I was giving this some thought today, I believe the general consensus is that V1.x is a dead issue. I know for me it has certainly come down to V3 based FireStorm as my personal favorite. However there are still some very nice V1.x viewers, a few are no longer in development, but you can still download them.
All of these viewers are based on The SnowGlobe Project, originally a LL open source initiative intended to advance V1.x to the next level. As you know the Lab abandoned the project in favor of the ill fated V2 Viewer, a complete disaster to say the least.
So Sit back and take a look at the current state of V1.x, starting out with the abandoned project that started it all.
The last version I could find for download was Snowglobe 1.4.2.3626
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Old_versions
There is a 1.5.x release, I tried it out back in August of 2010, but have been unable to locate a download site again. So as far as I know the following are either based on V1.4.x or V1.5.x, anyway's for one reason or another I was unable to get it running, Oh Well / no big deal. Anyways SnowGlobe eventually evolved into the Ascent Viewer reviewed here on this Blog in September of 2010
http://jayrcelasecondlifetechnologist.blogspot.com/2010/09/ascent-viewer-14127-for-secondlife-r.html
I believe this ended up becoming the Astra Viewer I did a post on the most recent version 1.6.4 August 3rd 2012
http://jayrcelasecondlifetechnologist.blogspot.com/2012/08/virtual-worlds-astra-viewer-for-open.html
Since Astra and Singularity are pretty much the same design team I downloaded the current version V1.7.1 ( 2888 )
http://www.singularityviewer.org/home
I have to admit it was disappointing, I could not seem to get Antialiasing to work, resulting in ugly jaggy edges, regardless of the viewers settings or my video card's utility program.
The Cool Viewer fared much better in this department, currently there are 2 versions available V1.26.4.28 Stable and 1.26.5.7 Experimental. I tried the latter. No problems here, this is easily the best of the bunch. http://sldev.free.fr/
Somewhere along this timeline the Imprudence viewer came onto the scence, they made some great contributions to the Open Source world and SL and Open Sim, Radar, AO Over-rider, are two that come to mind. But that has been a dead issue for a long time now. The team last I heard was into OS server development.
There is also the RealXtend viewer, *Yawns* this was developed for a now defunct VW. I had an account there back in 2009, at that time they were introducing a custom viewer called Naali, that was a tremendous failure. I believe now they are doing a few things in the Virtual World Server area, but who cares, I certainly don't. If you want a really lame viewer you can get it here.
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Other-Programming-Files/realXtend.shtml
There is also the Rainbow Viewer by Boy Lane it is and was developed for his personal use, it's pretty nice, but there is no compelling reason for me to download and install it.
http://my.opera.com/boylane/blog/
Then there were the Kristen S-series 1.x viewers, the last one I tried was S-19, it was pretty good actually, good luck trying to find it as a download, most traces of Kirsten seemed to have vanished from the Web.
Dolphin had an excellent V1.x series viewer the last version available V 1.5.51.3627 can be had here.
http://dolphinviewer.eregion.de/download-and-install/
Then of course you have the Phoenix Viewer, nuff said ? Sadly I do not believe you will see any future development with the Phoenix viewer, and personally I cant blame the Phoenix, FireStorm team for making this wise decision.
There is a point I am trying to make here. Viewer 1.x is a dead issue for SL, if you are into Open Sim, go for it, and in my opinion there is only one logical choice. Henri Beauchamp's Cool Viewer
JayR Cela
2 comments:
I usually direct someone to Rainbow Viewer when they don't have a computer capable of SSE2 or better(though it is not mesh capable,and is not based on Snowglobe) or if they are trying to use a netbook(it is considerably less resource needy): http://my.opera.com/boylane/blog/all-new-rainbow-1-22-12
Btw, as I understand it, Astra Viewer, while originally based on Singularity, is developed by a different team than the current Singularity team, specifically for the Aurora Sims.
Also, the Naali Viewer is not really supported by RealXtend anymore as they have moved on to their own Tundra viewer for their own Tundra Virtual Platform (but it is still available for download and still does a few things that other viewers don't). http://code.google.com/p/realxtend-naali/downloads/list?can=4&q=&colspec=Filename+Summary+Uploaded+ReleaseDate+Size+DownloadCount .
The Kirstens Viewer in any form is no longer available.
Phoenix Viewer has finally been overtaken by Firestorm in numbers of people actively using it. It is less advanced than either Cool VL or Singularity but can see mesh(as can Cool VL and Singularity).
To my mind, the V1 interface is still more usable than the V2/V3 interface although FUI made a big difference for V2/V3.
I suspect that eventually Cool VL and maybe, Singularity, will simply be a skins difference from the rest of the V3 viewers.
Hi there Lord
Thanks for your information, and post, apparently I could of used a lil more research
JayR :_)
Post a Comment