The title to last week's post, "Linden Lab Update Borked Black Dragon's Viewer Frame Rate In Second Life", is not quite accurate, because as Black Dragon creator NiranV writes in Comments, the JIRA bug report he filed, "Animesh: Massive performance loss since animesh update", relates to any viewer which incorporates that update. That includes Firestorm, the most popular viewer among the SL userbase by far. Niran argues it will take awhile for Firestorm users and developers to realize that problem, or implement a fix:
Worst case (as it is right now) no one will notice, since no one hasn't noticed yet even with the huge amount of testing of animesh. Then it will go to Firestorm, Firestorm will be blamed for their shitty stuff once again, and boom everyone got a smack in their face because one single tiny thing slipped through testing.
It might get fixed someday or it might not. Problem is Lindens often don't use the Viewer they are developing enough to make such concrete observations, they are way busy with other stuff like getting this stuff to work in the first place. So it's up to testers to see this stuff.
Problem is because most people use Firestorm they will disregard the possibly lower framerate as it simply being "Linden Lab's Viewer", besides most people testing the Viewer for what it was made = animesh, rather than normal usage.
This causes no one to notice until it hits their own Viewer, which in case of Firestorm, with its extremely long release cycles, could be a problem. Even if they were to notice it shortly after release, you most likely wouldn't see another update until another half a year. Most users will assume that it's simply Firestorm's fault and their usual degradation of quality and performance over several updates -- which if you followed Firestorm's development, you'd think is "normal", meaning you start ignoring the issue, no one might investigate and this thing, will have sneaked into all Viewers, reducing everyone's framerate for no reason.
And this is how fast shit can hit the fan.
Fortunately, Linden Lab has acknowledged the bug report on Jira, and is investigating, and calling for further feedback:
[Vir Linden]: We would be curious to hear about the experience of other users here. The Black Dragon viewer is not implemented or supported by Linden Lab, but if there are similar issues with the Second Life viewers we'd appreciate any feedback about what you're seeing.
We've had to restrict commenting in JIRAs, so the best way to give us feedback would be via the forum thread at: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/428428-slowdowns-in-graphics-performance/
So if you're experiencing problems, the best place to join the bug tracking conversation is here.
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