Update April 1st: Dolphin Viewer has been updated to 3.3.1.23706. Percipal updates comprise the Kokua mesh uploader (Nicky Perian), Firestorm’s ability to attach a short message to avatar-to-avatar payments, and some fixes to the gstreamer audio playback and client-side AO.

This week sees the Restrained Life Viewer and Dolphin Viewer gain Merchant Outbox functionality for Direct Delivery.

Restrained Love 2.8.3.1

The V3.2-based standalone version of Marine Kelley’s Restrained Love Viewer is built on the standard V3.2 code, with a number of UI improvements. Marine develops the Windows version, with Kitten Ninetails maintaining the Mac and Linux versions.

As well as the arrival of the Merchant Outbox, this version sees a number of updates and fixes to the Restrained Love capabilities within the Viewer, all of which can be found listed on Marine’s blog. In testing the Merchant Outbox on the Windows version, I found it worked without any problems, while the revision to the position of the draw distance slider helps make this more usable.

Dolphin 3.3.0.27000

This release brings with it support for the Merchant Outbox for Windows, Mac and Linux. In addition, as an added and welcome tweak, Lance has doubled the length timeout on the Outbox so disconnects should be less frequent than may be experienced in other Viewers.

The remaining updates comprise:

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.

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.

Performance

Both of these Viewers are using the latest 3.3.1 code release from LL, which has yielded some stunning results on my “regular” system. Together with the latest SL Viewer (3.3.0 (251182)), I experienced the following frame rates on my home sim with 4 others present on the same region:

Average fps, no-deferred / no shadows, @ 390m: 45fps

Average fps, no-deferred / no shadows, @ ground level: 36fps

Average fps, deferred / shadows active, @ 390m: 20fps

Average fps, deferred / shadows active, @ ground level: 18fps

While visiting a popular store (Graves main store), with seven other avatars present, my frames rates were: 32 fps with deferred rendering / shadows off, and 14fps with deferred rendering and shadows on. Taken together and in terms of running with lighting / shadows enabled, these figure represent the best results I’ve had for any Viewer running on my PC, and leave me hoping that similar improvements will be seen in other Viewers as they cut over to the 3.3.1 code.

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