Cool VL Viewer forum

Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.7 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed an issue with avatar preview rendering in PBR mode and reimplemented the latest and now compatible changes to water PBR rendering from LL's maintenance viewer.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix to a potential crash in PBR reflection maps code. Detected and fixed a similar issue in the reflection map manager code.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer "force blank normal Id into a local blank normal texture due to compression artifacts on server-side texture".
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a change to display the splash screen (with a "Cleaning up..." message) on viewer shutdown, after the main window is destroyed, so to let the user know that the viewer is still cleaning up after itself and not yet fully shut down (this step usually takes a split second only, with the Cool VL Viewer, but may sometimes take longer, depending on how fast some file or stale network operations can complete).
• Fixed the "Appearance" floater sometimes staying stuck in a "Loading..." state, when the edited inventory items have not yet been fetched from the server during the viewer session (AISv3 fetching laziness).
• Fixed the "Custom" skin detection to allow setting up a custom skin only as an override (meaning no need any more to have a "skins/custom/colors_base.xml" file in the viewer installation directory, but only as ~/.secondlife/skins/custom/colors_base.xml").
• Changed the GetAgentFriends() and GetAgentGroups() Lua functions to be available from trusted sources only.
• Changed the Lua callback code for inventory_panel UI elements to only call OnLuaFloaterAction() when the commit event is the result of a user action (selection), to avoid callback storms when filtering on inventory names.
• Added a new lua_command attribute to XUI controls to allow specifying a Lua on-commit command directly in the Lua floaters definition XML file (saves from using SetLuaFloaterCommand() for every such controls, most of the times). See the updated Lua manual for details.
• Backported from LL's GLTF featurette viewer the materials preview feature. Implemented material preview into my thumbnail preview floater (i.e., in PBR rendering mode, inventory materials without a thumbnail will show a thumbnail preview floater nonetheless, with their material previewed inside it), as well as in the Edit/Build floater "Texture" tab (note however that only the base material is previewed there, i.e. any overrides to it on the edited face(s) are not rendered in the preview).
• Enabled thumbnail preview in my generic inventory item picker (as a result allowing, in PBR mode, to see materials preview too with it).
• Linux only: updated libndofdev to v0.14, with a crash fix.
• Linux only: updated and rebuilt Dullahan against the latest CEF 121 release, with security fixes.
• Linux only: added a "dbuschat.tk" Tcl/Tk script to the distributed files, for use as a separate chat input window for the Cool VL Viewer. Do make sure to enable "Advanced" -> "Lua scripting" -> "Accept Lua commands from D-Bus" before using it.
• Minor code cleanup.

Enjoy !

Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:

This is a maintenance release and a recommended update.

Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.8 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed an issue (introduced in v1.32.0.7) with avatar preview rendering in PBR mode causing bogus object occlusions on some systems.
• Fixed the reflection probe parameters floater bugs (now properly sets the "box" type, among other fixes).
• Refined again the Build/Edit floater "Texture" tab to hide irrelevant parameters when editing PBR maps. Added informative text under the PBR preview.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix to "GLTF material disappears from object playing media".
• Fixed the RLV @camtexture feature failing to override materials (PBR and legacy ones alike).
• Backported from Alchemy viewer (Rye Mutt's code) a fix to banding sometimes seen in PBR mode when screen space reflection is enabled.
• Implemented the displaying of animation durations (when non-zero) for the "Advanced" -> "Character" -> "Animation info" feature.
• Updated the ca-bundle.crt certificates file to LL's maintenance viewer latest version.
• Updated tinygltf to v2.8.20.
• Linux only: updated zlib-ng to v2.1.6, freetype to v2.13.2, SDL2 to v2.30.0, and rebuilt all the packages depending on them.
• Linux x86_64 only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Linux x86_64 only: rebuilt Dullahan against the latest CEF 121 release.
• Linux aarch64 only: updated sse2neon to v1.7.0.
• Minor code cleanup.

Enjoy !

Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:

This is a maintenance release with important bug fixes and all users should update.

Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.9 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed UI avatars rendering in PBR mode; it does help, when the related shaders are actually loaded !... O.O The animation and texture upload preview floaters now properly render their UI avatar in PBR mode.
• Now properly refresh the UI avatar preview in the visual parameter hints of the "Appearance" floater, while the baked textures are loading.
• Fixed the bug which caused the avatar eyes to stop rendering when using the "Advanced" -> "Rendering" -> "Info displays" -> "Hit boxes" feature.
• Fixed, in LL's code, a confusion between Sun diffuse and Sun light color when setting PBR shaders uniforms and using the HDR auto-adjust feature for legacy EE sky settings, which caused very bad lighting discrepancies. Consequently reduced the "RenderSkyAutoAdjustSunColorScale" and "RenderSkyAutoAdjustHDRScale" settings to reasonable values (if you changed them, make sure to reset them to their new default value).
• Adapted SMAA anti-aliasing shaders and code to the PBR renderer. At last, an anti-aliasing mode that does not blur texture details and almost (CAS still not ready) brings PBR on par with the Cool VL Viewer legacy ALM shaders !
• Changed the reflection probe parameters floater logic to accept editing reflection probes primitives in a larger linkset (yes, you can link reflection probes to your objects/builds, so you should equally be able to edit them after they got linked), and to keep non-sphere primitive you want to turn into a probe as a "box" type probe (allows to size a box-type primitive to the final size of the probe it will be turned into, and not loose its dimensions when activating the reflection probe parameters).
• Backported from LL's viewer pull requests the change of the wind sound generation via OpenAL to use floats instead of integers for its samples, to fix sound distortions.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a "fix for more inaccurate than usual alpha sorting".
• Added a separate "ThrottleBandwidthKbpsOS" setting for OpenSim grids UDP max bandwidth, since it has been discovered (thanks Animats !) that current OpenSim servers got an overflow bug which causes them to go wild (and cease communicating after a while) when that bandwidth is set over 1024Kbps (which is ridiculously low for modern Internet links, such as fiber or even DSL). This new setting consequently defaults to 1024Kbps and is applied when connected to any other grid than SL...
• The "Advanced" -> "Network" -> "TP race workaround" feature is now enabled by default in SL. It has been over four months I have been using it, and during all this time I only encountered five TP failures (those failures that leave the viewer in the blue and result in a disconnection), while I used to have that many failures every single week before...
• Changed some links in the Help menu to point to changed SL resources/sites (e.g. Second Life feedback site instead of the JIRA).
• Recompiled the Lua library with the latest upstream bug fixes applied.
• Some code cleanup.

Enjoy !

Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:

This is a maintenance release with important bug fixes and all users should update.

Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.10 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed the annoying bug introduced in v1.32.0.9 and which caused a legacy hair mesh to be drawn on animesh objects. See this message for details.
• Fixed the bug, introduced in v1.32.0.7, and which caused a black screen in PBR mode for OpenGL v3.x drivers, and when "RenderReflectionsEnable" was set to FALSE. See this message for details. Please, note that even with this fix, in such conditions the rendering is still bogus (lighting is way too dark), but this is a bug in LL's shaders (same problem seen with LL's viewer) that LL will have to fix... PBR material preview is also not working with "RenderReflectionsEnable" set to FALSE (again, a bug by LL).
• Adapted the CAS shaders and code to the PBR rendering mode; the PBR mode anti-aliasing is now just as good as the ALM one in the Cool VL Viewer.
• Implemented a new "Advanced" -> "Rendering" -> "Refresh reflection probes" feature, and automatically trigger it when switching from a legacy rendering mode (forward or ALM) to the PBR mode.
• Improved the thumbnail preview floater to get auto-parented to the calling floater, so that it gets placed beside the latter. The thumbnail edit floater, on the other hand, keeps its private placement setting.
• Improved the Reflection probe parameters floater to automatically set the physics hull to "None" and (for non-PBR viewers compatibility) the click action to "Ignore object" for probes primitives linked to a larger linkset (since unlike individual probes, they cannot be set as phantom objects).
• Minor code cleanup.

Enjoy !

Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:

Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.11 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed the bug which caused beacons to fail to properly render in ALM rendering mode. See this message for details.
• Reverted "fix for more inaccurate than usual alpha sorting". It turns out the putative fix causes even more serious issues (with, for example, disappearing walls under certain camera angles); I even entirely disabled this bogus alpha sorting code by setting the Z parameter of "OctreeAlphaDistanceFactor" to 0.0m instead of 0.1m, which was its value before the "fix" (which raised it to an arbitrary 64m value).
• Fixed the random lighting angle seen in material previews.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer "Material preview shouldRender() should return false if no render needed".
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix to a crash sometimes seen when failing to read an XML file.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix to viewer sometimes crashing when switching models in the mesh upload preview floater.
• Fixed the totally bogus (way too dark) lighting that was seen when setting "RenderReflectionsEnabled" to FALSE or using the viewer with OpenGL 3.x drivers (which have this setting always FALSE). Note that the fix causes the HDR tone mapping to be permanently disabled when reflections are disabled. Regrouped the "RenderReflectionsEnabled" and "RenderReflectionProbeDetail" settings into a single "RenderReflectionProbes" setting, and exposed the new "Disabled" option in the "Reflections" combo of the "Preferences" floater, "Graphics" tab, "Renderer settings" sub-tab.
• Reworked some of the UI code (removed "volume_slider", which was just a sub-element of "slider", removed "multi_slider_bar", which was never used and was just a sub-element of "multi_slider"), added an introspection method (getTag(), to recover the tag/type of an UI control), and added tool tips for resize handles.
• Fixed invalid SLURLs causing bogus/useless opening of a blank web browser.
• Added floaters introspection functions to Lua: see GetFloaterInstances(), GetFloaterControls(), GetFloaterCtrlState() and GetFloaterList() in the updated Lua manual. Also added ShowFloater() to allow showing any existing floater instance (and not just Lua floaters).
• Added an OnSLURLDispatch() Lua callback to allow filtering SLURLs and/or implementing custom SLURL schemes. See the updated Lua manual for details.
• Implemented a nice Lua console floater (can be opened via "Advanced" -> "Lua scripting" -> "Lua console" or with the new CTRL ALT L keyboard shortcut), which makes things much easier than using the chat bar and the "/lua " prefix to issue Lua commands manually.
• Made "FlyingAtExit" a per-account setting, as it should have been from the very start.
• Added syntax highlighting support and tool tips to the LSL script editor for the new llComputeHash(), llGetCameraAspect(), llGetNotecardLineSync(), llWorldPosToHUD() functions and "NAK" constant.
• Made the "About this viewer" floater, "Version info" tab auto-refresh when changing region while this floater is left open.
• Synced parallel_hashmap with latest upstream changes.
• Updated tinygltf to v2.8.21.
• Linux only: recompiled Dullahan against the latest CEF 121 release, with security fixes.
• Code cleanup, with removal of unused code.

Enjoy !

Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:

This release is mainly an attempt at addressing the "ugly blue hue" issue seen in PBR viewers on shiny materials (PBR and legacy ones alike), without needing to touch to the environment settings (which won't suffice anyway).


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.12 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed minimized note cards title not changing while the original note card name changed.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix for a potential crash while optimizing some bogus meshes.
• Backported from LL's viewer pull-requests a fix to a potential crash on shutdown (never seen by me with the Cool VL Viewer, but better safe than sorry).
• Implemented a workaround for the ugly blue hue seen on shiny parts in PBR rendering mode. The "strength" of this workaround can be adjusted via two new debug settings: "RenderSkyReflectionDesaturation" and "RenderSkyReflectionDarkening". They both affect the "blue horizon" and "blue density" colors as passed to shaders when rendering the reflections irradiance maps. "RenderSkyReflectionDesaturation" desaturates the colors (the higher the setting, the more desaturated; setting this to 1.0 or lower disables entirely the workaround), while "RenderSkyReflectionDarkening" darkens them. With the default values (2.0 and 1.5 respectively), I get acceptable/tolerable shinies in sky boxes or on sky platforms not shielded from the sky with a reflection probe, while not impacting too much outdoors mirror-like PBR materials which are reflecting the sky. Note that this also improves well enough water bodies color, that I could disable my color-correction hack in the PBR water shader. Please, let me know (in the General forum) what you think of it...
• Simplified the categorization of NVIDIA RTX GPUs (they are all class 5 GPUs anyway, so do not bother checking for each different model).

Enjoy !

Note: since this release is mainly geared at PBR improvements, I did not compile an aarch64 binary for it (ARM64 SBCs cannot currently do deferred rendering due to bugs/shortcomings in their OpenGL drivers). But you can of course compile it yourself from sources.

Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.13 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Worked around a water reflections "detouring" issue around objects in the foreground, in PBR rendering mode.
• Backported from Alchemy (Rye Mutt's code) a "fix to some alpha lighting falloff weirdness", and a "fix to sky blowing out probes" in PBR rendering mode.
• Backported from LL's viewer support for emojis, but ensured that the new TwemojiSVG.ttf font's non-emoji characters won't override our usual UTF-8 characters in our fallback fonts (Roboto plus per-OS fonts) with fancy colored characters that would, for example, impact badly scripted objects menus/dialogs using them. Also added an option to disable colored fonts in the UI (the toggle is "Allow colored fonts in UI" in the "Advanced" -> "User interface" menu). Note that I did not implement an emoji picker; not being a fan of emojis (I prefer good old ASCII smileys), I'm not even sure I will implement one (feel free to advocate for it if you really want/need one). Updated the Advanced" -> "User interface" -> "XUI" -> "Font test" floater with emojis test.
• Do not set a "Resize" tool tip any more on the top-right resize handle for floaters with a close button (to prevent the latter from having its own tool tip overridden with the one of that handle).
• Linux only: recompiled Dullahan against the latest CEF 122 release (with security fixes).
• Linux x86_64 only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Minor code cleanup.

Enjoy !

Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:

This is a maintenance release and a recommended update.


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.14 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Reverted the backport from Alchemy for "fix to some alpha lighting falloff weirdness", which is causing other rendering issues.
• Fixed emojis not fading out properly when printed with fading text (e.g. in the chat console).
• Implemented a better emojis font fallback algorithm, which fixes an issue where some "genuine emojis" were printed using monochrome fonts glyphs. Added more characters tests to the "Font test" floater, covering the said emojis.
• Now properly render invalid/unknown UTF-8 characters using the replacement character glyph.
• Linux (and macOS) only: fixed a typo that prevented to use the "Large" font size specifier in font names.
• Implemented support for the "Little" font size specifier (its size is between "Tiny" and "Small").
• Fixed the minimum increment value (0.01 instead of 0.05) for the cloud scroll rates in the sky settings panel editor.
• Added a "Midday (PBR)" entry to the "World" -> "Environment settings" menu. This setting is the one currently in use by SL's maintenance gltf2 viewer (it got broken, fixed clouds, but is supposed to "fix" the blue hue). Since the corresponding asset Id for this setting has changed several times already, I made it configurable via the new "PBRSkyMiddayAssetId" debug setting.
• Resynced the "RenderSkyAutoAdjustHDRScale" and "RenderSkyAutoAdjustProbeAmbiance" default values with LL's current maintenance gltf2 viewer.
• Added a "Fix reflections blue hue" entry to the "World" -> "Environment settings" menu. It allows to toggle my sky reflections desaturation fix (without needing to set the corresponding desaturation setting to 1.0 or less).
• Reverted a former fix I implemented for some CEF versions that did not like to have a dash in the path part of an URI: escaping the dash now, on the contrary, causes issues with current CEF versions.
• Updated FMOD Studio to v2.03.00.
• Linux only: updated libSDL to 2.30.1 (with bug fixes) and recompiled libndofdev against it.
• Linux only: recompiled Dullahan against the latest CEF 122 release (with security fixes).
• Minor code cleanup.

Enjoy !

Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:

This is an emergency crash fix release. All users of v1.32.0.14 shall update.

Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.15 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Disabled the part of the code where unknown/invalid UTF-8 characters are rendered with the "replacement character" glyph: for an unknown reason, this causes the viewer to either crash or enter an infinite loop when many such characters are printed in a raw, and this was seen happening under Windows and Linux aarch64 (the Linux x86_64 build seemed immune, perhaps because it uses jemalloc, but better safe than sorry)... Unknown characters are now rendered as a simple question mark.

Enjoy !

Here is a new release of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.16 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed an infinite recursion crash encountered when trying to dispatch some specific invalid SLURLs.
• Exposed the note card and script editors font global settings via a new "Fonts preferences" floater which you can open by clicking on the new "Fonts for note card and script editor" button in the "Preferences" floater, "Cool features" tab, "User interface" sub-tab.
• Added a "Font" menu to the note card editor, to allow changing its font in real time, on a per-editor basis.
• Added a "Plots color legend" toggle to the context menu of the mini-map: toggling it on causes the legend for each type of plot to be printed with the corresponding color in the bottom left corner of the mini-map.
• Split the voice client code (LLVoiceClient) and reshuffled it into two classes (LLVoiceClient and LLVoiceVivox) to modularize it and prepare the backport of the WebRTC voice support. These changes should not result in any user-visible difference in how voice currently works (should you notice an issue, please file a bug report in the corresponding forum).
• Linux x86_64 only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Minor code cleanup and some build system changes.

Enjoy !