Is Niran Really Going To Call It A Day On His Viewer?

I’ve never used Niran’s viewer, I can remember looking at it before and realising my PC didn’t really meet the recommended specs. I’ve read good things about it and I hear it’s good for photography and Machinima, hence why it’s a viewer that performs on a higher spec kit, some of the screenshots I’ve seen are beautiful, although it should be noted that beautiful screenshots can be achieved on other viewers too.

There’s nothing wrong with a viewer aimed at higher specs, the same as there’s nothing wrong with a viewer aimed at lower specs, indeed this is part ofthe beauty of third party viewer development. The current recommended specs for Niran’s viewer are:

CPU: Quad Core (3.000 mhz upwards)

GPU: NVidia Geforce GTX 460 and higher

RAM: 6GB

OS: Windows 7 64bit Edition

However it seems that Niran is thinking of jacking it all in because of an issue related to a Jira post by the looks of it. Niran’s post: How to effectively destroy Niran and the linked Jira Open-162 tell a tale of woe of someone who went to a lot of time and effort to analyse, report and propose fixes for an issue, only to be shrugged off in a very blunt manner.

Is Niran spitting his dummy? Well yes, yes he is but many people spit their dummies over matters, here however there does seem to be good cause for spitting one’s dummy. Here’s the description of the problem that Niran wanted to address:

Since years we have been creating our clothes , attachments , avatars , accessiors and all that stuff on wrong , slightly asymetrical bone offsets. Recently a friend told me that something is wrong with aligning his upper arm armor plates on the same position on both arms , i investigated the avatar_lad.xml and found out that the left lower and upper arm aswell as the left upper and lower leg have wrong bone position offsets causing all attachments that are attached to X:0 Y:0 Z:0 on your Avatar appear obviously disaligned. That means that all the objects that have been created before , were created with wrong offsets and have to be realigned slightly in order to fit again and make future building of symetrical attachments for avatars easier and correct.

Now first things first, if this has always been broken, won’t fixing it, break everything that went before? Yes say some, no say others, minor inconvenience say others. However Niran developed a fix for the issue, had it in the code and then had his Jira closed as Won’t finish.

Now you may think, so what, this happens all the time but the real point is that Niran seems to have given the impression by someone, that creating the Jira, submitting the fix, writing patches, describing the issue and spending precious time on this was worthwhile, when the end result seems to be, that he wasted his time. Really, the way that Jira was dismissed suggests that developing a fix for this issue was never going to be welcomed, I’m not sure who encouraged Niran to go ahead, but it seems he should have been told not to bother at a very early stage.

Niran says at the end of his post:

“I think its time to bail out here and give up on everything , its all just a waste of time if Lindens and TPV Devs just keep Second Life as broken as it is. I hope you´re happy with what you´ve done , i hope you have fun seeing me having pain in the ass like that

 for my users , i will do one last release sometime soon (not sure yet) and i guess thats it then , i will just return to what i´ve done prior to creating a Viewer that doesnt try holding the users hand and wants to improve Second Life instead of keeping its broken state.”

Now at the end of the day it will be upto Niran whether he continues, users of his viewer clearly want him to. The whole issue though, really looks like it should have been handled better.

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