This is a collection of may articles on the Dolphin Viewer.
This is one of the younger third party viewers (TPV). It is similar to Imprudence and Phoenix. The user interface is based on the series 1 viewers. The code is a blend of old series 1 and new series 2.
It has many of the neat features found in TPV’s. The Dolphin Viewer blog is good about explaining the new features in each new release.
It has been a while since I took a look at a number of viewers. Rather than post them separately, I’ve lumped them together, except for Nirans. I had not used it for months, so I expected lots of changes.
The main Linden Viewer is still at version 3.4.5 (270263), pre CHUI (Chat Hub User Interface). I seldom use the Beta Viewer now. It is more of a fall back viewer for when a Development Viewer version has problems. This morning the Beta is at version 3.5.0 (271345). The Development Viewer had been at version 3.5.1 (270826) for about 10 days. Today it updated to 3.5.1 (271386).
I am still fighting with the CHUI update to keep it the size I WANT IT. Other than sizing problems I like the new CHUI. The new build 271386 seems to have some of the sizing problems fixed.
A new release of the Dolphin 3 Viewer is out. It has been updated to have the latest changes from the Linden Lab® Viewer and Marine Kelly’s updates to RLV 2.08.03.04.
The Lab’s updates include the code for Large Group Editing, handling the object properties Creator when there are multiple creators, and Maturity functions.
I’ve written a lot about the Large Group Editing so I won’t repeat that. The Creator thing seems self explanatory. The ‘Maturity’ things need a bit of explanation.
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.
With the inclusion of Havok code in the viewer to handle Pathfinding’s Navigation Mesh (Navmesh) things had to change. The Havok license restricts its use to the Second Life™ grid. This means the Lab is removing support for the command line options: –loginpage, –loginuri, and –helperuri.
That effectively prevents the Linden Lab™ viewer from being used with any grid other than the Lab’s.
Now the Dolphin 3 viewer is dropping support for OpenSim. You can read the announcement on the Dolphin 3 blog: Dolphin Viewer and support for OpenSim.
Basically it is too much work for a one-man team to maintain two versions of the viewer. So, version 3.3.19 will be the last version usable on OpenSim.
I’m bummed as Dolphin was my viewer of choice for OSGrid. But, I can understand Lance’s challenge.
I am not a fan of Norton Anti-Virus. My opinion is that company is more about selling software than making an excellent product. Whatever the case, Lance has posted a new article on the Dolphin Viewer blog.
It seems Norton AV is detecting Dolphin Viewer 3′s slplugin.exe as a possible virus. Lance has explained what he has done to check that a virus has not snuck into any of his systems or the viewer files.
The latest Dolphin Viewer is not setting off my ESET/NOD32.
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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.
A new version of the Dolphin Viewer is out. I have yet to try it, so I can’t say much.
At first look it seems to be some fixes and little more.
The announcement is here: Dolphin Viewer 3 – 3.3.10.24429.
New Machinamists Tool Panel
A new release of the Dolphin Viewer is out: 3.3.5.23763 “Fellini.” This release gets a new graphics floater panel. The idea is it can be used by photographers and machinamists.
The Dolphin Viewer also gets the ability to click a worn item in inventory to edit it. This will be way handy for moving those belly, lip, and nose rings that rez inside the avatar.
A feature to allow clicking a land mark in inventory to open on the world map has been added.
The Mesh Deformer control could previously be found in Preferences -> Dolphin Viewer 3 -> UI. The control is gone, so I assume the deformer did not make it into this version. It seems there are some problems with the Deformer code causing crashes. Also, there is a Linden factor in that Oz says the Mesh Deformer is a TPV Policy 2.k item. This means developers can’t put out their standard public release of a viewer that includes the Mesh Deformer. It can only appear in test viewers.
The download is standard and quick. The install is typical. I did not need to clear the cache or settings before installing. It seems to work just fine without those steps.
