Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Dolphin Viewer Information
A new release of the Dolphin 3 Viewer is out. It has been updated to have the latest changes from the Linden Lab® Viewer and Marine Kelly’s updates to RLV 2.08.03.04.
The Lab’s updates include the code for Large Group Editing, handling the object properties Creator when there are multiple creators, and Maturity functions.
I’ve written a lot about the Large Group Editing so I won’t repeat that. The Creator thing seems self explanatory. The ‘Maturity’ things need a bit of explanation.
Lance has a new release of the Dolphin 3 Viewer out. There is nothing Earth shattering in this release. More fixes and some new minor additions.
There are a couple of known bugs. One has to do with a Texture Refresh crashing the viewer. There is a fix for that and he plans to have it in the next release.
Another has to do with child prims that have Hover Text and scripted movement. That is not working as intended. There is a fix for that too, which he will be adding, hopefully by the next release.
Both of these are minor and you would probably never notice the problems.
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.
I am not a fan of Norton Anti-Virus. My opinion is that company is more about selling software than making an excellent product. Whatever the case, Lance has posted a new article on the Dolphin Viewer blog.
It seems Norton AV is detecting Dolphin Viewer 3’s slplugin.exe as a possible virus. Lance has explained what he has done to check that a virus has not snuck into any of his systems or the viewer files.
The latest Dolphin Viewer is not setting off my ESET/NOD32.
Dolphin Viewer 3 has had a number of quick releases recently. Most of these are for fixing bugs. Recently there was a problem with shadows. That has been fixed in this release.
The announcement for this release is: Bugfix Release – Dolphin Viewer 3 3.3.13.24707.
You can find the downloads here: Dolphin Viewer Download.
The download is about 28mb and takes a couple of minutes.
The install is typical, nothing special.
The install saves all your settings. With Lighting & Shadows and Ambient Occlusion turned on with HIGH settings I get 20 to 25 FPS. Turning on Sun/Moon Shadows pulls me down to 16 to 18 FPS.
The shadows look pretty good.
One of the things I’m finding I enjoy is the feature in Preferences -> Dolphin 3 -> User Interface -> Allow Separate Search Terms on each Inventory Tab. Try it. You’ll like it.
A new version of the Dolphin Viewer is out. I have yet to try it, so I can’t say much.
At first look it seems to be some fixes and little more.
The announcement is here: Dolphin Viewer 3 – 3.3.10.24429.