Preference searchbar and frame yield

[Tampa]

The two things that I really find help set usability apart from one viewer to another.
A searchbar for settings in the Preference window to be able to tell a user "just search for X in the Preferences and go into X tab" makes support a lot easier and finding settings to re-apply after a config reset on version changes.
Frame yield refers to the amount of time per frame is given up when the window focus is lost. Being able to configure or disable this is a useful feature for using a viewer as static camera or simply to enjoy the view while doing something else on another screen.
Would be really nice to have these things added at some point, probably my most used feature thus far. Hope you don't mind me putting two things in at once, if you want a thread per suggestion for tracking or something then I can do that too

 

[Geir Nøklebye]

The functionality for searching menus and preferences has been added to the SecondLife viewer neko repository in the commit below as a contribution from Firestorm. I don't think they have used it yet in a release viewer. After they do it should be relatively straightforward to add it to Dayturn.

lindenlab / viewer-neko / commit / 10d102d896a7 — Bitbucket

bitbucket.org

When it comes to frame yielding that is a somewhat bigger task as there is quite a bit of work to be done to better control frame rates in the viewer.
For instance on macOS application frames are composited to the desktop only at 60 Hz, so there is not much point in rendering any faster than that as it results in tearing when you move the camera. To minimize the effect one should try to render at 45, 30 or 15 fps if the combination of hardware and scene complexity is unable to produce the optimal 60 fps.

It is better to have a feature request posted alone.

 

[Tampa]

The frame yield thing has more to do with window focus loss. If you have the viewer running and then switch to a different window the viewer will lower its framerate considerably as it "yields" time to the other window. Firestorm has a slider for this to nullify the effect entirely, that way multiple viewers can run retaining the same framerate across all of them. I mainly use this to record two camera angles so I can switch between them on the fly. The viewer is unable to otherwise utilize the system hardware as it is because of how it was originally designed, so with multiple viewers running all at the same framerate of 50 or more I tend to not even see 70% system usage. In Firestorm it is under Preferences->Advanced. It is not really a framerate control, but you know more about that than me, I am just requesting features I like.

I suppose once they integrated, if they integrate it at all, having a search function would be nice, but certainly not top priority

 

[Tampa]

I saw the searchbar for preferences is in now, but it does not seem to work just yet. I spent some time today tracking down some log errors and found under windows it seems that some redist package blocks parts of the modal(?) code. Have nothing clear yet, but may really need to compile this myself locally to see if that helps. I can still offer you access to a dedicated windows box if needed.

 

[Geir Nøklebye]

It works in the macOS and non RLV versions.
I have not made any announcement of it, but thought it was better to enable it so someone can can make use of it.

Thanks for the offering, but having a remote Windows box does not improve much on the development situation as then I cannot use all the macOS tools and repository sharing I currently do. It might speed up the build some, but a recent update to VMware slashed the build time with about an hour.

 

[Geir Nøklebye]

...but may really need to compile this myself locally to see if that helps.

It won't help at all, cause the RLV version did not have the changes applied. It is building right now. It will definitely be there in 1.6.2 also for RLV. I might end up doing a RLV 1.6.2. only release with some other issues specific to RLV fixed too.

 

[Geir Nøklebye]

Search in Preferences has been enabled also in version 1.6.2 RLV.

There are currently no plans to enable this for searching menu items.