Viewers

General Viewer Information

#SL Viewer Update Week 48

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SL Viewer Updates

It seems the memory leak problem has finally been solved for the SL Viewer. We’ve had a number of false hopes that it was fixed. But now the main production viewer has updated. That is a sure indication the problem is fixed. That does not mean every problem is fixed. But, the problem causing a high crash rate in the Beta & Dev viewers is fixed. So, fixes can now start to roll again. For the last few weeks updates had stopped while the problem was tracked down. So, we sort of have open floodgates and a surge of updates rolling out. Viewer versions are changing quickly.

The Development viewer is at version: 3.4.4-267322

The Beta viewer is at version: 3.4.3-267135 – Release Notes

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Exodus Viewer Beta 9 Release Review

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If you are following my coverage of viewers, you know that most Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers are NOT releasing production viewers, but instead release Beta or test viewers to save on paper work. So, I am not surprised that Exodus has another Beta version out.

Exodus Viewer gets the Navmesh

The Exodus blog lists the New, Fixed, and Changed features in this release. See: Beta 9 (12.11.24.1).

The release comes in both a 32-bit and a sort of 64-bit (LAA) version. The download file size is about 37mb and the download is quick. The install is simple and typical. I installed it over the top of my previous 8.1 install and it seems to work OK.

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Kokua and Imprudence

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I don’t keep up with Kokua and Imprudence as much as I might and certainly not as much as I used to. Imprudence Viewer was for some time my favorite viewer for both SL and OpenSim. Soon it slipped to being my choice just for OpenSim. Then it fell so far behind I stopped using it. I still have it installed… I’m not sure why.

There is a small effort to update Imprudence. But, I think it is so far behind it is no longer usable.

[youtube jPpbTB9tKDI]

Kokua was to be the primary OpenSim viewer. I had hoped to see Aurora and Kokua offer some competition to Second Life™ by providing combined viewer and server features creators could use. I got the impression there was a goal to develop viewer and server dependent features more quickly and lower the wall between the viewer and server.

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Dolphin Viewer 3.4.3 – 26620

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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.

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Dolphin Viewer 3.4.1.26336 Released Review

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Dolphin Viewer Logo
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.

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Firestorm Beta Release

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On the 14th the Firestorm-Phoenix Team posted on their blog about the release of a beta version viewer.  The Large Group Editing changes for the server side have been rolled out on the grid. This roll out creates a bit of a problem, but not really.

UDP Cutoff

Once upon a time using the UDP protocol for Second Life was a good idea. Now that the devices that make up the Internet’s infrastructure are smarter and more HTTP aware the use of UDP for downloading large group member lists is not such a good idea. Also, the way users have decided to use groups has changed from what the Lab initially designed for. So, users are sending much larger data sets across the old UDP protocol used for the Group Member List download.

Firestorm Release

UDP packets can be lost and there is very little that can be done to recover them. For SL-users that means the user list of large groups often (usually) fails to load.

The new code now limits the list size to 10k or less for all UDP requests. For those using the SL Viewers and several Third Party Viewers (TPV) the limit makes almost no difference as they already had problems trying to edit lists over 10k.

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