Kristens Viewer Test

Kristen viewer is now available for Intel Mac (released Jan 2009)
- benefits: faster

The video shows Kristens viewer test (done on a PC with shadow patch):


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KirstenLee Notes on S16:
1) The Fastest Rendering Viewer in SL, and it's really quick both on start up and rendering in world even in laggy sims, the comments from users have ranged from 'wow' to 'bloody hell!' It uses a mixture of code from various viewers, bit of a hybrid really.
2) New UI skins, with clearer Fonts (and no licensing issues.)
3) Avatar Scanner - Scan up to 500 meters and across sim borders, brings up names and distance. Allows viewing of profiles and teleporting of friends.
4) Asset Browser - View every texture and photo in your inventory preview, or use the asset browser to apply the textures directly to builds via drag and drop.
5) More Prim manipulation different ways to cut prims in SL, and on opengrids micro and monster prim creation.
6) Some severe modification to what information is sent by the viewer when active - no sending of stats to a grid, such as FPS, Lang and version etc.
7) Modified network system viewerside.
8) Very low memory footprint runs much better on marginal hardware (older laptops) even runs on the Intel Atom-based Ultra Portables - Great for running multiple clients if needed.
9) Stable - Incorporated fixes that were either not used by Linden Lab or have come from sources not working directly on SL viewers such as RealXtend.
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KirstenLee Notes on getting shadows in Second Life:
(PC/Linux only, Mac needs an emulator)
1) I used a computer that supported it (so you must have a GeForce 8 or 9 graphics card)
2) I used an operating system that supports it - that is, Windows or Linux. Not Mac OS
3) I downloaded and compiled the source code from the files listed at the top of http://svn.secondlife.com/trac/linden/changeset/575. That is, the slviewer-artwork, slviewer-(linux/win32)-libs and the slviewer-src.
4) Compiled them, largely following the instructions on the wiki at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Compiling_the_viewer_%28Linux%29 (in the case of Linux, http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_Builds if you're on Windows )
5) Ran it, set the 'Graphics' slider to Ultra, pressed ctrl-alt-D to get the debug settings, went to Advanced -> Debug Settings, typed in RenderDeferred and set it to false, typed in RenderUseFBO and set it to true, and then typed in RenderDeferred again and set it to true.
"Then it hangs for a couple of seconds," warns Katharine, "followed by shadows magically appearing under everything. Affected by sun and moon only."
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References - History of 3D Animation

A Brief History of 3D Animated Film

realXtend Test

It's very exciting what realXtend (setup guide) can offer. The open source viewer (GPL license) and server (BSD license) technology of 3D net are completely free. (I wonder if they would release a Mac version any time soon especially after Intel Mac is capable of running Windows). Also interoperability is another issue to have your Second Life avatar and inventory accessible in realXtend server (not yet available). Besides IBM and Linden Lab's collaborative efforts, OpenSim is also working on how all virtual worlds may link together. Info about the current development regarding OpenSim. Article about Hypergrid by James Au and more.

In pursuit of dynamic shadow effects, here are couple testing results regarding realXtend:
1. yes, realXtend viewer can render dynamic shadow but only with its own server.
2. include avatar animation tool (IK Movement Editor), animate fingers?
3. use Python scripts.

Shadow

To bringing out features of 3D animation and engine's dynamic effects, this is a test of SL's capacity to render shadow, ran on PC using Kirstens Viewer SD2-R7. Results:
1. There's still some lag and errors for controlling character on upgraded computer.
2. Some textures in Kirstens Viewer are not the same as
the second life viewer.
Links:
Shadow Patch: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/06/the-hidden-shad.html PC/Linux only
Lightwave 9: http://www.mcpherons.com/media/mech.mov

First Rough Cut