Cool VL Viewer forum

Hello all,

I've just been testing for a few weeks the experimental v1.26.5 branch on the Mac, and basically, I won't use it: I'm not on a very high end configuration and the impact of the new renderer on performance is just too high for me. In most regions, things take several minutes to rez correctly and even when they have, I often can hardly move at all, or with ridiculous FPS. Deferred rendering is totally out of the question for me: I can't even turn it on on 1.26.4, and on 1.26.5, when I do, it becomes basically impossible to do anything.

So here is my question: is there any plan to continue support for the current stable branch (1.26.4)? The latest build for the Mac is version 1.26.4(20), while the latest available version on other platforms is 1.26.4(35), so the Mac one is lagging behind quite a lot… It would be very nice to continue to support it, not everyone has a gamer's PC with a top of the pop graphics card and fiber cable, really… For these, a more 'low end' renderer is really needed, as it is for me…

Thanks!
- Erika -

I will soon publish an update to the roadmap, but I can already say that 1.26.4 will be kept around for a while. The v2.6 renderer used by v1.26.4 is indeed faster (especially in non-deferred rendering mode) on "old" hardware than the v3.4 renderer v1.26.5 (and next versions) is (and will be) using.

As for an updated MacOS-X release of v1.26.4, you'll have to ask nicely to Kathrine or someone with a MacOS-X system (I don't have one) and the know-how for compiling the viewer on it...

Hi Erika,

its not exactly rocket science to build the viewer on OS X once the prerequisites (Xcode 3.x and CMake mostly) are installed, so if anyone wants to try,
have a look at the very short Build Instructions/Overview at https://bitbucket.org/kjansma/cool-vl-v ... x/overview and substitute the 'checkout the code' with
'download henri's tar.gz and unpack'.

I might give 1.26.4 build a try on the weekend. Will probably not be as frequent as 1.26.5er builds, but should be possible to do about once a month or so.

Kathrine

That would be great, thanks a lot Kathrine! Already had thought about trying to build one myself, as it indeed doesn't seem to be that complicated. The thing I'd lack the most would probably be time though. But I might give it a try one day, just to know how it all works, and just in case I need to do one eventually. Thanks a lot for the link by the way, makes it look like it's quite simple indeed.
- Erika -

Found the time to build a current 1.26.4.36 for OS X, give it a try (see announcements).

Thank you for compiling/building the Mac stable branch, Katherine. I can run the experimental version on my early-2009 iMac, but performance definitely suffers, so it is very nice to be able to carry on with the old renderer. Thank you also for posting the link to your instructions.

I don't know if I'm correct, but it appeared to me that the experimental version was "heavier" on virtual memory than the stable branch.

Thank you so much, and it works like a charm!