Cool VL Viewer forum

I noticed that in busy areas like infohubs or really busy clubs the memory usage skyrockets, especially compared to older versions of Cool Viewer... It also seems to happen in empty areas that are full of objects with different textures, like shops / malls...

I'm not quite sure but I think it started with Cool VL Viewer 1.25.0.12 ...

do you still have Cool 1.25.0.11 and 0.12 knocking around somewhere? I could run a few tests...

Hardly a bug... Simply the result of not having any more blurry textures... Older (experimental) versions of the Cool VL Viewer v1.25.0 were plagued with SnowGlobe's (and SnowStorm's) forever blurry attachment textures, for example, while new versions react like v1.23.5 and load those texture at 0 discard level (i.e. at full details level). There is of course a cost, in term of memory usage...

that explains it.

thanks!

I ran some tests, and found a better method that is gentler on the texture buffers, resulting in much less memory consumption in very crowded areas. It will be part of the next release.

dude you are just beyond awesome.

The new method is in today's release (v1.25.0.16): it still loads your own avatar's attachments at full texture details (0 discard level), but now only gives higher fetching and decoding priorities and importance to the camera to others avatar's attachments, thus allowing their texture discard level to raise above 0 so that they won't clutter uselessly the texture buffers (GL buffer, bound textures buffer and video card texture buffer) when the avatars in question are not in the frustrum of your camera.

It should save a lot of memory usage in very crowded places and get close to v1.23.5's usage (but will still be over SG v1.5's memory usage which low figure had a very annoying drawback: the "forever blurred" textures...).

I'm not 100% sure as of now but i have a feeling that the last iteration of the blurry&greytextures patch brought Cool Viewer's memory usage back to "a bit too much if you ask me".
Was at some shops last night, not even crowded places, and Cool ate 2.5 gig ram with draw distance 128.
Will do some direct comparison between build16 and build17 with exactly the same settings at the same places later today.

The new code just *cannot* consume more memory than the previous one: the previous patch forbid any texture used for any avatar's attachment to be discarded (meaning keeping the full resolution decoded texture permanently in memory and video buffers), the new code only do this for your own avatar and simply raises (when compared to stock Snowglobe code) the importance to the camera and the decode priority of the other avatars' attachments textures.

Here, I see a significant *decrease* in the memory consumption when compared to previous versions.

cool 16 was a big improvement over previous versions... cool 17 went straight back to making my 3gig laptop start swapping. I haven't investigated more thoroughly yet.
I'm not even sure that its anything in the blurry patch since as far as i understand that one is only relevant to textures on avatars, and the places that made me swap were not even that busy...

There is no change between v1.25.0.16 and v1.25.0.17 that could, even remotely explain a change in memory usage... Plus, here I do not see any such problems. Memory usage is around 1Gb (800Mb in quiet areas, 1.5Gb in extremely busy areas) and hardly ever climbs up to 2Gb, and only after a day long session.