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Sin-gu-la-ri-ty (noun) - a distinctive feature, a uniqueness; a point at which
continuity breaks up; a point in history at which machine becomes smarter than 
humanity and/or fuses with it indivisively; or simply a cool sounding word with 
my initials in it :)
	
Singularity Viewer is a Second Life protocol compatible client application. It
can be used to access Second LIfe service as well as a number of other such as
those based upon OpenSim plattform. It is directly based upon source code of 
Ascent Viewer by Balseraph Software Group, which is in turn based upon source 
code released by Linden Lab, with contributions from various sources.

I, Siana Gearz (Second Life Resident) am the sole maintainer of Singularity
Viewer, and to the best of my knowledge and effort, Singularity is fully 
compatible to Second Life/ Linden Lab Terms of Service and Third Party Viewer 
Policy and shall stay that way.

Following features are the focus of my work to distinguish it from Ascent:

* Ongoing effort to improve stability and performance beyond that of Ascent, and
  hopefully also beyond that of any other Second Life viewer. In particular,
  base code was upgraded from Snowglobe 1.4 to 1.5, texture fetch and texture
  decode reimplemented based on work from Imprudence Viewer project. Several
  performance and stability related improvements were implemented from scratch 
  or backported from more recent Linden Lab codebases.

* For roleplaying: RLVa system 1.1.3 which supports in-world RLV compatible 
  wearables. Thanks to Kitty Barnett for contributed implementation!

* Display names - partial support ported from Phoenix Viewer. Not as complete
  as in Phoenix so far, needs further porting, and after that is done, needs
  even more work.

Following features are present in Singularity, distinguishing it from official
Linden Lab viewers. These particular features have already been present in 
Ascent Viewer, unless noted otherwise.

General conveniences:
* Identification of other viewers, avatar idle time
* Double-click local teleport (partial support)
* Pressing Esc to reset camera won't force to stand up
* Phantom Avatar lets you avoid physical push when you're being harassed
* Avatar Radar
* Alpha Skins and Tattoo Layers
* Enhanced Friend and Groups panels
* Script counting to check yourself and those around you for your impact on the
  simulator performance
* Sound and animation explorers
* Multiple attachments per attachment point. Incompatible with Emerald system,
  but compatible to Viewer 2.1 and more recent. Nonetheless, Emerald-compatible
  attachments on other avatars can be displayed too. [NEW] in Singularity:
  the worn items are managed in Viewer 2.2 compatible manner
* Vertical IM tabs
* Quick settings for performance and windlight in lower right
* Command line from Emerald for common operations
* Area search
* Windlight editor
* Built in pose stand

Improvements for content creators:
* Free texture upload for testing textures and sculpties
* Preview animations on yourself upon upload
* Copy and Paste in build panel
* Embedded Animation Override editor
* Rez Objects As Land Group option
* Math expressions in build panel, from Imprudence
* Alignment tool, by Qarl Fizz
* Measure distance between any 2 prims
* UUID display for various things - full perm textures, prims, avatars
* Enhanced inspection floater

Roleplaying:
* Fake away status
* Mu style posing, auto close OOC brackets
* Bouncy Breast physics effect
* Emerald-style privacy controls

And possibly some or many that i forgot.

System requierements: Dualcore CPU with SSE2 support, NVidia or ATI/AMD graphics 
chip, 2GB RAM, Windows XP or newer, Ubuntu Linux 10.4 or newer. 
Other systems support pending.

Thanks go to following people:
* Linden Lab for publishing viewer source code
* All the various TPV developers and Snowglobe contributors for creating a
  huge body of code to borrow from and compare against
* Hazim for developing Inertia on which Ascent is based. A really fine dude,
  although his viewer is not TOS compliant
* Shyotl Kuhr who did many of the oprimizations incorportated in Ascent and
  some new for Singularity
* Beeks and Charbi for Ascent. Ascent was started as a project to bring
  Inertia to TOS compliance, and went on further to incorporate more features
* Robin Cornelius and Thickbrick Sleaford from Imprudence - have been a constant
  help with general issues and tech
* Henri Beauchamp and Lance Corrimal for being a great source to borrow from
  .oO(if Henri just wasn't such an unapproachable arse who doesn't respond
  to IMs or contact me when he bugfixes my patches?)
* Kitty Barnett for contributing RLVa, Inventory Links and Current Outfit Folder
* Tonya Souther and Wolfspirit Magic from Phoenix

Time for some FAQ! The questions are anonymized.

Q: I heard your viewer is malicious! I hate you!
A: This was not a question. Also the person who came up with the rumor is 
   malicious, whoever they might be.

Q: You are only 6 months old, thus you can't code!
A: And you don't have a life.

Q: You are only 6 months old, thus you must be a griefer alt!
A: Still not a question. And no, i'm really a young angel kitty -.-

Q: You are only 6 months old, thus you cannot know what Residents need!
A: Even if i was 1000, i'd still only know either what i myself need, or
   whatever needs any Residents have expressed to me. Go ahead, get in touch.

Q: But all TPVs are shady!
A: You are shady. Still, not a question.

Q: Why isn't your viewer listed on Linden TPVD?
A: Oh thanks, a first real question! Because i haven't applied for it.
   If there is a demand by real userbase someday, TPVD application will be
   considered. It shouldn't be a problem because i check all of the code which
   i commit, and borrow basically only from well known viewers from TPVD.
   And oh besides, that the viewer is on TPVD doesn't mean it's safe. It is not
   an unreasonable guess that it is, but there is quite a bit outside anyone's
   control, unless Lindens set up a build farm which builds TPVs automatically
   from publically released source, you just can't know that it matches up.

Q: I like your viewer! How can i help? (QUESTION HYPOTHETICAL)
A: If you are able to, fork my viewer source on GitHub, work your magic there,
   ping me on it, and i'll see whether i want your changes back in my viewer.
   Or build my viewer from source and find bugs.
   If you don't have necessary skills for that, your bug reports are somewhat
   unlikely to be processed because of lack of time on my hands.
   At the very least, precise reproduction steps are needed!
   Oh, and position of localization manager might be open.
   Also needed: someone to build from source on Mac OS X. 

Contact information:
   Chat: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=SingularityViewer
              (or freenode #SingularityViewer)
   e-Mail: siana.gearz@googlemail.com
   inSL: Siana Gearz - ONLY WHEN VISIBLE ONLINE!!!





TO-DO LIST:
 * Integrate, test, fix, test, test, fix and test OpenJPEG v2,
   inline interleaved operations.
 * Unified, high performance memory manager for all 3 plattforms. jemalloc wins on 
   memory use, google tcmalloc wins in every other regard, including use for 
   debugging, possibility of manual full collect on e.g. teleport, clean cross 
   platform integration. Either are better at what Windows and Linux offer.
 * Bug: if window is resized during teleport, HUDs don't adjust to new window ratio.
 * Bug: focusing from minimap is defunct.
 * Bug: foot shadows show even if avatar below ground, and sink into prims.
 * Fairer sculpty boosting
 * Complete Display names, better login mask for new Residents
 * Purge FMOD, force OpenAL on all plattforms, improve OpenAL denorm performance, 
   implement embedded ShoutCast player, OR just borrow VLC from Impru
 * One-handed camera control and walking
 * Stereoscopic rendering, mirror effects, better deferred mode
 * More early culling
 * Coalesced Drawables layer - puuuuuh -.-