I’m not a Singularity user. I have been. I know many people on older hardware use Singularity. It seems if Firestorm doesn’t work well for you then Singularity is the other white meat. So, I am always curious what is happening with the Singularity Viewer.
The SLUniverse user Lord posts about updates to Singularity (post). A new post came up yesterday.
Singularity Viewer Update, as per Shyotl’s blog post and reported on by OP :
Singularity Viewer 1.8.7 (available in Windows and Linux…MacOS later)
This past year has been a tumultuous one for our team, one of our developers passed away, another one left to pursue other interests, we were hampered in our ability to update and test the viewer by a lack of infrastructure and hardware issues.
It was not all bad, as we recently gained a new developer, miKa-Pyon, most of our hardware issues were resolved, and we’re working on improvements with renewed vigor.
Nevertheless, Singularity is constantly evolving, and as we move on to new technologies, we cannot retain support for older platforms. Our toolchain has been updated, we now use modern programming language features which require recent GCC and Microsoft Visual Studio™ 2015. Unfortunately, as part of this required toolchain update, some older platforms have become too burdensome if not impossible to support. On the upside, thanks to these newer language features we can write better code and get better performance for the viewer. Not only can we use modern C++, we are also able to share code and prebuilt libraries with our sister project, Alchemy Viewer, this is highly beneficial as the development workload is now halved between our two projects. Due to these updates, those compiling our project will find that we now make use of autobuild.
While making 32-bit linux builds is very high on our agenda, it requires a large effort and did not make this deadline. We are currently in need of a Mac developer to help us get Singularity for macOS back on track and building again.
The source for the post along with the change/release notes are available here: Singularity Viewer Release 1.8.7.
The important update is the change from SSL to TLS 1.2, which is the encryption protocol used for logins and money tasks. So, when the Lab changes this month to only talking money with viewers that use TLS 1.2, Singularity Viewer users will be able to satisfy their shopping urges.
The view reports avatar render info to the servers. I think this means the Avatar Complexity Information is being sent so other viewers know if the ACI exceeds the other users’ limit. It sounds like a Jelly Dolls thing.
RLVa has been updated. More features from RLVa 2.9 have been added.
On a sad note… the Singularity Team acknowledges Latif’s passing.
Lastly, we’d like to dedicate this release in memory of Latif Khalifa (lkalif), who has contributed so much to this and other viewers and open source metaverse projects, like his own Radegast viewer, libomv, and OpenSim. His contributions to the metaverse have been invaluable and are too numerous to mention. Suffice to say that without him, the metaverse would not have been what it is today.
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