Why hasn't anyone killed the Exodus Viewer website yet?

[Vlad_Malifozik]

Since Firestorm Viewer has taken the reins, added combat features, and have done many other things, this pretty much kills the one viewer that I and MANY others have relied on for its stability, reliability, and features that Firestorm Team is now striving to achieve. Maybe there's no dev that cares to work on it anymore? Perhaps Katharine wanted to see it die? (I mean come on, only 2 updates and that's it?) You guys owe us an explanation as to why, for 3 years many of us have waited with hope, that an update would come out, only to see the latest version that was released on the tail end of 2013. Sure, RL comes first, but when you have a product that had more promise than Firestorm, let alone people using it, it gets abandoned like its nothing. Why not just fork over the source code and viewer itself to Heather and let them take over the viewer. It's sad to see this viewer fade into the abyss. I guess maybe one day someone will rip it from Kat's possession and revive it to be something better, but until that happens, many of us will continue to wait to see it slap FSV back down in the charts.

[Ash Qin]

> Why hasn't anyone killed the Exodus Viewer website yet?

Project hasn't been closed formally.

On Sunday, 14 August 2016 13:24:36 UTC+1, Vlad_Malifozik wrote:

Since Firestorm Viewer has taken the reins, added combat features, and have done many other things, this pretty much kills the one viewer that I and MANY others have relied on for its stability, reliability, and features that Firestorm Team is now striving to achieve. Maybe there's no dev that cares to work on it anymore?

No idea, honestly. I pushed out the last release and there has been no further communication to me since.
 

You guys owe us an explanation as to why, for 3 years many of us have waited with hope, that an update would come out, only to see the latest version that was released on the tail end of 2013.

My own reasoning is that I let a few people who went on about how I was toxic to the development and future of EV get to me, so I didn't really feel like contributing since. 
 

Why not just fork over the source code and viewer itself to Heather

No idea who they are, but they could fork it themselves, the sourcecode is on Bitbucket at https://bitbucket.org/Exodus/internal - our sourcecode has been public since the start of the project.
 

and let them take over the viewer.

Taking over the viewer is a different matter. Katharine has current authority on it and I have no interest in doing a coup d'etat to take the domain away, build servers, automated systems systems, content distribution network etc. to give to someone else. Nor would I even give such resources to parties I don't trust. They would need to build and pay for their own infrastructure if they wish to mirror EV (all of which was and is paid for out of my own pocket).

 

many of us will continue to wait to see it slap FSV back down in the charts.

 
The problem with Firestorm is that it's like a Katamari. Whenever a developer creates a new viewer with new unique features, their developers look to absorb all the 'cool features' into their viewer and that viewer will never be able to compete because the amount of development effort to do something from scratch, new and proper is a lot more significant than just copying features across. This decensitivises developers from continuing their projects. The reason why Exodus Viewer somewhat persisted is that our features were not so trivial to copy into their viewer. HDR graphics required someone familiar with graphics codiing (of which Firestorm at the time and probably even now still doesn't have someone capable of doing), we fundamentally built features differently from Firestorm (not to be incompatible) because we felt we had a better approach to it. Those types of features we were working on are very intensive development wise.

When you look at the major contributions that were brought to SL, our team brought features like materials to Second life, the concept of request TP wasn't even considered to be brought into SL (and later developed by Jonathan Yap) until we built into our viewer for "medic teleporting" in the combat community. Kitty, Cinder, Sovereign and few others contribute to SL and make it better (that are mostly other viewer devs) to this day, I remain uncertain of what major changes or even major contributions Firestorm even brought in to the official viewer. Regardless these are irrelevant for user choice, Firestorm has the magic formula: Make a viewer that has everything, copy code as much as possible from other works to make it complete. There is no desire that I could see from them to contribute changes back to Second life as a whole and for them to remain the main viewer, I don't think they would want to and I don't think EV, with the best of development can compete against them.

EV's goal was originally to develop a viewer geared towards Second life e-sports, combat and visuals. With the introduction of TPV section 2.k, this has made the goals very difficult to accomplish because what we're allowed to do has been extremely limited and while old features can get through, through grandfathering new features cannot. I think EV's featureset somewhat became stunted when this was introduced and we never seemed to want to change our goals, nor could we seem to figure a way around it that worked well. Competing against FS was never a goal, but I think with the current goal, it would be hard to compete with FS, but I also think this goal now has become extremely difficult to accomplish, so change would likely be necessary for Exodus Viewer to be a fruitful viewer again.