With the inclusion of Havok code in the viewer to handle Pathfinding’s Navigation Mesh (Navmesh) things had to change. The Havok license restricts its use to the Second Life™ grid. This means the Lab is removing support for the command line options: –loginpage, –loginuri, and –helperuri.
That effectively prevents the Linden Lab™ viewer from being used with any grid other than the Lab’s.
Now the Dolphin 3 viewer is dropping support for OpenSim. You can read the announcement on the Dolphin 3 blog: Dolphin Viewer and support for OpenSim.
Basically it is too much work for a one-man team to maintain two versions of the viewer. So, version 3.3.19 will be the last version usable on OpenSim.
I’m bummed as Dolphin was my viewer of choice for OSGrid. But, I can understand Lance’s challenge.
Dropping OpenSim support or not is entirely up to the TPV developers: do not believe those saying they can’t do otherwise since, for now, the *only* feature that can’t be used by TPVs supporting OpenSim is the navmesh *rendering* (and only that !), which is itself in no way a requirement for navmesh support (it’s just a handy tool to visualize the navmesh in a sim, but the use of beacons and such can as well give you a precise idea of how the navmesh is organized).
The Cool VL Viewer will keep supporting OpenSim and will stay 100% OpenSource and, as such, will not provide Havok navmesh rendering (which doesn’t mean either mavmesh rendering will never be available in it: after all, HACD is an OpenSource alternative to Havok’s mesh decomposition and an OpenSource equivalent to Havok’s navmesh rendering would perfectly arise in the future). This is also the first v1-UI viewer to provide the navmlesh/pathfinding tools and support (even before many v3 based TPVs !).
What absolutely needs to happen is for someone to come up with a fully open source replacement for the particular Havok library that handles the pathfinder navmesh rendering, and of any other functionality in there that is covered by that exclusivity clause, and ideally make it work even better than the code provided by Havok. This would be a tremendous “Up yours!” to any corporate chair-warmers out there that dream up these sorts of in your face rules that aren’t meant to benefit the end users, don’t really help the virtual world either, but only benefit the corporate big-wigs who don’t have your interests at heart.
Havok shows the advantage that having a for-pay-product can provide. With dedicated teams developing the product it has far out paced the open source physics engines.
However, there are some heavy weight companies working on Bullet. So, you might get your wish.