Cool VL Viewer forum

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").
• 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 !

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 v1.30.2.36 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed the bug (introduced in v1.30.2.25) which caused vertices to fail to be drawn for meshes in selection highlighting mode.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix for "detaching an attachment stops unrelated animations".
• Fixed blurry textures sometimes seen on faces with below-unity texture scaling (e.g. on displays with scripted changing text), which also got the nice side effect to, on the contrary, avoid loading at an excessive resolution the textures with repeats per face larger than one.
• Improved the algorithm implemented in last release to prevent preview floaters from popping up after a copy/paste in the inventory, by extending its scope to copy/pasting of several identical items.
• Improved the generic inventory items picker. In particular, made it so it does not auto-select any more the first matching item (which caused unwanted effects, especially when "Apply immediately" is checked).
• Improved the inventory items "Properties" floater; fixed bugs in it (opening of wrong profile by buttons), added a "Thumbnail..." button for agent's inventory items properties, and made it a dependent floater (instead of opening in random places on the screen and failing to remember its old position).
• Improved the inventory thumbnail floater, adding the necessary code for potential future support of thumbnails associated with objects inventory items (not possible for now, since objects inventory management uses legacy UDP messaging and not AISv3). Also added a new "ThumbnailAutoPickTexture" debug setting (FALSE by default since still glitchy) to allow, when changing the thumbnail texture for an inventory one, auto-selecting any texture in the folder (or parent folder for an item thumbnail) as a candidate in the picker (sadly, there is a glitch which forces you to manually click on that selected texture item in the picker before modifying or confirming your choice).
• Added support for highlighting and tool tips in the script editor for the new GLTF and render materials related LSL functions and constants.
• Updated FMOD Studio to v2.02.19.
• Windows only: added an "USE_OLD_CEF" option (in indra/cmake/00-BuildOptions.cmake) to allow building the viewer against the old (and vulnerable) CEF91-based Dullahan web plugin, for Windows 7/8.x users (who will nonetheless need at least a Win10+ VM to build the viewer with, since VS2022 cannot run under anything older).
• Code cleanup, removal of dead code and minor optimizations.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.14 (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 v1.30.2.36, plus:

• Now consider PBR materials normal and emissive maps as "ALM" ones, allowing to apply a discard bias penalty (like for legacy materials normal and specular maps) to them when the texture memory is under pressure.
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a fix to "overriding to alpha mode blend not working".
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a fix to "revert of materials not working properly in some cases".
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a fix to "blank no-copy materials are not moved into scripted objects".

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 v1.30.2.38 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed a bug that caused super-slow textures creation by the main thread (shared GL threads unaffected) on weak hardware. See this message for details.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix for a "crash inside unpackBinaryData()", that could potentially be seen on receiving a corrupted UDP message.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix for a potential "crash clearing LLEventPumps".
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix for the bad camera axis sometimes seen after a TP to home.
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer the possibility to set GL sub-images line by line instead as whole in a single glTexSubImage2D() call: this is supposed to speed up GL image creations from the main thread (it does not apply to the shared GL threads), but I could not confirm this on modern (NVIDIA) hardware, and it seems detrimental on weak hardware. Made it an option (disabled by default), controlled by a new "RenderGLSetSubImagePerLine" debug setting (may be toggled on the fly). People with an AMD GPU and not using the "OpenGL worker threads" may want to give it a try...
• Re-enabled a line that got removed (likely by mistake) in LL's PBR viewer to preserve scale on uploaded mesh.
• Fixed the lower bound for the draw distance spinner in the "Graphics" preferences tab to accept 32m.
• Synced parallel_hashmap with latest upstream changes.
• Windows only: recompiled liblua with the latest upstream bug fixes applied, and updated meshoptimizer to 0.20 (this was actually ready for v1.30.2.37, but the was no Windows release for the latter).
• Minor code cleanup and optimizations.

Cool VL Viewer v1.31.0.16 (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 v1.30.2.38, plus:

• Backported from LL's PBR viewer "fix material set from script not updating when the GLTF material has non-default texture transforms".
• Backported from LL's PBR viewer a fix to "local textures not updating on PBR Materials" (note: the live material editor is still broken with regard to local textures: better creating a new inventory material using for it the now working local textures support, and applying that inventory material to the face(s) you want to test before uploading the textures).
• Minor code cleanup.

Enjoy !

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

Since LL pushed their PBR RC viewer to the release status (despite the fact it is still full of rendering glitches and issues), the former v1.31.0 experimental branch of the Cool VL Viewer becomes today the new v1.32.0 stable branch, deprecating as well the v1.30.2 former stable branch. But fear not: v1.32.0 is now just as stable as the previous stable branch, and does not remove any feature seen in the latter (i.e. in excess of PBR, you still can render with the EE renderer, which is the default renderer still).

All users should upgrade.


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.0 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Worked around an AISv3 fetching bug occurring when trying to fetch an individual item without knowing its parent folder, and which caused offered items from other residents to fail appearing in the inventory. See this thread for details.
• Fixed a bug in my backport of AISv3's fetching (too deep a depth for some folders fetching).
• Made it so that sim event polls replies are processed only at the right times (together with idle network tasks processing, or after voluntarily yielding to coroutines during the frame rate limiting process), and not as soon as the main coroutine yields, which might cause rendering issues (note that this condition was detected by LL but their own implementation of the poll replies postponing is totally bogus and causes crashes, so I re-designed and reimplemented it from scratch).
• Backported from LL's viewer a fix for GLTF material overrides to default value not always working.
• Backported from LL's viewer the possibility to disable HDR tone mapping during snapshots: the toggle is available (when in PBR rendering mode) as a new "No post-processing for snapshots" entry in the "Advanced" menu.
• Added syntax highlighting and tool tips support in the script editor for the new SKY_REFLECTION_PROBE_AMBIANCE, CHANGED_RENDER_MATERIAL and PRIM_REFLECTION_* LSL constants.
• Minor code cleanup.

Enjoy !

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


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.1 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Backported from LL's release viewer and from LL's DRTVWR-596 maintenance branch all the changes made to PBR shaders. This sadly breaks shadows (see BUG-234564), but I managed to tweak debug settings to (partly) revive them, and I could not keep the status quo anyway, since other fixes are being introduced in DRTVWR-596 (e.g. water and underwater related rendering fixes) and must be backported.
• Backported from LL's DRTVWR-596 maintenance branch "fix for box probes sometimes glitching out at the corners".
• Made it so that HUDs are no more clickable when hidden (via "Show HUD attachments" un-ticking). See this thread for details.
• Added a new MoveToInventoryFolder() Lua function. See the updated Lua manual for details.
• On successful TP, now remove keyboard focus from any focused floater/panel, to allow moving around immediately with keyboard keys after TPs.
• Windows only: when no external editor is configured by the user, now try and use notepad.exe instead of wordpad.exe, since M$ is removing the latter from new Windows versions...
• Code cleanup, removal of dead code and minor optimizations.

Enjoy !

EDIT: please, see this known bug with the provided fix (shader file).

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

This is a maintenance/bugfix release and a recommended update.


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.2 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed the bug introduced in last release and which caused semi-transparent HUDs to render opaque in PBR mode. See this message for details.
• Modified the PBR water shader so that water bodies look more realistic, with a better color (closer to the EE renderer color) than almost sky blue.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix to bad inventory folders version accounting, that could cause an apparent failure to rename folders until relog.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer a fix to potential crashes related with dead (derezzed) animesh objects.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer the addition to the "PBR materials" toggle entry in the "Advanced" -> "Rendering" -> "Types" menu.
• Backported from LL's DRTVWR-596 viewer its various fixes to the PBR shaders and render pipeline.
• Added a way to inform the user about the shaders recompilation (which cannot be done via a standard notification, since rendering is suspended while it happens): the viewer window title now changes with "Compiling shaders" appended during this process.
• Added highlighting and tool tips support in the script editor for the new LSL llGetInventoryDesc(), llIsFriend(), llListFindListNext() and llRezObjectWithParams() functions, and REZ_* constants.
• Updated the ca-bundle.crt certificates file to LL's latest one.
• Synced parallel_hashmap with latest upstream changes.
• Updated FMOD Studio to v2.02.20.
• Updated the boost libraries to v1.84 and rebuilt colladadom against them.
• Modified the CEF plugin code to properly work with newest CEF 120 releases (which require a separate cache directory for each running instance), while preserving shared cookies between CEF sessions and instances. Note however that the new cache scheme/constraint prevents from reusing an old cache in new CEF sessions (meaning more network traffic). Note: Windows viewer builds are still making use of LL's CEF 118 build, so no change will be seen with them for now.
• Code cleanup and minor optimizations.

Enjoy !

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

This is an emergency release and all users of v1.32.0.2 should update.


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.3 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Reverted the water-related changes to the PBR shaders and render pipeline, since they broke the preview avatar code (causing a black screen when customizing appearance, or uploading a texture or an animation). See this thread for details.
• Updated tinygltf to v2.8.19.

Enjoy !

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


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.4 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Implemented a hack to use the base color texture of faces with a GLTF material instead of the diffuse texture when not in PBR rendering mode. See this message for details. Three toggles have been added in the "Advanced" -> "Rendering" -> "Deferred rendering" menu to switch between the three options: "Always use diffuse texture" (i.e. what other non-PBR viewers can see), "Use base color for missing diffuse" (i.e. use base color when the object creator did not provide a proper diffuse texture fallback: this is the default option) and "Always use base color" (ditto). Note that this hack is automatically disabled for faces being edited (i.e. selected faces when the Build/Edit floater is showing), and that it won't apply at all for faces with a media texture applied (because the hack reuses the trick used for replacing the diffuse texture with the media texture).
• Improved the CTRL ALT SHIFT G feature, to also dump GLTF materials colors/factors.
• Added a CTRL ALT P keyboard shortcut for toggling the PBR rendering mode.
• Added a new "Pick unselectable in edit mode" entry to the "Tools" menu (enabled by default), to allow temporarily disabling (this is a non-persistent setting) the selection of unselectable objects (i.e. objects with "Ignore object" touch action or reflection probes) when the Build/Edit floater is showing.
• Improved the media plugins shutdown code on viewer exit so to ensure CEF can cleanly shut down.
• Backported from LL's maintenance viewer "ignore pelvis fixup when sitting in mouse-look".
• Backported from Alchemy viewer (Rye Mutt's code) "fix GLTF upload failing to strip opaque alpha channels".
• Backported from Alchemy viewer collada's build (Rye Mutt's code) "fix parsing error for large mesh files".
• 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/bugfix release and all users should update to it.


Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.5 (stable branch):

New in this release:

• Fixed a copy/paste bug introduced in last release and that could cause alpha rendering issues with legacy materials.
• Do not "touch" (mark for update/download) any more non-PBR textures (diffuse, legacy materials) on faces with a PBR material when in PBR rendering mode, to avoid seeing them downloaded for nothing.
• Refined the hack to use the base color texture of faces with a GLTF material instead of the diffuse texture when not in PBR rendering mode. See this message for details.
• Changed the Build/Edit floater code to allow setting diffuse and legacy material textures and parameters on a face bearing a GLTF material. Also changed the drag and drop code to allow dropping again a diffuse texture on a face with a GLTF material. There is strictly no reason to forbid such operations, much to the contrary, since such a silly restriction makes creators' task harder to support both legacy material and GLTF ones on their PBR-enabled builds.
• Fixed several bugs in the live GLTF editor. Sadly, live editing (on faces, via the Edit/Build floater) of GLTF materials is still broken elsewhere (this is the last bug in my PBR backport that I need to find and fix).
• Further improved the CTRL ALT SHIFT G feature, to also dump GLTF materials alpha mask cutoff for alpha-masking faces.
• Backported from Alchemy (Rye Mutt's brilliant idea) the splitting of the SSAO setting with a new softening shadow setting, making it possible to soften shadows without needing to enable the (costly and largely useless) SSAO mode. Shadows softening ("RenderShadowSoften" setting) is now enabled by default (SSAO still disabled by default), and a new "Soften shadows" toggle was added to the Advanced -> "Rendering" -> "Deferred rendering" menu.
• Minor code cleanup and optimizations.

Enjoy !