July 19, 2008

How your viewer could be effecting how you see prims

Hi everyone,

A conundrum was happened upon recently while I was building my latest release, and I thought I would share the investigation and findings with you all.

Firstly, the dilemma: I had made a pendant using 40ish prims, most of which where sculpties and VERY tiny. When finished I sent them to my friends (as you do LOL) to great reviews so all seemed well and ready for release \o/

But then... I received an IM from Ben Vanguard who I had sent a pack to, if you've ever sent stuff to Ben for review, you KNOW he will tell you if there is something not right (one of the things I really respect about Ben). He was seeing the prim wiring at the sides of the pendant being way out of alignment! "OMG!!! How??? was my first thought" because I had done all the close-up shots of the pendants for my ads the day before, and they where fine... so I rezzed one to have a look and then I saw what he was seeing >.<

So I set to work fixing the prims, I then sent it to Ben and a copy to a fellow creator. I then got two IM's one from Ben: "Perfect! I love it" (or words to that effect LOL) but from my friend, she said that she saw the prims waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out!!!

So I thought about this for a bit, and I will admit, freaked out some... you hear about prims moving quite frequently, but how can you fix what you don't see or how can you accommodate for all the various ways people will see the one thing??? I removed my pendants from sale until I could work out what was going on.

I sent packs to my friends and got pics back, five pics in all... 5 different peoples view of my pendants:






I then got to thinking (after auto-rant about glitches and bugs for a while), what if it's the viewer people are using? So Ben who is lovely, and was just as thrown by this as me, set to work researching, downloading various viewers to test the theory. I had been using the new release viewer when taking building the pendants, but had switched back to the official viewer (1.19.1(4)) because I didn't want to upload the update at the time :P

This is what we came up with (compare the below with those above)the official release viewer at this stage is shown to be the safer bet for prim alignment (at least in this case) but as you will see above, how old your download of that version is, appears to impact on what you see. Here are the pics of fresh downloads of the official viewer on two different computers (last two images):



BIG difference between viewer versions and age of download hey!!!

Anyways, that concludes my VERY long post, sorry about that...but thank you for reading all the way to here :)

Faery

4 comments:

Samara Kasshiki said...

Hi - Interesting post. I noticed today when building shoes that things seemed to be "off" and that shoes that had been perfect in past viewers were not looking as good as the invisiprims didn't seem to be working "correctly". I did the best that I could with the newest release candidate (the only one I can log in with) and gave it up for good. It is definitely a problem. We have so many changes so often with the server codes and now with the viewers. The newsest RC also seems to be very hard to control for viewing (for me anyway) and I was jumping all over the place. After a couple of years almost you would THINK I had that down LOL. Not sure there is much we can do but good to know that it isn't just me.

Anonymous said...

I wonder how it would look on OnRez's viewer for SL?

Faery Sola said...

Hi Samara,

*nods* it does make it somewhat better to at least know your not the only one this is effecting... lets hope some continuity in how viewers allow us to see prims happens fast!

but for now, chin up and keep at it :D we can only do the best we can with what we have!!!

Hi Anonymous, no clue about the OnRez viewer, but if anyone has feedback or comments about that, I would be interested to know :)

Casandra Shilova said...

Hi Faery,

I have both the official viewer (1.19.1(4) and the Release Candidate. I have critiqued for three designers and would be more than happy to do so for you. ;)

I'll have to warn you, I am the kind of nit picky person that you would either love or hate.

Casie

Studio Sidhe

RL art in SL. Fashion for your second life... Wear your art!