Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
It has been over a year since I last tweaked my video card for use with Second Life. A recent exchange in comments with Lance Corrimal, Dolphin Viewer, got me wondering about how I have my video card setup. It’s been over a year since I last made changes. When using the default High setting without other tweaks I get from 15 FPS to 80 FPS with my 8800 GTS depending on which viewer and which region I’m in.
Yay! Torley. There is a new wiki page up telling you how to see the DoF effect. You will need a pretty hot graphics card. My nVidia 8800 GTS will do it.
Rather than tell you more about DoF, visit the wiki page for videos by residents and the Torley tutorial.
Depth of Field Wiki page.
Kirsten has released version (44) of the KL Viewer. There isn’t a lot I can say about the viewer. KirstenLee explained the changes in this viewer on her blog. I’m just downloading it.
This is a bloody bleeding edge viewer. You have been warned.
The big changes, to me, are in the render pipeline and image decompression. The render pipeline seems to be diverging from SL’s. You still get an image on your screen, so for most people the changes are too abstract. However, I think this is an exciting direction. Having features and different user interfaces is something users can see and feel. Having a new render pipeline could radically change the viewer’s performance.
This install was like a first time install as I had previously removed Dolphin Viewer because of problems I had. The viewer worked well on initial start up. Since the viewer now uses its own settings file all my settings were the defaults. That included the cache location using the SL default location. I changed the cache location before logging on and restarted the viewer.
Once logged in I went through setting my preferences, external web browser, my chat color, stack IM’s vertically, hide tp progress, build tool decimals (4), close chat on return, and uncheck arrow keys always move avatar… boring stuff.
Dolphin Viewer has a new release out. This viewer is becoming popular. It has even come up a couple of times in the LL and TPV circles. The release notes published on the Dolphin Viewer blog are informative and easily read. See: Dolphin Viewer 1.5.40.3627.
Phoenix began using a separate cache by default and separating out more of their files. I think Dolphin Viewer is the first to use separate settings files. As Lance says, this will stop cross talk between the settings Dolphin is using and changes made in an SLV.
I write about the changes in Second Life that interest me and/or that I think will be of general interest. Most of the recent changes have been boring bug fixes and tedious changes to the SLV2 user interface. Things like making this or that button transparent when the panel loses focus. Mostly stuff everyone wants done, but doesn’t really want to read about or at least, I don’t. But there are a bunch of those tedious changes, which I’m skipping, and few interesting ones I’ve touched on here.
Throttling has been added to mesh to prevent using mesh animations. You may or may not know that sculpties are animated by changing the sculpty map a prim uses. It took no time at all for that idea to come those using meshes as a similar process is used. However, there is a drastic difference in the load mesh animation throws on the viewer and server. Throttling mesh changes will prevent the use of mesh swapping for animation and lagging the region.