Second Life 1.22 (RC0) now available

The Second Life viewer dev team has been working furiously away for some time now, and you may be forgiven for wondering where the fruits of that labor are. It has, after all, been some time since we've seen a new viewer other than emergency security fixes.

There are lots of little things in this viewer, mostly bug-fixes. What is particularly peculiar is that whispering seems to be back. Whisper was a short-range chat option that was discarded from the Second Life viewer back in 2005 due to it being confusing both conceptually and in the user-interface. Whispering has a 10 metre range and while it has been a deprecated script function for years is still available to scripted objects.

As with any viewer you should read and familiarize yourself with the known issues before downloading and using it. The remainder of the the changes are outlined below.

New features:

• Added: VWR-3434: New feature for text chat: "Whisper" as well as Say and Shout.

Changes:

• Changed: VWR-8689: Change the location of "Mute" in the pie menu to avoid mis-clicks

• Changed: Replaced the View > Beacons sub-menu with its own window for more accurate control

• Changed: Replaced pick rendering with a raycast method, to increase performance

Picking refers to identifying the object that is under your cursor. For example, when you alt-zoom, left-click, right-click, etc, a "pick" is performed to calculate what object you clicked on. For alt-zooming, it also determines where in 3D space you clicked. In version 1.22, the method for picking was refactored to use a raycasting method, which has enormous performance advantages.

However, the picking of avatars who are wearing non-prim clothes or no clothes is no longer pixel perfect (this is a known limitation). In some circumstances, this will cause unacceptable usability issues while we tune the behavior during the 1.22 Release Candidate cycle. Please read Known Issue VWR-10342 for more information and feedback.

• Added: new info display, Advanced > Rendering > Info Displays > Raycasting

• Removed: Remove Advanced > Compress Snapshots to Disk (no longer support .j2c now that .jpg is available for Snapshots)

Temporary Changes:

We have enabled some special debugging checks during the Release Candidate cycle. These have a short-term effect of causing the viewer to crash more when something goes wrong, but it assists Linden Lab to improve stability by identifying those failure cases. We appreciate that you send us crash reports that occur! These extra checks WILL be removed in a later iteration of the Release Candidate. But these can be turned off by a Resident:

• Turned on Thread monitoring (Watchdog) during the Release Candidate cycle

  • Thread monitor will detect when the application is frozen for a period greater than 20 seconds and possibly force a crash with detailed logs

  • Thread monitor can be disabled with a command line setting "--set WatchdogEnabled 0"

  • The threshold timing of the thread monitor is set in the file \SecondLifeReleaseCandidate\app_settings\settings.xml under the key "MainloopTimeoutDefault"

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed: VWR-8932: 1.21 RC - Script editor performance degrades with large scripts

• Fixed: VWR-9467: 1.21 RC will not install due to error opening file for writing (xulutil.dll etc)

• Fixed: VWR-8013: minimap causes lag when megaprims are present

• Fixed: VWR-3058: Viewer crashes trying to install on Korean Windows XP when the Windows username contains Korean characters

  • Also Fixed: Viewer crashes when run on Korean Windows XP when the Windows username contains Korean characters

• Partial Fix: VWR-9985 Gesture editor crashes in non-EN-US languages

  • Note: Until the code is better internationalized, these 4 translations have been reverted to English

• Fixed: VWR-8944: Viewer crashes on logout (crash on QuickTime.qts )

• Fixed: VWR-7284: Mute of Object Doesn't Work

• Fixed: VWR-1814: Can not change the volume of looping sounds once they start (except with master volume control)

• Fixed: VWR-8310: Cannot teleport from landmark - broken LLMsgVarData::addData()

• Fixed: VWR-996: wrong visualisation of animations

• Fixed: VWR-2387: Animations always drift when uploading with an inner loop of anything except 0% - 100%

• Fixed: VWR-8398: Previewing UV map as sculpted prim before uploading doesn't work any more

• Fixed: VWR-1180: Inappropriate uses of ctype (is*) functions in prevalidate methods for LLLineEditor

• Fixed: VWR-4070: OpenJPEG: LLImageJ2COJ::decodeImpl does not check if requested channel is higher than available

• Fixed: SVC-2771: Reset Script in Selection fails

• Fixed: VWR-9850: Report Abuse popup still references Police Blotter

• Fixed: VWR-2054: Several scripting tooltips could be improved

• Fixed: Rename tooltip on llPushObject icon in the menu bar to read "No Pushing"

  • Also Fixed: Rename the "Restrict Pushing" checkbox on About Land > Options to "No Pushing"

• Fixed: Reword some error messages relating to not having enough L$

• Fixed: SL no longer detects correct amount of VRAM

• Fixed: Detected video memory is too high and causes some texture downloads to stall or load forever

• Fixed: SLURL in chat log has space before it highlighted, link launches browser and teleport dialog

• Fixed: Advanced Menu>Rendering>Object-Object Occlusion... can be greyed out but still showing an X.

• Fixed: Basic DBus support for the Linux Client

• Fixed: View > Communicate should do the same action as the Communicate button

• Fixed: avatar animates when hitting escape while sitting on the ground

• Fixed: sorting of Group member list ignores the year

• Fixed: Switching focus from the SL Viewer in mouselook and returning causes loss of mouse control

• Fixed: linux client should send secondlife:// URLs to a running client if such exists

• Fixed: SecondLife.log reports a WARNING even when using the --login command correctly

• Fixed: On launch, Viewer doesn't clear keyboard input queue after becoming visible, so keystrokes for other apps can overwrite the First Name field

• Fixed: Verify that Landmark asset creation callbacks are happening with new server code

Bug Fixes to the rendering system:

• Fixed: VWR-8920: moving the camera around, or zooming in on an avatar, some attachments 'disappear' from view

• Fixed: VWR-7957: Clothing skinning error with nVidia 177.xx series drivers

• Fixed: VWR-8012: Gray shading all over clothing and avatars in world since the Windlight roll out

• Fixed: VWR-8668: appearance mode has a blue or red light

• Fixed: VWR-3272: WindLight: Some supported graphics cards have disabled shaders

• Fixed: MISC-707: /voicelevel3 gestures not triggered by voice chat.

• Fixed: VWR-8172: Camera is Unstable when editing an object

• Partial Fix: VWR-4025: Upper left corner black triangle appears on the GMA 950 chipset

  • Note: Turned off draw pool ground on the intel 950 for Mac

• Fixed: View is not reset when teleporting in flycam mode

• Fixed: Flycam mode does not disable alt-zoom icons

• Fixed: No Stars when Atmospheric Shaders disabled

• Fixed: Email Snapshot > Recipient's Email: field erroneously accepts non-ascii characters

• Fixed: When editing multiple unlinked prims, trying to move/rotate by Build tool numbers suggests that it would work on all prims, but only adjusts one.

• Fixed: Update GPU table for newer graphics cards

• Fixed: Add new GPU cards for 1.22

Bug Fixes to the Snapshot feature:

• Fixed: "Send" becomes disabled in Send Postcard when you click on More>>

• Fixed: Snapshot Save As suggests filename Snapshot.jpg.jpeg

• Fixed: BMP format displays wrong file size in Snapshot floater

Small usability Improvements:

• Changed: VWR-8689: Change the location of "Mute" in the pie menu to avoid mis-clicks

• Fixed: VWR-3336: Friend dots on the Minimap are not a different color (yellow)

• Fixed: VWR-7802: Save texture does not use texture name for default file name

• Fixed: VWR-4981: Windlight environment settings save in a bad location

  • Note: Now custom skies/water will save to the location Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\SecondLife\user_settings\windlight

• Fixed: SVC-2396: Particles not handled properly as hud

• Fixed: LLFloaterBuy explicitly deselects objects when closed

• Fixed: Improve the apply logic of the following Preference tabs, to more correctly obey OK/Apply/Cancel:

  • Preferences > General, Input & Camera, Network, Web, Text Chat, Voice Chat, Communication

• Changed: clarify the option Preferences > General > Start location

• Changed: Replaced the View > Beacons sub-menu with its own window for more accurate control

Localization changes:

• Fixed: VWR-3801: In certain languages, parcel primitive usage is broken: displays only as 0 in About Land

• Fixed: VWR-9940: Bad translation in Japanese: "shouts", "whispers"

• Fixed: VWR-9833: Translation of some viewer options in Japanese is incorrect

• Fixed: VWR-1874: Some locales incorrectly use Kbps to mean kbps

• Added: Six new Language choices in the installer application

• Fixed: Revised some terminology in French translations

Bug Fixes from the Public Nightly viewers

• Fixed: VWR-10473: Scroll bar opens at bottom of About: section in Profile window

• Fixed: VWR-10454: Local Chat window fails to scroll properly (IM and Groupchats slide to top)

• Fixed: Fix build error due to missing msvcr80.dll

• Fixed: Viewer crashes on Windows without .NET 2.0 runtime installed

Crash Fixes:

• Fixed: VWR-10476: Opening Get Top Scripts menu causes crash

• Fixed: VWR-10355: Crash on clicking a hyperlink in any instance of the inworld HTML browser

• Fixed: VWR-10353: Crash on trying to upload assets

• Fixed: crash on LLViewerObject::markDead

• Fixed: crash on LLViewerRegion::getPosAgentFromRegion

• Fixed: crash on Group chat floater (LLTextEditor::removeTextFromEnd)

• Fixed: Interacting with tortured prim crashes on Linux and WindowsXP

Source changes:

• Removed: Removed dead code related to a top-level landmarks menu

• Changed: partial llrender dependency removal from mapserver (bind & clamp)

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.

Notably, while they're called release candidates, they're actually beta (and occasionally alpha) releases. The reasoning behind calling them release candidates has never been made clear.

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

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