Cool VL Viewer forum

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

These are bugfix releases and recommended updates.


Cool VL Viewer v1.30.2.25 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed failures to properly unmap/flush vertex buffers in the mesh upload floater model preview code, which were causing render glitches (and totally ruined rendering for the PBR branch).
• Added a new debug setting ("LuaTimeoutForScriptFile", defaulting to 3 seconds) to use a longer watchdog timeout for one-shot Lua scripts loaded and executed from files. Added a new "GetWatchdogState()" Lua function to get the watchdog remaining and elapsed times. See the updated Lua manual for details.
• Linux x86_64 only: updated the boost libraries to v1.83, zlib-ng to v2.1.2, libpng to v1.6.40, freetype to v2.13.1, libxml2 to v2.11.5, OpenSSL to 1.1.1v, and recompiled the libraries depending on them.
• Code cleanup and minor optimizations.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.3 (experimental branch):

Please, see this post about this branch, which is a backport of LL's PBR viewer and yet preserves EE rendering modes (dual renderer).

Same changes as for v1.30.2.25, plus:

• Fixed a crash bug seen when right-clicking a mesh just after a TP, due to unmatched vertices and indices counts during mesh rezzing.
• Fixed a crash on shut down in the GLTF materials UDP messages responder code.
• Fixed two bugs in the object cache code that were causing failures to load some PBR materials on region connections, and re-enabled the objects cache reads ("ObjectDiskCacheReads" debug setting defaulting to TRUE).
• Fixed a bug which caused L$0 "for sale" objects to be impossible to "buy".
• Fixed the lighting flickering that was seen in the image upload floater preview for body parts when in PBR rendering mode.
• Fully fixed the preview in the mesh upload floater when in PBR rendering mode.
• Code cleanup and minor speed optimizations.

Enjoy !

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

These are maintenance releases and recommended updates.


Cool VL Viewer v1.30.2.26 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Re-enabled a putative fix to wrong/missing material parameters, that was disabled in v1.30.2.14 to match LL's PBR viewer code, but finally proves to be necessary for forward rendering of some (probably bogus) materials. See this message for details.
• Fixed a bug that was causing deferred rendering to be disabled when toggling the Wire frame mode on/off.
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix for wrong attempts to fetch null UUID animations.
• Fixed bad value types for some debug settings.
• Backported from LL's viewer DRTVWR-582-maint-U the implementation of the new "Ignore object" left-click (in)action type (available from the corresponding "When left-clicked" combo in the "General" tab of the "Edit" floater), which, when set, causes the object to become "transparent" to left-click actions (useful for very large objects with alpha textures such as mesh rain or light rays effects, for example, that would otherwise block left-clicking to other objects behind them). Note that it is purely a viewer-side feature (so you won't see any change with those objects when using viewers not implementing it). Note also that, for obvious reasons, the left-click-ignore feature is disabled while the "Edit" floater is shown.
• Updated FMOD Studio to v2.02.17.
• Updated xxHash to v0.8.2.
• Recompiled the boost v1.83 libraries with upstream late (post-release) bug fixes applied. Recompiled colladadom against them.
• Linux x86_64 only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Minor code cleanup.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.4 (experimental branch):

Please, see this post about this branch, which is a backport of LL's PBR viewer and yet preserves EE rendering modes (dual renderer).

Same changes as for v1.30.2.26, plus:

• Resynced the PBR materials editing code with LL's PBR viewer (in particular, materials with permission restrictions are now properly copied or moved into the object when applied to it).
• Fixed PBR-materials related UI elements enabling logic in the "Edit" floater.
• Fixed bad blend function setup while rendering preview avatars.

Enjoy !

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

These are recommended updates.


Cool VL Viewer v1.30.2.27 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed a crash bug that could be seen on texture layer set buffers destruction (e.g. after editing the avatar appearance, when closing the Appearance floater). See this thread for details.
• Fixed Classic clouds speed that was proportional to the frame rate (it is now independent from it, as it should).
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to particles geometry calculation when their velocity is null.
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to some SLURLs throttling when they come from untrusted browsers.
• Removed the bogus frame rate clamping when updating the agent position.
• Fixed bad export/import of (now legacy) materials in the object backup feature, which caused improper materials restoration when importing objects with mixed materials and non-materials faces.
• Improved the objects+textures import feature by avoiding to re-upload textures already present in inventory with suitable permissions.
• Implemented object cache reads threading (off by default for now, since still in stress-testing process by me). This feature removes one more source of FPS "hiccups" when regions connect around your avatar, by threading the file read operations instead of blocking the main thread while they occur. The "Threaded object cache reads" toggle can be found in the "Advanced" -> "Caches" sub-menu.
• Implemented a new "Show floater size while resizing" feature (toggle in "Advanced" -> "User interface" sub-menu), to show at the bottom right of the viewer window the size (in pixels) of the floater being resized.
• Exposed the VRAM amount override and max GL bound textures memory settings in the "Preferences" floater, "Graphics" tab, "GPU/GL features" sub-tab. Do read the tool tips for them !
• Synced parallel_hashmap with latest upstream changes.
• Code cleanup and removal of dead code.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.5 (experimental branch):

Please, see this post about this branch, which is a backport of LL's PBR viewer and yet preserves EE rendering modes (dual renderer).

Same changes as for v1.30.2.27, plus:

• Fixed the bug, introduced in v1.31.0.3, which broke the HDR tone mapping (giving the lighting a blue hue): if anything, the lack of bug report about it shows how unpopular/unused is HDR tone mapping...
• Implemented PBR materials export/import for the object backup feature.
• Minor code cleanup.

Enjoy !

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

These are maintenance releases and recommended updates.


Cool VL Viewer v1.30.2.28 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to crashes sometimes seen with puppetry plugins.
• Backported from LL's viewer a "fix applying textures and materials with limited restrictions to attachments".
• Fixed a bug that caused some animated textures to stay blurry.
• Fixed the annoying mouse cursor flickering seen in the inventory floater while the inventory loads.
• Reworked the LLEventPoll code for better robustness (will now treat 499, 500 and 502 HTTP errors as timeouts in SL) and implemented various settings to play with ("EventPollAgeWindowMargin", "EventPollTimeoutForSL", "EventPollTimeoutForOS"), in order to try and find the causes for the failed server to viewer messaging occurrences which result in failed TPs and failed region crossings (among other much less armful glitches). Reduced the default poll timeout for SL to 25s, so to avoid the "stealth" retries by libcurl, which only increase the probability for a race condition to occur.
• Implemented a debug display for the agent's region poll request age (toggle is "Advanced" -> "HUD info" -> "Show poll request age"). When the poll request enters an "unsafe" age (according to the configured poll request timeout and age window margin), a small star ("*") is appended to the age.
• Implemented an experimental workaround for failed TPs, consisting in delaying any TP which would be requested in the "unsafe" period of a poll request until the next poll request is started and has had (supposedly) enough time to be started as well server-side. Sadly, this does not fix all TP failures either. The setting to toggle this experimental feature is "TPRaceWorkAround" (defaulting to FALSE).
• Enabled threaded object cache reads by default (the "Threaded object cache reads" toggle can be found in the "Advanced" -> "Caches" sub-menu): after a lot of testing by me, this proved safe and reliable.
• Implemented support for the new GenericStreamingMessage UDP message (this is just a stub in this branch, since it is only for use by PBR materials, for now, but it will avoid warnings about an unknown message).
• Added syntax highlighting and tool tips support in the script editor for the new PRIM_CLICK_ACTION, CLICK_ACTION_DISABLED and CLICK_ACTION_IGNORE LSL constants.
• Removed the "UseMFAinSL" debug settings (MFA login is now always enforced in SL for accounts using it).
• Synced parallel_hashmap with latest upstream changes.
• Linux x86_64 only: rebuilt Dullahan against the latest CEF 118 release (with security fixes).
• Linux x86_64 only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Code cleanup and removal of dead code.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.6 (experimental branch):

Please, see this post about this branch, which is a backport of LL's PBR viewer and yet preserves EE rendering modes (dual renderer).

Same changes as for v1.30.2.28, plus:

• Backported from LL's PBR viewer "fix scale of avatar mesh parts when mikktspace tangent generation fails".
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer support for PBR materials data receival via the new GenericStreamingMessage UDP message, and fixed two bugs in that code. I also for now kept support for the old path (via LargeGenericMessage) in parallel, so that you would not see any breakage in sims not yet supporting the new method during the transition period.
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer fixes to reflection maps clipping.

Enjoy !


Note: at the last minute, I found two Wine bugs when testing the Windows builds under it (no such problem seen under bare metal Windows). I could work around one (the HTTP stack in Wine apparently dislikes having retries set to zero and then fails transfers), but not yet the other (which, sadly, is a crash bug). Seeing as using a Windows build under Wine while there is a native Linux build for the viewer is pretty silly anyway, I decided not to delay further these releases and instead added code to forbid to run their Windows builds under Wine...
EDIT: it turns out that the crash is not due at all to the new code, but to the MSVC compiler update I made in the past week: former versions of the viewer, that worked fine under Wine when compiled with MSVC v1936 are now systematically crashing during or just after login when compiled with the latest MSVC 19.37.32824.0... Thank you so much Micro$hit !

EDIT 2: see this post for the fix.

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

These are maintenance releases and recommended updates.


Cool VL Viewer v1.30.2.30 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed vertex buffer memory usage accounting issues seen when switching ALM on/off.
• Backported from LL's viewer a "fix to integer overflow when frame buffers are extremely high resolution" in texture memory accounting. Also clamped the "RenderShadowResolutionScale" debug setting (which excessive value would cause such overly huge frame buffers and textures to be generated) to meaningful and reasonable values.
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix to infinite coordinates that could possibly be seen while drawing bounding boxes for debug display features. Extended this fix to a second box drawing function.
• Backported from LL's viewer the use of a compiler intrinsic instead of the crashAndLoop() function, for llerrs voluntary crashes.
• Fixed a bug introduced in v1.30.2.28 and which caused reloading texture picker inventory when editing an attachment's textures with "Apply immediately" un-checked. See this thread for details.
• Backported from LL's viewer DRTVWR-567 the support for the future inventory icon feature in llinventory library (just some very basic underlying support: nothing visible at the user level for now).
• Backported from LL's viewer DRTVWR-567 a few corner cases fixes to the AIS3 API code.
• Hardened some UDP messaging callbacks to avoid potential issues in case of duplicate or out of order message receival. Just in case, added a debug setting ("HardenedMessaging", defaulting to TRUE) as a kill switch, should this cause any unsuspected side effects.
• Added a guard timer to the TP race workaround queuing code.
• Code cleanup, removal of dead code, and minor optimizations.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.8 (experimental branch):

Please, see this post about this branch, which is a backport of LL's PBR viewer and yet preserves EE rendering modes (dual renderer).

Same changes as for v1.30.2.30, plus:

• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a "fix for double sided not working" for the new PBR materials transmission protocol.

Enjoy !

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

These are emergency bugfix releases and mandatory updates for users of v1.30.2.30 or v1.31.0.8.


Cool VL Viewer v1.30.2.31 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed a nasty inventory bug introduced in v1.30.2.30. See this post for details.
• Code cleanup and minor optimizations.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.9 (experimental branch):

Please, see this post about this branch, which is a backport of LL's PBR viewer and yet preserves EE rendering modes (dual renderer).

Same changes as for v1.30.2.31, plus:

• Backported from Alchemy viewer (Rye Mutt's code with bug fixes by me) the accounting of cube map array textures in bound GL textures stats.
• Backported from Alchemy viewer (Rye Mutt's code) a fix to an underwater shader when SSAO is off.
• Backported from Alchemy viewer (Rye Mutt's code) support for live changes to the "RenderReflectionProbeResolution" debug setting.

Enjoy !

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

These are mainly catchup releases with LL's latest viewers (the said catchup is still work in progress and due for future releases).


Cool VL Viewer v1.30.2.32 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Improved the logging system. Made it (even) faster. Made "once" log macro types actually log messages only once (!) and added "sparse" logging types for when the old "not really once" behaviour is desired. Added "Precise timestamps in log file" (toggle in "Advanced" -> "Consoles") for when millisecond accuracy is needed (helpful when debugging race conditions).
• Backported from LL's viewer the changes and extensions brought to the AISv3 protocol. Also implemented AISv3 fetching, but made it optional for now (still under stress-testing by me): the toggle is in the "Advanced" -> "Network" menu ("Use AISv3 for fetches (EXPERIMENTAL)"). Also backported the removal of some (not all, unlike what LL did for their viewer) old UDP fallback code paths for inventory operations that have capability-based (AISv2) equivalents in excess of AISv3, and are therefore no more in use, even in OpenSim. Fixed two bugs in LL's AISv3 code, and simplified greatly their inventory links restoration code (in their "defense", their COF code is so incredibly and uselessly convoluted, compared with mine, that the result could only be a big plate of spaghetti code ).
• Implemented a workaround for a bug that got apparently introduced with the server-side changes to AISv3 and broke the "LinkInventoryItem" UDP message server-side processing: whenever the "Always use AISv3 to create links" toggle is enabled in the "Advanced" -> "Network" menu, AISv3 is now used in SL for inventory links creation, even when AISv3 is disabled by the user ("Use AISv3 protocol for inventory" disabled). I reported the server-side bug to LL and it is under investigation.
• Implemented crude and basic support for inventory thumbnails viewing (the final UI will differ and is still work in progress); a new "Thumbnail" inventory context menu entry appears and will be available for items/folders with a thumbnail: selecting this entry then opens a texture preview on the thumbnail. This feature is only available when AISv3 inventory fetches are enabled (see above for the corresponding toggle). You cannot, for now, set inventory thumbnails.
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer the removal of the local lights ("RenderLightingDetail") setting and instead made the number of local lights configurable (the new setting name is "RenderLocalLightCount"). Limited the maximum number to something that makes sense (2048 instead of 8192 in LL's code, since I never ever have seen more than about 500 lights (local or not) rendered at once, even at 512m draw distance in sims with neighbours). The new setting can be changed from the "Preferences" floater, "Graphics" tab, "Renderer settings" sub-tab (in the said tab, I also renamed the "Post-processing quality" slider to "Quality" and moved it under/made it dependent on "Glow", since this is actually what it relates to).
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer the removal of the (largely useless) "RenderDisable*Light*" debug settings.
• Fixed a race condition bug in my TP race fix workaround (what an irony ! ), and improved the latter by making it (when the new "TPRaceRestartPoll" debug setting is TRUE, which is its default value) force-relaunch an event poll request instead of just delaying the TP request whenever the latter is done during the "danger window" and too close from the previous event poll request timeout. This workaround now works very well and a toggle for it has therefore been added ("TP race workaround (EXPERIMENTAL)") in the "Advanced" -> "Network" menu.
• Added tool tip and highlighting support to the script editor for the (so far missing) "INVENTORY_SETTING" and new "INVENTORY_MATERIAL" LSL constants
• Linux x86_64 only: updated the SDL library to v2.28.4 and rebuilt libndofdev against it.
• Code cleanup, removal of dead code, and minor optimizations.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.10 (experimental branch):

Please, see this post about this branch, which is a backport of LL's PBR viewer and yet preserves EE rendering modes (dual renderer).

Same changes as for v1.30.2.32, plus:

• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a fix to animated textures on faces with PBR material.
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a fix to "Blinn-Phong alpha of 0 making GLTF materials invisible for non-root prims".
• Adapted from LL's PBR viewer "wipe reflection probes when applying parcel EEP settings and pause updates on probes until transition completes", with bug fixes by me.

Enjoy !

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

They implement proper inventory thumbnails support and are recommended updates.


Cool VL Viewer v1.30.2.33 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed a crash bug in the Notifications console floater, that occurred when selecting the "Response" combo items for a closed notification.
• Fixed a bug (introduced in v1.30.2.27 but not in the v1.31.0 branch) in the object backup import feature that prevented to upload textures.
• Expanded my generic inventory item picker with permissions filtering and callback on cancel features. Updated the PickInventoryItem() Lua function accordingly (see the updated Lua manual for details).
• Expanded the inventory clipboard to accept inventory item assets (used to copy thumbnails).
• Expanded the image upload and snapshot floaters to support thumbnails uploading.
• Enabled AISv3 inventory fetches by default in SL (toggle in "Advanced" -> "Network" menu).
• Implemented inventory thumbnails viewing and editing support. Editing is done via a right-click on the inventory object (folder or item) and by selecting the "Thumbnail..." entry to open the new floater. Auto-viewing is optional (see the corresponding check box toggle and timeout spinner in the "Preferences" floater -> "Cool features" tab, "Inventory" sub-tab), and happens when selecting (with a left click) any inventory item bearing a thumbnail. Note that thumbnails are only available when the AISv3 inventory fetches are themselves enabled.
• Added a new "Automatically switch to front camera view when taking inventory thumbnail snapshot" check box to the "Preferences" floater, "Input & camera" tab, "Camera controls" sub-tab.
• Improved the selection highlighting features, by regrouping them all into a single setting, with a new "Show selections" sub-menu (of course detachable, and therefore easy to keep around during editing) in the "Tools" menu, with a new "Show all vertices in build mode" option (which also is the new default highlighting mode).
• Made the frame rate limiting algorithm more fine-grained with less risks to undershoot the configured frame rate limit while rezzing many new textures.
• Linux only: enabled my backtrace() workaround for bogus addresses (absolute instead of relative to program start address) for gcc as well (in excess of clang) since, apparently, some newer glibc versions are buggy and produce unhelpful crash logs otherwise.
• Synced parallel_hashmap with latest upstream changes.
• Updated FMOD Studio to v2.02.18.
• Linux x86_64 only: updated libapr to v1.7.2.
• Linux x86_64 only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Linux x86_64 only: updated Tracy to v0.10.
• Updated the root certificates file to LL's latest version.
• Code cleanup, removal of dead code, and minor optimizations.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.11 (experimental branch):

Please, see this post about this branch, which is a backport of LL's PBR viewer and yet preserves EE rendering modes (dual renderer).

Same changes as for v1.30.2.33, plus:

• Fixed a bug in the object cache for GLTF data that caused some PBR materials not to show after relog or arrival in already visited regions. Changed and improved the cache data format to be more robust and to take less disk space. Removed the "Cache GLTF materials on disk" option from the "Advanced" -> "Caches" sub-menu.
• Removed the code for the old GLTF data transmission protocol, now that all Aditi and Agni GLTF-enabled simulators are running the new GLTF-server version.
• Fixed a bug in the in-world objects selection logic that caused failures to rez your objects onto objects you did not own whenever the "Select only my objects" feature was enabled. Re-implemented the reflection probes selection skipping code for something much simpler and bullet-proof; the reflection probe objects are now only selectable/touchable while the Build floater is visible.
• Fixed a bug that caused the Sun and Moon objects positions to fail to update in PBR mode.
• Improved the reflection probes updates pause logic while environment is changing.
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer "fix near clip on reflection probes being clamped to at or below 10m".
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a "fix for LSL spamming new probes into the scene deadlocking probe updater".
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a "preserve default probe when resetting reflection probes".
• Updated the tinygltf library to v2.8.18.

Enjoy !

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

These are maintenance/bugfix releases and recommended updates.


Cool VL Viewer v1.30.2.34 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed a copy/paste bug in my code that caused uploaded inventory thumbnail snapshots to fail to be associated with inventory items (was working fine for folders).
• Backported from LL's DRTVWR-587 viewer a fix to LLSDParam that could in some (not yet used) cases crash due to the use of a pointer on a temporary string.
• Backported from LL's viewer a faster code for decoding inventory items LLSD data; expanded the optimization to inventory folders as well.
• Further refined the textures discard bias algorithm to reduce the risks of entering a reloading yo-yo after reaching a 5.0 max discard bias value; added an hysteresis to the ALM textures discard bias penalty (controlled by the new "MaxDiscardToUnbiasALM" setting) and a minimum delay between attempts to free old images memory (controlled by the new "OldImagesFlushDelay" setting).
• Changed the "RenderDeferredSSAO" setting to allow automatic (de)activation depending whether shadows are enabled or not; i.e. added a value to allow enabling SSAO only when it matters (and does not impact too much the frame rates), that is when shadows are rendered. Changed the "Advanced" -> "Rendering" -> "Deferred rendering" sub-menu accordingly (now with three SSAO entries/toggles: "Never use SSAO", "SSAO only with shadows" and "Always use SSAO").
• Linux x86_64 only: updated jemalloc to the latest git version.
• Code cleanup/reshuffling, removal of dead code and minor optimizations.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.12 (experimental branch):

Please, see this post about this branch, which is a backport of LL's PBR viewer and yet preserves EE rendering modes (dual renderer).

Same changes as for v1.30.2.34, plus:

• Fixed a crash bug seen in PBR mode when rezzing a mesh object while it is selected (e.g. when rezzing it from inventory with the Build floater open).
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a "fix for PBR alpha HUDs sometimes using wrong texture".
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a fix for the Moon rendering in PBR mode, so that it does render in front of stars instead of behind them.
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a fix to the texture units usage, to prevent issues with some OpenGL drivers.
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a fix to default (blank) PBR material selection.

Enjoy !

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

These are emergency bugfix releases and all users should update.


Cool VL Viewer v1.30.2.35 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed a bug, introduced in v1.30.2.28, and which caused many textures to load at an excessive resolution, in turn causing excessive memory consumption and yo-yo texture reloading effects. See this post for details. Removed the now useless "OldImagesFlushDelay" setting which was introduced to try and avoid the said yo-yo.
• Solved the annoying spurious triggering of previews on items copied from and into the inventory when "Automatically open/view after accepting" is checked for "inventory offers" in the "Notifications" tab of the "Preferences" floater; the preview should now only be triggered when actually receiving a new item (from another avatar or a scripted item, or when dragging items from an object contents to your inventory, or when "Buying" from an object, or when uploading a new asset, etc).
• Fixed a minor bug in the failure path of inventory thumbnails uploads.
• Minor code cleanup.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.13 (experimental branch):

Please, see this post about this branch, which is a backport of LL's PBR viewer and yet preserves EE rendering modes (dual renderer).

Same changes as for v1.30.2.35, plus:

• Reverted the backport introduced in v1.31.0.13 to "fix to the texture units usage, to prevent issues with some OpenGL drivers", since this caused objects with faces bearing a diffuse (legacy) texture with an alpha channel to vanish when shadows are enabled in PBR mode. See this thread for details.

Enjoy !