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.
Changes since Release: 1.3.662
Release #3 - January 30th 11th, 2023.
Moved WASD options to Prefs > Input > Input and Movement. Special note: with WASD disabled, typing opens the bottom chat bar. For those of you who do not use the bottom chat bar, leave WASD enabled, and you can still use the keyboard arrow keys to move.
Release #2 - December 11th, 2022.
There is a new Genesis Viewer Release.
Version 1.2.594
This release is primarily to address the Chromium updates that bring the viewer in parity with Second Life Viewer's media abilities for shared streamed content, in particular, the rise in the popularity of HiVid TV.
HiVid TV media is now supported.
We added a cache system for Contact Sets to make them respond faster.
The Active Speaker list can now be paused, reactivated and refreshed.
The GenxProfileFloater is a new experimental profile floater that you can opt in and out of by enabling it in Debug. When fully implemented it will become an option in Preferences, but already, you can upload a profile picture without incurring any upload fees.
Added some hover text help for some ambiguous settings in Preferences.
Added an additional 7 skins for the User Interface. You now have a choice of 11. Check out 'Second Love' if you like extra colourful, or 'Snow White', if you want a Wintery theme.
Developers and Support team can now be identified by "Genesis Viewer Team" appearing in their profile.
The Script editor now uses a mono space font.
A group invitation is offered (once) to the account logging in on the first session of a new install.
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Release 1 - 5th November 2022
Genesis: A 1.23 style Second Life viewer for Windows 10/11.
Genesis is part of Linden Lab's Third Party Viewer program: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory
This release will mirror the nightly build version 522 and be installed in \Program Files\Genesis
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 and there is still so much more to come.
Upon this release, we will immediately begin work again on adding some of the best suggested improvements from the community, with a second release following quickly. Those wishing to experience the new features as soon as they are included are reminded to stay on the Nightly channel releases.
What is in Genesis?
A fast, responsive, low memory footprint viewer designed with laptop users in mind.
We inherited some very old code and settings, better suited to computers over a decade ago and have brought the code and settings up to date. A low-spec computer manufactured in the past ten years, should be able to run Genesis and enjoy improved performance.
We diagnosed and corrected many inherited errors in open-source code that v1.23 users have lived with for a number of years, the most obvious one being constant teleport and region hand-off failures. Sometimes it was as easy as changing the order that certain capabilities were called and sometimes it meant rewriting or back-porting entire portions of code.
Genesis is currently provided with 4 skins, GenX (our default), Dark, Classic and Dazzle.
New Features:
- Network Bandwidth is set to Adaptive by default. This makes your connection to SL the best it can be. It checks for packet loss and ratchets down during times of trouble then upward again. You can override this setting should you wish: Prefs > Network and set your own limits. You should, from time to time check for "packet loss" as the viewer will relinquish monitoring, when adaptive was disabled. (Stats: Ctrl+Shift+1).
- Zoom in on any resident on a region, using our "All roads lead to Rome approach", by right-mouse-clicking any menu (radar, sound explorer, active speaker etc) and choosing which ever option you need from the context menu. Additionally moderation controls for land owners can be accessed from any of these menus.
- Contact sets: You can now group friends, business partners or anyone you like into their own contact set from the main communication menu. Options for Contacts are in Prefs > Genesis > Contact sets.
To add a contact; Open a residents profile and click the contact set. You can rename and recolour sets from the main communications floater. You can choose to have their IM and local chat in its own colour.
- Profile Notes: You can colour users whom you have left Profile Notes about from the Genesis > Tags/Colors menu. Additionally you can change the default name tag colour from salmon to whatever you wish.
- Word wrap now works on profile notes.
- Teleport that works reliably. A lot of work has gone into the Teleport code. Many bugs associated with this problem including About Land not updating, the agent crossing the region and keeping on walking until disconnect, have fixed.
-Peek inside folders. You do not need to load an entire new instance of inventory. Right click a folder and "open in new window" for an immediate pop-up. This has already proved so popular that other viewers have already adopted it!
- Update Outfit: You can update items you are currently wearing to be automatically included in the clothing folder by clicking on 'File' in the Inventory window and choosing, update outfit.
- Hovering your mouse over another Resident will display their complexity value.
- Favourite's TP Bar. By dragging Landmarks to the Favorites folder in your inventory you can populate the bar on the top of your screen. You can drag and drop your favorites on screen to rearrange their order. The bar can be disabled in Prefs > Genesis. You can also temporarily hide this bar by clicking the left arrow at the top of the bar.
- The main communication floater has a handy button that will open the Genesis in-world group for user to user help.
- BackgroundYieldTime (the amount of resources your computer still allocates to the viewer when it is not in focus, can be controlled in Prefs > Genesis. 40 milliseconds is default, but you can increase this to give more processing power to the CPU when Genesis is in the background. Please be aware that setting this too high on an older computer could cause the viewer to stall when being swapped back into focus, so everyone's mileage will vary.
- EEP is emulated via Windlight so that you can go to an island with EEP and enjoy a similar experience to everyone else. Additionally you can exchange fixed sky EEP with others and right click it in your inventory and apply it to yourself. Day/Night cycle is not supported at this time but is a priority for subsequent releases. EEP is emulated to preserve existing frame rate. The user should see no appreciable deterioration when switching from their default setting to an EEP setting. Currently you cannot set EEP in a region, but you can see it. Work will continue in subsequent releases.
- Vivox 4.1 for voice. Better and more reliable.
- Updated FMOD for sounds and gestures.
- Bulk uploads fixed. They used to stall after the third or fourth file as the old code used to quite literally guess at when the next file should be uploaded by adding a random pause. This is now fixed and files are not sent until the server sends an acknowledgement that it is ready.
- Radar can now alert you to people only entering a region, or only exiting a region. Previously it would only indicate both and was for that reason verbose and slightly annoying. Additionally people with profile notes, have a new icon in the radar to plainly indicate that. You can change the reorder of radar by clicking the title bars within the floater.
- VLC and all other dependencies are now included in the package. This substantially improves installation time because it removes the reliance on slow distro sites.
Some cosmetics..
We have cleaned up Abuse Reporting, Ascending/Descending Date order of Group Notices, the snapshot floater, and multitude of other cosmetics and artefacts from another age.
Profiles and other floaters will now remember where they were last opened and open there next time. This setting does not persist through login to protect people from lost floaters. Should you lose a floater, relog and it will go back to the middle. Profiles no longer need to scroll left to right to see all the available tabs.
Friends online/offline can have a toast appearing, or appear in local chat, or both. set this in Prefs > Genesis.
Clickable links made much easier to see. They will be underlined. It is up to you if you click them or not, but making them stand out was an important security issue.
Technobabble: Performance: We replaced gDirUtilp->getDireDelimeter by LL_DIR_DELIM_STR for performance reasons. Detect Cuda compatible GPU and use nvJPEG2000 instead of OpenJpeg
Fixed various inherited bugs related to Old Names, DisplayNames and combinations of both. It was all rather tangled and now works as intended way back when this was first introduced.
Previously undocumented, you can change any debug value from typing in (local) /setdebug debug debugvalue when the option is only true or false /setdebug debug with toggle from true to false. These commands can be stacked in gestures (with a short pause between commands) for settings such as photography where you might wish to enable shadows, high graphics etc for photo's then revert to your regular settings. You should always look to see what a gesture does, when accepting them from other residents. (This option is disabled by default, but can be enabled in Prefs > Advanced Chat > setdebug checkbox.
What is NOT included in this release? These are the things that did not make it into this initial release because we feel we needed to make a release instead of staying in perpetual test mode.. So these are the items we are actively working on now in new Test builds.
MFA/2FA Multifactor authentication - EEP day/night - Ability to create EEP environments, Ability to open profile floater from mute list - Ability to sort login names on login page - Make favourite bar movable - Pop-Out profile from search - Transaction thresholds - Auto move lock (without a bridge).
... and lots of other features and improvements suggested by Genesis users.
Again, we urge our Test users to stay on the test builds as you will get these features long before they go into release and your feedback is vital to the project.
Please enjoy this first release of Genesis Viewer.
* We aim to incorporate all of the latest technology, but of course this takes time, so whilst most of the functionality is already supported, this remains an ongoing project.
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