Note: Niran subsequently released versions 1.31 and 1.32 following this review. Both contain tweaks and additions to 1.30, including further floater layout alignments (most notably the People floater (1.31) and the Merchant Outbox is translated and functional in German (1.32). You can catch these updates on Niran’s blog. 

NiranV Dean has released version 1.30 of Niran’s Viewer, which is described as “a complete overhaul” – and there is enough that has gone into it to justify that comment.

The Viewer has been something of a differentiator in the TPV world on a number of fronts: elements of UI presentation are markedly different (such as the menu presentation and things like the Build floater), the Viewer also offers a huge amount of nips, tucks, tweaks and changes to the graphic end of things which, while geared towards higher-specification machines, offer much that is of benefit to machinimatographers and photographers. Finally, and as the Viewer has developed, NiranV has not been afraid to seek to incorporate more of a game-like approach to things.

The changes in this release are extensive – and some are not always obvious (such as localisation in the log-in and log-in progress screens),, which doesn’t make them any less time-intensive to produce. I’ve aimed this piece at covering the more visible changes.

Over-the-Shoulder

The first noticeable difference between 1.30 and earlier versions is that the camera default position has been moved to an over-the-shoulder view. This may not be to everyone’s liking, but it does offer an improved world-view in many respects. As someone already using Penny Patton’s camera offsets to achieve a similar result, I found the look very familiar and comfortable when I logged-in, although the camera position is a little closer than I’m accustomed to seeing. This isn’t a problem until one uses the DOWN ARROW / S-key for moving backwards; while this now turns your avatar around, it also tend to have your avatar well over to the left on-screen, making navigation even over a short distance a little harder. For those that aren’t keen on these views, it’s obviously possible to reset to a more “traditional” view.

Staying with the camera for a moment, mouselook also gains the ability to use the SHIFT key in combination with mouse movements to smooth the motion of the latter on-screen and provide precise tracking. Handy for those in combat / shooting situations.

Floating Away

NiranV’s work on redesigning various floaters continues. With this release, People and Mesh Upload come in for attention.

The People floater joins Build in going horizontal – – and this works particularly well with Nearby, wherein the people list and mini-map can be displayed without having to have a long vertical panel opening on-screen.

Another nice touch with this is that both ONLINE and ALL are displayed side-by-side (although may require extra scrolling if you have an extensive list of friends!).

The Mesh Upload floater has been compressed and the lay-out tided so that it also doesn’t require so much on-screen real estate. The result is a clean, compact approach that is still relatively easy on the eye, although the ability to resize it via dragging might not go amiss for those who would prefer it to be a little bigger.

The Build floater has been further tweaked and again provides a cleaner display and appears less cluttered than early iterations.

Menus and floaters have also had their transparency adjusted to give a consistent feel right across the Viewer, and to aid in readability.

“Pick a colour, any colour…”

Perhaps the biggest single update in terms of the ability to customise the Viewer is that users can now set the colour and transparency of every common floater in the Viewer and set colours against every common widget.

Changes to floaters require a Viewer restart to take effect, while changes to widget colours will be applied immediately.

For those missing KLee’s Viewer, a small nod has been added to Niran’s 1.30: the UI buttons can now by displayed in KLee Viewer style.

And there’s more…

As well as these changes, 1.30 also sees:

• More work on translating the UI for German and French users
• Improvements and tweaks to various Preferences panels
• Fixes to media roll-off and max sliders
• Incorporation of the latest Shining fixes
• Text compression (which may help with some crash issues on older cards, but not recommended for ATi systems)

A full list of changes can be found at the end of the blog post on the release.  Gone from this release is the “main menu” option and the SL Kinect2 option. The former is being reworked, the latter may be gone for good due to compiling issues with Linux.

Feedback

I’ve always liked Niran’s Viewer – the “dares to be different” approach has meant that the Viewer has been very innovative and something very different from “standard” 3.x-based offerings. My experience has suffered over the last few releases because my PC has struggled to manage the Viewer, particularly when running some of the more advanced deferred rendering options. Whereas early versions ran very well – frame rates up in the mid-30s sans deferred options, more recent releases have been barely half that.

Release 1.30 goes some way to reversing this trend, allowing me to achieve frame rates of between 28-32 with 3 or 4 others on-sim, and deferred rendering is back on a par with earlier releases (around 8-9fps). This still isn’t as fast my PC can manage with other Viewers, but it’s a lot faster than I’ve enjoyed of late with Niran’s, and as such is very welcome.

In all, the Viewer runs smoothly, exhibits no proclivity towards crashing on me (it rarely has), and I had no lock-ups when taking lots of snapshots with deferred rendering turned on (an issue I tend to get with other viewers, particularly if I move the camera around a lot with the snapshot floater open when running in deferred).

In terms of the UI changes, the ability to make the UI multi-hued may find a lot of appeal among those who like a highly individual look to their Viewer. For me, I like the general tidying done to the Build floater – which is starting to grow on me – and I very much like the new People floater, which really maximises the use of space. The new default camera position is also something that appeals, given I already use something similar, although I’d personally prefer to set my camera back a little further.

Overall, a lot of work continues to go into this Viewer, it’s still one of my two preferred Viewers when it comes to my amateur attempts at photography, and given I’ve got a slight boost in performance with this release, it may well see a lot more use again as I hop around the grid exploring and snapping pictures.

Kudos!

Related Links

• Niran’s blog
• 1.30 release blog post
• Download page
• Source files

NrianV Dean has been putting in a lot of work on Niran’s Viewer over the past couple of months, with new versions rolling-out fairly regularly. Many of these have experimental functions added to them – so much so that NiranV has taken to jokingly referring to the development work as coming from Niran’s Lab. He’s been keeping me appraised of updates and changed almost daily, but in-world projects and real life concerns of late have meant that I’ve not really been able to take Niran’s Viewer for a proper spin since release 1.13.

Releases 1.24 (Feb 14th) and 1.25 (Feb 15th – gives you some idea of the speed of updates!), have given me cause to play a little bit of catch-up. Release 1.24 was itself essentially a series of fixes and tweaks to the 1.23.5 release (also made on the 14th February), while version 1.25 adds version 0.2 of Qarl’s Parametric Deformer to the Viewer and includes some graphics related tweaks. You can therefore take this review as more-or-less a n outline of the key elements from all three of these releases (1.23.5 through 1.25).

If you’ve previously installed Niran’s Viewer – particularly 1.23.5, it’s probably best that you opt for a completely clean install of either 1.24 or 1.25, although I do comment on a couple of pre-1.23.5 updates as well.

There are two flavours of the Viewer EXE on offer – dedicated 32- and 64-bit variants. As Niran’s is compiled Large Array Aware, I’m not entirely clear on the difference, but I gather the 32-bit version of the EXE was a special request.

On start-up, there are no overt changed to the Viewer’s UI: as is common for Niran’s, the buttons are split between the left and right sides of the screen, the Navigation / Favourites bars are on, and the Destination Guide initially opens by default, as is common for most V3.2-based Viewers.Which is not to say the changes aren’t there.

Navigation Bar: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t

For those that both like to use the Navigation / Favourites Bar but at the same time find it slightly intrusive on their world view, Niran’s now includes a nifty auto-hide function. Enabled through PREFERENCES->VIEWER->UI SETTINGS, this will automatically hide the Navigation / Favourites Bar when the mouse isn’t positioned over it, and replace it with the Mini-location Bar. hovering the mouse at the top of the screen automatically displays the Navigation / Favourites Bar once more. Neat!

“Are you lookin’ (down) at me….?” – Camera Updates

On the subject of views, the Camera options have been altered. NiranV is keen to introduce more game-like elements to the Viewer – we’ve seen it with the experimental “Main Menu” (F1 – of which more below). Now with the camera, he’s replaced the traditional Front view with an overhead view. As a slight aside: does anyone actually use the Front View? I always tend to find myself orbiting the camera around myself.

To me, the initial view is somewhat high, so many using the option are liable to find themselves using the Camera View Angle slider (PREFERENCES->ADVANCED-> CAMERA) to close the distance between themselves and their avatar.

Staying with the Camera and Preferences, 1.24 introduces something I’ve been waiting for in Viewers for a goodly while: the ability to alter camera offsets without the need to twiddle about with Debug options. As many know, I’m a firm convert to Penny Patton’s Camera Offsets for SL (if you haven’t tried them, you should), so it’s great to see a Viewer that includes the ability to change offsets on-the-fly through Preferences. Kudos, NiranV!

Staying with Preferences

Regular Niran’s users will noticed as well that the entire Advanced tab has been revamped in this release, with Camera, Movement and Mouselook options separated into their own button-activated sub-tabs. This also marks a departure from the more usual “sliding panel” approach seen to date within Niran’s Viewer with regards to sub-tabs (and which can still be seen within the Viewer tab, for example. Referring to this re-vamp in his blog, NiranV states the new button approach may be added to the Viewer and Advanced Graphics tabs should it prove popular with users.

Also new to the Viewer (from version 1.22 onwards), and found in the Advanced Graphics tab are control from the new Visual Auto-mute function, complete with colour-codes guides to possible settings.

Avatar Animations

Work has been done around avatar animations with this release. Most notably for those developing animations, release 1.24 of Niran’s provides full support for uploading .ANIM files, as supplied by Jonathan Yap (see STORM-1803). Niran also adds his own touches in the form of options to control how your avatar reacts when being rotated. NiranV has included a couple of videos to demonstrate the functions, and I’ve taken the liberty of embedding one of them here.

Build, People and Rendering

Having just completed a vast amount of work on an obsession of mine, which involved working with some relatively small cross-section prims, I found myself constantly annoyed at the way in which the white stretch anchors repeatedly blocked access to the red, green and blue X, Y, Z stretch points on a prim. NiranV offers a solution to this problem: providing WASD is set to movement (rather than starting chat), you can press and hold the X key to eliminate the white “corner” anchors to ease access to the X, Y ands Z stretch points.

NiranV has also revised the People floater with this release, replacing the FRIENDS tab with an ACQUAINTANCES tab, his argument being most people we have on our lists are more like acquaintances than true friends, and one cannot fault his logic on this in many respects. Also with this release, the Acquaintances List will show the full set of permissions you’ve set for friends (ability to map you, etc.).

Finally, and also coming out of Niran’s Viewer Labs, is a new rendering option that may have potential use in the future. NiranV explains it thus on his blog: “One thing big has been done here except Tofu´s new project which has been merged, it’s called worldspace semi-random macro-dappling, which creates random big darkness spots on a SIM and your Avatar depending on the sun position. Later this could be combined with the cloud X and Y movement to create a good but faked cloud shadow effect!” At present only the depth / darkness of the effect can be altered – but it will be interesting to see where this goes.

The Main Menu

Finally, Niran has been working on his Main Menu idea for the last few releases. I first covered this in my review of release 1.13. Back then I commented on the fact that using ESC to invoke the menu wasn’t perhaps the best choice, given that key is traditionally associated with the Camera. NiranV took this on-board, and the menu has, for the last few releases, been accessed by pressing F1. The style of the menu has also been changed, as shown below.

The look is apparently borrowed from a popular video game. I’ll be honest and stay that while I have no idea how well it has gone down with regular Niran’s users, I actually find it jarring and incongruous compared to the rest of the Viewer, factors that tend to make me shy away from using it.

Performance

Niran’s Viewer is intended for high-end machines and continues to get tweaked in that direct and further releases come out. As such, it’s a little unfair of me to comment on performance in some respects, because my hardware is well below the recommended hardware specifications for the Viewer (the closest I get to meeting them is that I’m running a quad-core CPU). My graphics card in particular now struggles mightily with Niran’s if I attempt to use deferred rendering & shadows, a factor that has, sadly, prevented me from using the Viewer quite as much as I might otherwise like.

That said, I’ve put the Viewer to several hours of reasonable use, bouncing around the grid, trying different environments, playing with the settings (as some of the screen caps here will show!) and generally poking and prodding, and the Viewer has taken it all in its stride (albeit without deferred rendering). The changes NiranV is introducing to the Viewer are both novel and leading-edge. There are some that are very practical – for me, the camera offsets in Preferences are a great addition, and those wishing to make use of the Visual Auto-mute option will find the inclusion of both that as a set of sliders and the annotation for settings that goes with it as being of benefit. Other additions – such as the top-down camera view are potentially more specialised, and it’ll be interesting to see how popular these prove to be for a wider audience of user.

Related Links

• Niran’s Viewer download page
• Niran’s blog
• Viewer source code

Update Jan 24th:  Version 1.14 is now available which fixes the snapshot floater iessue meantioned in the article, and which also see the Main Menu moved to F1 from ESC, thus resolving the camera / Mouselook reset issue also mentioned here. The download location remains the same.

Good grief! I turn my back on SL for 1/2 a day to go shopping and take care of that “real life” thing, and what happens? Another Viewer update pops up! :).

NiranV Dean has been busy scribing away (do coders scribe, I wonder?) on Niran’s Viewer of late, with 1.12 appearing earlier in the week and now we have 1.13 arriving. NiranV’s aim with the Viewer is not to come up with the fastest (in terms of frame rates) or the most features and functions – but rather to focus on developing better graphics and a more flexible user interface. This combination has made Niran’s Viewer daringly different  – and release 1.13 continues with this.

Main Menu

On starting the Viewer there is also little sign of any changes within the release. However, tap ESC and you’ll receive an interesting surprise: the Viewer has a “main menu”!

The options on the menu are self-explanatory, and NiranV clearly states this is only an initial pass at the menu – the style and layout will be subject to change, and constructive feedback on the idea is welcomed via his blog.

I have to admit that when the idea was first explained to me, I was sceptical as to its use – but I’m not sure I fully understood what NiranV was proposing. On seeing the menu, I can see that there is potential here. However, I’m not sure that using ESC is the right key function. While I understand it may be a common approach in “traditional” games (I’m genuinely not qualified to comment either way on computer games), it has to be said that ESC has long had a “traditional” use in SL: for resetting your camera view or popping out of ML. Ergo, there is a risk here that putting ESC to another use is going to cause frowns among some users, other options for getting into / out of ML notwithstanding.

I did have problems with the My Profile and Outfits options on the menu (neither worked for me), but again, this is an experimental feature.

Snapshot Floater

The revised snapshot floater in V3.x has always struck me as being a tad on the large size. Niran’s addresses this by offering a more compact floater, although it needs a couple of tweaks to finish things off – the “expand” chevron and image resolution information is somewhat squeezed by the image preview pane, and the expanded Advanced Options slider could do with being just a little wider (the closing bracket of “(fullscreen)” seems to “fall off” the edge of the panel a little. However, this is, to me at least, an improvement over the default floater in terms of size.

Looking at Snapshot actually reminds me to comment on the top-to-bottom fade found in the floaters on Niran’s Viewer. I’m not sure how recent a change this is – I first noticed it on the 1.12 release – but it is really rather smart and I find it adds a little something to the Viewer as a whole.

Gestures Enhanced and Other Bits

This release sees gestures enhanced with additional trigger options, as NiranV explains, “You can now use additional trigger keys for gestures, which are E Q R F I T Y Z G C V M O P and Space, you can set them in the Shortcut key combo NOT MODIFIER!”

Also in this release as an experimental option is the ability to bulk upload .anim files via NV->FILES->UPLOAD->BULK UPLOAD.

The revised Build floater, introduced in 1.12 has gained popular feedback from the core Niran’s Viewer users and has received some nips and tucks as a result.

Version 1.12 also suffered from locking issues that appeared to be related to Shining fixes. However, following investigations, NiranV found the problem seems to actually be connected to inventory loading, and has this to say on the issue and Shining fixes in general within 1.13:

“Well with 1.12 I added some Shining fixes that seemed to cause initial freezes on login, but no ….its your Inventory! IF you freeze several times on login before [the] World turns smooth, then your Inventory has been fetched … If you want, I can do an option to disable initial fetching.

“Apart from that, I´ve added a few other Shining fixes which fixed the Underwater Crash I´ve noticed when you look into the “void” (the blue water fog at the end of a sim) and transparent meshes -> meshes should now render correctly when setting them to 1% transparency or having a transparent texture on them … instead of vanishing completely. [Be aware that] the bump map on mesh crash is still present; don’t set bump maps on meshes unless you want to crash. The bump map will be set after your relog.”

Feedback

Niran’s Viewer doesn’t have everything I like to see in a Viewer – but then again, if it and every other Viewer did have everything we all wanted, they’d all likely be exactly the same. However, it is still very much a Viewer I enjoy using. However, recent releases have suffered where I’m concerned, as they have tended to push my system to its limits when I’ve wanted to use the bells and whistles.

While Niran isn’t focused on the “traditional” elements of performance (and remembering that they are always subjective and subject to a myriad of factors that cannot always be managed in everyday use of the Viewer), I have to say the 1.13 has so far reversed performance issues for me somewhat, and has been more amenable to me running with shadows, occlusion and so on switched on. This has been a pleasant surprise, as alongside Exodus, Niran’s is my Viewer of choice for what passed for photography in my hands.

Outside of this, I think the main menu idea could well have more traction than I’d given previous credit. The inclusion of such a menu may seem out-of-step with Viewer development to date, but I have to admit that were it to be used in a Viewer specifically aimed at new users, for example, it could have considerable positive impact. As it is, it’ll be interesting to see how the idea develops within Niran’s Viewer, and whether any other TPVs adopt the approach.

All-in-all, an interesting update, with more to come in the future, going on NiranV’s blog comments!

Links

• NiranV Dean’s blog
• Viewer Download (now release 1.14) – Windows
• Souce code – Bitbucket
• Previous detailed reviews on this blog (search “Niran’s Viewer” for more):
  • The Viewer that dares to be different – December 12, 2011
  • Daring to be different 2 – December 26, 2011