Cool VL Viewer forum

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

This is mainly a bug fix release and a recommended update.

Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.1 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Implemented a work-around for a race condition that sometimes occurs when applying a baked texture to a rigged mesh via Lua (OnAgentBaked() callback) and a LSL script: the texture is then possibly fetched before the bake server provides an URL for it, causing a failed fetch and a "missing" (grey) texture. The work-around automatically forces a re-fetch with the proper URL for that texture when it is received from the bake server.
• Plugged a couple potential crash bug cases in the object cache reading code.
• Made the "Sunrise"/"Noon"/"Sunset"/"Midnight" entries always available and working (whatever the rendering mode) in the "World" -> "Environment settings" menu.
• Rewrote the "Bump, pushes & hits" floater from scratch, implementing better and more detailed statistics, real time updating, and several actions (buttons): "Clear" to clear the history, "Show" to focus the camera on the avatar responsible for a given assault, "Profile" to view their profile (from which other actions are possible, such as IM, Mute, etc), and "Report" to abuse-report them (with proper pre-filling of the report floater, using the gathered statistics).
• Brought more fixes and improvements to Restrained Love. Improved the "Restrained Love status" floater. See the release notes section of RestrainedLoveReadme.txt for details.
• Fixed environment settings related Lua functions not always working. Added a few Lua functions. See the Lua scripting and viewer automation feature documentation for details.
• Backported from LL's viewer several fixes to EE shaders affecting HUDs and water rendering.
• Backported from LL's viewer a rendering fix for "skewed baked texture offset values".
• Backported from LL's viewer (yet more !) fixes to the capability-based offline IMs retrieval, still disabled by default in the Cool VL Viewer.
• Linux only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Updated the Lua library to v5.4.0.
• Updated the root certificates bundle file to LL's latest version.
• Code cleanup and minor optimizations.

Enjoy !

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


Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.2 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• By popular demand (1 user), made the custom mini-map dot colours to stick, even for de-rezzed (far) avatars.
• Added a few Lua functions and callbacks for the Radar. See the Lua scripting and viewer automation feature documentation for details.
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to "crash at processDomModel()".
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to the EE renderer: "remove redrawing of sky twice and timer causing it not to be re-drawn twice 2% of the time".
• A whole lot of code cleanup and "elevenification" (with systematic use of C++11 "override" and "final" keywords where appropriate, for more robust sources and some compiler optimization benefits).
• Fixed a bug in complexity calculation for animeshes and another bug in spatial partitions culling (as a result of the "elevenification" described above).
• Fixed a bug that prevented to edit the "blue density" in the sky parameters editor panel. See This thread for details.
• Removed some useless cruft (LLRun* stuff that was executed but did stricly nothing else than wasting time !) in LL's code.
• Some speed optimizations.

Enjoy !

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


Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.3 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Added a new setting ("RenderWaterCull" which replaces "RenderCullWater") for culling of water bodies, which solves a weird issue with flickering sky sometime seen on some systems (never seen by me). The setting can be changed from the "Preferences" floater, "Graphics" tab, "GPU features" sub-tab, via the "Cull water" combo (do read its tool tip !). See this thread for details about the rendering glitch it fixes.
• Fixed the object cache files corruption bug in LL's code (it is recommended to clear your cache, so to get rid of the old corrupted files once and for all).
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to EE settings: "allow full density multiplier range".
• More code cleanup and "elevenification" (with systematic use of C++11 "override" and "final" keywords where appropriate).
• Backported from Alchemy viewer a couple of minor optimizations.
• Updated FMOD Studio to v2.01.02.
• Linux only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Minor speed optimizations.

Enjoy !

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

This is a recommended update.

Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.4 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Added a "Refresh" entry in the pie menu for particles (seen when right-clicking on a particle while "Tools" -> "Pick particles" is enabled), so to allow a force-reload of the texture in use (when any) by the associated particle system. This can be used to fix wrongly glowing particles in EE rendering mode, for textures that fail to fully load.
• Fixed a bug that caused the "RenderWaterCull" setting value not to be properly reflected on opening of the "Preferences" floater in the corresponding combo of the "Graphics" tab, "GPU features" sub-tab.
• Fixed a rendering glitch that affected water reflections in ALM mode and caused them (in both the WL and the EE renderers) to fail to be updated when flying up/down without rotating the camera.
• Make use of "GL_ARB_depth_clamp" when available for water culling, but keep avoiding it in shaders unless the new "RenderUseDepthClamp" debug setting is set to TRUE (LL's viewer has depth clamp usage always disabled because of issues with shadows, but consequently fails to render edge waters in some situations). Inspired from Alchemy's (Rye Mutt's) code (which lacks the debug setting and thus could introduce issues with shadows).
• Backported from Alchemy viewer (Rye Mutt's code) the possibility to use the old (and slightly faster), Windlight water edges rendering method with the EE renderer. This is disabled by default and can be enabled via the new "RenderWaterFastEdges" debug setting.
• Fixed a cosmetic bug in the "Edit" tools floater that caused the fallback image of the specular map color swatch to stay wrongly stuck with the "locked" image while editing mod-ok primitives.
• More "elevenification" of the code (with systematic use of C++11 "override" and "final" keywords where appropriate).
• Backported from Alchemy viewer (Rye Mutt's code) a few minor optimizations.
• Code cleanup and a few minor speed optimizations of my own.

Enjoy !

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

This is mainly a bugfix release.

Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.5 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Separated the teleport history for the Aditi (SL beta) grid from the one for Agni (SL production) grid.
• Backported from LL's viewer "change inventory cache to use a standard LLSD format". Note that it will cause your old inventory cache to be ignored and a new cache to be rebuilt on first login with each avatar.
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to a crash bug on exit that could potentially be seen when an asset storage transfer was still in flight on quit.
• Backported from LL's viewer "glow disable no longer breaks rendering" (that I helped debugging since LL's first commit was totally bogus).
• As a result of the above, added a "Glow" check box to the Graphics preferences panel, as well as a glow strength spinner (note: glow strength defaults to 0.25 in the Cool VL Viewer, while it defaults to 0.35 in other viewers since I always found glow effects to be way too strong and overwhelming).
• Backported from LL's viewer "add an avatar appearance light to deferred mode".
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to the "help follow cursor" feature in the script editor, where the help keyword could be badly detected when UTF-8 characters were present in the same line.
• Backported from LL's viewer pull requests (Nicky Dasmijn's code) an LLExtStat coding improvement, together with a bugfix to the asset storage asset download callback.
• Backported from Alchemy viewer (Rye Mutt's code) a "fix to incorrect usage of LLSD::emptyMap and LLSD::emptyArray", with a crash-bug fix (in multi-sliders) of my own to that fix...
• Backported from Alchemy viewer (Rye Mutt's code) the "removal LLGLNamePool and its associated overhead".
• Increased the maximum usable resolution of plugins from 2048x2048 to 4096x4096 for non-HiDPI screens (there was already no limit for HiDPI ones).
• Updated the security certificates file (ca-bundle.crt) to LL's latest one.
• Updated FMOD Studio to v2.01.03.
• Updated the Lua pre-built library to include all the latest bug fixes currently available for Lua v5.4.0.
• Linux only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Linux only: added support for (and a work-around for a bug in) gcc v10.
• Linux only: added detection of XWayland compatibility mode and failed Xlib multi-threading safe mode initialization (and report for any such issue in the About floater).
• More "elevenification" of the code (C++11 dialect related improvements).
• Code cleanup and a few minor speed optimizations.

Enjoy !

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


Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.6 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Backported from LL's viewer (and further improved/fixed) "workaround for enqueueCoprocedure() crash with asset storage".
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to "crash 'Enqueue failed' due to viewer requesting over 4K landmarks".
• Backported from LL's viewer "partially restore atmospheric effects for the moon" and "fix local scalar mix masking global mix() function" (EE renderer shaders changes).
• Backported from LL's viewer "use TLS-enabled map server".
• Fixed a potential crash bug in LLCoprocedureManager.
• Implemented Lua threads. See the Lua scripting and viewer automation feature documentation and this message about threads for details.
• Code cleanup and a few minor speed optimizations.

Enjoy !

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

This is a bugfix release.


Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.7 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed a crash bug in LLTemplateMessageReader, seen happening when receiving bogus UDP messages reporting negative data bucket sizes.
• Brought llplugin code on par with LL's latest code (including a recent plugin shutdown fix).
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to a potential crash on shutdown in the LLViewerRegion code.
• Backported from LL's viewer "revert part of SL-12978 change that broke low-angle sunlight", "SL-13721: fix incorrect water reflection", "remove moon glow from sky and clouds", "de-obfuscate cloud/sky vertex shaders" and "SL-12978 & SL-13743: confirmed sunlight y component is up, removed abrupt changes in Sun calculations" (EE renderer shaders changes).
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to "URL gets changed when opened in the internal web browser".
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to "SL-8225: do not sit or autopilot to 'zero' global coordinates. Also significantly increases autopilot flight precision."
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to "SL-13566: 'Use joint positions' option causes collapsed joints for some files", when uploading mesh models.
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to "SL-13891: coroutine creation was requested on exit" on Experience cache shutdown.
• Added a "LegacyNamesForSpeakers" debug setting (the corresponding configuration is in the "Preferences" panel, "General" tab, "Speakers" check box) to allow always listing avatars by their legacy names in the speakers list of IM and voice panels.
• Updated the security certificates bundle file to LL's latest version.
• Linux only: fixed a bug in the Dullahan (CEF plugin library) shutdown code.
• Linux only: improved the 'cool_vl_viewer' wrapper script to try and disable Fresync and V-sync for non-NVIDIA drivers. Added a way to allow private overrides to that wrapper default settings (via an optional, user-written ~/.secondlife/cool_vl_viewer.conf file), so that you do not need to edit that script after each viewer update.
• Minor code cleanup.

Enjoy !

PS: please make sure to vote for the poll about 32 vs 64 bits viewers. Thank you !

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

This is a bugfix release and a recommended update.


Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.8 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Backported from LL's viewer fixes to "SL-3278: parts unique to 'self' should not affect render complexity" and "SL-3278: compensate for randomly-switching textures" in avatar rendering cost calculations.
• Backported from LL's viewer "SL-13768: remove glow from Moon when Sun is down due to it using the sun glow setting", "SL-13465: remove hack offset of Moon when AS is ON to match when AS is OFF." and "SL-13465: restore Pre-EEP haze effecting Moon" (EE renderer changes).
• Updated Dullahan for a build using CEF 81 instead of CEF 74 (*).
• Updated FMOD Studio to v2.01.04.
• Linux only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Linux only: changed the build scripts so that when --tune is requested, the aggressive registers optimizations are not imposed any more but left to gcc to decide based on the CPU architecture instead. This may, or may not, improve performances for tuned builds with some CPU types...
• Minor code cleanup and speed optimizations.

(*) I want to thank here Nicky Dasmijn who spent quite some time and efforts and successfully diagnosed the "crash on SL Market place products" in CEF 77+ for Linux to a conflict with jemalloc. This in turn allowed me to narrow the conflict down to Chromium's browser extensions code, which happens to be useless for CEF and can be disabled at runtime from Dullahan's glue code. The CEF 81 binaries used for Linux 64 bits builds is a version compiled by Nicky (for Firestorm) which includes proprietary CODECs support. I also added a switch in the 00-BuildOptions.cmake script of the viewer to allow building against CEF 85 for Linux (that I built myself with proprietary CODECs support as well, both for 32 and 64 bits builds): alas, the latter does not shut down cleanly.


Enjoy !

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PS: please make sure to vote for the poll about 32 vs 64 bits viewers. Thank you !

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

This is a recommended update.


Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.9 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Made the "RenderDeferredInvisible" setting inoperative (always on) when in EE rendering mode. See this message for details.
• Backported from LL's viewer "Remove moon glow from ALM deferred path" and "removed some potential div-by-0 NaNs and a mangled clamp" (EE renderer changes).
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to a potential bogus initialization of the EEP environment on login.
• Reworked the auto-pilot and its recorder code so that it actually works (and does not force flying when auto-piloting in a skybox). In particular, the recorder data is saved in the per-account settings folder, instead of the viewer installation directory (which was plain bogus). The menu entries in "Advanced" -> "Character" -> "Auto-pilot recorder" have also been extended (new "Forget record" and "Allow flying" entries) and are properly enabled/disabled depending on the recorder status. Removed the old "StatsAutoRun", "StatsNumRuns", "StatsQuitAfterRuns" debug settings which related with "drone" features of the auto-pilot (now replaced with Lua much greater capabilities).
• Added new auto-pilot related Lua functions. See the Lua scripting and viewer automation feature documentation for details.
• Linux only: updated the Dullahan pre-built library (reverted to CEF 74 due to CEF 81 crashing in SL grid status page and randomly in other places).
• Linux only: various improvements to the 'cool_vl_viewer' wrapper script.
• Some code cleanup.

Enjoy !

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PS: please make sure to vote for the poll about 32 vs 64 bits viewers. Thank you ! <-- I'm quite a bit disappointed that so few users do vote... But I suppose it's how things are nowadays: voting is no more considered a civic duty, even in democracies !

Here are two new releases of the Cool VL Viewer, available now from http://sldev.free.fr/:


Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.10 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Removed ancient/dubious (and now clearly detrimental) fixes for Intel and AMD GPUs OpenGL drivers. Some speed benefits are expected on these platforms as a result.
• Reduced the retry timeout for failed materials data download to 2 minutes (instead of 20 minutes in LL's original code, which was pretty silly).
• Backported from LL's viewer (and improved) a fix to "validate buffer size to avoid SIGBUS crash on sscanf" for landmarks data decoding.
• Backported from Alchemy's viewer a fix to a HTTP request retry delay bug.
• Updated the root certificates bundle file to LL's latest version.
• Linux only: proper extraction of the gcc (and clang) version number in the cmake build scripts (the former algorithm failed on some Linux distros with fancy version strings appended to gcc's "normal" string).
• Linux only: removed the (useless) libdb-5.2.so library from the distribution as well as the (always included in Linux distros base libraries) libuuid.so.1 library.
• Code cleanup (with removal and modernization of ancient code) and minor optimizations.

Cool VL Viewer v1.28.1.0 (new experimental branch):

Same code as v1.28.0.10, with the following changes:

• Removed all the 32 bits compatibility code. This viewer can now only be compiled for 64 bits targets. Also raised the build prerequisites to a fully C++14-compliant compiler; this precludes using gcc versions older than v5.0 or MSVC versions before (an up to date) VS2017.
• Linux only: recompiled all the pre-built libraries with gcc 5.5 (and the modern C++11 ABI). FYI the new build system used for Linux is a Rosa 2016.1 (R11.1) VM.
• Linux only (*): removed the dependency on boost::regex (which is causing linking headaches under Linux when it is built with another gcc version than the one used to build the viewer); now using std::regex instead. This potentially could cause subtle bugs: please do report any discrepancy with the stable branch as far as SLURL, emails, links parsing and substitutions, DAE files (mesh models) uploads, media white/black-listing, and GPU features detection are performed.

(*) And macOS. Not for Windows because std::regex is f*cked up in VS2017 and crashes lamentably...


Enjoy !

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Edited to add v1.28.1.0.