Lance has release a new version of the Dolphin Viewer. A problem with it not saving your preferences has been fixed.

Download & Install

This one is a very standard download and install. Nothing new and no gotcha’s to deal with.

Experience

I stumbled across the Local Bitmap Browser that has apparently been part of the Dolphin Viewer since version 3.0.9. This feature allows you to work with textures on your hard disc without having to pay an upload fee. This is like the Temp Uploads in other viewers with some nice differences.

With the Dolphin feature there is no upload. This has two effects. One they appear instantly when assigned to a prim because your viewer can grab them from your hard drive, does not have to access the asset servers, and does not have to decompress them.

You can set the feature to update the texture whenever you update the texture file on your computer. This should make for nice round trip texture editing in a work flow.

There is the rather minor gotcha that others in-world will only see a grey texture, not the one you see. Another point is that this feature only lasts through a login secession, which is similar to other Temp Upload features.

Instructions for using the feature are here: Dolphin Viewer Local Bitmap Browser.

HTTP Inventory

Wednesday Direct Delivery and the New Inventory Services rolled out to the Le Tigre release channel. If you look in Dolphin Viewer’s Develop Menu, you will see items for both HTTP Textures and HTTP Inventory. The latter being a feature of the new Inventory Services. So, when in Le Tigre regions one should have faster inventory loading and services.

Performance

I am getting 25 to 35 FPS in my cottage. Jumping to Dance Island (DI) I get 15 FPS while things download. The Interest List does not seem to have good control. Lots of far away things are rezzing ahead of nearby items. But, most of the shopping area rezzed within a minute. DI is laggy and has lots of avatars, which is why I go there. After a few minutes in the club I was down to 7 FPS. The regions Time Dilation was 0.8 and Physics FPS 25 to 44 with a average in the low 30’s.

I ran into a problem with Parcel Audio. I couldn’t get it working. I checked my settings. I can’t see any reasons for it not to work. Gesture sounds were coming through. I tried the audio stream in 2 other regions. No joy.

Outside of DI my FPS rates jumped back up, in general running around 20 to 25 FPS.

Summing Up

Dolphin Viewer is a good viewer and serious issues get fixes in a reasonable time. Download Dolphin Viewer.