Tag: Dolphin Viewer

With Server-side Baking / Appearance starting to be enabled on the grid, the only two maintained viewers not to be SSB/A enabled are Dolphin and Imprudence.

I recently covered the state-of-play with Imprudence, and the fact that the team plan to ramp-up the viewer to support all of the new SL  capabilities and viewer changes, including CHUI, materials and SSB/A, but it is liable to be some time before they actually get there.

Now Lance Corrimal, the man behind Dolphin, has provided an update on the status of that viewer. The main part of his blog post reads:

I’m sure there are one or two people wondering what is going on with the Dolphin Viewer lately.

To put it simply, my life has been quite hectic the last few months, and it still is. I have a new job that demands a lot of my time and attention. I’ve moved to a different province because of the job, and when I am actually home (the new job involves a lot of travelling), I’m just too damned tired to spend time on working on the viewer.

That being said, there will be a new version, that will have all the new shinies from the Lab. The CHUI interface, SSA, Materials, you name it.

Just … please do not ask me when. “When it is finished” is all I can say right now.

So – SSB/A and more will all be coming to Dolphin – soon. Just give Lance a little room to breathe as the dust of a busy real life settles around him.

He also notes that Dolphin users seeing the advisory warning users of a mandatory viewer update which is displayed on the splash should be aware that clicking on the link will download the official SL viewer, not an updated version of Dolphin.

Lance Corrimal released Dolphin Viewer 3.2.24.24816 on November 1st.

The release comprises a small number of updates, of which perhaps the most significant is the inclusion of the revised Mini-map first seen in Catznip R7.

For the most part, I have to say that I’ve never really seen the point of the Mini-map. Certainly, it has its various uses at times – role-play, combat, etc., but for me, the big let-down with it has been the map itself, impaired by an exceptionally weak background texture and god-awful zooming.

Catznip R7 revised all this, as I recently reviewed, completely overhauling the Mini-map and making it an exceptionally useful tool – and one I have been hoping would be adopted elsewhere (such as the code being contributed to LL).

Dolphin now includes the revised Mini-map in this release, and to mark its arrival, Lance has called the release his “Sailor’s Mini-map Mark 2”. It’s well-named, as the new Mini-map is a complete godsend for those into sailing and flying – and will probably be really handy for those who engage in cross-region road races.

The code includes all of Kitty’s refinements and updates, and really does make flying and sailing a joy without needing to necessarily clutter-up the screen with a lot of HUDs and having to waste space with the World Map to confirm your overall location.

Not only does it how you your overall direction, it displays upcoming region boundaries, allowing you to make adjustments to course and speed which may help smooth the crossing (very handy in avoiding the risk of trying to make the diagonal corner-crossing between regions, which so often finishes rather badly (at least for me).

The revised Mini-map also helps avoid those pesky parcels where object entry has been turned off, showing them in red in the display, allowing sailors and aviators to navigate around them without suddenly finding themselves bouncing up against something or having their craft vanish from under them.

Other Updates in the Release:

• Reset graphics preferences to default button in status panel, next to draw distance slider, labeled “GReset”.
• Z offset reset button relabeled to “Z” to get room for GReset button.
• “Refresh texture” also refreshes sculpt maps (from Firestorm).
• “Restore inworld” now also sets the proper land group if you have “Rez with land group” switched on and are a member of that group.

The Last Dolphin Release Supporting OpenSim

Release 3.2.24.24816 marks the end of line for OpenSim support within the Dolphin Viewer; it will be removed from future releases. That Lance would no longer be supporting OpenSim was made in a Dolphin blog announcement back in August 2012. The reason for this is the new Havok sub-licence arrangement Linden Lab have entered into, and Lance feeling he is unable to support two flavours of Dolphin for SL and OpenSim access on his own – which is a fair and reasonable decision on his part.

Should anyone wish to continue development of Dolphin to specifically support OpenSim access, Lance has created a clone of the original Dolphin repository for anyone wishing to fork the viewer, and he is also leaving the 3.3.19 release installers available for download from the Dolphin website.

Performance

This release of Dolphin sees a slight upturn in FPS rates over recent viewer reviews for me, if again using my rough-and-ride technique. With my usual test defaults (see the Review Systems panel on the right of this blog’s home page), I subjected Dolphin on my Linden Home region with three other residents (including my Alt in the same parcel) with the following results:

• Deferred off:
  • Ground: 38-39 fps
  • 370 metres: 43-44 fps
  • 2875 metres: 55-56 fps
• Deferred on + lighting set to Sun/Moon + Projectors; ambient occlusion on, full reflections:
  • Ground: 11 fps
  • 370 metres:15 fps
  • 2875 metres: 17 fps

I did find that running in Deferred with both lighting & shadows and ambient occlusion active within my Linden Home parcel did result is a significant drop in fps (to 5-6). A quick test with Catznip produced the same result.

Overall, a small, tidy, and welcome update.

Lance Corrimal is keeping up a rapid series of releases to his Dolphin Viewer, averaging around one release a week of late. Most have contained nips and tucks or have been driven by SL requirements such as Direct Delivery. However, at the beginning of March he rolled out the “Fujiyama edition” (version 3.2.9.23177), aimed specifically at SL photographers.

With his latest release, 3.3.5.23763, issued on Saturday April 28th and code-named “Fellini”, Lance adds functionality to his Viewer that is specifically aimed at machinimatographers – the code-name clearly being a reference to the late Italian film director Federico Fellini

The functionality in question comes in the form of an adaptation of  Marx Catteneo’s machinima floater. In this the release is somewhat serendipitous for me, as I also linked to one of Marx Catteno’s marvellous videos on the 28th to highlight the architecture of this year’s Fantasy Faire.

In integrating the floater into Dolphin, Lance has modified it slightly so that information is tabbed for easier reference, especially when used on smaller screens, and while it may be aimed at the machinimatographer, it contains a lot of options that SL photographers are liable to find very useful.

The floater can be accessed in one of two ways:

• via WORLD->MACHINIMA TOOLS in the menus
• via a dedicated toolbar button called MACHINIMA TOOLS, which has a nice little movie camera icon (note that the button is not active by default, but must be dragged out of the Button Toolbox).

The toolbox essentially provides fast, single-point-of-access to a range of Preferences options as well as to a number of other panels and functions, allowing the machinimatographer / photographer to quickly and easily carry out a range of tasks such as enabling Windlight presets for the sky and / or water, adjusting their camera / flycam, enabling / disabling lighting and shadows, adding / adjusting depth-of-field, adjusting shadow and occlusion settings and much more besides.

Each of the tabs in the label is clearly laid out, and some benefit from having certain functions disabled (grayed out) until such time as their controlling option is enabled. In the Graphics tab, for example, the drop-down for selecting the required lighting types (None, Sun/Moon, Sun/Moon+Projectors), is disabled until the LIGHTING AND SHADOWS option is checked.

Rather than waste words describing each of the tab, here is a set of screen captures for the remaining tabs in the floater:

The derendering options are liable to prove useful for eliminating bystander avatars who are having a detrimental impact on camera movements, etc., when trying to shoot a video, while the “Miscellaneous” tab as a whole leaves room for further options to be added, should they be required / possibly requested.

Other Updates

As well as the machinima options, the blog post for the release notes the following updates are also included:

• Getting a worn attachment into edit by right-clicking it in your inventory and selecting “Edit”-
• Opening a Landmark on the map from your inventory, similar to what you can do from within the Places window.

Performance

I’ve not been able to thoroughly test the release in my usual manner due to time constraints elsewhere. However, in the tests I did perform, using my home sim as usual (3 others present in the sim) and both PC and Viewer set to my usual defaults (see the panel on the right of this blog’s home page), I found this release of Dolphin performed as well as other recent Viewer releases from the majority of 3.2-based TPVs. Running with deferred rendering off (no shadows / lighting enabled), the Viewer comfortably ran with an FPS in the mid-30s at 390m, with this increasing to the low 50s at altitude on my build platform (2850m). At ground level, the rate dropped very slightly to average at around 30-21 FPS.

Enabling deferred rendering and setting the lighting option to Sun/Moon+Projectors saw my frame rates fall to around 19-21 FPS at 390m, and to the mid-teens when at ground level. This was again pretty much in keeping with recent releases from the likes of SL and Firestorm.

Overall, an interesting new addition to Dolphin which should prove to be of interest to those interested in both video and photography.

Related Links

• Dolphin website