Kokua/Imprudence Blog

A Small Update On Kokua

Work continues on the new Kokua viewer. We’re moving forward using the v3.2 Linden viewer as a base, we feel this version of the viewer is stable enough and has solved enough of the UI problems from v2 that our users will be happy with it. It’s also what many of you recommended in previous blog comments and at our meetings. We’re currently focusing on releasing a stable viewer on at least three platforms, Linux 32bit, Linux 64bit and Windows 32bit. You can follow our progress by trying our experimental viewers if you’d like, but buyer beware, these are alpha viewers and you should read the warning label carefully before use. You’ll find the link to our experimental viewers page on our wiki bellow…

http://wiki.kokuaviewer.org/wiki/Kokua:Experimental

Currently there is both a Linux 32bit and a Windows 32bit experimental client available and we’re working to support more platforms but said clients just aren’t ready to be posted to the wiki yet (They either don’t run/compile or have known showstopper bugs). With the coming site redesign we’ll create a better way for users to talk about the features they’d like to see. Please understand that these experimental viewers are pretty bare-bones and lacking features we plan to implement at a later date. We feel that right now the collection of sites we have is a little unruly for both you our users as well as ourselves in an administrative capacity and we’re working to improve that.

Correction

The current experimentals are based on v3 viewer code, future version will be based on v3.2+

Results Of All Hands Meeting

This last weekend we had our all hands meeting where we discussed the fate and direction of the project going forward. I’m pleased to say that the meeting was well attended not only by team members but the public as well. A few of us even met for the first time as not everyone is able to make the regular meeting due to scheduling conflicts. You’ll find a full transcript of the meeting on our wiki but I’ve included a summary of what was decided for convenience.

We’re going to continue to develop Third Party viewers with a focus on cross supporting Second Life and OpenSim/Aurora. However we’re going to focus on Kokua in the future, the ultimate fate of Imprudence is still undecided though as we may push for a final 1.4 release but nothing that takes up too much of our time. Kokua will use Second Life v3.2 as a base, we feel the LL code for v3.2 has matured greatly beyond v2 and v3 and we’ll of course make our own modifications to it to make it more “purple” in flavor. It is also our intent to finalize the name change from Imprudence to Kokua, Imprudence and Kokua are separate viewers and the project has historically been called the Imprudence project. The intent was to switch from Imprudence to Kokua as the next generation client was released but it has been dragged out for quite a while now and caused confusion, so we’re going to finish the change over to Kokua.

It’s also our intent to give a fresh face to our web presence, to update the look and feel of the blog and forum, and possibly eliminate some section like the rarely used Q&A sub-site. Our hope is that this will make it easier for users to navigate our online infrastructure and find the information or support they need. This may include the addition of a few simple tutorials about how to use the client and how to connect to grids besides Second Life proper.

Windows 32bit, Linux 32bit and Linux 64bit will be the three platforms we focus on primarily. We’ll make an effort to get out a Windows 64bit and Mac client down the line, but right now we need to focus on getting things rolling and these best fit our users demographics. We’re supporting two flavors of Linux because our devs use both Linux 32bit and Linux 64bit, plus it’s a big PITA run the 32bit client on Linux 64bit so we’ll continue to make a Linux 64bit client available. Regarding Windows, at first we’ll only provide a 32bit client (With SSE optimizations) as we have been doing already, the necessity of a 64bit client on Windows is questionable as the client can’t quite make use of all that ram (Yet, but that can change), plus Windows 64bit OSes can easily run 32bit programs. Still we would like to release a Windows 64bit version at some point to try to see if it makes a difference. Unfortunately we still don’t have a Mac developer and thus can not support the platform, we’d like this to change but it is the state of things for now.

There are other matters besides these that were discussed at the meeting, I encourage you to read the meeting transcript on the wiki if your curious.

A Little Taste

This weekend we’ll be having our all hands meeting to discuss the future of the project as mentioned in our last update. Many of you have replied with your thoughts and suggestions on the last blog post and even attended our weekly meeting to lend your thoughts. We’re very pleased to see such interest in the project, and a lot of your thoughts are in line with our own. So it’s good to know we got the right idea. Here is a highlight in no particular order of some (But not all) of the ideas that were suggested by you…

• Focus on the next generation Kokua client rather than Kokua & Imprudence
• Continue to support Linux 64 bit
• Keep it easy to explore alternative grids (ie not Second Life proper)
• Mesh support in Second Life and OpenSim
• Support older hardware
• Experimental builds

I think my favorite comment was from Chaniyth, simply because it made me laugh out loud, literally. Here’s what Chaniyth had to say (Emphasis mine)…

First and foremost, please don’t be asses [...] listen to your end users, do the respectable thing and listen to what your end users want and need, and in a timely fashion [Experimental Builds]!

That would make a great company slogan wouldn’t it? “Please don’t be asses”, perhaps even better than Google’s “Don’t be evil”. Could we live up to it I wonder? Haha

It brings up a good point though, in that it’s important to listen to what your users want. Granted sometimes there are things we just don’t have the manpower to do. Ideally we’d love to make a viewer every month with a completely revamped UI that is fully customizable and adjusts to a users tastes (Are you a builder or a shopper, a dancer or a socialite, a machinima maker or a sailor etc). Unfortunately there are limits to what we or any developer can do, but  we’ll try to work out what’s best and try things from time to time. Experimental builds are a great step along this line, as suggested be several people, as it allows the public to test out new viewers before they’re really “ready” and give us feedback, allowing us the opportunity to make changes to things before we put too much time into them and it’s too hard to change course.

And so we’re going to try to release more test viewers, starting today. We’ve set up a special page on the wiki were we will post test viewers as we can, they may or may not be announced here on the blog. Please understand that these are not Beta viewers but Alpha viewers and are generally only tested internally. We’re going to make an effort to put more of them up on the blog though. They may not be available for every platform (ie it may be only Linux 64 or Windows 32 and nothing else). But if you want to see what’s “brewin in the pot” this is one way you can do it, just be sure to read the instructions on the page and take whatever necessary precautions are recommended (This is the knife’s edge folks, you have been warned).

On The Wiki – Kokua: Experimental

What’s Next..?

Here at Imprudence we’ve been juggling several issues, trying to develop two different clients at the same time (Imprudence and Kokua) for three different platforms in 32bit and 64bit flavors. not to mention supporting not only the Second Life grid but all the various OpenSim grids as best we can. We think we’ve made some pretty awesome viewers but lately we’re also become stagnant as we’ve been weighted down by trying to juggle all these various things. It seems we may have over extended ourselves a bit and to fix that we need to refocus and simplify. Thus in the coming weeks we will be holding an all-hands team meeting for all Imprudence/Kokua team members, be they Dev or Support, where we will discuss what’s working and what isn’t and what we plan to do about it (Details have already been sent to all team members).

But we’d like to hear your input as well, as we make these viewers for you our users after all. Tell us what makes Imprudence special for you, what draws you to this particular Third Party Viewer over others and what you would like to see going forward.  How do you use Imprudence, and how do you use other viewers even the official one? What do you like about them, what don’t you like, and how is that similar or different from Imprudence. Do you use OpenSim, Aurora or any other alternative grids, even your own local grid? Is there anything you think that Third Party Viewers are missing that would make them easier or more productive for people? What about the site itself, this blog, the forum, the wiki and etc, how can we improve it?

While we can’t make any promises about addressing every issue, we will try to discuss any points made here in the comments.

Happy Thanksgiving & A Short Update

Thanksgiving at the Trolls by martha_chapa95

It’s Thanksgiving this week in the United States, and while not all of the team is based in the US a number of us are. And while we’re with our friends and loved one’s this holiday, we wanted to wish everyone the best this week, whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not.

As an update; work on the Kokua client continues and we’ve had Mesh view working for a little while now in this very alpha client, and now we have Mesh uploading working as well (On both Second Life and OpenSim 07.2+ based grids). The client is still very alpha though and we don’t yet recommend people testing it out as we can’t guarantee a stable experience (We hope to have something stable enough for people to test soon, and we’ll announce it here on this blog when we do). Further we won’t be having our usual weekly meeting this week due to the holiday, but will be returning next week, at the same time but on a new day (Wednesdays at 20:00 UTC on the 3rd Rock Grid as always). Meeting logs will continue to be posted to the wiki for those who can’t attend but wish to see what was discussed.

So be safe this holiday everyone, and we’ll see you next week.

Some insights into our development process

As many of you have noticed, the process for getting Imprudence 1.4 beta 1 out has been a long one, so I wanted to take some time tonight to explain our process as developers behind it–what we intended to do, how we got there, and where we go from here.

Imprudence is something of a unique project for me in that we’re all volunteers scratching our itches, yet somehow despite this we’re able to come together and make things work. I know this sounds horribly cheesy and cliche, but I really have never worked with a more heartfelt and kind-hearted group of people. What makes an ImpDev unique, I think, is that we’d have just as much fun sitting around chatting for hours as we do hacking on the viewer source. We care a lot about what we do, and ironically that’s partly why the 1.4 process has been so frustrating for us.

After the release of 1.3, something became clear: our Quality Assurance process was far too long. We would fix an issue, then it would sit on the repo for weeks without being properly tested on all the environments we want to support (OpenSim, Second Life, InWorldz, and now Aurora grids). We changed that up with releasing the Weeklies (later renamed “Experimentals”). The idea was to get fixes as fast as possible into user’s hands in order to get important feedback. A LOT of the major bugs in 1.3 were fixed in this manner, and thanks to residents who were willing to track down bugs with us we really made a lot of progress. The 10.23 Experimental release is a highlight for people, I know, and that’s largely thanks to residents all over the metaverse being involved in the development process (one of my favorite stories is how many of us it took to track down what we called the Infamous Wright Plaza Crash of Doom. Fixing this eventually led to a patch that made all other 1.x viewers more stable).

But we’ve had problems. The QA process started to take on a life of its own, and as we got sucked into releasing quick updates the gap between our Stable and Experimental branches widened. When our doors were flooded with tens of thousands of new users after another viewer was banned on Second Life, we were thrust into a quandry: do we push to include all the new feature requests, or continue to focus on stability and workflow improvement? In the end, the Experimental line got lengthened again by a rush of new features (and fixes for those features), further widening the gap between the two branches. Looking back, that was probably a mistake. We should’ve kept to our core mission of releasing solid incremental viewers without the feature bloat that other viewers have. But, as I said, we’re a group who cares passionately about our users, and it was important to us to address what we felt were significant needs.

This brings me to the subject of beta 1. The release notes for 1.4 are longer than any release we’ve done to date (and if you follow our commits on github, you know how much work we put into the viewer on a regular basis). It’s been something of a culture shock for us, trying to resolve issues while still moving forward. The Imprudence development process is much like that of a UI designer. We make a change we think is useful, then release it to the community, gather feedback, and refine. Over the course of several iterations, you get a release like 1.3.2, which many people still prefer due its stability. With 1.4, though, this process is much harder for us. We’re giving the community a lot to look through, and we’ve received a lot of feedback. In a way, it’s almost intimidating, because 1.4–as the last of the Imprudence line–is very dear to us, and as I mentioned, we’re all personally dedicated to giving you guys the best viewer we can.

So, where we go from here might be a bit of a struggle for some. There’s obviously work left to do, but I want to point out that releasing the beta (i.e. moving Experimental features into the stable line) has pushed us to focus back on core issues. Based on early feedback, the inworld audio issues on Windows seem to be fixed. Inventory loading’s been vastly improved. More crash fixes have been pushed. The texture cache will hopefully be improved next if time allows before beta 2. Likewise, we’ve also had to balance our need to work on big issues with our desire to make sure everyone who submits a bug report at least gets their voices heard, which is why it’s so important for us that you use the issue tracker and promote it among yourselves. Commenting there brings issues to our attention much faster than commenting in other places. Particularly with this release, there’s so much going on it’s hard for us to give you guys the one-on-one time we’d normally like to. For example, I only recently learned about the “disappearing prim” issue from a forum post and a comment from a friend (currently, it looks setting RunMultipleThreads to FALSE in the debug settings fixes the issue;  let us know if this works it for you or not).

Most of all, I want to make a personal appeal to the community to be patient with us as we work on all these issues. We have Imprudence 1.4 to finish up, then a huge merge to do with Kokua followed by the many features/improvements we want to implement there. This is no easy task, believe me. As a user of our software myself, I know how frustrating it can feel to use an unfinished product, but it’s our hope that at the end of a concerted effort 1.4 will be the best version of Imprudence yet–one you all can look back upon as a journey that was worth the destination, and Kokua will grow into the same.

In short, we’re here, focused on getting this done. You guys are still the primary reason we do this, and while we haven’t been interacting with the community much lately, you guys are always on our minds. I hope you’ll keep with us as we continue to fine tune our process. In the meantime, I also encourage you to check out our new support system. I think it’s really nifty, and Codebastard Redrave has done an awesome job at making it easier to get answers from your fellow users. Check it out at http://support.kokuaviewer.org/qa/.

Cheers

Thank you !

I want take the chance before the beta is released  to say thank you to YOU -our users- and YOU – all developers- of Imprudence and Kokua.
Last December the Computer I was doing the Linux 64-bit releases on showed signs of aging, which got worse in January and end of February it was almost unusable. Fortunately McCabe, when he heard of this, didn’t hesitate to offer me to get a new one from donations left, when about the same happened to his computer. Thank you McCabe! Thank you all who donated that time !
So since March the Linux 64-bit releases are done on a shiny new Box with Intel Core i5-750 processor, 4GB of RAM, 1 TB harddrive and a Gainward 1GB graphics card with nvidia GTX 460 chipset.

Special thanks to Rynnan, who helped me to find my way through quicksand north-north-east bridges and smoke signal prone power supplies. Thank you Rynnan!
I am really still surprised what huge difference it is to do development without waiting forever for the compiler to finish. So already a lot thank you is written in code on the new machine, most work on Kokua is done with it. And a lot of bugfixes for the Imprudence 1.4.0 beta release, to which I am looking  very much forward  for.

Thank you

Armin

Status Update (May 27)

Greetings, Kokua/Imprudence fans! It’s time for another status update.

Lately, we have been hard at work finishing up Imprudence 1.4.0 beta 1. It has been a loooong time coming, but we think it will be worth the wait! Our current goal is to release the beta next week, perhaps on Thursday or Friday. But, as with any release, that depends on our personal schedules and how much time we can work on Imprudence between now and then.

One bit of exciting news is that I have been able to focus and make good progress on the Mac media system in the past few days. It’s not fully working yet, but it’s close. With a bit of luck and some favorable winds, I will be able to get audio streams on Mac working in time for the beta next week!

Continue reading ‘Status Update (May 27)’

Kokua 0.1.0 WIP test build available

Kokua 0.1.0 WIP (“Work In Progress”) test build is now available for testing purposes. We request that you read this post carefully before downloading or using this test build.

Continue reading ‘Kokua 0.1.0 WIP test build available’

Status Update (April 18)

Greetings, Kokua/Imprudence fans! Things have been a bit quiet on the blog, but we’ve been busy behind the scenes. I’d like to take a minute to give you all an update about what we’ve been working on.

Forum Restructuring

For the past several weeks, I’ve been working on defining, clarifying, and streamlining the Kokua/Imprudence Project’s “communication policy”, i.e. the way we use various communication channels like the blog, issue tracker, mailing lists, and forums. My goals have been to reduce the redundancy/overlap of communication channels, define guidelines for which channels shou be used for which purpose, and to publicly document this policy. Most of my work has been writing and organizing wiki pages, for example the Communication Channels, Reporting a bug, Proposing a feature, and Support pages.

My focus now is on restructuring the forums and tweaking their purpose so they don’t overlap as much with other communication channels. Before we do that, we would like to get more feedback from people who use the forums regularly. Please check out the “Forum Restructuring” topic in the forums to read more about the proposed restructuring and let us know what you think.

Imprudence 1.4 Beta

McCabe has been on an Imprudence coding frenzy lately, hammering out tons of bug fixes and UI tweaks, and applying patches from other viewers. There are too many to list them all right now, but Imprudence will finally have a more detailed radar in its own window (to complement the one in the minimap), and the grid manager can store a login name and/or password for each grid (alas, it’s not the best possible solution, but it’s better than no solution at all).

We’re aiming to release one more Imprudence 1.4 Experimental, probably within the next few days. After that, Imprudence 1.4 will (at long last!) enter beta development, bringing it one step closer to final release. I’m anticipating about 2 beta versions, then 1 or 2 release candidates, then the final release. Barring any major unexpected problems, Imprudence 1.4 should be complete before the end of May. Then, we can finally focus fully on Kokua!

But, while I’m on the topic of Imprudence 1.4: I know Mac users have been wondering about the lack of audio stream support. That issue has lingered much longer than it should have, so you guys deserve an explanation of what’s going on.

It isn’t really a technical issue, but rather a mental/motivational block. Currently, I’m the only one on the team who can work on Mac stuff. (Elektra, who has handled Mac development in the past, is still officially on the team, but she has been busy with RL work for so long that she is, for practical purposes, retired from Imprudence.) But, McCabe and I have had so much trouble and frustration with the media system in the past, that my mind associates it with strong negative emotions. It takes a real effort for me to focus my mind on the media system, and there have been many other tasks for me to deal with lately, so I have subconsciously neglected/avoided addressing Mac audio stream support.

So, that’s why it has taken so long. But, you can rest assured that — one way or another — Imprudence 1.4 will have working Mac audio stream support before we reach the release candidate stage.

Kokua Test Builds

Meanwhile, Armin has been leading the Kokua development effort, so that we can soon begin to release test builds. The purpose of these builds will be to start getting bug reports and preliminary feedback from the community. The Kokua development process will involve a lot of iteration and experimentation: make a change, get feeback from the community, repeat. Some of the experiments will be flops, but those can be improved or reverted. Over time, the viewer will evolve and change, with your feedback as a selective pressure.

We’re hoping to release the first test build within the next week or two. At this point, Kokua still looks and feels quite a bit like the Second Life Viewer 2.4

Here’s a little teaser Armin posted recently, showing some of his recent experiments with the UI (click for a larger view):

A few things to note are the re-integrated camera controls (the window in the top left); the Inventory button, which toggles a non-Sidebar inventory window; and the Sidebar button, which toggles a small window with buttons to navigate the sidebar). And, of course, be sure to note the purple UI.

So, that’s the status! Watch for a new Imprudence 1.4 Experimental very soon, and a Kokua test build shortly after that. And don’t forget to give us your thoughts about the forum restructuring!