Tag: Radegast

Kokua: release 6.4.21 and Radegast 2.34

Posted on by Inara Pey

Kokua released version 6.4.21 of their viewer on Saturday, July 24th, bring it up to parity with the official viewer version 6.4.21 (formerly the Fernet RC viewer, version  6.4.21.561414), and which also sees a further porting of options from Firestorm, together with a series of updates and fixes implemented by the Kokua team.

As always, all of the information relating to updates and fixes can be found in the official release notes; the following notes highlight the more directly user-facing changes.

Lab-Derived Updates

Kokua 6.4.21 includes all Linden Lab viewer updates through to the Fernet release. Most notably these include a range of improvements to Voice handling, including changing to default Voice settings in the viewer intended to help prevent issues of drop-out when talking, and which have reportedly all but eliminated drop-outs for those using the new settings. Additionally, the VIVOX VAD options have been exposed via Debug Settings, and detailed notes on these can be found in the official viewer release notes.

Preferences → Graphics Redesign

Kokua 6.4.21 sees an overhaul of Preferences → Graphics that to eliminate the Advanced panel and instead incorporate its content on three new tabs within the Graphics panel: General/Avatar, Hardware, Level of Detail / Shaders.

In addition, one of the never tab ports the dynamic sizing of texture memory developed by Ansariel Hiller for Firestorm.. More on this below.

The updated Preferences → Graphics panel with the new tab-style layout

The additional tabs provide a logical and clear-cut breakdown of options:

  • The General/Avatar tab presents the options perhaps used most frequently by the majority of users: Draw Distance, avatar complexity / number of imposter avatars, post-process, detail and physics quality settings.
  • The Level of Detail/Shaders tab provides access to the controls for the viewer shaders, and general rendering quality sliders (terrain, trees, objects, etc.).

The remaining tab, Hardware, is the tab that incorporates the dynamic texture memory sizing option. The idea with this is that it allows the viewer to use more of the available graphics memory whilst still reserving space for other uses (subject to the overall dedicated graphics memory / system memory that is available – you obviously cannot use more memory than your system actually has!).

The Preferences Graphics tab, showing the new (to Kokua) dynamic texture memory options (from Firestorm)

KKA-878 Add Option to Always Pop-up Chat/IM toasts

This is a fix for a noticeable issue with how Kokua handles chat notifications.

Until now, the default pop-up / Toast behaviour is as toasts show unless the local chat panel is visible and not overlaid by another floater. This is counter-intuitive in that the purpose of pop-ups / Toasts are designed to inform because floaters / panels may be obscured.

The new option to Always Pop-up the message, which is common to all of the drop-down lists on the Chat → Notifications tab in Preferences

BugSplat Updates

This release also includes a number of fixes for Kokua crashing whilst attempting to send information to the BugSplat reporting tool, before sufficient information can obtained to help pin down what might have been happening leading up to the crash, rather than just reporting where a crash happened. Please refer to the release notes for more on this.

Radegast 2.34

Radegast, the lightweight client for Second Life and OpenSim updated to version 2.34 on July 26th.

The majority of the updates included in the release are “under the hood” changes, specifically designed to:

  • Paving the way for future UI changes.
  • Providing better non-Windows platform and mobile support.

However, there have been improvements  to image processing, with JPEG2000 decoding and encoding times now improved.

Radegast JPEG2000 decoding and encoding times should help with elements of in-world rendering

As noted in the release notes, these improvements also require the installed version of Radegast to be specific to your computer’s architecture (e.g. the x64 version on Windows 64-bit system).

Also note that the 3D world rendering can give variable results (as it always has), depending on aspects of the system on which Radegast is being run, etc. While it has been a while since I last used the client in anger, the 3D rendering appeared to be a lot smoother than I remember, although it still includes issues in rendering mesh clothing correctly rigged to the avatar, and also demonstrated a familiar issue of failing to render textures on all prim faces.

For the full list of updates and fixes, please refer to the official 2.34 release notes.

Given it has now been several years since I’ve reviewed Radegast in-depth (it’s actually been a decade since my first review, and just a month shy of that since me first review of the client’s rendering capabilities), I will endeavour to offer a complete refresh in the future.

Links

Radegast 2.24

Posted on by Inara Pey
Radegast Rebranded

Cinder Roxley continues with her promise to maintain and improve the Radegast lightweight client for Second Life and OpenSim, and on July 15th she released version 2.24, which sees a range of improvements, both visible and under-the-hood.

In terms of user-visible changes, Radegast2.24 allows:

  • Triggering gestures directly from nearby chat, just as you would from any viewer (e.g. by whatever trigger is set for the gesture – such as “/hey”).
  • The wearing of multiple system layers (multiple pants, shirt, jacket, tattoo, layers), again as has been the case with the viewer for the last several years.
  • An audible “pop” sound when blue notifications open, to assist the visually impaired when notifications are received.

Under the hood are even more changes, with Cinder continuing to refactor and improve the code – notable focusing on the plug-ins manager, and a new tarball for Linux installation. In the case of the latter, Cinder notes you need to have a recent (4.6.x or later) version of mono installed, together with the latest patch set.

The tarball could potentially be used with Mac OSX, although Cinder also states, “it will run if you put a lot of effort into configuring Mono and Xquartz to properly handle WinForms … but WinForms is poorly supported on MacOS.” She goes on to say she’s still working on getting the client more readily installable on Mac OSX.

The Linux installation has not be thoroughly tested, so if you are a Linux user and would like to help Cinder, please download and install 2.24, and record any issues you encounter on the new Radegast issue tracker.

If you are a coder / developer, and would like to assist in maintaining Radegast, please contact Cinder Roxley.

Related Links

Radegast – new website and updates

Posted on by Inara Pey
Radegast Rebranded

Radegast, the third-party Second Life / OpenSim client which has proven to be especially popular with those on low-end systems and / or those with visual impairments, now has a new home, and recently underwent a new update. As I’ve missed the last couple of cycles with this client, the following is intended to be a quick overview of its status and a brief look at the updates which have been made since my last review.

New Home

Radegast now has a new web presence, where details of updates are blogged, and which will see things like the wiki and user guide move across to it in due course.

As there is no means to access the “old” Radegast site, this remains available for legacy purposes.

The client itself, as I noted towards the end of 2016, is now being maintained by Cinder Roxley, who would welcome any support that can be offered in helping to maintain and develop Radegast and the website.Those interested in doing so code-wise, can find the source code, build instructions, and examples at https://bitbucket.org/cinderblocks/radegast.

In her first blog post on the site, Cinder also provides a brief summary of things:

So far, any updates have been Windows-based. This has allowed me to roll with the punches and familiarize myself with the codebase without getting mono too much in the mix. The roadmap for other platforms is as follows:

  1. Update LibreMetaverse to be compliant with .NET Core
  2. Update Radegast to be compliant with .NET Core
  3. Begin packaging .deb releases for Linux
  4. Begin packaging installers for MacOS
  5. Bring speech support to Linux and MacOS

Updates

There have been two updates to Radegast since my last review of the client (which essentially laid-out the updates Cinder had made to restore Voice capabilities reliably after Beq Janus provided a workaround for issues being experienced as a result of Radegast no longer being maintained as a result of Latif Khalifa’s sad passing).

The first of these updates, which saw Radegast increment to version 2.21, was released on February 12, 2017, and comprised:

  • RLV updates
  • Second Life Enhanced Skeleton Support (Project Bento)
  • Branding changes
  • Updates to
    • FMODStudio 1.08
    • SLVoice files
  • Swap of base system to LibreMetaverse
  • Many bug fixes.

Version 2.22, release on May 17th, 2017, comprises:

  • Updates to:
    • OpenTK 3.0.0-pre nuget
    • VS2017 .NET 4.5
    • LibreMetaverse 1.4.40
  • New build system
  • Fix Give Inventory menu item for screen readers
  • Many bug fixes

General Notes

An important note to remember with Radegast is that while it has a 3D scene rendering capability, allowing you to see the world around you, it is very experimental, therefore, the degree of success you may get with rendering things might be variable. In testing the client, I found Radegast had a hard time trying to render rigged mesh body parts, making it impossible to visually confirm the Bento support. However you mileage may vary.

Certainly, the fact that the 3D scene renderer is experimental and may hiccup shouldn’t put those who need / prefer Radegast off (I sincerely doubt it ever would). The bottom line is that with or without the rendering capability, Radegast is a superb lightweight client, and both the 2.21 and 2.22 updates are ensuring it keeps abreast of updates to the “full” viewer, and remains a useful tool for those who rely on it.

Links

with thanks to John Brianna for the note on the new Radegest website.

Radegast set to continue for Second Life and OpenSim

Posted on by Inara Pey
Radegast client is the leading lightweight client for many users with disabilities
Radegast client is the leading lightweight client for many users with disabilities

Thanks to an article by Beq Janus and news passed to me by Whirly Fizzle, this blog was recently able to cover the issues of Voice installation failures in the Radegast lightweight client, and the work put into rectifying the problems.

In short, it was discovered that Radegast would no longer install the SL Voice package due to the location the installer was pointing to being a) not provided by Linden Lab; b) no longer valid. Shortly after this was discovered, Beq found a temporary workaround to get things going using the Radegast version of the SL Voice package,  and Whirly found a means to manually get Radegast to work with the current SL Voice package from Linden Lab.

In response to a plea from Beq for developers to consider helping to provide a more robust solution, Cinder Roxley stepped in, and in short order had Radegast’s installer updated to work with the current SL Voice package.

Cinder has now confirmed she hopes to continue maintaining working on Radegast.

“It would just be a shame to see Radegast become obsolete considering how useful it is, especially in terms of accessibility.” she told me, after I heard confirmation she’d be continuing the work. “Right now, Voice is updated, and Bento is now in. I still need to do AIS v3 [inventory handling].”

Given that the current website for Radegast can no longer be accessed for updates, Cinder is working on a new site as well, although as she notes, bringing everything together will take time and energy.

“I already have a full plate with work and life and Alchemy,” she said, “So anyone else who wants to help out is more than welcome to.”

There’s no immediate time line for a further Radegast update, but knowing the work is continuing is likely to come as good news to a lot of people – and if other developers are interested in helping out, please contact Cinder in-world.

In the meantime, thanks to Cinder for taking up the challenge.

Radegast now up-to-date with SL Voice

Posted on by Inara Pey
Radegast client is the leading lightweight client for many users with disabilities
Radegast client is the leading lightweight client for many users with disabilities

Earlier in November 2016, I invited Beq Janus to write about recent issues which have come to light for people trying to use SL Voice with the Radegast client. In short, it was recently noticed that Radegast would no longer install SL Voice on a new or clean (for those who had previously used it) installation. The problem lay with the Voice package being used no longer being available, compounded by the fact that since the sad passing of Radegast’s developer, Latif Khalifa, no-one is actively maintaining the client.

At the end of the article, Beq put out a plea for someone with the necessary coding expertise to consider stepping forward, and – if not take over maintenance of Radegast – at least update the installer to ensure it can use the correct Voice package going forward.

Well, that plea has been answered.

Cinder Roxley, a TPV developer and open-source contributor to Linden Lab, has stepped forward and updated Radegast to work with the current SL Voice, and provider a new installer package.  The links are as follows:

Many thanks to Cinders for responding to the plea and updating Radegast like this.

Radegast: recovering Voice capabilities

Posted on by beqjanus
Gentle Heron, second from the right encountered a Radegast Voice installation during the recording of a Designing Worlds special. Credit: Beq Janus
Gentle Heron, second from the right encountered a Radegast Voice installation during the recording of a Designing Worlds special. Credit: Beq Janus

Update, November 30th: Cinder Roxley has updated the Radegast installer to work with the most recent SLVoice package. See her comments here and here (following this article). There is also a separate blog post on her work, for easier future linking.

It was recently discovered that the Radegast client was no longer installing the SLVoice extensions with a new / clean installation. On hearing of the problem, Beq Janus and Whirly Fizzle decided to investigate, and thanks to their work, we now two workaround solutions. As they had put the effort into sorting things out, I asked them if either would like to write about the issue and the solution, and Beq, with Whirly’s blessing, agreed to do so.

by Beq Janus

A few days ago when I was invited to reprise my role as a videographer for a special episode of Designing Worlds on the Future of Second Life, which will air in early December. The panel for the discussion included Gentle Heron of Virtual Ability Inc, the group who work to enable access to virtual worlds for those who, through disability or illness are unable to make ready use of regular viewers.

During the show, Gentle urged Linden Lab and us all to look for ways to make Virtual Worlds more accessible, remarking, somewhat fatefully, that many of her communities are limited to a single, troubled viewer, Radegast.

A subject of reviews in this blog, Radegast is a lightweight, extensible client which has been the ideal foundation for the disabled communities to build upon. It boasts an impressive set of speech to text and text to speech integrations and can be integrated with other devices such as braille screen readers. Sadly, Latif Kalifa, Radegast’s creator, passed away earlier this year and despite the code being open source, no-one has yet stepped forward to maintain it at a time when the Lab viewer is moving ahead in leaps and bounds, with the risk that non-maintained viewers and client might lose functionality.

Radegast client is the leading lightweight client for many users with disabilities
Radegast client is the leading lightweight client for many virtual world users with disabilities

As if to underline this, Gentle fell silent towards the end of the show, as she was dealing with a number of users who were reporting they were unable to use Voice with Radegast as it was failing to install the all important SLVoice extensions. While I am unfamiliar with Radegast, I offered to try looking into it for Gentle.

SLVoice is a pre-built binary package supplied by Vivox and distributed by Linden Lab. During the summer, it had been upgraded to address some security concerns and so it seemed likely to me that Gentle’s problem might be that the older SLVoice package had been deprecated and removed from the download server. Sure enough, a quick check on the package URL resulted in  the dreaded 404 not found error. I sent an email to Oz and Patch Linden asking them to confirm whether older versions of SLVoice had been moved.

The next day Oz confirmed that all old SLVoice packages were still available and nothing had changed. Whirly Fizzle, the powerhouse behind Firestorm QA, leapt into action: she cracked open the installer and discovered the URL actually pointed to a separately hosted Voice package which was no longer available, causing the Voice installation to silently fail during a new or clean Radegast installation as a result. However, Whirly also found a working back-up archive we could perhaps use. Unfortunately, neither Whirly or I are C# coders and cannot update the installation package directly; so how could we get a Radegast installation to work with the back-up Voice package?

I hit on the idea of first installing the backup package that Whirly had discovered, and then running the standard Radegast installer. Success! So, for anyone who is performing a clean / new install of Radegast and needs Voice, I’ve produced a set of instructions – see the link below. There is, however, more.

I mentioned above that Linden Lab had updated the SLVoice packages over the summer to deal with security concerns. Because of this, older versions of SLVoice are to be blocked from connecting to the service, and Radegast would once again be without a Voice option. Knowing this, and never one to leave a job half done, Whirly successfully tested my approach using the most recent SLVoice package available from the Lab, and confirmed it will also work.

This means that providing that there is no internal dependency within Radegast on the legacy Voice package, we now have an upgrade path for Radegast users that will ensure continued voice support after the block on older SLVoice packages comes into force. To help ensure people know what they need to do, Whirly’s instructions can also be found in the link below.

Radegast Voice Installation Instructions.

A Plea to Developers

These instructions are only a workaround. We still need to find a way to have Radegast install the correct Voice extensions automatically, as a part of the client install process. So, if you are a C# (C-Sharp) developer and are willing to spare a few hours looking at this, please take a look at the Radegast codebase and see if there is a way to incorporate the correct binaries into an installer package. Thank you.

With grateful thanks to Whirly Fizzle.