New Second Life release candidate viewer: 1.20(RC7)

Linden Lab has released the eighth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

For those of you worried about the Dazzle UI being hard on the eyes (around two thirds of you), 'We plan to release Skinning Phase 1 (which will allow residents to install custom skins and switch between them, e.g. switch to a "classic" skin) before we make 1.20 mandatory,' says Steve Linden, '(hopefully well before-- we are trying to keep mandatory updates to a minimum), so we will support switching skins before imposing this release on everyone. However, this is the look we are planning to support going forward.'

Note that that does not mean that Viewer 1.20 will contain it (skin switching) at release, or necessarily that it will appear in viewer 1.21 or 1.22 -- we're only promised that it will appear before support for 1.19 is dropped.

This release-candidate (which is not intended to be final, so really, there should be a less confusing name for it) contains 46 assorted fixes, plus other changes -- and a few known bugs. There's also user-contributed lip-synching for voice, and what appears to be the new Ruth in there. Bonus: The vanishing skirts problem finally seems to be fixed, and users are automatically unmuted if you interact with them (pay them or their objects, send an IM or inventory to them).

If you use a Mighty Mouse or 3DConnexion Space Navigator, apparently 1.20 will continue to make your life unpleasant.

Interestingly, the release notes appear to be missing in the distributable bundle.

Known Issues with (RC7):

• In RC7, the Hover Tips on objects inworld show a single garbage character for the 'For Sale:' Amount. This will be fixed in an upcoming version of the Release Candidate. This means objects may "appear" to indicate in the hover tip as if they are for sale at L$0 to L$9, or even nonsensically as L$d or L$g. In reality the object could be any price– so please verify an object's price when paying, regardless of its Hover Tip.

• In RC7, a rectangular block of "pixel static" is sometimes rendered nearby avatar impostors. We are investigating this issue and expect to fix it in an upcoming version of the Release Candidate.

• The Known Issues from previous RC iterations with camera behavior using the SpaceNavigator in "Flycam" mode, as well as using the SpaceNavigator with Apple's USB Mighty Mouse on Macs, continue in this Release Candidate RC7.

As always, please continue to report any new issues in the Issue Tracker and be sure to set "Affects Version/s" to "1.20 Release Candidate".

New features and changes:

Thread monitoring to catch freezes:

• A new thread monitor (also referred to as a Watchdog) will detect when the viewer application freezes for a period greater than 10 seconds and will force a crash with detailed logs

• Thread monitoring can be disabled by choosing to never report crashes, or with a command line setting: --set WatchdogEnabled 0

Resident names are interactive in Chat/IM:

• [EDITED 2008-05-21 18:41] Clicking on resident names in Local Chat or a Group IM will open their Profile page

Added four texture constants to reference in llSetLinkTexture:

• TEXTURE_BLANK is the non-transparent blank texture, equivalent to "5748decc-f629-461c-9a36-a35a221fe21f"

• TEXTURE_DEFAULT is the default Media texture, equivalent to "8b5fec65-8d8d-9dc5-cda8-8fdf2716e361″

• TEXTURE_PLYWOOD is the plywood texture, equivalent to "89556747-24cb-43ed-920b-47caed15465f"

• TEXTURE_TRANSPARENT is the default "white transparent" texture, equivalent to "59facb66-4a72-40a2-815c-7d9b42c56f60″

• Note: Scripts using these constants will run smoothly in all Second Life viewers, however previous versions of the viewer will NOT be able to edit and recompile scripts using the new constants. Older versions (1.19.1 and below) will report "(XX,YY) : ERROR : Name not defined within scope" when trying to compile such a script.

Improved internationalization support:

• Make 'System Default' language option work on Linux and Windows.

• Make unicode system font support good on Linux

Improvements to Search:

• Search > Popular Places is replaced by a Search > Showcase tab that points to the website Showcase

• Search > Places, and Search > Groups use web-based search

• Classified ads have a drop-down menu to indicate Mature or Not Mature content

Other UI changes:

• Moved "Set Window Size" options from File menu into Preferences > Graphics

• Newly created avatars without a gender, or any avatar where "clothing is still downloading" are rendered as a cloud rather than naked/wrong body shape

• Directly interacting with a muted resident will unmute them, with a note logged in the Chat history (VWR-1735)

• Fly button is now shown as disabled when you are sitting

• Pasting multiline clipboard content into Chat will show a Paragraph symbol at newlines (Partial Fix behavior)

• Group Info > Notices tab explains the storage limits of 200 notices and 14 days

• Added OpenGL monitoring via Advanced menu > Rendering > Debug GL option to turn on extra rendering error checking and help reproduce crashes

• Added beta support for basic voice lipsync for voice visualization (VWR-4794) via Advanced menu > Character

Changes:

• VWR-463: Blank is a pre-defined texture in client, but not in LSL

• VWR-4204: Clicking on names in Chat/Group IM history should open Profile page or IM

• VWR-4794: Basic voice lipsync for voice visualization

• Updated library version for openssl

• Added thread monitoring to the viewer

• Added a setting switch to completely disable thread monitoring

• New users are shown as a cloud rather than naked until they choose a gender.

• Move "Set Window Size" options from File menu into Preferences > Graphics

• Make clothing-still-downloading dialog into an ignorable alert dialog

• Internationalize additional hard-coded viewer strings to a strings.xml file

• Search > Popular Places is replaced by a Search > Showcase tab that points to the website Showcase

• Convert Search > Places tab to use HTML search

• Convert Search > Group tab to use HTML search

• Search: Require Mature/Not Mature in Classifieds

• Make strict GL debugging toggleable on-the-fly via Advanced menu > Rendering > Debug GL option - turns on extra rendering error checking and help reproduce crashes

Fixes:

• Fixed: VWR-104: Unused class LLVertexProgramGL should be removed

• Fixed: VWR-1735: Directly interacting with a muted resident should unmute them

• Fixed: VWR-2142: Parcel voice icon doesn't reflect disabled status if voice isn't used

• Fixed: VWR-2272: Fly button doesn't work while sitting

• Fixed: VWR-2275: Linux 1.18.3 Won't Link

• Fixed: VWR-2404: Lossless texture compression on small textures is not lossless

• Fixed: VWR-2448: Snapshot Preview tool should respect 'Quiet Snapshots to Disk'

• Fixed: VWR-2778: System skirt textures turn invisible on wearing

• Fixed: VWR-3598: Non-group owned objects appear to belong to the group of the last selected object, no matter the owner/group.

• Fixed: VWR-3813: gtk_check_version() API changed to return const gchar * - causes gcc ERROR

• Fixed: VWR-3857: Script (LSL) editor shows non Latin 1 characters as square boxes

• Fixed: VWR-4057: Multi-line chat display bug - first character in line missing

• Fixed: VWR-4860: WindLight: Planar texturing renders incorrectly in 1.19.0 (79674)

• Fixed: VWR-5807: Wild rotations of linkset while using the editor in Local Ruler Mode via CTRL key

• Fixed: VWR-5853: Double-Clicking on vertical edge of Inventory/Gesture window destroys the floating window.

• Fixed: VWR-5963: LLImageGL::setClamp may affect random texture (making repeating textures on objects non-repeating)

• Fixed: VWR-6186: Second Life is leaking Objective-C objects at startup

• Fixed: VWR-6399: llMapDestination should still show teleport map - Teleport / Map

• Fixed: VWR-6056: Animation viewer does not play animations on upload.

• screen changes in 1.20 RC0 need to be undone

• Fixed: VWR-7061: Trivial UI grammar error in the title of the "Script Warning/Error" window

• Fixed: SVC-1241: Dead code in lscript_execute.cpp [is this even in the right place?]

• Fixed: llrender.cpp export

• Fixed: Clean up log messages in viewer to make crash logs more readable and useful

• Fixed: Create secondlife:///app/ URL to open my groups panel

• Fixed: Create secondlife:///app/ URL to open create groups dialog

• Fixed: Display a message if LLWebBrowserCtrl blocks a secondlife:///app/* url

• Fixed: Abstract common glTexParameter calls

• Fixed: Orientation Island HUD select language texture is wrong for English version in 1.20

• Fixed: Double-clicking border of communicate window makes window unrecoverable

• Fixed: Command line parser bug parsing "–multiple true" at beginning of a command line.

• Fixed: –loginuri is not being handled correctly

• Fixed: Grid selection drop-down on login screen does not take priority over -loginuri when selection is first opened

• Fixed: crash in LLMediaImplQuickTime::load

• Fixed: crash on LLViewerParcelMedia::update

• Fixed: Pop-up menu width should try to accomodate the longest menu item (within reason)

• Fixed: Can't change values with debug settings floater

• Fixed: Focus > Zoom button can't be re-selected

• Fixed: Debug Permissions displays overlap

• Fixed: Objects with no group tagging show group tags of previously clicked items

• Fixed: stop bundling libexpat with the linux viewer

• Fixed: World Map's keyboard focus that jumps from Landmarks to Teleport is broken in 1.20

• Fixed: text results for Search > People is displayed as white text

• Partial Fix: Pasting multiline clipboard content into chat loses newlines. (This will be more fully fixed in an upcoming version of the RC.)

Localization Fixes:

• Fixed: VWR-7087: Japanese "About Second Life..." file includes an invalid UTF-8 character

• Fixed: VWR-7153: An typo in en-us version of alerts.xml file makes an <ignore> text of unlocalizable

• Fixed: VWR-7168: A typo in base (en-us) version of mime_types.xml

Release candidate viewers access your live account on the main Second Life grid (Agni). Potentially they may cause hair-loss in pets, and should be always be kept out of reach of children. The downloads are served by Amazon's S3 service and we use and recommend the use of a download manager to keep your download times to a minimum.

You can download this viewer from the usual place for Windows, Mac and Linux.

If the viewer crashes at startup or at login, disable the thread watchdog as described above.