Dolphin Viewer 3 – 3.3.13.24707

by
Dolphin Viewer Logo
Logo

Dolphin Viewer 3 has had a number of quick releases recently. Most of these are for fixing bugs. Recently there was a problem with shadows. That has been fixed in this release.

The announcement for this release is: Bugfix Release – Dolphin Viewer 3 3.3.13.24707.

You can find the downloads here: Dolphin Viewer Download.

The download is about 28mb and takes a couple of minutes.

The install is typical, nothing special.

The install saves all your settings. With Lighting & Shadows and Ambient Occlusion turned on with HIGH settings I get 20 to 25 FPS. Turning on Sun/Moon Shadows pulls me down to 16 to 18 FPS.

The shadows look pretty good.

One of the things I’m finding I enjoy is the feature in Preferences -> Dolphin 3 -> User Interface -> Allow Separate Search Terms on each Inventory Tab. Try it. You’ll like it.

 

Working with #SL Male Shape

by

Some of the avatar files have a male shape included. Others appear to NOT have the separate male shape. You can also import a male shape to Blender by exporting one from SL. See Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial for information on how to export from Second Life® and details on which shapes are what.

Revealing the Male Shape

This tutorial is about working with Blender 2.63a shape keys to get the male shape. It will also give you some idea of how the Alternate or Redpoly Deformer can work.

If you make petites or giants, getting a copy of the male model that is well weighted is important. If you have tried exporting the male model as a mesh for use in SL, you likely ran into problems. This tutorial will help with exporting the male model.

Read more

MetaReality Week 27

by

This week the podcast is interesting. Lots of opinions are voiced and lots of SL news is touched on. There is not a lot of what I think of as hard news. But, you’ll gain an idea of where some things are headed and probably some insights.

Metareality Podcasts

I’ve provided time marks and my take on the discussion. I have not tried to relate the opinions, I would likely get that wrong and I see that as unfair to the MetaReality cast. So, listen to the audio to get the opinions and apply your own personalized interpolations.

MetaReality Podcast: Healthy Competition

00:00 to 02:15 – Introductions

02:30 – Review Mesh Deformer developments.

Read more

DNS Changer Virus

by

Everyone in the media is making a big deal of the DNS Changer Virus. If you have it, you will drop off the net in a few days when the virus kicks in.

If you have an anti-virus program and it is working, try doing a manual scan, then you are likely OK… like 99% certain to be OK.

You can visit a rather lame page to test whether you are infected. If it gives a positive result, you DO have a problem. Visit: http://www.dcwg.org/detect/. This is the page mainstream news media is sending people to.

The problem with it is: it does not definitively test whether you have the virus or not. Your ISP could be unintentionally hiding the problem. So, only the positive result is definitive. However, the site has a FIX for the problem.

The US FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) has a better ID and fix it page.

The FBI page about DNS Changer (link died 5/2017) is here: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911

This is so big in the news because people can’t tell if they have it or not. So, fear of the unknown kicks  in.

So, how do you definitively tell if you have a problem? Go to the FBI site. Since this is a DNS Changer how do you know if you are at the FBI’s site? OK, that is a problem. I’ve spelled out the URL’s to help. The red and green parts have to be in the URL as shown. If what I have does not match what you see in the address field when you get to the page… have a friend email you a copy of the page.

I put this up because some are asking me how to check if they have it. Since they are not finding anything and it keeps coming up in the news, they want a definitive answer with some meat. So, this little post.

Second Life News Update Week 27

by

You may have had problems logging in Thursday. Around 1 PM SLT things were getting sorted out. Thursday was to be the main roll out to the main channel. That had to stop because of network outages. I was trying to make it in about that time. No login errors. Viewer would just sit there doing nothing.

Beta Server Meeting

As to exactly what the network problems were no one is saying. That means either they don’t know, some information travels slowly within the Lab, or it was security related.

The roll of the Pre-rendered Library Avatars package was stopped. The Linden regions got the roll. The network outages forced a stop before the roll out could be completed. So, the grid is in a rather unique state this week and will be until next Tuesday. Then the Pre-Render package will go grid wide.

Read more

Content Creation Improvement UG

by

The new group had its first meeting. I’m bummed to have missed it, but RL fun was calling. They posted their meeting minutes so I can have an idea of what was happening. Some of the interesting things from the meeting follow.

Geenz Spad is chairing the meeting as the facilitator. He states the purpose of the meeting as: the idea is for people to discuss their ideas in a collaborative environment, and if everyone can agree on an idea, that idea will hopefully be made into a proposal at some point for Linden Lab, and prototypes demonstrating that functionality will also eventually be submitted as well.

So, this meeting is an opportunity for fashion and content designers to contribute ideas to enable better content creation and get problems in the design and creation work flow smoothed out.

Read more