Doctor Who Series 6 and Sarah Jane Adventures Series 4, Decision Time, and Demolishing the Lies About Viewer 1

 DOCTOR WHO SERIES 6, SARAH JANE ADVENTURES SERIES 4

I was able to get hold of both seasons on DVD, and once I've gone through all episodes of SJA, I'll issue a review of the latter series.

I maintain my criticism of Moffat's tenure as head writer of the show as one fraught with inconsistency — on an overall storytelling basis, that is.  Moffat does well in doing one-off stories, but trying to keep a longer term story arc running and maintaining story continuity are two tasks he can't seem to balance.  We'll see how Sarah Jane Adventures' final season pans out.  Considering it was the last complete series of the show before lead actress Elizabeth Sladen passed away, there's going to be a certain poignancy watching that is bound to color my review, but I'll try to do justice with an honest one.

DECISION TIME

Now, I've been thinking a while on the events of the past year or so.  2011 was, needless to say, horrible for me, and a fairly large chunk of the SL side of things was my own fault.  Swiping prims from a copied Dalek avatar in a fit of impatience was pretty stupid, and that's going to haunt me for a long time to come, no matter that I paid back the guy whose builds were swiped and admitted what I did.

Since then I've passed the remains of Archangel Network over to others, and it now exists in the form of Sci-Fi Enterprises.  Right now the only things it sells are unscripted TTC exteriors and freebies, and that's it.  I haven't had the time or the inclination to package up my unscripted console builds, but I've been seriously thinking of changing that.  I'm tired of having them sit in my inventory gathering pixel dust.

Of course, even if I were to do that, what then?  Who'd buy an unscripted console?  The whole point of having a TTC in Second Life is to have a grid-wide teleporter that serves triple duty as a skybox and role-playing scene.  It kind of defeats the purpose if it doesn't actually do more than look pretty.

It doesn't help that two of my closest friends in SL are on indefinite hiatus from SL, and one of them was a scripter whose skills were slowly but steadily improving.  I was hoping that my consoles would one day be sold with a functioning set of scripts again, and that is true of two of them, which are sold through Novatech.  Those are the Steampunk and the Zero 3.0 console.  But the rest languish in my inventory, and that's just a waste.  I'd love to be able to script them myself, but I've had to accept that I'll never be able to find someone willing to teach me what I need to know.

So what are my options?  I can try to convince my scripter friend to return to SL, hoping she'll script my consoles for me, or I can hire someone else to do them up and do a fifty-fifty split on sales.  But then, given that the last scripter I had disrespected me, then stabbed me in the back by trying to take over my company, I've got obvious issues with the idea of letting someone else have that kind of advantage over me again.  I've been burned too often by trusting all the wrong people.  Never again.  I can always submit my builds to other sellers, but most of the Whovian TTC sellers in SL are either severely backed up on submitted builds or not inclined to have anything to do with me.

I'll have to make a decision soon as to what I want to do with my builds, and more than that,what I really want to do in SL.  I have goals I'd like to achieve, but never the means.  And really, there just isn't any point to having those goals if I can't ever possess the resources to accomplish them.  And then what's the point of even staying in SL?

Ya know what I'm sayin'?

 "VIEWER 1" IS NOT "GOING AWAY"

There are certain people going around spreading lies about the fate of SL Viewer 1.23.  They claim that because Linden Lab is no longer offering updates or support, this means that the viewers are going to go away any time now, so we had better get on the crappily designed, highly unstable, resource-hogging Viewer 2 and its clones — or we will be forced out of SL altogether.  The truth is that Viewer 1, or more accurately, Third Party Viewers (TPVs) that use the Viewer 1 graphic user interface (GUI), are going to be around at least until their developers decide to quit the projects.

One person to expose the Big SL Viewer Lie for what it is is Henri Beauchamp, the programmer who brought us Cool VL Viewer.  Henri's code work was incorporated into the latest Phoenix Viewer release, albeit grudgingly and still with the lies about Viewer 1 going the way of the dinosaurs.

Why is this claim a lie?  For one thing, no one making it is able to give a definitive date for Viewer 1 GUI being shut off.  This is because, according to witnesses, Rodvik Humble himself stated that Linden Labs "would NOT be turning off v1.x access - just that they would NOT be updating the 1.x viewer themselves, so their version would not be kept up with the new features - that would be the responsibility of the TPV coders."

What this means is that the CEO of Linden Lab himself is saying that there are no plans to turn off Viewer 1 access — no company is stupid enough to literally block access to its product for more than half its user base.  They're simply not offering updates or support for it anymore.  As long as TPV programmers are able to back-port features like mesh and other goodies, like Henri Beauchamp, Boy Lane, and the Singularity Viewer developers, SL Viewers that use the Viewer 1 GUI will stick around.  As one member posted on Henri's forum, the liars are starting with the false assumption that a viewer's features are inextricably bound to its GUI, and then using that false assumption to create a false rationalization for why they want to force everyone else who uses SL onto the Viewer 2 GUI viewers, namely, theirs.  But as was pointed out, "under-the-hood" features simply are not tied to the GUI.  At this point the only real difference between the official Linden Lab viewers and the TPVs generated using the Viewer 1 GUI is only...the GUI.

It is highly dishonest for people who love Viewer 2 GUI viewers and their clones, and despise Viewer 1 GUI TPVs, to claim that those viewers with the Viewer 1 GUI are going away.  They're not.  Linden Lab isn't claiming that they are turning off access to Viewer 1.  TPV developers who still like the GUI on Viewer 1 will continue to back-port Viewer 2 and Viewer 3 features into the Viewer 1 GUI until the only thing that is still "Viewer 1" about them is how the finished program looks on your screen; in fact, they're pretty much that way already.  If you don't like the Viewer 2 or Viewer 3 GUI, or if you simply find that the Linden Lab-approved viewers are still too buggy and unstable, you do have alternatives, and you will continue to have them for a while.

For your downloading enjoyment:

http://www.singularityviewer.org

http://my.opera.com/boylane/blog/rainbow-viewer

Cool VL Viewer - http://sldev.free.fr

http://downloads.phoenixviewer.com/windows/Phoenix_Viewer-1.6.0.1600_RELEASE_SSE2.exe


http://downloads.phoenixviewer.com/Mac/Phoenix_Viewer_1.6.0.1600_Intel.dmg

http://downloads.phoenixviewer.com/Linux/PhoenixViewer-i686-1.6.0.1600.tar.bz2

Viewer Snobbery

The latest gripe fest on the Phoenix Viewer blog demonstrates just how out of touch the development team is with reality.  Now, don't get me wrong; I prefer Phoenix, which is still much more stable than, say Singularity, even though I believe Singularity will eventually supplant Phoenix as that development team ceases to update their viewer.  But the attitude coming from Jessica Lyon and her supporters is downright puzzling, not to mention irritating.

Lyon and her supporters are making the argument that trying to backport Viewer 2 and Viewer 3 features into Viewer 1 interface is like "taking a diesel engine from a school bus and fitting it into a ford pinto".  But Henri Beauchamp, the developer of Cool VL Viewer and whose code the Phoenix team used to bring mesh capability to Phoenix, cleared up a number of exaggerated claims by Lyon.  Far from taking "many" months of work, it only took Beauchamp two, two and a half at most, albeit with him working overtime in his spare hours to get the work done.  And contrary to the diesel engine metaphor, Beauchamp stated on his forum, "It's more like replacing the battery and alternator of the car engine with newer, more powerful ones (ll* libraries), replacing the mechanical injection with an electronic one to make for the increased mechanical power demand from the alternator (v2 classes in the viewer code) then adding air conditioning to the car (mesh renderer). Nothing that would make the poor car into a weird hybrid vehicle."

So it really isn't that difficult to backport the Viewer 2-Viewer 3 code into the Viewer 1 interface, contrary to what Jessica Lyon and her supporters claim.

I get the impression that the Phoenix Development Team decided to follow Linden Lab's lead and go with the crappy, bug-ridden, crashtastic, user-unfriendly, outsourced viewer that most Second Life users can't stand and would prefer not to use.  That's why so many people refuse to use the default SL viewer, and instead go with third party viewers such as Phoenix, Singularity, Cool VL, Rainbow, and others.  That's bad enough.  Literally adding insult to injury, however, was the condescending dismissal of legitimate criticisms that Viewer 2 and its clones (including Firestorm) are highly unstable, have a tendency to gobble inventory -- say goodbye to no-copy items forever -- eat up loads and loads of memory even on newer computers, and tend to crash said computers when the viewers alone aren't crashing, by telling disgruntled users to buy new computers instead of the decade-old ones we're allegedly clinging to.

This is a false assumption on the part of the Phoenix Development team, for many if not most users are not on ten-year-old computers.  I, for example, am on a computer that is less than a year old, has a monster graphics card, and is built for gaming purposes.  Yet the Viewer 2 and Firestorm beta I tried kept crashing on me, and often crash my computer altogether (even Phoenix and Singularity crash my comp).  Another dismissive claim is that users only tried Firestorm for a few minutes before giving up on it, despite people complaining that they spent hours on Firestorm only to have the same problems.  Simply put, people don't like the user interface no matter how much the Phoenix team tries to gussy it up, and the viewer itself is a bug-infested resource hog just like Viewer 2.  It's not a matter of people clinging to old technology, rather, they simply don't like the craptastic interface of a product that messes up their newer computers.

I think what's really driving the outright hostility coming from the Phoenix team and its supporters is simple snobbery.  They hopped on board a product that someone told them was the latest rage, and they genuinely don't seem to accept the legitimate reasons most people don't like it.  What if Coca Cola had stubbornly stuck by its "New Coke" product even after the massive customer backlash?  That company would now be out of business.  Instead, Coca Cola wised up, came out with "Classic Coke", and remained competitive with Pepsi, its closest competitor.  That was honest of them to do, and they survived by accepting and acknowledging their business mistake and correcting it.  If Phoenix developers want their viewer to remain the preferred one used by SL members, they will have to accept and acknowledge their mistakes, make the necessary apologies for their attitudes, and keep working to correct their mistake by continuing support for Phoenix Viewer.  it's what more of their user base seem to want anyway, and it makes better business sense.

Thoughts On Mesh and Rebuilding

With mesh imports now becoming a reality in SL, I've been seeing blogs wherein the writers boast about revamping their regions with all new mesh builds, including buildings, vehicles, and the like.  It's their regions and they can do what they want with them, but I have to admit I'm a little puzzled as to why so many people are being so quick to replace as much as they can with the mesh imports.

The fact is that a huge chunk of SL users will not be able to even see mesh imports (properly) because not all viewers support mesh.  Sure, some third party viewers, like Firestorm, are cloning Viewer 2 in hopes of being able to adopt mesh, and I think someone told me that Kirsten's Viewer is mesh-compatible.  But most people still seem to be using Viewer 1-based viewers, including Phoenix, Singularity, and Rainbow, which cannot yet support mesh (although the Singularity team is working on bringing mesh import-and-viewing capability into its viewer).

Then, of course, there is the prohibitive cost of importing mesh objects.  See, sculpt maps cost only ten Linden Bucks to import, seeing as how they're actually texture-images you import like any other image.  Mesh objects, on the other hand, are apparently priced according to the level of complexity, and they are said to come with a prim-cost.  So the more complex and the larger the size of a mesh build, the more expensive it is to import it.  Given this, why is it expected that anyone but people with surplus disposable income (a group the size of which gets smaller and smaller by the day) will even be able to afford a lot of mesh imports?  While I don't begrudge the right of people who can afford to toss away money like that, it does puzzle me that anyone thinks that something so cost-prohibitive will catch on quickly, if at all.  If anything, with the real-world economy causing people to tighten their belts, I don't expect nearly as rapid a switch to mesh from sculpted and reguler-prim builds as is being claimed in some circles.

I've made no secret about my opinion toward Viewer 2 and its clones, and the elitist attitudes of its proponents.  But there is a practical aspect to this whole craze over mesh that some people may not care to recognize.  Most of the grid can't and probably never will be able to see mesh imports, unless people switch to a viewer like Singularity once they are able to add mesh to theirs.  So a lot of mesh-importers will probably begin to lose visitors to their regions once they start having to deal with people coming to their sims, seeing a bunch of blocks, spheres, and ovals instead of the supposedly super-awesomely-detailed mesh imports they ran right out and spent money bringing in; then the cost issue will begin to slow the growth of mesh importing.  If region owners and moderators don't handle these two tricky issues correctly, they'll only turn people off and end up hurting their own traffic rankings, and in SL, losing traffic means losing a lot in donations and vendor sales.

Now, will mesh eventually become the standard of SL?  Probably.  I just don't see it catching on quite as fast as its proponents want to think.  One thing Linden Labs can do to avoid that is to lower the cost, both in Linden Bucks and prim count, of mesh imports.  Yes, it took a lot of time and labor to integrate it into the grid.  But charge too much too soon for your nifty new toy, and don't expect a lot of sales.  The second thing Linden Labs can do is to go back to the drawing board and bring back the Viewer 1 user interface for its current system, or something as close to it as possible.  If nothing else, at least give users a choice instead of turning them off with the current cruddy viewer that seems designed only to frustrate people.  Other grids, such as InWorldz, are catching up to SL in terms of stability, and they use viewers that are user-friendly and easy to learn.  By lowering the cost of mesh imports and producing a better viewer than what is currently being pushed on us, I am confident Linden labs can avoid shooting itself in the proverbial foot.

Just my opinion, for what it's worth.

Phoenix Viewer Gets New Update, But Developers Promise it Will Break

The Phoenix development team is announcing its latest update.  As is typical, they are trying to dismiss concerns that Viewer 1 will no longer function by addressing questions that don't seem to have arisen.  You can read the condescension here.

What grabbed my attention, though, was the following comment:

Both Singularity and Cool VL Viewer are in the final stages of having mesh implemented. It is wrong to think V1 and mesh are mutually exclusive. It might be that Phoenix will be left behind, but there sure will be mesh capable V1 viewers pretty soon.

I don't expect the Phoenix development team to give a straight or satisfactory answer, but that's not the only comment worth noting.  (Note: I asked a similar question in the blog thread.)  I've experienced this myself on the latest Firestorm beta release, and received nothing but dismissive answers in the past, which is why I uninstalled the viewer and left the support group.  Here is a comment that sums up the problems many of us face when trying to use ANY Viewer 2-based viewer, not just Firestorm:

i'm TRYING to get used to Firestorm, if the webkit crash can be fixed :( Right now it crashes for me as soon as I load the viewer, and then i'm stuck... search does not work, some group chats wont work... we've been goign back and forth on JIRA for a couple of weeks now (thank you Whirly), I've even submited logs! HELP!

The general response, other than to repeatedly sing the praises of their Viewer 2 clone, is to either ignore the issue or write it off as a troll post.  In this light, it isn't surprising that the Phoenix development team is rolling out at least one last update for its superior, Viewer 1-based viewer.  In spite of claims to being #3 for users, Firestorm is still in ultra-buggy beta mode and it is based on a viewer that only a fraction of the SL user base even bothers with.  Most people I encounter in SL are either on Phoenix, Singularity, and Imprudence, with Singularity starting to appear more common — especially among users who signed on to SL before Linden Labs rolled out its cruddy Ukrainian made viewer.

So what the Phoenix development team is saying is that even though Viewer 1-based viewers will no longer work, they'll still work, or something along those lines.  They'll just break so that they become unusable, which doesn't mean Linden Labs is effectively blocking them.  But unless they are made by a development team with the skills and patience to resolve the issue, the inability to work properly means that Linden Labs is effectively blocking them by making them unable to function properly, if at all.

Can you see the contradictions in that train of logic?  Yeah, I thought so.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted about Viewer 1 and Viewer 2 developments.

Ooh, Rainbow Viewer is back...But for How Long?

While chatting in the Singularity Viewer group in Second Life, someone was kind enough to point out that Rainbow Viewer, based on the old SL Viewer 1.22, has gotten an update as of July 10th.  You can read the newest entry here.

I used both Rainbow and Emerald viewers until Emerald went kaput last year for reasons explained in this blog entry.  From the ashes of the Emerald Viewer arose Phoenix, which had most if not all of the functionality and user-friendliness of Emerald, and a great graphics engine.  It has had its bugs, such as objects (both local and attached) suddenly de-rendering with right-clicking only working to re-render them sporadically, and conference and group chat windows not showing who else is participating, but overall the user interface was and always will be far superior to Linden Labs' Viewer 2 and several third party viewers based on it, like Kirstens.  Of course, Linden labs is jealous of third party viewers that give users what they like and want, and they're determined to kill off all Viewer 1-based viewers by breaking the code that allows them to function.

For its part, the Phoenix team decided it was better to suck up to Linden Labs than it is to make users happy, so they've been working long and hard on a viewer that is in most aspects that I can see identical to Linden Labs' Viewer 2, which they've called Firestorm.  The viewer is currently in public beta mode.  If this weren't bad enough, the Phoenix team apparently thinks that it can dismiss legitimate concerns with the user unfriendliness of Firestorm by insulting its users.

I'm happy to say though that the unhappy folks are only a small minority, however they can be very vocal, loud and discouraging.

Yeah, way to alienate your user base.  Maybe if you didn't respond to user complaints with such snark as "Viewer 2 is coming, get used to it," you wouldn't be forcing harsher replies.  Alas, some people never learn.  Oh well.  At any rate, with Linden labs forcing everyone to adopt its inferior Viewer 2 software and layout, it looks as though a lot of long term users will find themselves forced to leave Second Life for greener pastures.  Fortunately, Singularity's development team has managed to do what the Phoenix development team apparently refuses to do, namely, make a Viewer 2-based viewer that actually has the superior Viewer 1 layout and controls.  I heard through the user support group in-world that they are working on getting the mesh import feature, and that they are very close to succeeding in bringing it in.  No date was given, which is understandable considering that anything can happen which might delay release of an updated viewer.  But at least Singularity seems to be trying to make its users happy.  And they do seem to listen to people's concerns with a much friendlier attitude.

In the meantime, I've installed the new Rainbow Viewer update and it is working splendidly so far.  It is anyone's guess as to exactly how long it will remain functional, however.  As I've written, Linden Labs is working diligently to break Viewer 1-based viewers for Second Life.  Rainbow will probably end up joining Phoenix and all the other better viewers out there on the Viewer 1 trash heap.  But until that happens, I'll enjoy it and Singularity until they are no more or until I am no more.  I'll keep Firestorm around just in case its developers wise up, but chances are I won't be using it much, if at all.

UPDATE (10:09 PM EDT/7:10 PM SLT): Calisto Llewellin  has brought it to my attention that Singularity is indeed based on Viewer 1.  My apologies for giving the wrong information.

Phoenix Viewer Soon To Be Broken by Linden Labs, Horrible Firestorm To Take its Place

Reading through the dismissive blog entry on the Phoenix Viewer web site about complaints from Viewer 1 users, I couldn't help but be reminded of the replies in-world to people trying to use the Firestorm beta asking where various features were and getting unsatisfactory responses.  The general attitude was, "Viewer 2 is coming so get used to it".  Never mind that Viewer 2 is unusable for most people who started Second Life on Viewer 1.  Granted, Phoenix does have a video in which it claims to help users make their Viewer 2 viewer look more like Viewer 1 (using voice, naturally, and the volume isn't loud enough for people with impaired hearing).  But the issue here isn't just that by making a viewer that most Second Life residents who signed up before Viewer 2 can't use they are in fact helping Linden Labs to alienate a huge swath of its customers.  It's the condescendingly dismissive attitude in the face of legitimate complaints.

After all, no one told the developers who work on Phoenix Viewer to make it so that the inventory button doesn't show up at all unless you right-click the bottom of the viewer screen, and even then you have to hide another button as the trade-off.  And no one forced the Phoenix development team to make it so that the inventory menu remains hidden behind the chat window and that resizing the inventory menu isn't an option.  This means that every time you want to gain access to your inventory, you have to move or close the chat window in order to do it.  Phoenix Viewer didn't make you go through that nonsense.  Whatever window was active, that was the one that appeared on top of others.  And if you wanted to make another window active, all you had to do was click that window.  But Viewer 2 doesn't allow that.  Nor will it allow anything from inventory to be saved as an off-world .xml file — even if it's full-perm, and even if it's a texture image that is full-perm.  If you didn't make the object yourself, and if you didn't upload the texture image yourself, forget about making a backup.  So when Linden Labs servers decide to completely delete parts of your inventory, say goodbye to them forever.  The only way currently to make .xml backups of your full-perm inventory is to use a viewer like Meerkat, and soon that will be broken as it is Viewer 1-based.

In essence, the Phoenix development team caved in to Linden Labs and made their viewer an almost carbon copy of the unusable Viewer 2.  And by dismissing legitimate complaints from users as unfair attacks on volunteer staff who have been rude and condescending, a fundamental point gets lost: the Phoenix development team could easily have kept the viewer 1 layout while making the viewer itself compatible with Linden labs' demands.  It can be done because it already has been — by the Singularity development team.  The graphics engine on Singularity seems to have some deficiencies, like over-saturated colors, too-intense lighting effects, and a pixelated look making everything appear way too cartoonish.  But these are things I'm sure the Singularity team is working on, or will soon.  And they built their viewer to have the same layout and features Viewer 1 does while being compliant with Linden labs' unreasonable software demands.

Maybe instead of insulting its user base, which arguably made Phoenix Viewer the most popular one of choice for residents seeking an alternative to the unusable Viewer 2, its developers should actually listen to them and go back to the drawing board.  Just because they want to bend over backwards to please Linden labs doesn't mean they have to make their users suffer, or dismiss user complaints with insults.