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Omega BETA Viewer   logo

Latest Build: Build 4 (January 31, 2007).

Welcome to Omega BETA, an open-source Second Life viewer.

Omega BETA is a public testbed to introduce new features we are experimenting with to the Second Life community. Most of these features are intended for submission into the official Second Life viewer (subject to Linden Labs approval), while other features are meant to demonstrate particular ideas or directions, and to spur discussions within the community.

Omega BETA can run "along-side" the official viewer, so you can switch back and forth as often as you would like (or even run both at the same time.)

Omega BETA is brought to you free-of-charge under the provisions of the GNU General Public License Version 2.

Build 4: (January 31, 2007)
based on 1.13.3.2

Features:

  • Full support for uploading PNG textures (at any bit-depth, compression, alpha and transparency options, matte-backgrounds, gamma handling, etc.)

New in this Build:
png screenshot

Binary availability: Windows XP and Macintosh OS X binaries are available. Only the executable file is distributed, so you should already have a full working copy of Second Life installed before adding Omega BETA.

Downloads:

WinXP: sl-omegabeta-4-win.zip (MD5: f393533ccc036d5fccc0d7a7ae6bfe80)
MacOS: sl-omegabeta-4-osx.tar.gz (MD5: 8f49fc00e168ad9047c374e3825e792c)
Source: sl-omegabeta-4-src.zip (MD5: 6166e74e259a0645282d42521e1e0d0d)

Installation Instructions:

Windows XP:

  1. Download the WinXP archive.
  2. Unpack the archive into a temporary folder.
  3. Review the README.txt and LICENSE.txt files.
  4. Copy the OmegaBeta.exe executable into your Second Life folder. On Windows, this is usually "C:\Program Files\SecondLife".
  5. Right-click and create a shortcut of this executable.
  6. Drag the shortcut to your desktop and optionally rename it.

MacOS X:

  1. Download the MacOS universal binary archive.
  2. Double-click to extract into a folder.
  3. Review the README.txt and LICENSE.txt files.
  4. In the Applications folder, create a duplicate of "Second Life.app".
  5. Rename the duplicate "Omega Beta.app".
  6. Control-click "Omega Beta.app" and select "Show Package Contents".
  7. Navigate to Contents, then MacOS folders.
  8. Replace the "Second Life" file with the Omega Beta version.
  9. You can now launch the Omega Beta viewer from the Applications folder.

Building from source:

Build #3 patches are against 1.13.3.2. You need libpng 1.2.15 to compile the source.

At a high level:

  1. Unpack the source; review the README.txt and LICENSE.txt files.
  2. If you haven't, compile libpng or obtain its binary distribution.
  3. Copy the png libs to your platform's lib_debug and lib_release directories (eg., i686-win32 or powerpc-darwin).
  4. Create a "libraries/include/libpng" folder and copy png.h and pngconf.h there.
  5. Patch the source with the included VWR-*.patch files.
  6. Copy the included *.cpp and *.h files to your source folder.
  7. Add the above files into your llimage project.
  8. On Windows, add "..\..\libraries\include\zlib" to the llimage include path.
  9. Add libpng.a to newview's linker.
  10. Rebuild solution.

MacOS notes: when compiling libpng for MacOS (and other OS with GCC 4), be sure to add "-fexceptions" to CFLAGS. Otherwise, the application will crash if it encounters an invalid or corrupted PNG image. You must NOT use the "-fvisibility=hidden" flag.

Additionally, when building a universal binary libpng archive, you may need to turn off assembler code (with PNG_NO_ASSEMBLER_CODE), or build the different architectures by hand and merge them with lipo.

Feedback, support and suggestions:

We greatly value your feedback on whether the features we are developing meets your needs (or not). Bug reports, comments, suggestions and (constructive) criticisms are greatly appreciated.

If you have any issues using Omega BETA specific features, please DO NOT use "Tools -> Report Bug". Instead, please email us at support_targetomega_dot_com or send an IM to Peekay Semyorka.

Fine Print:

Target Omega is not affiliated with Linden Research, Inc. Omega BETA is provided to you free of charge on an as-is basis without any claims or warranty to its suitability for any purpose. Use of Omega BETA denotes your acknowlegement of the experimental nature of the software, and signifies your agreement to accept any liability stemming from using or not using the software. Please read each distribution's LICENSE.txt file for additional licensing information.

Archive:

Older builds are preserved in the archive.

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