In Casmira you can see and hear up to the 50 nearest people at once.

Being able to see 50 avatars at once can be both a blessing and a curse. Avatars are typically complex objects, and having 50 of them moving around you at once can cause a noticeable reduction in performance. To help you tune the Casmira browser for best performance on your computer, there exists the concept of near and far avatars.

Near avatars are rendered in their normal, full complexity. Far avatars, however, all appear as the same model. Typically, the model used for the far avatar is much simpler than a standard avatar and is thus much faster to render. By adjusting how many near and far avatars you can see, you should be able to achieve an optimum balance between performance and avatar realism.

To adjust the balance between near and far avatars, go to the Chat settings dialog box (select Settings... from the Options menu.):

In this dialog you can choose how many avatars are "fully rendered." This value can be anywhere from 0 to 50. These are your near avatars. The remaining number (the total number of avatars minus the number of fully rendered avatars) will be your far avatars.

Whether a particular avatar appears to as you as a near or far avatar has no effect on your chat messages to and from that user.

Note that special avatars are always fully rendered, regardless of whether or not they are within the near avatar limit.

Logging chat to a file

If you would like a record of all of your conversations saved to disk automatically, simply check the Log chat to file box. Each new Casmira chat session will be appended to the previous sessions in the log. If you clear the Log File field, chat logging will not begin right away but will instead begin the next time you start your Casmira browser if you have selected to log chat, at which time the Log File field will be set to chat.txt by default. If you decide to use the Chat Log field to specify a filename to save the chat log to, be very careful in choosing a filename so as not to damage an existing file.

Disabling "chat balloons"

By default, when people speak their messages are printed both in the chat window and also above their heads in the 3D window. If you find these "chat balloons" distracting, you can disable them by unchecking the Display chat text above avatars box. When this option is disabled, users' names will still appear above their avatars.

Changing chat bubble styles

If you would like to use the older style of Casmira chat bubbles, clear the Use "Comic Style" chat balloons checkbox.

Marking new messages

When you scroll back in the chat history window to read old messages, if the Identify new messages after scrollback option is enabled, a message will be added to the chat window marking which messages have appeared since you first scrolled back.