[sldev] Client detection and official viewer signatures

[Maya Remblai]

That's because Snowglobe handles textures differently, and apparently 
your computer has trouble with the standard viewer's method. So you're 
right on that point, that Snowglobe does have that going for it.

But what I was talking about was more along the lines of features. 
Snowglobe's texture handling isn't something that the average user will 
notice, because their computer can run SL properly already. In theory, 
anyway. When I say Snowglobe doesn't do anything new from a user's 
standpoint, I mean it doesn't have any new abilities. No flexisculpts, 
no extra attachment points, avatar alpha masking, no features that users 
have been asking for for months/years and should be in *some* test 
viewer somewhere. The fact that third party viewers already have lots of 
new features and are open source (so they COULD be in Snowglobe) gives 
me very little faith in the Snowglobe project. It's all under the hood 
stuff, no attention is being paid to feature inclusion. Developing 
requested features and fixes is just as important in a development 
viewer as redone calculations, and Snowglobe isn't doing it.

Maya

tinselsilvera at frontiernet.net wrote:
> Regarding Maya's Snowglobe observation "It doesn't do anything the end-user can see as different, currently."
>
> I can only speak of my own experience in saying that you are wrong on that point.  My inworld experience, post windlight, pre Snowglobe, was a world of gray.  Everytime I visited a new place I would have to wait up to ten minutes for my world to rezz around me.  Since Snowglobe, and the way it handles textures, I no longer live in a world of gray.  Snowglobe has changed my experience for the better.  Is it the end all, be all, viewer?  Not yet.  I still have screen freezes ending in crashing out at least once per session.  I also have temporary screen freezes that are annoying.  But total overall experience?  Huge improvement for me.
>
> I have tried most of the third party viewers with the same gray/slow results as the LL standard viewer.  My setup is amd dcp 4400+ 2.3ghz, GeForce 9500 GT 1gb, dsl connection.
>
>