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.
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.
Builder’s Brewery sent out an announcement about the Large Group Edit Change (SVC-4968 – readable by all) that rolled out this last Tuesday (week 46). The new code should be on all regions now. The Beta viewer has the code to take advantage of the change.
Whoever wrote the announcement wasn’t quite up on what the changes do and how they affect you but, for practical purposes they are close enough. If you have followed the coverage here, I think you’ve heard better details.
A quick recap of Large Groups, somewhere over 10,000 to 15,000 members, is they could not be loaded for editing. If you fiddled enough you might get a 20k or so group to load. The actual size of a list that could be loaded depended on how well SL was performing and your connection. This made it generally impossible to edit large lists. So, members that hadn’t logged into SL for a year or more could not be pruned out of the group. Roles in the group could not be changed. That has been fixed.
Runitai Linden has released a pre-QA version of a modified viewer. The mesh upload function has been changed to solve some problems. The primary problem being SH-3055 – Cannot upload any model (*.dae) file; “xxx failed to upload, see the log file for details.”
You may have noticed the item in the Develop menu labeled Render Metadata. At this week’s Content and Mesh Creation user group meeting Zed Tremont asked about getting more information for items in this menu. Nyx Linden provided some insight into these items.
Second Life Viewer’s Render Metadata Menu
If you have not noticed the item look in the top menu try: Develop (Ctrl-Alt-Q – Advanced has to enabled in some viewers to see it Ctrl-Alt-D)-> Render Metadata.
These tools are more for developers than ‘for creators.’ But, creators can use some of them. Unfortunately most of the items are not explained in the Second Life™ Wiki. Nyx says, “…at the moment our documentation around this *is* the source code, most of these displays are mostly used by our graphics engineers, they’re not intended to be general-use displays (hence the lack of documentation).”
This is my first experience with the new Second Life(TM) Prohect Viewer: New #SL Project Viewer. Its just a quick look.
Download & Install
The CHUI Project Viewer is the standard download. The file is about 29mb.
The install places the viewer in its own program folder. The viewer has its own settings. So, you will have to run through the settings to get it the way you want.
However, my menu buttons came up just as my main SL Viewer. Which is kinda cool.
CHUI – Chat User Interface 10/2012 – Expanded Chat
Experience
The first thing I noticed is this viewer has the problem that first clicks on doors do not appear to open the door. It opens you just don’t see it open. You can see it the second time the door opens or closes.
