Cool VL Viewer forum

Hello Henri et. al.,

I was wondering if it would be possible to incorporate the fix by Zwagoth Klaar for VWR-1844 (erroneously titled 'on Windows Vista' -- this is actually a general issue, as the discussion reveals) into the Cool VL Viewer.

I am blessed with fairly good hardware but Internet access with a rather slow upstream (affectionately called my uptrickle by me ) and frequently run into the situation that is described there in high framerate (>60 FPS) situations. Granted, this is somewhat of a luxury problem, but it would be nice to see it fixed nonetheless.

On another note, would it be possible to have floaters remember their minimized position across sessions? The default position in the lower left hand corner is somewhat of a bummer, so I always move them out of the way. Having to redo that is no biggie, but it does get old over time.

And in an additional note, thank you for your wonderful work and especially sticking with it even now with LL making things more difficult than they already did in the past. It is well-appreciated.

Regards,
Lia.

For today's release, I implemented only half of the proposed patch (do not flag the control flags dirty when they are not), but not the other half (and therefore keep forcing an update every 10th of a second), since it would introduce a very annoying delay (about 0.25 second) each time your avatar starts walking or running, and is independent from the FPS rate anyway.

Note however that this kind of lag spike is due to a badly configured Internet connection, and not to the viewer itself, so while decreasing the number of small messages needing a short response time ("ping") indeed improves the situation, it does not cure it. Your problem comes from the fact that your computer feeds your MODEM with too high a bandwidth and the latter queues the data in a 2 seconds wide queue, which is good to maintain the highest possible transfer rate but is very detrimental to applications using small packets but needing fast response time (since those packets get queued with the rest of the data and thus must wait for the queue to empty before being sent). It means that, for example, you got good FTP performances (high transfer rates) but very poor telnet/ssh performances (long delays).

To cure this problem, you need to tell your computer to:

• Give priority to small packets over large ones. This can be done via proper QoS settings.
• Not send data faster than the MODEM can transmit via its uplink. This can be done via proper queue discipline and traffic shaping.

Here is a link that will give you more details about traffic shaping, queue discipline and QoS.

I'd rather change the order into which the floaters stack (right to left), since storing each position for each floater (including duplicate floaters, such as several notecards, scripts, textures, etc) would be a real mess to implement and would result in a very glitchy interface (with minimized floaters stacking where you won't expect, since depending on the number and types of floater minimized in the previous session, they would "leave holes" in the next session with less floaters).

Oh my, thank you so much

Yes, I can see the point about the second part being very annoying. And after a quick check I can say the fix as you included it now seems to work well enough for me.

I suppose I could probably try to wrestle things down further as you suggested, and I may look into it at some point. For now I think I'm going to enjoy this and your other fixes. Yay!

Oh, and by the way, I found your tip jar!



Oh, that might work just as well, I think. I always thought it ridiculous they minimized to the lower left, left to right -- right where chat is displayed. Even though they are transparent, personally I think they make reading chat too hard. Then again, it might just be my old eyes.

Of course my personal favourite would be top right, top to bottom or right to left. But then again I'm weird that way. Maybe others could make suggestions here as well what would be the most appreciated way?

Finally again, it can't be said enough: thank you so much for your involvement and wonderful work!

Regards,
Lia.

I just finished up the patch for this feature: it allows to choose to stack minimized floaters either Left to Right (default) or Right to Left, and Bottom to Top (default) or Top to Bottom, and also to optionally limit the stacking to a fraction of the width of the screen (default fraction is 1 = full width): for example 1/3.

It will be part of the next Cool VL Viewer releases.