By Avatar JayR Cela
Well the day many of us have been so anxiously awaiting has finally arrived, after nearly a year and a half, the team of folks so diligently working on the beloved Classic V1 style viewer for OpenSim and (SL) is out and about ready for download. The first thing you will notice is that the 32bit version(s) are no longer under development, this is pure 64bit goodness. I'm not sure what this means for all the die hard hold out's still clinging to Second Life as a viable platform for the future, as the Havok physics engine currently licensed to LL is 32 bit only. ( at least it was last time I checked ) However since I could give a rats ass about SL these days it has no effect on me :_)
Visibly you will notice virtually no outward changes in appearance, the UI remains untouched, the preferences menu has had several refinements as far as placement of certain options have been changed slightly or moved to another section. If you are running the Linux version you may have to fiddle around with the launcher script. in my case on 2 of my machines running KXStudio 14.04
( a professional grade high end Audio Studio distribution ) I needed to uncomment the,
export LL_BAD_OPENAL_DRIVER=x : line in the first section
## - Avoids using any FMOD Ex audio driver.
#export LL_BAD_FMODEX_DRIVER=x
## - Avoids using any OpenAL audio driver.
export LL_BAD_OPENAL_DRIVER=x
## - Avoids using any FMOD audio driver.
#export LL_BAD_FMOD_DRIVER=x
However on my ChaletOS 16.04 box ( another Ubuntu-Debian derivative designed for more casual desktop use ) I had no such problem. I'm not going to go into the long list of under the hood changes, because you can easily read about them better on the official Singularity web site.
http://www.singularityviewer.org/home/release187
and that list is a long one, to say the least. The first thing I noticed is an increase in FPS performance and much more reliable rendering on certain types of complex mesh builds. This seems to have come at a cost though ( at least for me ) with having to rebake my avatars texture just about everytime I log in, and or sit and suffer thru being a cloud quite often for longer than I care to endure, usually it is just a simple matter of changing out the bald hair piece of my worn outfit, but hey these things are a minor nuisance compared to the amount of changes for the better. In other words I can put up with it, and since I am not really an active Windows ( 10 ) user, ( I only use Windows when I have to or on Patch Tuesday ) I can not really comment. Macs I have limited experience with and do not personally own any Mac Equipment ( I only uses them in the Studio ) However I am sure they work just fine.
In closing, this is one fantastic piece of work, an excellent Viewer for anyone that prefers the V1 to V3 style User Interface. Great work and Salute to Team Singularity / Live Long and Prosper, Team Singularity.
JayR Cela :_)
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