Genesis Change Log R10

An active participant in Second Life's Third Party Viewer Program.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory/Genesis

Download page: https://genesisviewer.org

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions and Solutions

Nightly Builds

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The way voice works in Second Life will change soon.  You will need a WebRTC compliant viewer to hear other residents.  WebRTC will replace Vivox. 

Genesis Nightly 1040 and above supports WebRTC.  

See the story:  Big updates coming to Voice in SL

November 7th, 2024 (1084)

- Fixed artefacts (jagged edges) on uploaded images.

October 9th, 2024 (1082)

- Updated Openjpeg to 2.5.2 to fix errors in partially decoding jpeg 2000 images.

This is a test build and mileage will vary until finely tuned.  Users may experience problems with old skins.

October 7th, 2024 (1080)

- New Feature: Ability to restrict upload textures to 1024 (10L$) so that a texture of any size will resize to a maximum of 1024, via the checkbox on the upload floater. Otherwise textures beyond 1024 and up to 2048 (40L$) will be supported when left unchecked.  (Default is unchecked, ie 2048 uploads enabled).

October 5th, 2024 (1078)

- Minor edit to credits.

September 26th, 2024 (1074)

- Added support for 2k resolution images bakes for mesh.  

- Added, calculation for upload fee depends on image resolution.

Caveat: Temporary workaround:  You may need to set GenxDecodePartialImage to False to render 2k images.

September 25th, 2024  (1071)

- Fixed Voice visualiser for WebRTC (Voice dot).

- Added WebRTC logo to viewer startup  (Right hand side of where the user inputs their name).

- First test of Non-Friends attenuation for WebRTC in the hopes we can keep this Genesis feature after Vivox becomes deprecated.

 

September 24th, 2024 (1065)

- Fixed version number: We forgot to set Nightly's from 1.9.x to 1.10.x after the last full release.  

September 21st, 2024 (1064)

- Minor change to team profiles.

WebRTC controls

September 12th, 2024 (1062)

- VLC for video updated to 3.0.16

- User Interface: Font scaling overhaul [Fidget]

- User Interface: WebRTC voice controls [Shep]

September 11th, 2024 (1054)

- Added the new library commands needed for Combat 2.0 to LSL. [Fidget].

- Fixed.  Some of our LSL script library was out of date. [Fidget].

September 5th, 2024 (1042)

- WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications)

 

- Added debug: VoiceNoiseSuppressionLevel (Default 4).   0 is off, no noise cancelling, 4 is maximum noise cancelling.

Users who already have background noise cancelling microphones or software, may wish to disable this to prevent two 'systems' fighting it out, resulting in the first word they speak being clipped.  Those with standard setups will benefit from leaving this setting enabled.

The value from 1 to 4 dictates how aggressive the suppression should be.  You need to find your own sweet spot.  Everyone's microphone and room acoustics differ. 

September 3rd, 2024 (1040)  WebRTC early testing.

- WebRTC first implementation with caveats:

    - Voice indicator in SL is currently always red.

    -  Person to Person private calling is not yet supported.

    - NonFriendsAttenuation is yet to be implemented.

The viewer should correctly detect and switch from Vivox to WebRTC. Additionally the new voice system is handled internally meaning no more external routines handled by  SLVoice.exe once WebRTC goes live.

You can test WebRTC at regions, "WebRTC Voice 1" (through 4)

- Fixed Autobuild again.

September 2nd, 2024 (internal)

- Initial WebRTC voice system to replace Vivox voice services, successfully tested in Genesis.  Now testing coexistence of both services.

WebRTC voice testing in Genesis Gateway

As part of the testing for the forthcoming big changeover from Vivox Voice services to WebRTC, London City Genesis Gateway region supports WebRTC beta deployment from Linden Lab.

Residents are encouraged to test their voice out with friends, in our Gateway region and check that their viewer is WebRTC compliant.

Genesis Viewer Nightly builds already support WebRTC.  

Hop over to London City Gateway and check your viewer http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/London%20City%20Gateway/91/13/23

Known issues on the LL end that they need to fix:

- Mute/Change gain of others doesn't work

- Inconsistent behaviors for P2P/Group/Ad hoc calls between WebRTC <> Vivox regions

- Voice dot falsely appears if voice is disabled at login

- Echo sometimes heard going back to public voice from parcel with private voice set

- Sometimes voice goes to headphones while other sounds go to speakers

Genesis Viewer, Release 1.9.1032

We very much hope that our current Genesis testers will continue to use the Nightly Builds. It is thanks to your testing that we can find and fix issues quickly. Those people using the Nightly build will always get features and fixes quicker than the Releases.  This release build is identical to the Nightly build of the same number.

Genesis Viewer, Release 1.9.1032 (August 2024)

Main changes since: 1.8.957

Download:  https://genesisviewer.org

For a log of all that has transpired from the last Release, please see the Nightly build notes listed immediately below this story.

This will be the last release version that still contains the original Vivox voice system before it is replaced with WebRTC.

New:

- Friends Volume (aka Hearing Voices).

This feature permits the users to reduce the volume of nearby avatars who they are not friends with.  This makes it easier to hear your friends in busy voice places.

Open the Quick Pref for Sound (Bottom Right) and use the "Non Friends Att(enuation)"  slider to reduce the volume of non-friends.  

You can still raise and lower individual volumes of friends and non friends from the main chat menu.  Click the >> chevron at the top right to expand the names on those on voice, click their name to highlight, then use the slider at the bottom to adjust the volume on the resident you selected.

(Can also be applied in Active Speaker floater).

- Additional 'Contact Set' preference options.

These control how the contact sets colors are displayed for the avatar: Tag, Local/IM chat, Radar and Nearby Voice window.

Preferences: Genesis > Contact sets.

- Particles slider in QuickPrefs previously offered zero then 256 as its first increment.  It can now be increased in 64s, i.e.  0, 64, 128, 192 etc.  This is a good feature for admins who want to easily detect particle griefers without running the risk of their GPU being overtaxed.

- Added Crashpad to help diagnose issues for users wherelogging is unhelpful or non-existent. Limited to 24mb.  Privacy: Please note this does not store or send information to us.  To share your dump file, you have to manually email it to us. Even when you do, it does not contain any sensitive information, only details of the driver versions the program is using and information about the operating environment.

- Refinement of ability to temporarily derender assets from the pie menu ('more'option).  Previously an asset was permanently blacklisted until removed from the mute menu.  Temporary blacklisted objects will be cleared from the blacklist upon teleport or on the next session.

Fixes:

- Updated runtime libraries (DLL's) that had caused login issues for some users when their computer's version was older than the library the viewer was built with.

- Fixed aspect ratio in snapshot, i.e. the saved output now matches preview.

- Fixed: Material folder name (llbadfolderlookup), the code was not included in the last release.

- Inventory can now edit/save and manage Material Assets.

- Fixed inherited bug where script error floater fails to identify owner of object with issues.

- Fixed info freeze about Computer and Operating environment in "About Genesis" menu. 

- To fix the 'hover/flight at login' issue, the debug value for Nimble now defaults to True.

- Updated terminology for region maturity ratings to bring us in parity with all other viewers,  replacing PG with General and Mature with Moderate.

- Fixed bug where the viewer forgot if you had the favourites bar enabled. It now remembers and persists to next session.

Genesis Change Log R9

An active participant in Second Life's Third Party Viewer Program.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory/Genesis

Download page: https://genesisviewer.org

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions and Solutions

Nightly Builds

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August 24th, 2024 (1.9.1032) Release Candidate

- Preparing 1.9 Release.

- Updated members and contributors credits for 'About' floaters.

August 22nd, 2024 (1026) Release Candidate

- Potential Release Candidate as the final Vivox version before WebRTC supersedes. 

August 22nd, 2024 (1025)  

- New Feature:   Additional 'Contact Set' preference options, to control how the contact sets are displayed in the avatar Tag, Local/IM chat, Radar and Nearby Voice window.

August 22nd, 2024 (1021)

- Updated DLLs are now included in the Genesis folder.

Out of date DLLs was causing a Quit to Desktop on login for some users.  Our build environment uses a more recent DLL than some users have installed on their computers.  This update to the build environment happened after version 1005 was compiled.

- Added Crashpad to help diagnose issues for users where logging is unhelpful or non-existent.

- Crashpad is configured to use no more than 24mb of disk space.  Enough for approximately 12 dump reports to diagnose issues.  These files are stored under the logs part of appdata/roaming/etc.  It is up to the user if they want to manually share these reports or not.  No data is collected by anyone automatically and dump reports are only about DLLs in use by the viewer anyway.

- New Feature:   Additional 'Contact Set' preference options, to control how the contact sets are displayed in the avatar Tag, Local/IM chat, Radar and Nearby Voice window.

- Removed Builds, 1007, 1010, 1012, 1015, 1017 for failing QA

August 18th 2024 (1007)   

< Investigating: Quit to desktop bug after 'loading world' message on this build for some users >

- Contact sets extended to 9 (was 3) - per Shep.

- Resolved a show stopper issue with WebRTC: 

The ProvisionVoiceAccountRequest cap request gives unexpected response.

June 8th, 2024 (Internal)

- Test refs/heads/439-implement-webrtc-which-will-succeed-vivox

June 1st, 2024 (1005)

- To fix the 'hover/flight at login' issue, the debug value for Nimble now defaults to True.

May 30th, 2024 (1004 )

- Starting implementation of WebRTC in viewer, the replacement for Vivox (Voice Chat).

March 3rd, 2024 (Nightly 1003)

- Particles slider in QuickPrefs previously offered zero then 256 as its first increment.  It can now be increased in 64s, i.e.  0, 64, 128, 192 etc.  This is a good feature for admins who want to easily detect particle griefers without running the risk of their GPU being overtaxed.

(debug value: RenderMaxPartCount)

February 27th, 2024 (Nightly 1001)

- Removed FriendsBoostLevel debug and from settings.xml.  Superfluous setting for vivox friends volume boost. 

February 26th, 2024 (Nightly 999)

- Reworked 'hearing voices', the ability to change the default incoming voice volume to make your friends louder than non-friends in busy places.

This now works by attenuating non-friends instead of boosting friends volume which caused distortion under certain conditions.  

Related debug value: NonFriendsAttenuationLevel

You can access this setting from QuickPrefs Volume:

You can still adjust individual volumes for residents via Active Speaker or by clicking the chevrons in Local Chat box.

Fixed: Genesis 997 forgot if you had favourites bar enabled or disabled and would set to disabled.  It will now remember the setting.  The default setting for new install is off.

February 10th, 2024 (Nightly 997)

This feature has been reworked in Nightly 999. You only need to set the attenuation level for non-friends.

- New Feature: As part of  the 'hearing voices' overhaul, we have added a debug to set default voice volume on all other residents.  The volume of 0.5 was previously hard coded.

The debug: GenxBoostLevel is the master volume for all residents, friends and non-friends. It defaults to 0.5 which is the previously hard coded default you could not change.

The debug: FriendsBoostLevel is the amount of volume to boost your friends, so they are louder (to you) than other people in a group of avatars on voice.

In the following example, we have set all Residents voices to 0.3 (so everyone will be quieter by default unless we adjust their individual volume).  We will then boost our friends by 0.2  (to a total of 0.5).

In this example the default master volume of all residents has been reduced from the default
 of 0.5 to 0.3.  I have done this, because I am about to boost the volume of my friends..

For ease of access, the level you boost your
 friends by is also located in the volume panel

To adjust individual volumes, this can be done via 'Active Speakers' option, or by

clicking the two chevrons in local chat and adjusting individual people there.

Click >> in local chat to open voice panel, click the name, adjust their volume.

Play around with it as you wish, but please bear in mind that if you boost your friends volume too much without compensating by decreasing the GenxBoostLevel, your friends may sound over-modulated.

Also note that sometimes you will need to teleport out and then back to the region for changes to take effect.  This is a Vivox 'quirk' and is not viewer related.

- KNOWN ISSUE:   Favourites bar now defaults to off on new installation.  You currently need to reactivate it by going to Prefs > Genesis > Adv. Features (Display favorites bar)

- Inherited bug fix: Inventory filters can now exclude links to objects being displayed. (Further refinement from Nightly 993).

February 3rd, 2024 (Nightly 993)

- Inherited bug fix: Inventory filter to prevent links from displaying now works.

- Fixed: Boosting friends volume beyond 1.00 can cause Vivox to drop out.

February 2nd, 2024 (Nightly 989)

- Default volume for friends on voice, can now be set at a different default level to non-friends.  Located in main volume settings (bottom of main gui).

Use: Handy for busy voice places. When there are a lot of people you don't know, mashing their gums and you want to talk to your mates.   It is like squelching out people on a CB :)

- Updated terminology of region maturity ratings to bring us in parity with all other viewers, replaced PG with General, and Mature with Moderate.

- Materials work continues.

This replaces 986 compiled earlier today.

January 17th, 2024  (Internal)

- PBR Base textures are fine.  Metallic overlays need work.  Work continues.

December 19th, 2023 

- Work continues on PBR rendering but several issues exist in library code and therefore in all viewers. This is slowing us down slightly as we continue to develop our own implementation.  

Problems affecting PBR:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-234706  [GLTF] [PBR] Performance unstable / massive performance loss 

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-234672   [GLTF] Random stuck texture causes bad performance

December 16th, 2023 (internal)

- Testing PBR implementations whilst preserving shader settings.

November 30th, 2023 (internal)

- Render work for materials 

November 21st, 2023 (internal)

- Continuing internal development of material asset rendering.

November 15th, 2023 (internal)

- RenderAttachedLights PBR.

November 3rd, 2023 (982)

Materials work for 'PBR':

- Edit floater contains PBR as texture option.

- Add Material to inventory,  Create Material in inventory, Edit, Open from inventory.

- Material texture picker.

- Added Save and Cancel options to floater. 

- Fixed: Material folder name (llbadfolderlookup).

- Added generic streaming dummy handler.

November 1st, 2023  (978)

- Genesis Viewer is now able to edit and save material items from inventory (in PBR enabled regions).

October 29th, 2023 (internal)

- log markers pbr.

October 17th, 2023 (internal)

- Removed "incidents" marker from splash screen until it is ready to use.

- Back end work, no front facing user discernible changes:

i. Materials need to include xxhash in licences

ii. Use xxhash instead of MD5

 

October 16th, 2023 (967) 

- Fixed aspect ratio in snapshot, i.e. saved output now matches preview.

- Inventory can now manage Material Assets.

- Add and Edit Materials from Inventory window.

- Early preliminary PBR work, getting our ducks in a row.

PBR enabled regions will correctly send this warning to the genesis.log as the viewer does not yet have instructions on how to interpret the assets: LLTemplateMessageReader::decodeTemplate: Message #1

October 15th 2023 (963)

- Fixed info freeze on "About" menu. Tested on both  AMD and NVidia.  Mileage may vary on cards we haven't been able to test.

October 15th 2023 (961)

- Working on info freeze on "About" menu. Fixed for AMD, not so great for NVidia.

October 10th, 2023 (959)

- Fixed inherited bug where script error floater fails to identify owner of object with issues.

Genesis Viewer - 1st Birthday Party

Genesis Viewer celebrates it's first year since its initial release, this coming Saturday.

We hope you will be able to join us for a Birthday Bash being held in London City, Saturday at 12pm SL time.

Great Music, Free Grog and a Concert performed by Hazel O'Connor are on the menu and we very much look forward to meeting other Genesis Viewer users.  Hope you can make it!

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/London%20City/102/107/23

Genesis Release

We very much hope that our current Genesis testers will continue to use the Nightly Builds. It is thanks to their testing that we can find and fix issues quickly. Those on the Nightly build will always get features and fixes quicker than the Releases.  This release build is identical to the Nightly build of the same number.

Genesis Viewer, EIGHTH Release 1.8.957

Main changes since: 1.7.880

Download:  https://genesisviewer.org

For a log of all that has transpired from the last version to this version, please see the Nightly build notes listed immediately below this story.

New:

- For your security, MultiFactor Authentication is fully supported See the SL blog.

- Introducing Temporary Asset Blacklists, accessed from the pie menu "more option".  The temporary list is cleared down upon teleport.

- Genesis now has its own Splash screen on start up, to keep you up to date with events in world and developments with Genesis Viewer.

- Introducing Multi-threaded rendering.  Why limit render decoding to a single core when most computers have more than 2 cores?  Faster rendering via Preferences > Genesis > Texture Management.

- Ability to render/derender "sim" water from the Quick Preferences menu.  Sim water is always rendered, even if it is 100m below the region.  By disabling sim water, better frame rates can now be achieved.

- Substantial rework of internal AO engine.  Multiple note cards for multiple sets of overrides are now supported.

- Complete rework of Object Area Search and ability to Cam-To

Changes:

- Added "Use the legacy font" to Preferences: Genesis> Main. 

When enabled Genesis will use the smaller DejaVu font that supports a much wider range of high/extended ascii characters (unicode) commonly used for display names that use arabic letters.   Left unticked, Genesis will continue to use its existing clearer and larger font, which doesn't support the full unicode range.

Caveats:

Genesis is optimised for the existing font, so when switching to Deja Vu, you will most likely need to also adjust (FontsDPI) Preferences > Genesis > Adv. Features "Screen font DPI."

Apply and Save.

You need to restart the viewer when switching between fonts.

You need to restart the viewer when changing sizes of fonts.

Should you lose any windowed floaters from your screen by changing these settings, see the section called "I've accidentally dragged my chat floater off screen", in FAQs

- Nightly Beta versions will now expire on a 3 monthly cycle, to prevent potentially unfinished versions of the viewer being used for a protracted time.

- Mouselook crosshairs: Using OpenGL, the size of mouselook crosshairs can now be increased/decreased  GenxCrosshairSize (factor) See Prefs: Input.

- Viewer now supports the uploading of 30 second wave files

- Estate Management tools: Increased banned agent limit from 500 to 750.

- Estate Management tools: Increased estate manager limit from 15 to 20.

Fixes:

- Fixed font issues in certain floaters.

- Don't show the favourites bar when in (M)ouselook.

Genesis Change Log R8

An active participant in Second Life's Third Party Viewer Program.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory/Genesis

Download page: https://genesisviewer.org

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions and Solutions

MP  https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/255951

Nightly Builds

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October 8th, 2023 (No Release but..)

- Brings Genesis bespoke Splash screen online to keep users up to date with the viewer, tips, tricks and development news.  No appears in 956+

September 25th, 2023 (Build 956)

- Retirement plan for defunct Nightly Builds.

September 24th, 2023 (Build 954)

- Temporary Asset Blacklist: Upon TP remove temporary blacklisted assets from list.

- Nightly build retirement for very old and extremely superseded defunct betas.

September 23rd, 2023 (Build 950)

- MultiFactor Authentication (MFA) if MFA.dat should ever become corrupted, request a new token.

- Do not record anything to log file relating to MFA for additional security.

- Better explanation of threading settings Prefs > Genesis > Texture Management

September 22nd, 2023 (943)

- New Feature: Temporary Asset Blacklist (needs refinement).

- New Feature: Ability to enable/disable rendering of "sim water" from Genesis button. With water disabled most users will see a significant frame rate boost.

- Background work for splash screen.

September 4th, 2023 (Build 939)

- Genesis now supports MFA, Multi Factor Authentication.  See the SL blog.

- Further refinement to Object Area Search, added Cam-To (look at).

- Fixed: Bug introduced in 922 - If favourites bar is disabled, exiting mouselook re-enables it.

September 1st, 2023 (Build 929)

- Added additional logging to the log file to analyse transit of login process.  Nightly 929  build users with slow logins, please send us your genesis.log file so we can fix this.

August 16th, 2023 (Build 927)

- Experimental GenxTextureCache is now accessed in its own thread. (Default is False).

- Experimental multi-thread decoding is now available and contains an explanation on the Preferences page (Genesis > Texture Management).

August 15th, 2023 (Build 924)

EXPERIMENTAL code to test threaded decoding for texture fetching and discarding of partials.

Prefs > Genesis > Texture Management.

Genesis defaults to 1 thread and Partial texture rendering enabled.

Your PC can run at least 1 thread per core but beyond that, you will need to find the best setting for your particular computer.

You will likely see a performance gain by unchecking "partial texture rendering", when increasing threads above 1.

click to enlarge

To find your starting point, in Windows: Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager. Select the Performance tab to see how many cores and logical processors your PC has.  You should set your threads to either the amount of cores you have or logical processors, whichever is the higher value. The 'sweet spot' is likely to be somewhere in between your amount of threads and logical processors.

Note: If you leave threads at 1, you should also leave partial rendering enabled (Default setting for both).

 

August 13th, 2023 (Build 922)

- Mouselook crosshairs: Using OpenGL, the size of mouselook crosshairs can now be increased/decreased  GenxCrosshairSize (factor) See Prefs: Input.

- Don't show the favourites bar when in (M)ouselook.

August 12th, 2023 (Build 918)

- Added "Use the legacy font" to Preferences: Genesis> Main. 

When enabled Genesis will use the smaller DejaVu font that supports a much wider range of high/extended ascii characters (unicode) commonly used for display names that use arabic letters.   Left unticked, Genesis will continue to use its existing clearer and larger font, which doesn't support the full unicode range.

debug value: GenxUseLegacyFont 

Caveats:

Genesis is optimised for the existing font, so when switching to Deja Vu, you will most likely need to also adjust (FontsDPI) Preferences > Genesis > Adv. Features "Screen font DPI."

Apply and Save.

You need to restart the viewer when switching between fonts.

You need to restart the viewer when changing sizes of fonts.

Should you lose any windowed floaters from your screen by changing these settings, see the section called "I've accidentally dragged my chat floater off screen", in FAQs

- Added checkbox for debug value EnableAORemote in new AO Engine

- Optimisation work and code cleanup for Object Area Search.

- Removed additional debug logging for Area Search as no longer required.

August 7th, 2023 (Build 911)

- Object Area Search, re-imagined. Capitalising on search capability commands at our disposal.  This is a test and is disabled by default.  To enable, go to Debug and set GenxAreaSearchFloater to true and restart the viewer.

August 5th, 2023 (Build 909)

- Updated Genesis Concierge members shown in their profiles.

July 30th, 2023 (Build 907)

- Estate Management tools: Increased banned agent limit from 500 to 750.

- Estate Management tools: Increased estate manager limit from 15 to 20.

July 29th, 2023.  (Build 905)

- Reverted to original Object Area Search floater whilst we debug performance issues on new style.

- New update splash.

July 29th, 2023.  (Build 894 Pulled)

- Build 894 with new Object Area Search Floater has been pulled.

- Estate Management: Increased banned agent limit from 500 to 750

- Optimisation and Rework of Area Search, bringing it in parity with SLV and capitalising on search capability commands at our disposal.  (Caution!  Needs further refinement to make less intensive use of memory).

Crossed through items failed QA and will appear in a future build.

Additional notes:

Yesterday having outgrown our previous server, we relocated to a new host.  We are aware of an issue where MS Edge will not permit the download of the viewer.  These are teething issues on our new server and we are working on them. In Edge, please mark the download as safe to proceed with it, or download using any other browser.