“This is the first I’ve heard of OpenSim grids taking advantage of the Destination Guide,” said Lyon. Last night, I had a chance to ask Firestorm’s Lyon about the coding issue.Â It’s a long show, but some of the discussion starts at the 21 minute mark. Ideally, of course, all the viewers would get on the same page and adopt a common protocol. So right there, two fewer viewers I need to test with.

These viewers are popular with people who need an old-fashioned interface - but, according to my visitor logs, not that popular with the average hypergrid traveler. In particular, Kokua and Imprudence use an old-style coding scheme that isn’t supported by the new viewers. Testing the directory against every single viewer was becoming really time-consuming, since each time I made a change, I had to check it with several different viewers! I was inspired to run the numbers because I’m working on a Destination Guide based on the Hyperica directory, and different viewersÂ have different methods for coding destination links. While other viewers may have certain features that appeal to particular groups, Firestorm seems to be the viewer that serves the majority of people best. New features that are developed in other viewers get thoroughly tested by the users of those other viewers and prove their value before they’re added.įinally, there are usually good reasons why a particular viewer is more popular than another. There are also more people working on bug fixes and other improvements. For example, it’s easier to get help with a viewer that everyone else is using. There are also other benefits to using a popular viewer. In fact, she said, the majority of Second Life users do actually use the OpenSim version and, thus, have access to all the OpenSim grids with the same viewer. “The OpenSim version can upload mesh as well, just not with the physics attribute,” she added. She explained that only a handful of people would ever need the specialized physics mesh upload option or the pathfinding creation tools that the Second Life-specific option offers. “I recommend everyone use the OpenSim viewer,” she said. But she doesn’t advise people - including Second Life users - to use the Second Life viewer. “I believe that the future of virtual worlds lies in OpenSim,” she said, at the 1:05 mark in the video below.įirestorm publishes two versions of its viewer - one specifically for Second Life, with the proprietary Havoc physic engine for pathfinding and physics mesh uploads, and the other for OpenSim. Plus, the Firestorm viewer developers have openly committed themselves to supporting OpenSim for the long term, and, last night on Metaverse Week in Review, project manager Jessica Lyon repeatedÂ that pledge.

The Firestorm viewer is currently the most popular viewer in Second Life, and it makes sense for people to continue using a viewer they like and are familiar with when they come to OpenSim. These numbers are for Hyperica visitors only - many closed commercial grids use their own viewers, and those numbers wouldn’t show up in these statistics. Kokua accounted for just over 2 percent of visitors, followed by Imprudence and OnLook at around 1 percent each. Less than a third used Singularity, and CtrlAltStudio, Cool LV, and Replex were all around 3 percent each. More than half of the last 3,600 visitors to Hyperica used the Firestorm Viewer. The Firestorm Viewer is the most popular on the hypergrid by a wide margin, according to today’sÂ analysis of Hyperica server logs.

Kokua viewer bug