NiranV Dean has been back working on Niran’s Viewer, and in doing so has lifted the viewer to version 2.0 with a number of initial Betas. On Wednesday October 24th, he made a final release, 2.0.2185, which he calls Niran’s Viewer Rebooted, given the amount of additional work put into it, which finally saw him bypass his planned 1.5 release.
As the last release of Niran’s Viewer in these pages was version 1.46, the following will touch on elements previously released in 1.47 – 1.49 as well.
Download and Installation
The download file remains an archive EXE, rather than an actual installer, and is just on 50MB in size. It will extract the files into a default directory Nirans Viewer in C:\Program Files. If you’ve had a previous version of Niran’s Viewer installed, it is strongly recommended that you remove it first, together with all cache and settings files. The viewer itself has no uninstaller, some removal is a matter of deleting the program folder. The locations for all three are:
- Viewer: C:\Program Files\NiransViewer (delete this entire folder)
- Cache: C:\Users\[user name] \AppData\Local\NiransViewer (delete this folder)
- Settings: C:\Users\[user name] \AppData\Roaming\NiransViewer (delete this folder and all sub-folders inside).
First Time Running
Once you’ve made your initial keyboard camera preferences selection, the log-in screen features a new video from NiranV. I have to admit, I’m curious as to the music track and whether it is taken from something or original, as I rather like the keyboard arrangement in it.
You may get an anti-virus alert relating to the SLVOICE.EXE plugin – if you do, make sure that it is the plugin being referenced and clear it. The log-in splash screen is again liable to be something of a surprise to first-time users. There is no familiar splash screen feed from Linden Lab here. Instead, and providing you’re running flash, there’s a YouTube video NiranV has put together and which will play while you enter your log-in credentials in the panel to the right.
Note that Niran’s Viewer isn’t intended for use on OpenSim, so the other grids selection is limited to the SL Agni (main) and Aditi (Beta) grids. Once you’ve entered your you log-in credentials, you’re treated to a series of hints and tips as the viewer logs-in to Second Life.
Preferences Overlay
Niran’s alternative to the usual Preferences floater started appearing in version 1.46 of the viewer, where he referred to it as his “Skyrim influence”. It’s slowly been maturing through a number of releases since then, and with version 2.0, it completely replaces the old Preferences floater, which is no longer available within the viewer.
Accessed via the Preferences toolbar button, CTRL-P or NV->EDIT->PREFERENCES, the overlay does exactly what it says – overlays the in-world view.
To the left of the overlay are the main options: Display, Audio Controls, Camera, Chat, User, Interface and Viewer. Depending on the complexity of the screens / options associated with this, clicking on one of them may display a panel directly, or may open-up a sub-menu of further options which in turn will open up individual panels on the right of the overlay.
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Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
People & Joystick Floaters not changing opacity , check
Tooltips for Filters , check
Different Icons for Pathfinding Characters and Linksets , check
Pathfinding infos in Tools , uhm checked long ago but will be fixed someday with my secret project…
will all be fixed today when i´m done playing Mass Effect =D
anything else that needs to be fixed?
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Well as using the latest betas, all i can add is that this version has all the lil bugs we where used to, fixed!.
I don’t agree nor use Niran’s advise of disabling gama and its easy to see why if you use the day cycle and are indoors at night,
So for Me and My love, that use the same settings, on a build computer with same specs as mine, we run all at Ultra and also check gama, plus tone maping on liniar and Water to tone mapping as well (High defenition 1 is lovely but we stil prefer the tone mapping 1)!
The new preferences floater makes a lot more sense but i think that you really will not need to use it a lot after inicial tweeks, as F1 gives almost all the options that you can change often!
Still its much easy to understand then the messy v3 reg one for sure!
As we have steady 100 and more fps, at ground level on a public sim you can test, RIR racing sim, just without dr checked and reg 34 up to 45 ffps on Bad’s nightclub (not a empty space to test!) with all at ultra butr shadows set to high, plus Dr hp gama and tm and plus, Nvidia control panel overriding AA and AF to 16ho and 16 instead of 4 / 1q6 (yes Niran cant understand why we use this, well she needs to get a nvidia graphics instead of a Ati!) and We, both, use these setttings and both got the same performance on Intel 7 quad core, 12 giga ram ddr3 mine rig/6giga ddr3 hers, Nvidia gtx580 me, Nvidia gtx460 her, Windows 7 64b both!
I have several screnshots to proove this fps taken on crowded places like bad’s ambrosia and many more, that show how i was running the viewer (shot the interface open showing graphics general, machimina bar, fps screen ) we can’t understand why many are complaining about its perfomance!
Exodus latest night build gives Me a bit more fps but at a hard cost, (The graphics tweeks of Niran’s are unique and amazing)!
Firestorm never gives us more then half the fps on any of this places and does not have tone mapping.
So i honestly can’t understand the bad fps some report, unless advising to use a bandwich connection not higher then 1500kb sec and draw distance fixed on 260 like we use and reduce it to 160 on closed crowded places!
For us, em and my love and also for a few nascar racers at RIR, niran’s without dr checked is the fastest viewer of all!
Thats the reason why many nascar racers on sl are using it now!
Its also the one that less crashes on cross sims, allowing us to do long trips on mainland!
And i test ALL the viewers Sl and open sims have, known, so i can and i dont accept a denial on that, tell comparing with all the other viewers (But amstrag and Ludmyla lol), that for a fair (for God’s sake, our computers are already at least 1 year old! so not the top notch, any Slikryn player will laugh if i say otherwise) rig, Niran is the best in what matters:
Stability, perfomance, quality!
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Glad you get a high personal fps rate. But then, given your rigs, I’m not surprised! They may be a only a year old, but for those of us with systems around 5 years old (or more) that’s pretty state-of-the-art!
Hardware has a big impact on how well viewers run; for the most part, I’ve found that own my set-up (details in a panel to the right, including my “standard” viewer defaults) I find most viewers today remarkably consistent (which, given they are all using LL’s base code is unsurprising). I’ve no idea why my system struggles a little more with Niran’s than with others – but it has since one of the very early releases, and other than with the 1.46 release, which banged itself into the same overall personal performance level is experience with other viewers. This release sees Niran’s return to levels of earlier versions for me; is this down to any code tweaks, or simply my system showing its age again, I’ve no idea.
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its more like a code change , since 1.44 i was basing on Viewer Development which slowly destroyed the Viewer in alot ways , at 1.49 i couldnt do anything anymore , TPs failed all the time , Friendlist never loaded , IMs didnt work , Groups didnt plop up anymore and alot more…it was annoying , really annoying , so i had to rebase on Linden Beta which is somewhat stable but my Viewer still does suffer from some rendering issues in Deferred , breaking my FPS down to 5 out of sudden and for no reason…
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i LOVED the viewer when i tried it a few months ago, glad to hear there is an update. Also, i LOVED the preferences, BUT i think i might need help (or a spare week) with the graphics settings, and i don’t have time to actually take a photography course. is there full documentation on how to or what’s what for the aesthetically inclined, but nontechnical user?
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I dont think anyone wants to create a sort of Wiki for an everchanging Viewer.
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thank you foneco! i find firestorm often does not play well with other viewers, so i am already down with the frequent wiping up lol. and 1000 outfit… HOLY CATS
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fast easy 1, set on high resolution tab, tone mapping to liniar, move also the bar on middle to 1.5!
Choose LL day cycle, and water mapping, hid defenition or tone mapping 1!
Check all display tabs to ultra, make sure draw distance is 254, make sure shadows tab is set to high!
hit f1 and make sure all the top boxes are checked but depth of field!
Then you can wonder around and see if you need to lower some of the settings on the diplay or move the light slide strength to a blt less and so on!
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I believe that until v1,47, the defered rendering that niran used was diff from the 1 it uses now!
A reason for me to use that version for long, till the beta 2 was relased, cause i was not happy, not with the performance but with the overall quality of the v1,48 and 1.49 versions.
You can try the v1.47 and see if with some settings you feel it faster, on my case it didnt and this latest is faster for sure, but one never knows (and v1.47 is still graphics speaking, a amazing one!)
But one thing i can tell you, Niran does not mix with firestorm, so if you use stil, firestorm and connect with the same account on both viewers, id advise you to do another clean install of niran, log with that 1, and while you use it, dont log with firestorm!
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And remenber to hit invetory tab, hit recent, let it fetch (opening about land tab while doing that speeds up the process)!
Also if tou use my outifts folder, know that if you have 2 many like me (more then 1000 there) it wil take some time to wear for the 1st time each 1 of them!
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