Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
Niran released this version March 17, 2012. I saw Inara did a review. Our takes are different. I’ll try to skip some of the stuff she covers or at least provide more information. Also, I’m running the nVidia 296.10 version on my GTX560, which may change how some things work for me. I seem to have fewer problems now that I’ve updated.
The viewer is innovative. If you are looking for something different, this viewer is different.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.