Kirstens S24 DX - Pre-Alpha 0.1 Release!

 

Alpha Testers… it’s happening.  Now on SF for Download

S24 Build 3665 — a protocol‑compatible hard‑fork of Second Life running native DirectX 11 — is now officially in Alpha 0.1.

It’s rough. It’s experimental. It’s held together with caffeine, stubbornness, and whatever remains of my sanity. But it’s finally at a point where I can let people poke it without the entire viewer bursting into flames.

This build will contain bugs, visual oddities, unfinished engineering panels, and mysterious switches you absolutely should not touch unless you enjoy summoning eldritch GPU behaviour. But it’s close enough to feature‑complete that it deserves to be out in the wild.

The Only Requirement for Alpha 0.1

Can you log in? That’s it. If the viewer doesn’t implode on startup and you make it to world, we celebrate.

House Rules (a.k.a. Things That Are Totally Normal )

1. Shader Compilation Takes Time DX11 shaders compile at startup. It’s not frozen — it’s thinking very hard.

2. Changing Graphics Settings Takes Time Too The pipeline is still settling. Expect pauses, stutters, and the occasional “is it dead?” moment.

3. Reflections & Mirrors Are WIP The entire cubemap system is being replumbed. Right now it’s WIP.

4. Framerates Are Comparable to GL — With a Twist DX11 gives you consistent framerate across resolutions. If you get 120 FPS at 1080p, you’ll get ~120 at 4K. No more “resolution roulette.”

5. The UI Runs in Its Own Context / Thread This is a huge architectural shift. Expect quirks. Expect improvements. Expect me to swear at it occasionally.

Bonus Round: Vulkan via DXVK

Yes, you can run the client through Vulkan using DXVK. I’ve bundled the DLLs and a config in the root folder for anyone who wants to experiment or torture‑test their GPU. It’s optional, unsupported, and very much “try at your own risk,” but it’s there.

S24 DX — Six Months of my Life :)

It’s been half a year of late‑night debugging, GPU‑side archaeology, and the occasional existential crisis, but S24 DX is finally standing on its own legs. A year of planning, six months of building, and more than a few “why does this shader hate me?” moments — and now we’re here.

So… what does this actually mean for the viewer and for Second Life?

That’s a deceptively big question.

A New Branch, A New Future

Let’s set aside the obvious: this is effectively a new branch of the viewer. A DX‑based client isn’t just a renderer swap — it’s a foundation change. And foundations determine what you can build next.

By stepping away from OpenGL, we unlock capabilities that were previously either impossible or so catastrophically slow that nobody sane would attempt them. To a non‑technical user, that translates into features that feel like magic compared to the legacy pipeline.

What Becomes Possible

Here’s the short version of the long list:

• Tessellation: Classic prims can be resampled and redrawn with additional geometry. Think smoother curves, richer detail, and prims that don’t look like they escaped from 2003.

• Detached UI Contexts: Chat, inventory, and other panels running as independent windows. Drag them across monitors. Dock them. Treat them like proper OS‑level windows instead of welded‑on GL overlays.

• Volumetric Clouds & Atmospheric Effects: Flying through a cloud layer. Fog banks rolling across a winter sim. Proper volumetric scattering instead of billboard sprites pretending to be weather.

• Threaded Avatar Mesh & Skinning: Avatar rendering in its own thread. High‑population regions stop nuking your framerate. Crowds become a cost you can amortize, not a punishment for daring to teleport somewhere busy.

• FSR, DLSS, Ray Tracing: All technically feasible. Not promises — but finally possible instead of “maybe if the GL gods smile upon us.”

This is the art of the possible when you stop dragging 20 years of OpenGL baggage behind you.

Where We Are Today

Right now, the goal is simple:

• Fix edge cases

• Hunt down the weird bugs

• Improve performance

• Continue removing the fossilized OpenGL layers that have been quietly haunting the viewer since the days of There.com

Once the dead code is gone, the real fun begins. As Tom Baker once said:

Who knows? Who knows!

A Personal Note

If you want to say hi, poke me, prod me, or throw coffee at me — please do. IM me in‑world, nudge me on the forums, or just drop a message. Feedback is oxygen at this stage.

Much love, KL