Kokua 7.1.4 Release Notes

Owned by Chorazin Allen
Last updated: Apr 01, 2024
3 min read

The Kokua team are pleased to announce the release of version 7.1.4 which brings Kokua to parity with the LL 7.1.4 (PBR Maintenance 2) release as well as intermediate releases (PBR, PBR Maintenance 1 and Emoji support)

Why the gap in releases?

  • The introduction of PBR required additional Linux library work to match LL’s work with Windows and Mac libraries

  • The Emoji support added additional Linux library work

  • We have been waiting for PBR to settle down. Now that it’s on its second maintenance release it’s in a much better state than the initial release although issues still remain

The new PBR and Emoji features are ported over pretty much exactly how they were implemented by LL. Both still have some rough edges. If you find some unusual behaviour with this Kokua release check whether the standard LL viewer shows the same issue - if it does consider making a report to LL, if not, please make a report via our Jira issue tracking tool. PBR and Emoji features are still being refined by LL so we will probably not accept any change requests whilst there is a likelihood that LL will make the same change themselves.

Amongst the upstream issues we’re aware of:-

  • Some trees fail to render at certain graphics levels

  • The introduction of emojis has made script dialogs more messy with inconsistent conversion to emojis between button text and the text string above the buttons. Additionally, emojis tend to be wider than characters to anything that relies on unicode character alignment is going to look strange until LL fix it

  • Although reduced from the initial PBR release there are still scenarios where the entire scene gets a blue hue, particularly noticeable on shiny surfaces

  • The viewer performance is bumpy right after login resulting in jerky movement or short freezes. This clears up quite quickly on Windows and Mac but seems a lot more noticeable on Linux systems. It should be noted that PBR places an increased load on the graphics capabilities of the computer so Kokua may no longer run in some situations (eg in an emulated Linux environment) or run less well than before. We don’t consider the Linux performance acceptable on a Nvidia GTX 1050 system that we use but have chosen to include Linux in this release to find out whether the problems are still apparent on newer/more powerful Linux systems.

  • Following the latest update to the CEF browser the build platform for Linux Kokua is now Ubuntu 20 LTS. Kokua is not supported for earlier versions and probably will not run.

Those of you who follow LL’s technical messaging will be aware that LL is intending to move away from Vivox for voice support and switch to WebRTC instead. We are watching this initiative and will port it into Kokua when we judge it has become mature enough to be included (this will likely be once a Release Candidate viewer with WebRTC becomes available).

This release also addresses two crash scenarios in the RLV versions

  • Clicking a texture within a notecard whilst viewtexture is denied would cause a crash

  • Receiving a folder structure into #RLV that involved creating subfolders (eg the incoming folder is named something like #RLV/A/B/C) would often cause a crash