Monthly Archives: March 2012

Dolphin Viewer 3 3.3.0.23700

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Here’s the next version of the Dolphin Viewer for your entertainment.

This release is quite important for Second Life Marketplace merchants, since it contains a working Merchant Outbox for Direct Delivery with an additional tweak from FireStorm.

New in this release:

  • Full support for direct Delivery, including Merchant Outbox, which uploads on linux and Mac, not just Windows.
  • The timeout for Merchant Outbox upload has been doubled to make it fail less often.
  • The “RLV Height offset” slider is now wide enough to be properly functional, and has a reset button.
  • A checkbox to disable rendering of attached light sources has been added in Preferences->Dolphin Viewer 3->Graphics.
    Now it is much easier to disable those evil mega-facelights 🙂
  • A fix for scripted sounds from FireStorm has been imported that makes scripted sounds play correctly the first time.
  • Codebase has been updated to official 3.3.1 source from SnowStorm.
  • RLV has been updated to 2.08.03.01.

The downloads are on the download page, as usual.

Dolphin Viewer 3, Direct Delivery, and the Merchant Outbox

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As most of you should know, Linden Labâ„¢ has rolled out what they named “Direct Delivery”, a new technique to deliver Second Life Marketplace purchases to customers that does not utilize Magic boxes anymore.

If you do not sell anything on the Second Life Marketplace, most of this post does not concern you, since receiving Direct Delivery items from the Marketplace works as it should. All you will need to know, is that you have a new ‘Received Items’ folder, where all your SL Marketplace purchases will go if the merchant uses Direct Delivery.

If you do sell things on the Marketplace, please read on:

During this roll-out, Linden Labâ„¢ has followed their true and trusted procedures and changed course in the last second, by announcing that Magic Boxes will cease to function in May 2012, in total disagreement with all their previous statements which were to the effect that Magic Boxes would continue to work for some time.

What you need to know is that uploading your products to the Second Life Marketplace does not work on linux or Mac OS X right now, and does not work reliably on Windows on any viewer, including the official Linden Labâ„¢ viewer.

The reports on the JIRA seem to indicate that, at least on Windows, it can help to switch your viewer language to English.

My own findings show that the “Merchant Outbox” has other very volatile issues as well, such as not even showing up all the time.

For now, if you have to migrate items from your old Magic Box, use the original 3.3.0 Viewer for Windows from Linden Lab, which is available here. If this is not an option for you because you do not run a Windows operating system, I suggest that you comment to that effect on the JIRA. The links are further up in this post.

Here is the planned migration schedule:

  • April 2 through 13, 2012: Inworld Q&A sessions on using and migrating to Direct Delivery
  • April 18, 2012: All listings priced L$10 and lower must use Direct Delivery
  • May 16, 2012: Magic Boxes no longer allowed for any Marketplace listing

 

Dolphin Viewer 3 – 3.2.10.23198

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Here’s the next Dolphin Viewer 3 for you.
Please read carefully if you have an ATI graphics card.

New, changed, or fixed in this version:

  • New: Texture compression. This should alleviate some crashes on systems with smaller graphics cards.
    The checkbox for this new setting is in Preferences->Graphics->Hardware settings. If your graphics card has 512 mb memory or less, this setting is turned on by default and enables texture compression.
    NOTE: For those of you who have an ATI graphics card, texture compression should always be switched off.
  • New: Online help redirect. The Help button/menu item in every floater now takes you to the Dolphin Viewer forum where you can search for information, or post your question about your problem.
  • New: Antispam filter from the NaCL Viewer.
  • New: Asset Blacklist from the NaCL Viewer. Basically the same as Derender, but the list of the UUIDs of derendered objects is saved on your computer, so they won’t reappear when you leave the sim and return. Detailed info on this feature with screen shots is available here.
  • New: Sound explorer from the NaCL Viewer. “Area search” for sounds. Lets you find (and occasionally block) sound sources. For detailed info, look here.
  • Fixed: Fly-after-teleport. Now, when you were flying before a TP you will be flying as well when you arrive.
  • Changed: Antialias is no longer off by default for all graphics cards, since it does not have that big bad performance impact anymore.
  • Some performance tweaks.
  • Changed: The “Items incoming too fast” popup that appears when you unpack boxed stuff now fades out on its own and has no “OK” button anymore.

The downloads are on the download page, like always.

Dolphin Viewer 3.2.9.23177 ‘Fujiyama’

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Here’s the newest release for you, 3.2.9.23173, the “Fujiyama edition“.

Mount Fuji at sunrise Lake Kawaguchi

Why Fujiyama? Well, pretty much everything in this release is about taking pictures, and my first decent camera in real life was a Fuji STX-2.

New in this release:

  • Reverted webkit to the version used before, to make images in webpages work again.
  • Fixed: posting pictures to your profile feed under linux works now.
  • Fixed: the Flickr uploader does not ask for Flickr authorization until you actually go to use it for the first time.
  • Fixed: the Flickr uploader goes back to the snapshot start page on success.
  • Fixed: the Flickr uploader now uses the standard progress indicator.
  • Added: “Direct snapshots” (the ones you do with the ctrl-shift-d hotkey) now have their own, separate quality settings.
    See Preferences -> Dolphin Viewer 3 -> Miscellaneous
  • Added: all windlight presets and day cycles from Firestorm.

The downloads are on the download page, as usual.

The picture is from the Wikipedia article on Mt. Fuji, and not taken by me.