Is There More To Project Zipper Than Meets The Eye?

The Linden Lab blog post about Project Zipper has so far met with an underwhelming response. Project Zipper, for those who don’t know, is a new Second Life project viewer that apparently improves the installation speed of the Second Life viewer.

My initial reaction to this news was “?!?!?!?! WTF!” I must admit that was my second and third reaction too. I’m not alone in this, others have expressed bemusement as to why this is an important improvement.

The Second Life client download and install times have never been something that has struck me as being problematic. Some third party viewers have larger download and install times, and I have never found that problematic either.

The largely bemused response is pretty much summed up in Inara Pey’s blog post on the subject, Inara tested the install times of Project Zipper and the official Second Life client on her system and the results were:

• Second Life release viewer 2.7.2.286707: 35.6 seconds
• Second Life Project Zipper viewer 3.7.2.286810: 16.4 seconds

Now you could look at this and say that Project Zipper installs in less than half the time of the current release viewer, which put in those terms is an impressive achievement. However it amounts to just over 19 seconds difference, which in reality is neither here or there. People on other systems may see better or worse results, but I’d imagine in most cases, people aren’t going to be blown away by this.

However a couple of folk have added a bit more detail, which makes this sound a bit more interesting.

Now bear in mind that these people are not Lindens, so their information may not be completely accurate. However their views do add some substance to this project. In the comments on Inara’s post, Trinity Dejavu, whom I believe has done work on the Catznip viewer (but don’t quote me on that) said:

The short install time is a side effect.

The viewer now uses one big file for resources rather than hundreds of separate files. This is much faster to write to disk.

I would be more interested in how it performs running and how much overhead is added. If there is a performance decrease then you have to wonder why even use this approach.

Over at SLUniverse, Cerise says:

They could have gone into more detail for sure. The biggest visible change on this round is that the whole skins folder is installed as a zip archive instead of a zillion scraps of XML and textures. They’re using physfs to read it as a virtual filesystem. That can help the viewer load a bit more smoothly on the junky systems most people use to get to SL.

Nothing earth shattering in either comment, but both suggest that using the viewer, rather than merely installing the viewer, is where this project could show improvements for people. I think people may have more patience installing the viewer than actually getting inworld from the start screen.

Hopefully this project will be the start of something bigger, if it’s not, well it is a technical improvement, even if it’s not one that will make many people sit up and take note. All improvements should be welcomed, although some people will think in terms of priorities, the installation speed of the Second Life viewer is not high up the list. Let’s just remember that jiggling boobies .. Avatar Physics wasn’t exactly a high technical priority either, as Linden Lab explained very amusingly in their blog post when they introduced it:

Of course, we continue to smash bugs and make strides in viewer stability and performance, but we figured that you would be much more interested in avatars bouncing and jiggling.

We all have different priorities!

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