Last night, out of a mix of sheer desperation and curiosity, I tried the new Electric Sheep viewer for Second Life®. I’m not at all interested in the CSI New York or related TV shows - I hate them vehemently in fact - but I wanted to see if the viewer was easy to use and whether it would afford me a better in-world experience than the official viewer.
Well, during an all-too-brief test, I was able to remain online for approximately 30 minutes before crashing. This custom viewer has the maddeningly annoying habit of always logging in to one of the regions made specifically for this TV show despite my telling it I want to sign in to my Home location, but hey if it’s better I will use it anyway, advertising and all - and if you’ve ever heard me rant about advertising you know that’s a huge concession from me.
Unfortunately, my testing was far from comprehensive because my in-world time was interrupted by my wife injuring her back and requiring immediate medical attention. It will be at least another day before either of us are able to get in-world again for more than a few minutes to catch up on IM’s and such, but I have C:SI (the REAL C:SI, Combat: Samurai Island) obligations this weekend that I am pretty confident I’ll be able to meet.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Well, I just tried the OnRez viewer. Two things turned me off right away. First I can’t change my screen resolution or choose whether to run SL in a window. These two things really have helped to better my C:SI performance and overall SL experience in the regular viewer. Secondly, Robby’s right…you ALWAYS log into the CSI-NY sim. So given the problems with the viewer performance on my particular computer, i didn’t even try drawing my sword.
On a brighter note. Anyone visit the CSI-NY sims and notice the utter lack of lag? i wonder what kind of sims these are. I poked around the map and found some close-by non-CSI-NY sims and landed on an island that had the same lack of lag. I think i might bring some friends to spar in these as yet empty places when the main combat sims are lagged up to heck.
And Robby…C:SI update coming soon? Pretty please? With sugar? Seriously thanks for whatever time you can give to improving our SL experience in the C:SI community. We really appreciate it and understand that RL is RL.
I noticed the window problem as well. I, too, always run in a window, and the official viewer allows you to set it to precisely 800×600. That is definitely one feature that I miss.
I hadn’t noticed the lack of lag on the CSI:NY sims, but upon reflection that’s not too surprising: I would have been more likely to have noticed heavy lag than the lack of lag, as heavy lag is more “in your face” and painful. To be honest, though, I had no interest in staying around those sims, and always teleport away immediately. I may have to go try it now that you mention it, though. I wonder how they’d feel about having sword-wielding combatants running around?
As for the C:SI update, yes, it is coming very soon. I think I’m finally learning a lesson that the other C:SI devs learned long ago: Don’t give expected timelines. We’ve been very nearly ready for a few weeks now, but there have been a few things that have interfered; Archanox had a very heavy school schedule last week, I was sick the week before, etc. On top of that, all of the other C:SI devs have been extremely busy doing some work related to this update that does not involve the swords directly, though I don’t think I should spill any details before it’s all unveiled.
And finally, I got an update from Archanox last night for the scripts that fixes a problem that I had not encountered in my testing, so I’m very glad that Archanox was still doing heavy testing, though I was a little disappointed in myself for not being more familiar with the latest codebase.
Actually I had my client water off too. So i ran to the edge of the entry-point CSI-NY sim and it actually wound up being a river. So I was slashing and kicking away under water. Don’t think anyone noticed me. LOL. And again, we know you are all trying very hard to juggle all aspects of life. We’ve all been there. Thanks for hanging in.
I have decided, after several days of using the OnRez viewer, that I can’t stand it.
Firstly, I hate advertising, that’s no secret, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I don’t care for the splash-screen advertising for TV shows that I couldn’t care less about.
Secondly, I am extremely irritated that it does not respect my choice to login at my home location. For the first day or two that was forgivable, but after a while I grew to hate it more and more.
And finally, it’s really no more stable. It was apparently a fluke that the first day that I tried it went so well, but I knew that might be the case.
It was worth a shot, but in the end it simply didn’t work. Sorry sheep-devs, it’s just not for me