Viewers

General Viewer Information

Dolphin Viewer 3.2.10 (23198) Released

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Today we got a new release of Dolphin Viewer 3. If you have an ATI/AMD video card, you may want to avoid this release or read carefully before attempting to use the new release.

Texture Compression

A new feature was added to help those with lower end graphics cards, those with less video RAM. Just as textures are compressed for downloading to save on bandwidth and storage space, so too are textures compressed as they are placed into video RAM.

If your card has less then 512mb of video ram, compression will be turned on by default.  If you have an ATI video card, keep it turned off.

Preferences->Graphics->Hardware settings.

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Oz Linden Interview Summary

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Wednesday Jessica Lyon, of Firestorm/Phoenix project Manager, conducted an interview with Oz Linden, the director of open source for Linden Lab. After a previous crash prone four region Phoenix Hour the week before, Jessica conducted the Interview on a private region with no audience.

The Interview Arrived

Treet.tv made the heroic effort to stream the interview. With something like 350 or so people connecting, there were problems. But, Treet.tv  was able to make a recording of the interview and it is now available on Treet.tv. See: Specials -> Episodes to find it. LINK

I’ve written a review of the audio tape. I paraphrase wording. Transcribing is tooooooooo tedious for me. May be I can find a masochist in the SL community that will do that… Whatever, be warned that I listen, decide what they said and then write what I heard. I try to be objective and accurate. But, I have my biases and prejudices. So, I include the time marks so you can listen to the parts important to you.

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Firestorm-Phoenix Debug Settings

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If one just uses the FS/PH viewer, they may never need the Debug Settings. However, knowing about these settings will allow you to customize your experience. A good example of their use is in Camera Position Tips.

The Wiki for Firestorm-Phoenix has a list of the Debug Settings for those viewers. You will find the lists here: Phoenix Debug Settings – Alphabetical Listing and Firestorm Debug Settings – Alphabetical Listing. They are not clear which list is for which viewer. Hopefully I have it right.

Also, the lists are incomplete. Settings like; FocusOffsetRearView and CameraOffsetRearView are in the viewer but not the lists on the wiki. You can find the rest of the list in the SL Wiki here: Second Life Debug Settings.

Oz Linden Interviewed by Jessica Lyon

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The interview with Oz Linden on Third Party Viewer (TPV) Policy came off today. It went better than the last Phoenix Hour. Still, the Treet.TV Stream was over loaded. There were something like 350 users connected. There were 270+ people in IRC. @Howdy says about 25% more were connected to the stream, so 350.

The Interview

The stream was almost impossible to understand. The stream kept buffering. That causes the video and audio stream to pause. I was getting 2 to 4 pauses per minute. Some pauses were long, 20 to 40 seconds. One could get the gist of what they were saying, Buy, any nuances were lost. Sometimes whole sentences were lost. Not a fun listen.

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#SL Clouds, Grey, and Blurry Avatars

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We seem to be getting another round of poorly rezzing avatars. The particle cloud avatars we know about. That is often a connection issue. I write my fix-it article Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth in September 2010. But, something new is up.

The Problem - Extended Bake Fail

Blurry Avatars

For several weeks I have noticed when changing clothes I get a blurry avatar. My skin and clothes start blurry after a change, then rez nice and crisp once, then go blurry again and never seem to finish rezzing.  They stay blurry.

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#SL Development Viewer Update

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I have been watching for a Development Viewer update since February 6. Yesterday SL Dev Viewer 3.3.1 (250315) became available for download. See: Snowstorm. If you are not closely following viewer development it is hard to know what new features and fixes are in the development viewer. If you read ‘repositoryese’, it is easier. I’m not that good at it.

ADITI Receive Testing Area

Viewer related fixes and features from all the various projects make it into the Development Viewer before moving to the Beta Viewer. The Development Viewer is for those that like to play with the bleeding edge tech from the Lab and do not mind some problems. The purpose of the viewer is to allow SL users that want to help to test the viewer. For most users of the Dev Viewer it is mostly about running and using the viewer and letting it send crash reports. Filing JIRA’s to help explain problems is greatly appreciated the various teams. Bitching about bugs in the viewer is poor form that displays a lack of understanding.

Download & Install

The download is about 28mb and it’s fast.

The install is simple straight forward run and done.

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