Idiot tries to improve speed of Cool VL Viewer for his potato PC.

2025, Jan 11 -- Last updated 2025, Feb 10/Apr 18 (depending on how you want to see it)

Warning idiot notes

Note: It doesn't seem possible currently to build Cool VL Viewer from source, due to a missing (misversioned?) library "sse2neon". There is only one version available and it doesn't work with the current (1.32.2.35) source uploaded....or the one before that.... I think I may be missing some facts, as this isn't a discussed problem.

(Update, 2025, Apr 18: I dont remember how long it took exactly for this problem to be fixed but i think it was a few months. I do not know if this was exclusive to ARM64 users.)

libXinerama by any other name

To get Cool Vl Viewer to compile via the included linux-build.sh, I had to go into /lib/aarch64-linux-gnu and add a link named "libXinerama.so" that leads to the pre-existing library "libXinerama.so.1.0.0".

The script for me kept failing with an error of ld: cannot find -lXinerama: No such file or directory. This was especially annoying as this only happens at the end of a four-or-so hour compile process.....

After trying to install libXinerama manually, only to find it was already installed, and fiddling arround with compile options that previously worked I found out that I could run sudo ld -lXinerama --verbose and check the output.

It'll output a lot of stuff. Somewhere it would list all the locations where it tries to find libXinerama. It does this specifically under the name "libXinerama.so". I searched the paths given for anything libXinerama-adjacent. Thankfully I found what looked like the correct library pretty quickly, where I then performed the symlink kludge described above. With all ambiguity and confusions cleared up for ld, the viewer compiled without hassle. I use the resultant build regularly, and the only problem is that I need to select Advanced -> Media -> Restart audio engine, most of the time, before I could hear sounds.

I don't really know if that's the standard way to solve that kind of problem, but it worked for me. I really don't think this kind of thing comes up normally.

Me trying to speed up the viewer

You'll almost definitely not need to do this. The RPi4 does not even meet the "minimum requirements" for the viewer, but it runs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So far, these are the changes i've made from Cool VL Viewer's recomended settings...

Certain change:

in Edit -> Preferences -> Graphics -> Render settings:

• Reducing "Draw distance" to 80m
• Setting "Water surface reflections" to "Nothing (opaque water)" (Turns out "Sky (minimal reflections)" gives similar performance.)

in Edit -> Preferences -> Graphics -> GPU/GL settings:

• Increasing "GL texture memory" as far as it will go

Dubious:

in Edit -> Preferences -> Graphics -> Render settings:

• Disabling "Low altitude clouds" (No idea how these are the "classic clouds") (This may have an affect but I think i'll leave them on)
• Reducing "Maximum local lights" to 32 (I remembered Blender 2.79 slowing down with too many lights) and "Maximum particle count" to 256
• Reducing "Level of detail" for Objects and Flexiprims to just barely "Mid" "Low"
• Enabling the "Avatar cloth shader"
• lowering "High altitude clouds" to the minimum.

in Edit -> Preferences -> Graphics -> GPU/GL settings:

• Enabling the core GL profile
• Disabling Anisotropic filtering (apparently a very low-workload function, but remember my PC's a potato)
• Setting "Antialiasing" to "Disabled" (refer above) (also may not have an affect. I have it on minimum.)
• Quadrupling RAM with ZRAM(.) then increasing "Available VRAM" to 4GiB