Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC8 is the ninth release candidate in the unexpectedly elongated 1.22 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). RC5 was supposed to have been the last release-candidate in this series, but unfortunately a number of serious issues prompted the release of RC6, and now we have some major changes, which by all rights should mean quite a few more release-candidates before becoming an official release.
OpenAL and gstreamer support are the big surprises. We're wondering if Quicktime has been given the flick entirely. This mirrors the work being done with the Imprudence Release Candidate, though the Imprudence Project does not appear to have the same difficulties with sound under Linux. That's a huge change for a release-candidate, especially so late in the series, and we'd be surprised if they released a new official viewer anytime soon on that basis alone.
New Features:
- Added: VWR-2662: OpenAL support
- Added: VWR-5659: Implement audio streaming via gstreamer
- Updated: Update the Vivox SDK to support additional voice features and resolve known volume problems
- Also Fixes: VWR-4589: Terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::out_of_range'
Bug Fixes from the Public Nightly Viewers:
- Fixed: VWR-11581: Undo, Delete, and Duplicate are not working when Local Chat Bar enabled
- Fixed: VWR-11640: the backside of prim jitters wildly when resizing
Localization/Translation Fixes:
- Fixed: CT-136: improvements to Brazilian Portuguese in viewer 1.22
- Fixed: CT-86: improvements to Polish translation in viewer 1.22
- Fixed: modify the Voice Channel controls XML to correct the appearance of translated control buttons
- Added: Additional translations and fixes for German, French, Japanese, and Hungarian viewer
Other Changes:
- Added: memory usage tracking to crash reporting
- Added: more information to hueristic stack walking on driver crashes, without editing the call stacks
Known Issues:
We are aware that this build introduces the following bugs which may not be solved in the 1.22 Viewer:
- Although improved on Linux, there may be continued problems with Audio/Voice on Linux:
- VWR-11759[c]: Linux stops playing audio streams / VWR-11875[c]: No audio stream with OpenAL
- Streaming audio from parcels may not work without additional preliminary setup of a compatible 32-bit GStreamer on your Linux computer.
- Please read the file README-linux.txt. Goto Section 3, INSTALLING & RUNNING, and see Section 5, TROUBLESHOOTING for Problem #6.
- Linux may have no audio (ambient, UI, gesture sounds, etc) when using a USB headset
- This problem does not affect Voice over a USB headset.
- Workaround: An analog headset does not exhibit this problem.
- Voice quality on Linux can be poor (a pulse of crackly noise) with Intel Audio chips, such as Intel ICH7 and ICH8.
- We are investigating bugs in the voice SDK which degrades the quality of voice on some systems
- VWR-11759[c]: Linux stops playing audio streams / VWR-11875[c]: No audio stream with OpenAL
- A limitation to the 'Hide Selected' feature:
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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