SLV "Visual Polish Viewer"
SarahKB7 Koskinen
Please leave your comments, criticisms, screenshots and reviews of the SLV "Visual Polish Viewer" project viewer here. The viewer may be downloaded below.
Geenz update - March 6:
New SLVP build is here: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/releases/tag/Second_Life_Project%2314b74c9a-VisualPolishAlpha
Some notes:
- Much faster SSR - if it slowed your machine down previously, it should be much faster now.
- Much smoother "glossy" SSR - should generally look much nicer on glossy surfaces and water
- New "Ultra" reflection quality - enables realtime reflections on water. Some things are still a little glitchy here, but should be generally closer to 6.6.17's "realtime" reflections
- Planar mirrors should now be much faster.
Geenz update - Feb 26:
New SLVP build is here: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/releases/tag/Second_Life_Project%2374474388-VisualPolishAlpha
Some goodies:
- Drastically reduced striations as you move the camera around
- Some VRAM wins with selective texture streaming. We now downrez textures more aggressively based upon what they're used for (diffuse, normal, emissive, specular, etc.)
- New EEP settings for tweaking post processing.
Log In
Geenz Linden
As an FYI to anyone popping in on this thread with any visual bugs and such - _please_ post screenshots. That's extremely helpful to me.
I will edit Sarah's post with the latest build as they become available prior to a full alpha deploy.
Frio Belmonte
Visual polish sounds like it would be an excellent time to fix the incorrect colors in the PBR base color channel, old bug reports here: https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/base-color-is-interpreted-inconsistently-between-blend-opaque - https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/loss-of-texture-color-depth-when-using-mask-or-opaque-with-pbr
Confirmed to still be an issue, as per the attached screenshot taken in VP viewer published at the moment of this writing. Top strip is Blinn-Phong, bottom is a PBR material with the same texture as base color, taken with 4.0 exposure to highlight the differences. The numbers are the hex values of the grayscale colors; since the issue especially affects dark colors, I took only the bottom part of a gradient. Everything between 00-06 gets crunched to 00, 08-12 to what I estimate as 0B, etc.
I have no shader programming knowledge so I can't pinpoint any issues to tackle, but it looks to me like what happens when a gamma correction is applied while in integer SDR range instead of float HDR, losing precision? The alpha blended PBR material shader is not affected by the bug, as noted in the old reports.
Also attached is the original test texture in case it's useful.
Ayron Talamasca
This house has two rooms. I manually added probes. When your camera is within a probe (one room) the room next to it does not render its probe. I intentionally used the default settings, and it's a bit off and glitchy for a first impression.
My viewer info: https://rentry.co/eddazeob
This was reported here: https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/reflection-probe-derenders-when-camera-leaves-probe
I'd also suggest to add some sort of blur between probes the transition from one to the other is not as sharp. (You can see it on the right of the video, that it's too sharp and noticeable)
Jelly Doll
Not much I can do if there isn't a Linux version, this really needs to be sorted out.
🤷♀
SarahKB7 Koskinen
SLVP (6 March 2026)
Using: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/releases/tag/Second_Life_Project%2314b74c9a-VisualPolishAlpha
Graphics settings: Ultra, Shadows On, HDR On, "Midday" EEP.
The latest version of SLVP has some new water bugs.
Bug 1: There is a strange darker, less reflective area on the water surface on both sides of the screen which is very noticible and undesirable.
Bug2: The reappearance of a boat wash/spray particle bug that was previously fixed in 2025. (See: https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/transparent-particles-over-water-make-the-water-look-black-under-their-transpare )
Light levels are less intense and better than in the previous SLVP version now.
There are no Moiré Effect striation lines on water with SSR on. No fuzziness at boat waterlines or overhanging objects.
Water reflections are good overall, their underside surfaces are reflected, but reflected just a little too faintly for my tastes. A little more intensity of reflections please.
observeur Resident
SarahKB7 Koskinen The darker areas on the sides is a common downside of SSR in all games using this technique, and it means a lots of games. The only way to lower this would be to render a larger portion than the visible area internally to use as a projected map.. which would cause an important performance drop sadly. You will see the same kind of effect in your character or a big object is visible in the middle of the screen. There is not much that can be done.
Whirly Fizzle
I see white flashes on the water next to some objects when moving my camera
Also when camera is stationary, there's a TV static effect around the stems of the Lotus
Using shared environment
---------------------------
Edit to add:
Set environment to Midnight & water to "Mirror Water" from the library.
On the Visual Polish build you can easily see a white halo around the lotus plants.
Release: https://prnt.sc/rtPIeOYc3hwd
Visual Polish: https://prnt.sc/lv87YZlq5BKA
---------------------------
Edit to add again:
Better example of the white halo on the water around certain objects
Set on Midnight in screenshots
Look how the pink tree looks against the water
Visual Polish: https://gyazo.com/a0576d1b37dd1b99155bb9fde9287801
Second Life Project Visual Polish 26.1.0.22707152363 (64bit)
Release Notes
You are at 65.8, 50.8, 23.8 in Griffer Cove located at simhost-07f749379b374659f.agni
SLURL: https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Griffer%20Cove/66/51/24
(global coordinates 278,850.0, 293,683.0, 23.8)
Second Life Server 2026-01-28.21455867889
Release Notes
CPU: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13700K (3417.6 MHz)
Memory: 65304 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 11 64-bit (Build 26200.7922)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Windows Graphics Driver Version: 32.0.15.7628
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 576.28
Window size: 3440x1369
Font Size Adjustment: 96pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 512m
Bandwidth: 3000kbit/s
LOD factor: 4
Render quality: 6
Texture memory: 12282MB
Disk cache: Max size 2150.4 MB (29.0% used)
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v8.4.1
Audio Driver Version: OpenAL, version 1.1 ALSOFT 1.24.2 / OpenAL Community / OpenAL Soft: OpenAL Soft
Dullahan: 1.24.0.202510081738
CEF: 139.0.40+g465474a+chromium-139.0.7258.139
Chromium: 139.0.7258.139
LibVLC Version: 3.0.21
Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.10.0000.32327.5fc3fe7c.5942f08
Packets Lost: 2/235,965 (0.0%)
March 05 2026 10:08:17
Zeth Starlight
Almost TV static shimmering effect happens on surfaces that have PBR and are using reflection probes. It seems to come from having reflection quality set to high as turning off screen space has no effect on it. Switching reflection quality to medium or low fixes the issue.
Mister Acacia
No Linux viewer. Too bad
JeromFranzic Resident
Mister Acacia Yeah, not happy about that... this is why I dual boot. There's the Lua viewer to mess with in Linux ATM. Perhaps this will be ported soon enough our way!
Oh Baby
"Visual Polish" seems like a good time to tackle this long-standing visual bug, where rigged mesh with alpha blended textures doesn't light correctly with user lights. The easiest way to reproduce it is with a projector where the blended surfaces are only partially lit: any that are within the dark portion of a projector texture, or just outside the projector's range will get a sort of fullbright effect, or in some cases appear particularly dark when they should be lit. This can also happen when the outer limits of multiple point lights overlap. I've included photos to illustrate the problem using a simple projector and HD makeup layers on a Lelutka EvoX head, however it affects any rigged mesh with alpha blended textures, including hair, HD nipple add-ons, genital add-ons with detail layers, clothes, etc. Pictures were taken with the latest Visual Polish Alpha!
This bug has likely existed since rigged mesh with alpha blended textures became a thing...certainly it was there in 2017 when I joined. We've all hated it in all that time, but we learned to live with it...mostly just by avoiding using point lights and projectors in builds as much as possible! But since the PBR update it has basically become imperative to use lights to illuminate properly-probed interior spaces, which leaves us with a choice between sacrificing PBR goodness, or living with "disco nipples," as my dear friend calls them.
Though I can see what is happening and that it is happening, the technical details of the problem are beyond my expertise. If I had to guess though, it's probably related to alpha sorting and the way that lights fall off (my understanding is they use some form of alpha blending themselves), which I know is always a difficult thing. But you got it sorted with attachments, so maybe lights aren't out of the question!
I'll be happy to do whatever I can to help, which probably won't be much other than providing pictures or reproductions, which I'm very familiar with doing after all these years of fighting with this. And in case the included picture is not clear, the first 3 all display situations under which lighting and colors appear "normal" and the last one (Blends | Half Projector) show where it breaks.
Thank you for your time and for all that you do to keep making SL awesome!
💚
Zeth Starlight
Oh Baby I fully agree! Would love to see this bug squashed.
Robin Lobo
Beach at
Left pic = Visual_Polish. Right pic = FS_7.2.3.80088
location has several probes on the water, in this shot you can see 2 of them in the FS pic. Both taken using Midday. HDR and Ultra. No Mirror.
SarahKB7 Koskinen
Here's some sunlight comparison screenshots, taken on FS V7.2.3 and SLVP. Same location, same settings (including HDR on, same EEP (Midday), both with shadows enabled). The SLVP one is the brighter of the two. The SLVP also shows some strange shadow bias effects on the white flooring, not noticible on the Firestorm version.
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