Personal Account: Finally Can See Mesh, But ...

Remember the Dranopia Quest Xymbers Slade wrote on? Well, some friends of mine insisted I head over them and join them in the fun. As the area is made up of lots of mesh objects, what I saw on my Singularity was essentially what the first picture shows.

Naturally, I felt a bit left out. So I told my friends I was going to get the latest Phoenix Viewer, Firestorm and the official viewers unable to run on my machine. Phoenix had been updated earlier to see Mesh, but was quite unstable. I crashed just after logging on with it. I did hear there was a further improvement to iron out a few bugs, but hadn't given it a try. So I logged off, downloaded the new Phoenix, and began logging on ...

And it worked!

It actually worked! I was finally able to see the mesh objects that I never could before, in all their detail.

But, there was a catch.

I found the viewer a bit awkward to use at times. It seemed to default to just behind my avatar's head in a position that made walking about difficult. It was like having to adjust to a stronger perscription of eyeglasses. It just seemed ... not quite right. It wasn't always easy to pan around to get a better look either.

And as it turned out, it was still a bit crashy. I would still crash on occasion after teleporting or even logging in. Mesh was now visible, but the result was an unstable viewer that could be hard to move around and focus with.

By this time, the old Singularity viewer I had had been starting to show it's age, some objects appearing as red even when they weren't. Downloading the latest version, I was no longer seeing red. But it wasn't long before I crashed. The viewer was less stable on my computer than the latest Phoenix.

So I now had a mesh-capable viewer that was hard to focus around and crashed occasionally, and a non-mesh capable viewer that crashed even more.

It might not be completely the viewers' fault. the computer I've been using is now five years old. Perhaps it's time to replace it soon, but as a working stiff, my finances have usually been a bit tight, and these days tighter than ever. To complicate matters, I've heard of computers upgraded to be more powerful, only to have Second Life run even slower.

Perhaps the best thing is to keep an eye out for a good buy. In the meantime, life on the Grid has become a bit crashy for me.

Bixyl Shuftan