⚠️ Kirstens Viewer — README

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🖥️ About This Viewer

Kirstens Viewer is a maintained fork of the official Second Life Viewer. It prioritizes fidelity, performance, and compatibility with modern Windows systems.

• Optimized for modern multi-core CPUs (AVX2); target audience: high-end PCs & technical users
• Modern C++: replacing legacy code
• Unique build system: modern vcpkg / PowerShell solution
• Functionality aligns with official viewer for consistent user experience

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⚖️ Legal & Compliance

Not affiliated with Linden Lab. Users must adhere to the Second Life Terms of Service.

This software is provided "as is" with no warranty. You assume all risk of use and agree that the Kirstens Viewer team is not liable for any loss or disruption caused by use of this software.

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🔒 Privacy Features

Kirstens Viewer respects user privacy and disables the following components by default:

• 🚫 Background Updater
• 🚫 Metrics Collection
• 🚫 Crashlogger

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💬 Message from Kirstenlee

Thank you for your time and interest.
Best wishes always,
Kirstenlee Cinquetti

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🏗️ Build History

Build	Codename	Version
2182	OTHAN	S24.1
2342	DRIF	S24.2
2527	FARA	S24.3
2700	SJAANDI	S24.4
3075	VETR	S24.5
3259	LYSI	S24.6

Forked from Viewer Develop / 2026.2

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✨ Change Log (Concise)

🎨 Graphics & Rendering

• Anaglyph 3D V10.6 — complete rewrite with new modes, ultrawide compensation, and dual-eye shadow optimisation
• Reflection Modification System V1 — user-controllable SSR water reflections with dedicated controls and zero-value off support
• Selection Beam Enhancement — GL line core with 10% fade, custom colours, three modes: particles / line / hybrid
• Dynamic Light Culling — distance-aware culling with per-scene tuning
• Shadow Cascade System — distance-throttled cascades, texel-snapping stabilisation, underwater space tuning, and user-facing toggle with explanation
• Extended Tonemapping — additional hand-curated tone maps added to the pipeline
• Water Controls V2 — comprehensive water rendering overhaul building on V1 tweaks
• GLTF / PBR Respect — user GLTF settings honoured throughout; upstream PBR planar alignment fix applied for all texture channels (LL #5676)
• Hysteresis Band — prevents object pop-in/out thrashing at the draw-distance edge, complementing auto-tune
• GPU Completion-Based FPS — more accurate frame-rate readout derived from GPU completion timestamps
• SSAO Performance Pass — reduced sample count and matrix churn without visual quality loss
• Particle Effect Fix — resolved the significant GPU performance hit affecting Nvidia cards under heavy particle load
• Night Vision Noise Fix — interference pattern caused by kernel batching corrected for a clean result

⚡ Performance & Optimisation

• L1 RAM Texture Cache — experimental in-memory layer above the on-disk texture cache for dramatically faster texture hits
• L1 RAM Object Cache (Lysi) — experimental L1 object-cache layer with improved VOCache file-handling for previously unreliable cache reads
• AO Motion Leak Fix — resolves FIRE-3801: accumulated stale animation sets on timer reloads, preventing 150+ motion build-up while maintaining LLInstanceTracker safety
• Texture Fetch Shutdown Performance — upstream improvement to texture pipeline teardown (LL #475)
• LLTextBase Optimisation — upstream text rendering performance improvement (LL #5626)
• Spam & Hot-Path Reduction — extensive removal of non-actionable console spam and redundant work in render, texture-fetch, and network hot paths
• P-Core / MCSS Thread Scheduling — Windows thread-priority and performance-core awareness via MCSS for smoother frame pacing

🖌️ UI, Themes & Skins

• New Skin — UI refinement producing a polished new default appearance across all UI variations
• New Icon Set — full replacement icon suite throughout the viewer
• S24 Visual Menu — icon-driven visual menu with toggle to show/hide from S24 Engine
• Modernised Splash & Login — updated splash screen layout and enhanced login panel
• Compact Chat Bar — S20 chat bar design restored using modern code for a compact chat experience
• Advanced Profiles — richer profile pages reviving S19/S20 concepts, with expanded picture support matching SL profile image dimensions
• Borderless Fullscreen — native borderless windowed fullscreen mode improved performance offloading DWM work from GPU
• Modern Resolution Picker — updated window-size floater with contemporary resolution presets
• RAM Cache Stats Floater — persistent position memory stats and semi-transparent window
• S24 Engine UX Overhaul — label clarity, sane slider defaults/ranges, and improved layout throughout

🔊 Audio

• Enhanced Audio V2 — building on V1 with expanded controls and mixer improvements
• Collision Audio Mute — dedicated toggle to silence collision sound events

🎥 Camera & Input

• Pro Camera Tools — advanced camera control suite
• Recording / Playback Decoupling — camera detaches from UI during recording, playback, and loop sessions upto 1min of smooth 60fps footage at a single touch
• Movement Smoothing — option for non-analogue control systems to smooth avatar locomotion

🛠️ Debug & Diagnostics

• Advanced Debug Console — integrated command-line interface with full command execution built in
• RDTSC Profiling — no-overhead timer-based profiling surface via the Fast Timer console
• Enhanced Texture Console — live texture pipeline statistics and state display
• Improved Memory Console — richer memory breakdown and colour display based on load
• Improved Scene Stats — expanded scene-view statistics overlay fixed many bugs

🔄 System Reset Tool

• Selective Reset System — interactive UI for clearing shaders, caches, or performing a full viewer reset independently

🔒 Privacy & Moderation

• Security & Privacy Hardening (Lysi) — race conditions eradicated, security fall-throughs closed, null-safety modernised
• Mute List Cache Fallback — focused fallback path for the mute list without adopting LL's state machine
• Selective Group Chat Mute — per-group mute capability with early-out guards for invalid group chats

🔗 Upstream Merges & Bug Fixes

• Fix viewer fetching group chat history for P2P IMs (LL #5690)
• Permit smaller cloud scroll rate values (LL #1355)
• Show feedback when role members are not yet loaded (LL #2965)
• Media priority fix (LL #5702)
• Fix experiences search and classifieds content-rating label display
• Initialise LLJointData support category from avatar skeleton (LL #5639)
• Show underwater nametags when camera is above water (LL #2888)
• Corrected progress view for teleports vs. logins with accurate status readback
• KVTweaks Max Local Lights raised from 1 024 → 8 192 to match Advanced Graphics settings

🏗️ Build System & Infrastructure

• cmake Overhaul — two-phase modernisation removing legacy cruft and Darwin remnants
• Full vcpkg Migration — hunspell, libxml2, OpenAL, tinyexr, nanosvg and zlib all converted to vcpkg-managed packages
• Python Build System Retired — final vestiges of the legacy Python/autobuild system replaced with a modern PowerShell automation suite
• DXRender Foundation — experimental Direct3D render path scaffolding added as a long-term side project

Binaries signed: Codesign Serial: 4e2969400a179e151ba7323da181f8b0

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📬 Footer

Kirstens Viewer is independently developed. For support, build reports, or contributions, please use the designated contact channels.
Special thanks to SourceForge for hosting this project and supporting the open source community.

"I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." — Richard P. Feynman