Viewers

General Viewer Information

nVidia Update and Goodies

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I’ve been using NVIDIA driver version 285.62 for quite awhile. I needed to update a clients machine and noticed a new update was out for my machine, 295.73. So, I got it and updated my computer.

The install has dramatically changed. Along with the drivers and Control Panel comes 3 add-ons for Photoshop; DXT Compression, Normal Maps, and Scripts.

Photoshop Plug-in

DXT Compression

This is a Photoshop plug-in that allows Photoshop to open and save Direct Draw Surface (.dds) files. Simply said these are files used with DirectX to provide efficient textures, They are not much use for Second Life users, which uses OpenGL.

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Imprudence Viewer to Live

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The development team building Imprudence started work on a new viewer Kokua. They were attempting to maintain Imprudence and build the new viewer. With limited resources working on both slowed development of both. It also seemed to me to be burning out the developers. Whatever the case, during the last of 2011 and January the … Read more

Cool VL Viewer 1.26.2 (17) Released

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There are not many changes in the last two versions. But, the experimental version 1.26.3 has an important change for me, which is the addition of Qarl’s Mesh Defomer 0.2. Henri has done something a bit different in his implementation. In his words from the forum:

Second version of Qarl’s mesh deformer implemented (with a new “Force Mesh Deformer” advanced settings in Advanced -> rendering, to force the same behavior as in the first version, i.e. to apply deformers even to meshes which were not designed for them): the new default/normal behavior of the code is to apply deformers only to meshes which were flagged as deformer-compatible at upload time (with a new “Deform to avatar shape” option added to the “Upload Options” tab of the “Upload Model” preview floater).

This should give us the ability to see how the 0.1 and 0.2 versions of the Deformer differ.

Download

I found the download horribly slow. It basically ran at 150kbps taking 30 minutes to download. My connection will handle 31mbps according to SpeedTest.net. Other downloads were running well, so who knows…

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Pink Prims Bug

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A number of people updating to SL Viewer 3.2.8 are getting pink prims. See the image below.

Image by Blaise Glendevon

There are two fixes. Neither are that great, but they will get you by until the Lab brings out a fix. The fix is thanks to the Firestorm/Phoenix Team, as far as I can tell. See: FIRE-4945 – Pink/Fushia textures when basic shaders enabled on ATI 3000-4000-5000 series cards.

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Niran’s Viewer Update 1.23.5

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The speed of updates to various viewers is overwhelming. If I reviewed every release, I would never have time to do much else. Fortunately several of the viewers do a good job of blogging what’s changed in their viewer. The problem with those updates is they tend to only tell one the good stuff, which makes sense if you think about it. If they find a problem, they tell the development team so it can be fixed. So, the problems they know about have been fixed.

Give a viewer to a regular user and we’ll do something odd with it that the developers haven’t tried. That is why users always find bugs. As good as the developers and testers are, they can’t think of or do everything that can be done by a user.

So, reviewers always have things they can find. The problem is finding it all.

Version 1.23.5 of Nirans is out and has a load of fixes and additions. As usual the interface has changes. Some you’ll like and some not so much. But we learn from experimenting.

Downloads

Niran’s now has both 32 and 64 bit versions of the viewer for Windows. The 1.23.5 was released in the 64 bit version about 10 AM today. Nirans Viewer download page.

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