL when they added the SSB code.
Tonya's point stands, get decent hardware. If mine can run it, most people should be able to. Finally to add, set your system up properly. Check background processes, check how it's set up to make the most from your sytem. Don't ever accept the default settings as being optimal and I think most will find any viewer, including the new SSB enabled ones run pretty nicely.

[Cheyenne Palisades]

pinballoon, methinks you have an ax to grind. Your posts in this thread are all heat and no light.

[Tonya Souther]

And to answer Hamlet's basic premise: Those 1665 viewers aren't yet displaying the same virtual world differently. They will be once server-side baking happens - but when it does, as has been said before here, there will be a great winnowing, and the number of viewer versions in active use will drop precipitously.

The viewer codebase is not impossible to manage at all. What you see is the result of several years of robust open source development. The source for viewer code that counts is LL's, and they manage it just fine. It's up to the TPV developers to remain compatible.

[Pepys]

Archidiot, keep flogging away on that Pentium II, the rest of us will ride on Firestorm while you sit in some cave wondering omgwtfbbq happened. You need providence, where are the facts? Are you one of those Phoenix has beens? You sound fat, are you? Firestorm runs fine for me. 23 skiddo small change.

[Tracy Redangel]

I try different viewers all the time. I'm not passionate about them, I simply use what works best on my machine. I've tried Singularity 1.80, and I get about the same frame rate performance I get from the latest Firestorm release 4.4.0.
I like Firestorm because it works for me. I didn't like Singularity because I don't have my built-in-AO, and it's rather nifty to move the buttons around. Call me crazy, but that's what I like.
So Singularity works great on your computer (or toaster), great, mazel tov. But shut up about it already.

[Star]

If you think FS is 'crashy' look at the TPV list - they are arranged in crash order - fewest crashes at top of list.

Nobody on the FS teams pushes anyone to use Firestorm - the choice is your's which viewer you use.. really. The fact that the majority of all users use FS is testament alone.

If you are just here to troll - go troll somewhere else.

[Ajax Manatiso]

I don't know where or how LL develops a crash list. I am certain they don't actually have employees testing it as they do not have enough employees to respond to ARs, visit sims inworld, or answer the damn phone until it rings for 10 minutes. My RL/SL partner uses Firestorm but after about her 3rd crash of the night she switches over to Singularity and we can spend the rest of the night inworld without incident.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I'm in favor of not letting yourself get boxed in by obsolete paradigms, but at the same time, to the greatest extent possible, you ought to program for graceful degradation on suboptimal systems. From my perspective, the perfect virtual world could be accessed and navigated via text, 2D sprites, isometric top-down, first-person, immersive headset or holodeck.

In brief, if you've got a compelling world then it makes sense not to tie it to any single graphics technology. If Ultima Online were not wedded inextricably with the isometric perspective, it would still be competing with the top titles in the MMO genre instead of languishing in perpetual twilight.

Games and worlds get hung up on either/or thinking, when the correct answer is "all of the above".

[Tonya Souther]

Ajax, every viewer listed in the TPV directory's top part sends a crash report to LL on the next restart after every crash. That's where the numbers come from.

[Aliasi Stonebender]

Y'know, there's probably an equally large number of web browsers that interact with the web, but they all work for varying values of working.

This is because there's a standard they adhere to. There's nothing magic about just having a single unified browser.

[Archangel Mortenwold]

Well, Tonya, if you don't like being called a liar then stop lying. It really is that simple. I just wrote a blog entry explaining the lies in Jessica's latest whinefest attacking Firestorm users for posting their complaints about FS on the blog.

http://timelordsofgallifrey.blogspot.com/2013/06/jessica-lyin-whines-lies.html

Now, could it be that the reason you get so much negativity is because you dole out so much of it yourselves? You lie to your user base, you lie to people who blog about Firestorm, and you lie whenever someone points out your lies. Your primary response to any and all issues people have with Firestorm is to order them to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on brand new computers, as though that's the only possible explanation for people not wanting to use your craptastic viewer. Your tendency to cuss at your user base is another factor. It's all in your attitudes and your lack of programming talent. People simply don't like buggy, crashtastic viewers, Tonya. Grow up and get over yourself.