The Astra and Singularity Viewers : Strong Ties and Open Sim

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Several months ago I had decided to start dabbling in the Open Sim waters. Of course if you look at the O.S. home page, the main viewer recommended is The Hippo Viewer, which I did not care for at all. So I started using Imprudence, another viewer I have never really cared for much either. That being said, I met someone on OSGrid and she recommended I give the Astra Viewer a try. At that time it was at version 1.0, but still much better for building purpose's then either Hippo or Imprudence was. Sadly, I soon got extremely frustrated with OSGrid and Open Sim in general, and quickly forgot completely about them both, and Astra as well.

    Anyone that has been following this Blog for a while may recall how much I really enjoyed using the Ascent Viewer. ( Emerald was no longer available ) The last release of Ascent was in October of last year, so eventually I gave up on that too, and became a full time died in the wool Phoenix user.

    However something interesting happened the other day, I caught wind of the fact that there was a new version of Astra available. I started scouring around the web looking for a Windows executable, sure enough I eventually found a 1.5.10(2) build. ( don't waste your time looking for it unless you know one of the Dev's, it has since been removed, you will have to compile your own ) But why waste your time ? Turns out the Singularity viewer and Astra are pretty much one in the same. Just take a look at the list of credit's

    ASTRA
Astra Viewer is developed and maintained by the Astra Dev Team ,Siana Gearz, Shyotl Kuhr, Aleric Inglewood and Narv Czervik, with contributions by Henri Beauchamp, Kitty Barnett, Thickbrick Sleaford, Zauber Parecelsus, Wolfspirit Magic and others. Astra is based upon Ascent source code. Credits for Ascent include Hg Beeks, Charley Levenque, Hazim Gazov, Zwagoth Klaar, Qarl Fizz, and others. Ascent is based upon the Inertia source code.


   SINGULARITY
Singularity Viewer is developed and maintained by Siana Gearz, Shyotl Kuhr, Aleric Inglewood and Narv Czervik, with contributions by Henri Beauchamp, Kitty Barnett, Thickbrick Sleaford, Zauber Parecelsus, Wolfspirit Magic and others. Singularity is based upon Ascent source code. Credits for Ascent include Hg Beeks, Charley Levenque, Hazim Gazov, Zwagoth Klaar, Qarl Fizz, and others. Ascent is based upon the Inertia source code.


    I knew there was something I really liked about Singularity :_)

JayR Cela :_)