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.

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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.

The Dolphin Viewer download.

New Machinamists Tool Panel

A new release of the Dolphin Viewer is out: 3.3.5.23763 “Fellini.” This release gets a new graphics floater panel. The idea is it can be used by photographers and machinamists.

The Dolphin Viewer also gets the ability to click a worn item in inventory to edit it. This will be way handy for moving those belly, lip, and nose rings that rez inside the avatar.

A feature to allow clicking a land mark in inventory to open on the world map has been added.

The Mesh Deformer control could previously be found in Preferences -> Dolphin Viewer 3 -> UI. The control is gone, so I assume the deformer did not make it into this version. It seems there are some problems with the Deformer code causing crashes. Also, there is a Linden factor in that Oz says the Mesh Deformer is a TPV Policy 2.k item. This means developers can’t put out their standard public release of a viewer that includes the Mesh Deformer. It can only appear in test viewers.

Download & Install

The download is standard and quick. The install is typical. I did not need to clear the cache or settings before installing. It seems to work just fine without those steps.

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A new release of the Dolphin 3 Viewer is out: 3.3.3 (23731). This one seems to be mostly small bug fixes. The announcement on the release lists these:

• The avatar offset reset button in the status panel is now properly hidden in mouse look.
• A new setting in Preferences -> Dolphin Viewer 3 -> UI that controls what the Dolphin does when a scripted object sends you several menu popups at the same time.
• A new reset button in the extended build options floater, which resets the pivot offset options so that the coordinate origin is back in the center of the object again. My wife is happy about this one.
• A fix for how fading music in and out behaves when you teleport within the same parcel.
• A fix for the bug that prohibits the mouse cursor from switching back to the normal arrow shape when hovering over certain UI elements.

Download and Experience

All seems very typical and nothing out of the ordinary.

I find the viewer gives me about the same performance as the Linden Lab® Development Viewer, 10 to 15 FPS in my Core2 Quad w/ASUS GTX560Ti.

The Viewer’s Fast Timers show it is spending 62ms rendering a frame. My CPU cores are run about 25% and the 560 about 15 to 45% load. There are almost no page faults. So, I don’t see a hardware bottle neck. Viewers using the latest Linden Lab® code are just slow. Finding a fix is like questing for the BIG ‘O’.

Dolphin has another release out. Lance says this one come quickly after the 27000 version because 27000 was a rush release to get a working Merchant Outbox out. This release includes features and fixes from the planned 27000 release that were skipped to get out Merchant Outbox.

Mesh Upload

This version has the Kokua Mesh Uploader. I have yet to try Kokua’s and Dolphin’s uploaders. I don’t know if they have the ability to create the convex hull when asked to create the physics layer. In Linden Viewers the task is handled by a feature in the Havok physics engine, a proprietary package. On my next trip to ADITI I may try out Dolphin’s and see.

I tend to make my own physics layers to minimize Land Impact. So, whether it does or doesn’t have the ability to do convex hulls isn’t an issue for me.

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