Sunday, March 3, 2024

Genesis Change Log R9

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

Download page: https://genesisviewer.org

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions and Solutions


Nightly Builds


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.




Thursday, November 2, 2023

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

Sunday, October 8, 2023

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.

Download page: https://genesisviewer.org

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions and Solutions



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


Nightly Builds


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.



Friday, August 4, 2023

Historians Note..

"GenesisViewer Resident" is 365 days old today.

Although the first release of Genesis Viewer wasn't until November 1st, last year, the birth of this account denotes the beginning of the Genesis Viewer project.

Please take a look at his new Marketplace store here: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/255951



Friday, July 28, 2023

Migrating to a new host

[Now completed] Friday, July 28th, 2023.

Popularity comes at a cost and we have outgrown our existing hosting service.

This has manifested in our nightly builds recently being chronically slow to compile and queue's for downloads. Through Friday expect downtime on our website genesisviewer.org as we migrate to a new bionic server, better, stronger, faster and will greatly increase our capacity and speed.


Saturday, July 15, 2023

New Genesis Release 1.7.880

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, SEVENTH Release 1.7.880

Main improvements since: 1.6.799


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:


- Substantial rework of internal AO engine.  It now supports multiple configuration settings for different AO's and will remember the last AO setting and persist upon relog.

- New snapshot floater brings Genesis inline with SLV style snapshot previews and refresh.
You can toggle between old and new style.  Debug GenxSnapshorFloater = True / False

-  Ability to change screen font size via a slider in Genesis > Adv. Features.  Default is 104. Setting this to either 96, 104, 112 will give the equivalent of small medium and large.  Mileage will vary because of the multitude of different screen sizes everyone uses.

- Stop Animations, handy one-click to stop now added to the bottom user toolbar next to media options.

- Avatar distance can now be displayed in with the avatar name, group bubble over the avatars head.   Genesis > Tags: Show Avatar distance.



Changes:

- Viewer now supports the uploading of 30 second WAV files (previously 10 seconds).

- Genesis Viewer now supports long password up to 16 characters, SL grid maximum. (previously 12).

- Changed debug value to display IM in chat console (IMInChatConsole) along with local chat, to False (previously true).  User should have to opt-in to see IM in with local chat (not out).


Fixes:

- Fixed font issues in certain floaters, most notably "build" so land impact and group settings no longer truncate.

- Fixed very long text truncating in blue dialog boxes.

- Fixed seeing holes in terrain caused by archaic inherited hard coded region "assumptions".

- Fixed: there should be no need to scroll Profile tabs to use "notes" when using default size screen font of 104 dpi.

- Fixed: unlimited zoom via camera constraints.




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...