Friday, March 23, 2018

RLV 2.9.23 (64-bit)

Hi !

It's been a while but I have gone back to working on the RLV during the week. This RLV is the first one to be 64-bit, and I'm sorry to say that I will not keep working on the 32-bit one anymore, since it would mean twice the workload for me. Windows is 64 bit now and has been for a while so I believe this will not be a problem anyway.

The other thing about this viewer is the fixes I brought into it, most of them being about silhouettes and vision restriction spheres.

When I first introduced silhouettes in the RLV, my idea was to make an avatar difficult to recognize, yet be fully aware of what they are doing when they're close. Now I've managed to do that by making the silhouettes look like silhouettes, i.e. flat gray shadows without any feature save for their outlines, they're not 3D anymore. It can be very interesting if the avatars around you are both rendered as silhouettes and have their names hidden, it becomes a lot more difficult to know who's who and that's the point. Silhouettes were also lacking the unrigged mesh attachments worn by the avatars, which was problematic in some cases.

I also worked on making vision restriction a lot more accurate. Before this version, when blindfolded you could see some of the transparent parts of the avatar in front of you simply disappear, for example a sheer latex catsuit, or a hair base, or even eyes. It looked silly and was caused by the RLV hiding alpha-blended surfaces if their objects are too far from you (since alpha-blended rigged attachments poke through the vision restriction spheres). It no longer works that way, the distances are now tested on a face-by-face basis, in other words a surface will disappear if it is too far, not if its containing prim is too far, which makes a big difference when it comes to avatars.

And the calculation of what rigged surfaces to hide and show when blindfolded has been sped up a lot too, so normally you should stop seeing your viewer slow down to a crawl when blindfolded in the middle of a crowd.

Oh and when every occurrence of a name is replaced ("censored") in a chat message or a hovertext, it is replaced only when it is a complete word, not a part of a word. This should stop some silliness I see when people choose very short display names like just one letter, and that letter is replaced by "This resident" in everything word containing that letter.


Here is the full change list :

- changed : The viewer is now 64-bit, which means you need a 64-bit operating system to make it run. You may run it via the provided SL_launcher executable (which checks for updates) or on its own, this makes no functional difference.

- improved : When rendering avatars as silhouettes via the @camavdist RLV command, the silhouettes now appear as flat grey 2D without any shading, as they were intended since the beginning.

- improved : Silhouettes now feature every single attachment the avatar is wearing, including unrigged ones unlike before. The only attachments that still don't show are the unrigged alpha-blended ones. I will try to work on that in the future.

- improved : The calculation of what to hide beyond the vision restriction spheres is dramatically sped up, there should not be such a slowdown anymore when around several avatars while blindfolded. Moreover, the faces are now hidden on a face-by-face basis and not on an object basis, i.e. you should no longer see alpha-blended parts of an avatar disappear when taking a step back while blindfolded.

- fixed : The avatar of the user is no longer hidden by its own silhouette when silhouettes are active and you are looking at someone else from certain angles. Thank you Henri Beauchamp for the fix.

- fixed : Censoring names (replacing with "That resident", "This person" etc) in the chat and in HUD texts looked wonky when someone had a very short user or display name. For example, hearing someone say "I need more money" no longer reads as "I need This soulre This soulney" when around Mo Noel.

- fixed : RLV commands that you can send to someone else through IM (@version, @stopim and others) could not be sent when the IM  window was in "expanded view" mode.

- fixed : Glow and fullbright no longer poke through the vision restriction spheres when they are not black.

- fixed : Surfaces that are fullbright, with environment and materials and alpha-blended (yes, that specific) no longer render through the vision restriction spheres.

- fixed : Put "share" after "replace links" in the inventory context menu.


You can grab the Windows version here :
http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/

The MD5 hash for the Windows executable is :
145d1e7ff8d1e76b40362ecbc8972e50

Alternate download :
http://www.mediafire.com/?nsck5qglp7gdi

Have fun !
Marine


PS : I know the 64-bit SL viewer and many 64-bit TPVs have been around for a while already, the RLV kind of comes late to the party. This is because I have been (and still am) very busy in RL, and the code I have had a nasty crash on startup that did not allow me to release it sooner. I coded a workaround only today, it will stay until I find the cause of this crash (which is probably due to one of my merges) and fix it.