Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, December 3rd, 2023
This summary is generally published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Release viewer: version 7.0.1.6894459864,the glTF / PBR Materials viewer, issued November 17, promoted November 28 – NEW.
Alchemy – GLTF PBR 7.1.1.2251 (Beta build) November 30 (Beta build, but listed here due to the official release of PBR Materials in SL) – download and release notes.
Black Dragon updated to version 5.0 (PBR) on December 2 – release notes.
Firestorm updated to version 6.6.16.70339 (non-PBR) on November 29 – release notes; my overview.
V1-style
Cool VL viewer updated to version 1.32.0.0 (Stable) (PBR) on December 2 – release notes.
On Sunday, December 3rd, 2023, Bay City will once again be hosting their annual Christmas Tree Lighting and fund-raising event. With it comes an opportunity to support Child’s Play Charity, a 501c3 non-profit organisation offering on-line communities such as the Bay City Alliance the ability to help seriously ill children around the globe during their hospital stays via the purchase and donation of games and gaming equipment.
Activities will commence at 13:00 SLT and run through until 16:00 SLT, taking place at the Bay City fairgrounds. On offer will be:
Live entertainment by performers Wolfie Starfire and Essence Bilasimo, and music by DJ GoSpeed Racer.
A skating party around the base of the tree.
The tree lighting itself.
Refreshments and fun.
Funds will be raised via a silent auction that will run through until the close of the event. On offer is an impressive range of items kindly donated by designers and creators from across Second Life, including Madpea, the Genus Project, Javatar Mocha, Buzzbox Munro, Junk Food, Cica Ghost, Shippe & Saille, Plato Novo, Caly Applewhyte, ChristiSart, Dutch Mainsail, and Vicious Hollow. Bids are made via vendor, and should your bid be exceeded by another, your Linden dollars will be automatically refunded. You can, of course, increase your bid if you wish. Items will be awarded to the highest bid when the auction closes.
Bay City Christmas Tree Lighting 2023
In addition, donation kiosks are be provided in the Fairgrounds for those who would like to support Child’s Play without participating in the auction. The 2022 Tree Lighting raised L$15,1576 for the charity, and the organisers are hoping to exceed that this year – and such is the impressive range of items in the auction, I’m pretty sure they will!
About Bay City and the Bay City Alliance
Bay City is a mainland community, developed by Linden Lab™ and home to the Bay City Alliance. The Bay City Alliance was founded in 2008 to promote the Bay City regions of Second Life and provide a venue for Bay City Residents and other interested parties to socialize and network. It is now the largest Bay city group, and home to most Residents of Bay City. To find out more, contact Marianne McCann in-world.
Bay City and the Bay City Alliance and Child’s Play
Bay City and the Bay City Alliance have a long history of fund-raising for Child’s Play, and in 2016, they received special recognition by the charity, being awarded Silver Level sponsor on the Child’s Play’s website.
The following notes were taken from my chat log transcript and audio recording of the December 1st, 2023 Third Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting, together with the video recording of the meeting made by Pantera – my thanks to her as always for making it and allowing me to embed it in these summaries.
Meeting Overview
The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development.
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.
General Viewer Notes:
The promotion of the PBR Materials view marks the second promotion of a viewer built using the Github Actions build page.
It is uncertain whether or not there will be a further viewer promotion in 2023. If there is, the most likely candidate would by the Emojis viewer, although at the time of writing, this had had to go through the Github build process (which it naturally will when merged with the release viewer code-base).
PBR Materials was shipped with a number of known bugs and issues, none of the former of which were considered to be significant enough to block the release, whilst some of the latter required further investigation for repros, etc., and the Lab decided to release whilst investigating.
This means a maintenance update is already in progress which will continue additional fixes, and this will also be used to catch issues and bugs reported post-release.
One of the post-release bugs uncovered is that – for reasons unknown – disabling transparent water impacts animation playback; see: BUG-234759.
Another issue revealed by PBR is that the viewer draws Linden Water twice. (not the entire scene, an issue previously remedied, just Linden Water), and this is being corrected.
The request is for bug and issues to keep being reported, simply because PBR Materials now has far more eyes on it, and so things that may have been missed due to the limited number of eyes on things in testing / the multiplicity of ways people use SL, means that some edge-cases, etc., may have been missed.
A question was asked if LL had considered off the exposure adjustments (adjusted within a set range through the Sky settings) to prevent the viewer from rendering some scenes excessively bright.
The response to this was that the exposure is tied to tone-mapping and a controlled HDR range, as such LL would rather users adjust to designing environments in accordance with the new (glTF-defined) tone mapping, then introducing more granular options into the viewer (such as which tone mapper to use).
[Video: 14:58-15:55] However, it was also noted that if TPVs wish to provide their own tone mapping options, this would not be seen as violating the so-called “shared user experience”, as they are regarded as post-processing effects (then don’t actually physically manipulate how objects appear in-world) and they are subjective in how they are seen by individual users.
Part of this future work will be to look at how automatic LODs for mesh objects are produced, and whether to continue to support them through the uploader (which is limited in its abilities) or to direct content creators to other solutions for generating LODs prior to upload (e.g. via Simplygon and Blender).
This conversation also encompasses various limitations common to SL which glTF might alter / improve upon as it is further adopted (such as meshes currently being limited to eight faces due to the platform’s data entry model regarding meshes as prims), plus the potential impacts of changes. Please refer to the video for specifics on this discussion.
One issue that is proving hard to consistence repro is that of frequent slow-downs with NVIDIA GL drivers which can result in significant FPS loss in the viewer – see: BUG-234706 for more details.
At the time of writing, both LL’s QA and others are trying to consistently repro the problem, however, so of the thinking is is related to a mix of CPU core and GL optimisations running on the host system.
The concern here is that where it has been repro’d, it has been with systems using 8-core CPUs and NIVIDIA GPUs (although what the correlation between the two might be in terms of a cause for the problem, is unclear), which could impact a fair percentage of SL users if it proves to be a widespread issue (particularly if it is unresolved when Firestorm makes a PBR release).
Those who feel they are experiencing a performance loss over time logged-in which reflects the notes presented in the bug report, and who can dig down into their system data for possible causes, are asked to add relevant comments to the Jira.
Some of these may pre-exist PBR or be related to the PBR release:
Objects not rendering at log-in due to the inventory frame load locking main processing with the result that messages to the viewer about some in-world objects are simply dropped, and they are never rendered other than via a re-log (or TP out / back?). LL has a fix for this in progress, but as it causes some additional issues, not ETA on when it might be deployed.
There is an issue with mesh objects in particular not rendering (see BUG-234700 “[GLTF] Mesh objects randomly not rezzing properly at login”), but it is currently unclear if this is related to the above issue or the result of something else.
BUG-234616 “[PBR] Lights outside of camera frustrum are not rendered until within camera frustrum” – has been accepted by LL, but is still an open issue under investigation.
General Notes
[Video: 13:18-13:54] The “Fall Colours” simulator update (currently on the BlueSteel and Preflight RC channels) has a bug related to collision sounds (see: BUG-234757 “Repetitive Collision Sound?” and this forum thread) which is under investigation. It was also noted that Fall Colours is liable to be the last simulator update for 2023.
[Video 17:24-25:15] The question was asked if LL would accept either the entire RLVa API (Restrained Life Viewer alternative, as maintained by Kitty Barnett and used by several third-party viewer and analogous to RLV) or a subset thereof.
RLV/a have been shown to have a wide range of uses outside of their original intent, some of which have, to a degree been matched / had some level of equivalence via things like Experience Keys in the viewer, while others still remain useful for multiple applications – such as the use of either to manage wardrobe / outfit systems, for example).
The short response to this via Runitai and Vir Linden was “probably”, as LL are aware that the widespread use of RLV/a features does create something of a schism between TPVs and the official viewer. As such, a pull request of code / the opportunity to discuss has been offered.
This led to a wider conversation on how RLV/a works and just what form of open-source platform SL should be in terms of extensibility / code contributions – please refer to the video for more.
[Video 33:41-34:20] Linden Lab Office Closure for Holidays: Linden Lab will be closed other than for emergency coverage from end of business on December 22nd through until start of business on January 2nd, 2024.
This means that a No Change window for simulator and official viewer releases will be in place from Monday, December 18th, 2023.
There is a project in development for upping the simulator and viewer to HTTP/2 (although the viewer will require a Curl update in order to handle it).
Requests have been made to extend this work to encompass the Asset Store, which internally at the Lab is seen as a nice to have / good to have, but no actual work in that direction in currently in-hand.
[Video: 48:00-End] General discussion on better support for the viewer on Linux, segueing into a discussion of possibly adopting voice options other than Vivox, and what needs to be improved within voice in general.
Next Meeting
Currently slated for 13:00 SLT, Friday December 22nd, 2023, at the Hippotropolis Theatre, but may move to Friday January 5th, 2024. Check the SL Public Calendar to confirm.
† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.
NovaOwl Gallery: Lisa Dartmouth – See Through My Eyes, December 2023
Currently open (for a while longer at least, having formally opened in mid-November!) at the ground level gallery NovaOwl, operated and curated by ULi Jansma, Ceakay Ballyhoo & Owl Dragonash, is a small exhibition of Second Life photographic art by Lisa Dartmouth entitled See Through My Eyes.
The collection presents a baker’s dozen of images Lisa has put together, representing twelve of the places she has visited during her journeys through Second Life. For those – like myself – who are fellow travellers / explorers, these are places instantly recognisable by name, being some of the most enduring and photogenic spots in-world, popular for both their appearance and the fact that those responsible for them remain every willing to re-invent them and provide new visions and imaginings to be explored and appreciated, or for bring the beauty of the physical world to SL.
NovaOwl Gallery: Lisa Dartmouth – See Through My Eyes, December 2023
Thus, among this selection we can find Panjin with it brilliant “ref beach” growths of Suaeda salsa (see here for more), Whimberley, Grauland, Bella’s Lullaby, 80 Days (in its Wild West iteration, Wind River) and Elvion (featured twice in the exhibition), all of which have appeared in these pages multiple times over the years, thus imbuing for me, a real sense of attachment / recognition with Lisa’s work.
The displayed images are beautifully framed and cropped, with a lightness of post-processing to allow the natural beauty of the regions they represent to show through. Each one is also gently personalised by Lisa through the appearance of her avatar making her way through each location, generally (but not exclusively) on horseback. Further depth of touch is given to several of the images through the inclusion of 3D elements which help extend their presence into the gallery: a grass-tufted dune with feeding Avocets flowing outwards from the sandy expanse of Arum; a growth of yellow nanohana watched over by a scarecrow drawing the eye to the fields of rapeseed at Whimberley; a tall lighthouse sitting between coastal shots of Bella’s Lullaby and Fall @ Florence, and so on.
NovaOwl Gallery: Lisa Dartmouth – See Through My Eyes, December 2023
All of which makes See Through My Eyes both a personal personal retrospective by the artists and a veritable catalogue of reasons why exploring Second life can be so rewarding for the virtual traveller.
Leloo’s Jingle Bells Trails, November 2023 – click any image for full size
LeLooUlf is back with another setting for the end-of-year holiday season, Leloo’s Jingle Bells Trails. This delightful sky platform setting is probably best described using LeLoo’s own words:
An enchanting outdoor Holiday Season festival that promises a magical experience for all! Bring your skates and get ready to glide around the frozen pond using the skating system for singles and couples. You can also skate along the beautiful icy paths with the soft glow of twinkling lights. Then take a well-deserved break and visit the outdoor café for some hot cocoa or a cup of mulled wine … Everyone is Welcome to this PG event!
– Jingle Bells Trails
Leloo’s Jingle Bells Trails, November 2023
This is a place that is unabashed in its celebration of the modern spirit of Christmas; there’s a Christmas market, ice skating, snow, reindeer, snowmen, decorated trees, baubles, a mistletoe kissing booth, hot chocolate – the list goes on.
Two paths lead away from the landing point. One is signposted the Skating Path, and the reason becomes clear as to why after travelling along it for a short distance visitors will find it turns to ice and a skate giver and sign where it does – allowing them to continue along the path on foot or by skating along it, passing under a pair of trestle tunnels with glittering lights as the path meanders onwards to reach a junction.
Leloo’s Jingle Bells Trails, November 2023
Here the main path turns to the right, whilst a short stretch continued onwards into the Playful Pond, where a little skating can be had (if the pond is not too crowded for you!). Passing onwards, however, the main path allows visitors to reach a little chapel which, in keeping with the Christmas theme, has a little nativity scene and a decorated tree within.
From here the way loops back towards the landing point once more, a small junction and a footpath enticing visitors to drop in on the setting’s one house, a cosy little place with a fire in the hearth and goodies to be enjoyed in the kitchen. Meanwhile, running westwards, the skating path once again slips under a couple of light-festooned trestle tunnels, one with another path leading away from it to offer a further little diversion – this to visit the setting’s horses.
Leloo’s Jingle Bells Trails, November 2023
Prior to getting back to the landing point, this arm of the path provides access to the main skating pond (around which it largely loops) where among other things, you can join a slightly odd-looking but fun-filled snowman in a dance (or several!) if the skating doesn’t appeal; and he certainly knows his dances (up to and including David Brent’s spectacularly weird dance from The Office – that’s the original UK version, not the US remake). That said, the skating options displayed under the tree occupying the middle of the pond offer an extensive range of opportunities for having a little icy fun.
Just beyond the entrance to the pond, the icy surface of the path gives way to snow, and that to cobbles and the setting’s café, where hot drinks and suchlike are on offer. From here, it is a short walk back to LeLoo’s little market and the landing point. But there is also much more the see and enjoy as you wander: there are little comic vignettes to cause a smile, polar bears who seem to be making the most of the wintery setting, LeLoo’s art to be enjoyed and lots of little photo opportunities. All of which makes for an engaging visit in preparation for the upcoming holidays.
It has been confirmed that Firestorm 6.6.16.70339 has a bug within the client Animation Override (AO) which is affecting multiple users. Because of this, version 70339 is being withdrawn from the Firestorm download page, and will be replaced once a version with the necessary fixes is available. In the meantime, those affected by the issue (not all Firestorm users necessarily are) should consider rolling back to release 6.6.14 to escape the problems.
On Monday November 27th, 2023 (SLT), the Firestorm team released version 6.6.16.70339 of their viewer. This is another release to bring Firestorm up to parity with the more recent releases from Linden Lab as well as adding some new / improved options from the Firestorm team. It is also important for two additional reasons:
It clears a path for Firestorm to move towards a PBR Materials release in line with the Lab’s move to PBR Materials / reflection probes.
It provides a final 32-bit Windows build of the viewer. Going forward, only the 64-bit Windows version will be built and released. See below for more.
This article is not intended to cover every update / change / improvement within the release. These can be found within the Firestorm 6.6.16. release notes, which also provide full credit details for the changes.
This review focuses primarily on the new features included with Firestorm 6.6.16, together with an overview of its parity with Linden Lab’s official viewer code base and and overviews of various updates, improvements and fixes I believe will be of specific interest to Firestorm users in general.
Finally, I have not had time to personally try this release to any great extent, so am not offering any personal feedback on it.
Please note this release is not a Firestorm PBR release. PBR support will be in the next update.
Only download Firestorm from the Firestorm website. Do not utilise and other third-party site purporting to offer the Firestorm viewer, and remember Firestorm will never ask for log-in credentials in order to download a release version of their viewer.
There is no need to perform a clean install with this release if you do not wish to.
Do, however, make sure you back-up all your settings safely so you can restore them after installing 6.6.16.
Version Blocking
As per the Firestorm’s teams standard practice of only supporting 3 active versions of the viewer at any time, note that version 6.6.3 will be blocked from accessing Second Life three weeks from the date of version 6.6.16’s release.
End of 32-Bit Windows Builds
Linden Lab has recently moved their automated viewer build process to Github Actions (GHA) – see here for more. The positive side of this is that Firestorm is particularly well-placed to leverage this change, reducing their own overhead in maintaining a build process whilst also producing more frequent updates. The negative side, however, is that in making this move, Linden Lab removed all of the code libraries required for building a 32-bit Windows version of the viewer.
This means Firestorm 6.6.16 will be the last Firestorm release to support Windows 32-bit, bringing the windows version into line with the Linux and Mac versions
A Note on Inventory Updates
This viewer includes numerous Inventory updates (see below), some of which see changes to the way in which communications between the inventory service and the viewer re managed. Whilst these changes fix a long-standing bug wherein some deleted items became orphaned from the inventory folders and thus invisible, they also mean that these “orphaned” items will now be restored to your Lost and Found folder. So you might want to check Lost and Found and ensure everything in it is for deletion – or move any returned treasures elsewhere before clearing it.
As this re-creation of old items in Lost and Found can occur randomly, JIRA has been raised with the Lab – see BUG-234508.
Linden Lab Updates
Firestorm 6.6.16.70339 is fully merged up to the following recent Linden Lab viewer releases:
Core features – Inventory item preview image; single folder inventory view. See below for a short overview.
Updated Object Profiles: right clicking an inventory item → Properties will display an update profile, which includes the ability to view an associated thumbnail (and create one if there is not one available).
Firestorm users can switch back to the old object profile via Preferences → User Interface → Interface Windows → Use Legacy Object Properties
Notes:
When using the inventory extensions for the first time, the pop-up shown on the right will be displayed.
This version of Firestorm includes and upstream fix from that Lab to suppress false reports of packet loss and log spam noise when visiting GLTF enabled regions on a non-PBR-enabled viewer. See BUG-234550.
Increased limits to the number of Estate Managers and Ban list entries in Estates.
A move to VLC for improved parcel audio playback (streaming audio).
New option: Show Ban Lines On Collision (World → Show) when enabled, will only show ban lines around parcels will only be visible on collision, rather than whenever they are within draw distance.
Inventory Extensions Summary
The Inventory Extension viewer introduced two new features intended to make browsing the contents of your inventory easier. These comprise:
Inventory Item Preview – the ability to include thumbnail images (either your own or supplied by the item’s creator) of items within inventory (clothing, body parts, accessories, attachments). These images are persistently linked to the item / folder (unless intentionally deleted or changed) and displayed whenever the mouse pointer is hovered over the related element.
Single Folder view: the ability to see the contents of a single inventory folder in its own window.
The Item Preview capability comprises two parts:
The ability to view the included thumbnail images on on mouse-over, as noted above.
A dedicated tool for creating thumbnail images, as shown below, right
Note that thumbnails can also be created via an object’s Properties floater.
Elements from the Inventory Extensions capabilities – view and generating thumbnail images
The Single Folder View allows users to open an Inventory folder within a floater of its own, allowing the contents to be viewed without distraction, with them displayed in in one of three ways:
Gallery view – displaying only the thumbnails of those items in the folder for which thumbnails have been created.
List View – all of the folder’s contents, displayed much as they are seen within the open folder in Inventory.
Combination View – those items with an associated thumbnail will have that thumbnail displayed, those which do not will be listed.
Any folder in Inventory can be opened in this manner by right-clicking on it and selecting Open In New Window from the Inventory Context Menu. Further, the floater displaying the open folder includes:
Search (including filtering options) and navigation controls at the top of the floater.
The same tools for accessing additional Inventory management options at the bottom of the floater as those found in the main Inventory panel, together with and additional trash can icon to which items can be dragged-and-dropped to move them to Trash (or can be clicked on when one or more items are selected to move all of them to Trash).
The Single Folder View (right) as supplied by Linden Lab and incorporated in Firestorm 6.6.16, and the menu option used to access it. Note the floater here is set to display in the combined view, in this case showing the thumbnail image supplied by the item’s creator
Important note: Firestorm has had a “Show in new window” option offering similar (but with lesser functionality). This option remains in the viewer for the present, but may be removed in the future. Unfortunately, the Context Menu option for accessing it is displayed directly above the new Open In New Window option (see image above), and the two should not be confused.
The ability to page back and forth between visited Inventory folders in a manner akin to the page back / forward buttons in a browser, and to move back up the folder tree via a similar button. These can all be found in the top left of Inventory floaters.
Inventory Settings
Firestorm 6.6.16 adds a new option called Inventory Settings to the gear icon in the lower-left corner of all Inventory floaters. When clicked, it will display a floater defining how the Inventory view button (again found at the bottom of Inventory floaters, to the left of the Elements count) and how the Show in Inventory option (right-click on an attachment you are wearing and select from menu) and the Find Original option Inventory option (used with inventory links) all behave.
See the images below for both the menu option and the floater it displays with its options.
The Inventory Settings option and floater. Use the radio buttons to set the options in the latter
Preferences
New option for sorting in “Attach to” menus: Preferences → Firestorm → Build 2 → Sort Attachment Spots in “Attach to” Menus Alphabetically (Requires Restart).
When enabled, attachment spots are sorted alphabetically after a restart.
When disabled, attachment sports are ordered according to the hierarchy for alpha priority.
Menus: the Help → Report Problem now redirects to an informational / instructional page on obtaining help from both the Firestorm team and Linden Lab, as shown below.
The new Firestorm Help informational page
Rendering
The issues with motion blur / ghosting after enabling / disabling Shadows has been fixed. This also fixes the related bug that caused saved snapshots to be too dark when Shadows were disabled if Ambient Occlusion was disabled. See: BUG-234275, BUG-234461 and FIRE-33151.
Other Updates of Note
Firestorm 6.6.16 includes numerous bug fixes and improvements – notably with viewer skinning in light of the new Inventory Extensions UI elements, and numerous small improvements to UI element layouts. Please refer to the release notes for details.
Library Updates
FMOD Studio updated to version 2.02.18 – Release Notes.
KDU updated to version 8.3.
Linux Updates
CURL changes: as the use of CURLINFO_SIZE_DOWNLOAD and CURLINFO_SPEED_DOWNLOAD has been deprecated since Curl version 7.55 (2017), the respective replacements are CURLINFO_SIZE_DOWNLOAD_T (documentation here) and CURLINFO_SPEED_DOWNLOAD_T (documentation here). This change will correct the deprecation warnings when compiling with newer versions of curl on Linux.
Library Updates:
SDL updated to version 2.28.4.
Curl library updated to version 8.3.0.232750741.
Nghttp2 library updated to version 1.56.0.232750738.
OpenSSL library updated to version 1.1.1w.232750656.
The IME checkbox has been renamed from “Use IME Text Input” to “Enable Full IME Support” per FIRE-32074.
OpenSim Updates
For OpenSim the Estate Ban limit and number of Estate Managers remain at 500 and 15 respectively, and the new Second Life limits of 750 and 20 respectively are ignored. OpenSim developers will need to add server-side support to enable the higher limits on their grids to make use of the increasing in the viewer.
A fix has been implemented for a potential region crossing crash.
General note: OpenSim does not current support the Inventory Extensions features outlined above.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 