Confluence Viewer

A modified version of Aurora Viewer, for OpenSim grids and the Confluence project.
It is not made or supported by the Aurora Viewer team. The rest of this page is Aurora Viewer's own README.

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A modern Second Life viewer, written in Rust.
A Vulkan renderer, a clean interface, and the Second Life you already know.

       

_{This software is not provided or supported by Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life.}

Why Aurora · Creator tools · Performance · Features · Roadmap · Using Aurora · Build · Contributing

Multi-threaded from the ground up: parallel loading, ultra fast teleports, built for today's hardware with Vulkan and Rust.

All the tools you need to experience SecondLife the way it's meant to be experienced, Photo tools, Auto Hover Height, tons of QoL !

Modern UI and Legacy toggles to get the Legacy UI back on the modules you want! (if you prefer).

New login experience with multi-avatar support.

More screenshots: conversations, notifications, inventory, places, search and the resource monitor

Conversations like a messenger: bubbles, pictures, and teleport offers or gifts right in the thread.	A notification center that unrolls from the bell, with the history of everything you missed.
An inventory that widens into an explorer: folders, details, filters and each item's rights at a glance.	Places: favourites, landmarks and history in one list, with a preview of each place.
One search for residents, places, events, groups and classifieds, with the details beside the results.	A resource monitor that shows where every millisecond, megabyte and kilobit goes.

Aurora Viewer is a Second Life client written in Rust, with a modern GPU renderer (wgpu on Vulkan) and a clean, flat interface. It is a new codebase, not a fork: many of its parts are Rust ports of code from the Second Life viewer and the Legacy Viewer, credited file by file (NOTICE.md). It follows the behaviour of the Legacy Viewer — same protocol, same rules, same defaults — while rethinking the user interface.

Status: early development (0.x). Usable for exploring, chatting and testing. Some implemented features still await live-grid validation — see TASKS.md.

Why Aurora

Multi-core the work shared across your processor while the graphics card draws

≈ ½ the video memory for the same textures

Instant teleports within a region, with no loading screen

Vulkan a renderer built for today's graphics cards

New in 0.9.9

Aurora Weather Rain, snow, wind, thunder and northern lights, with puddles, lying snow and footprints. Choose yours in the Environment window, or let regions set it (off by default).	Avatar Studio A calm space to dress, pose and photograph your avatar, with its own animation editor: keyframes, a timeline, ANIM and BVH import.
Lua scripts SLua scripts get a real editor: Lua colours, completion, hover help, and the compile target of your choice. New script can create a Lua script on a region with SLua.	Gamepad and VR Switch between First Person, Avatar Mode and Flycam with a gamepad, on the desktop or in VR. The camera can also follow an animated body part.

Items marked are planned or in progress: they are not in the viewer yet.

Fast, and smooth

• Built for every core. The work is shared across your processor: while the render thread draws one frame, the main thread prepares the next, and the big loops of a frame are split between helper threads (who does what).
• The picture keeps moving when you arrive. Textures and meshes are decoded on background threads and written straight into GPU memory, so landing in a busy region doesn't freeze the view.
• Places you know come back at once. Textures are cached on disk ready for the graphics card: back in a place already visited, nothing is decoded again.
• About half the video memory for textures, with nothing lost to the eye: each texture is checked before it is kept compressed.
• Instant teleports within a region. The other teleports show your last view, blurred, with real step-by-step progress.
• A graphics card that finally does the work. It decides by itself what is visible and draws thousands of objects in a handful of calls.
• Faster arrivals: what you are looking at downloads first, and after a teleport the region shows about a second sooner. Downloads keep pace with your connection, so avatars come out of the cloud about three times sooner, already textured.
• Fewer hitches in a crowd: avatars, their outfits and changing materials are updated without the little stutters of a busy place.
• It holds on: a network blip no longer logs you out (Aurora reconnects you right where you were), and a full video memory no longer freezes the viewer: Aurora stays within the video memory your graphics driver grants it.
• Your whole inventory, ready: it loads in the background from login on, so its folders are already filled when you open them.
• Your whole outfit, every time: every attachment is worn at login and at each outfit change, even in a busy region.
• The right graphics card on a laptop: on a PC with an integrated and a dedicated GPU, Aurora picks the dedicated one, and you can choose the card in Preferences, from the login screen on.
• Fast with a huge wardrobe: the Appearance window stays smooth with thousands of outfits.
• Quick starts, every time: Aurora keeps the graphics pipelines it compiled, so a start no longer depends on the driver's own shader cache still holding them.
• Light on a 4K screen: on large scenes, ambient occlusion is computed at half resolution and brought back along the depth, for the same image at about a third of the cost.
• Sharp after a teleport: in a busy region, texture memory comes down once and holds, instead of blurring and sharpening again every few seconds.
• Two viewers on one card: a window in the background gives its video memory back, and pauses its 3D drawing when the card is full, so the one in front keeps its frame rate. Aurora also shares the card fairly with the other viewers and programs on it, and caps world textures at 512, 1024 or 2048 pixels if you wish (Preferences › Graphics).
• AMD FSR 3.1 upscaling and its native anti-aliasing, on every brand of graphics card: the world drawn at 67 % down to 33 % of the window, then rebuilt sharp at its size, for more frames per second (Preferences › Graphics › Anti-aliasing).

A sharper, richer picture

• Modern ambient occlusion (GTAO): soft, accurate shading in corners, under furniture and around avatars, which also keeps reflections out of the places light cannot reach.
• Sun contact shadows: the small shadows that ground feet, objects and folds, where shadow maps are too coarse.
• Clean sun shadows: no hatching, no stair steps along curved surfaces.
• Highlights that hold still: specular anti-aliasing stops shiny surfaces from shimmering as you move.
• Motion without smearing: TAA follows each pixel's own motion, so moving avatars, animesh and objects stay sharp.
• Details that stay: normal maps keep their full strength, foliage, fences and hair stay solid in the distance, and textures load as finely as you expect close to the camera.
• Graphics levels matched to your machine, chosen at first launch: GTAO from Medium up, contact shadows from High, screen-space indirect light (experimental) in Deluxe with a 192 m draw distance; per-section resets when you want to start over. Save your own settings as named graphics profiles and switch between them from Preferences or the FPS counter.
• HDR, or the older look: the Legacy Viewer's HDR and Emissive switch, on by default, in Preferences › Graphics › Image.
• A real night sky: the 8,920 stars you can see with the naked eye, in their true places and colours, and the Milky Way, turning with the region's day and following today's season. Choose where on Earth you look up from (Paris, Tokyo, Sydney… or your own latitude) and how bright the stars shine, in Preferences or Personal Lighting; the Legacy Viewer's random stars stay one click away.

The Second Life you know

• The same world, the same look. PBR and legacy materials, EEP skies, shadows, reflection probes, mirrors, water, glow and particles, compared side by side on the main grid.
• Nothing to relearn. The rules, options and defaults you are used to, down to the chat commands of the built-in Animation Overrider.
• Voice, IMs, groups and offline messages, with a conversation history you can search, kept on your disk only, that brings along the history of the viewer you used before (Preferences › Chat). Voice comes with noise suppression, echo cancellation and gain control, a speaking glow that follows each voice, and a resident's volume at the top of their menu.
• A well-behaved client. Aurora speaks to the servers the way they expect: same messages, same request rates.
• Shape and clothing editing, with 82 body and face controls, textured mesh previews and saved copies; the editors of skin, hair, eyes, tattoos, alphas and the nine clothing types, previewed on you before you save; and manual or automatic hover height to keep your feet grounded.
• Gestures, with a manager, an editor, chat triggers, shortcuts, animations and sounds; they keep their rhythm, and talk to your HUDs on negative channels too.
• Go to and Follow a resident from their menu: Follow keeps up when they run, take off or land. Its compact window adjusts the target distance and stops the follow; an optional teleport resumes following when blocked.
• Your own sky and water, with EEP sky, water and day-cycle editors, personal previews and parcel or region environment settings.
• Smoother avatars: movement of the people around you extrapolated and smoothed between two server updates.
• Mouselook that plays right: hold the right button to zoom, and scripted weapons and HUDs hear your clicks — even a scripted attachment worn under a mesh body. Hold Alt to free the cursor and click a window or a HUD. Pick your crosshair: a dot, a cross, a circle, the Legacy corners or your own picture, with its size and colour.
• Little comforts: walk backward without turning around, log back in still flying, Quickjump to jump and land without the animation delay, animations that pause while you edit an attachment, and Help › Grid status to see at once whether the grid has a known problem.
• Unbox in one click: copy an object's contents into a new inventory folder, or wear them straight away, replacing your outfit or adding to it.
• Sound Explorer: find which object plays a sound, preview it, stop it or block it.
• Experiences that set the scene: an experience you allow can change your sky and water, as its creator meant; Forget or Block puts the shared environment back, and so does leaving the region.
• Shopping in one click: a vendor sells on a click on its price, a short balance opens Buy L$ instead of greying the button, and Buy works from the menu of any object for sale.
• Run your land: a complete Region / Estate window (people and bans, interventions, scripts and physics with Top scripts / Top colliders, environment, experiences, covenant, telehub and terrain), in the Aurora layout or the classic eight tabs.
• Livelier water (experimental, off by default): waves, foam on the shores and around what floats, caustics, wakes and an underwater view, each effect switched on its own; the built-in AO swims, at the surface and underwater.
• RLVa, when you want it: the restrictions, exceptions and commands that scripted outfits, furniture and experiences rely on (RLV 3.4.3 / RLVa 2.4.2). Off by default: turn it on in Preferences › RLVa; turning it off releases every restriction at once (details).
• PBR terrain: regions whose ground uses PBR materials render with them, as in the Legacy Viewer, and estate managers preview a ground-cover change on the terrain before they apply it.
• OpenSim and the Hypergrid: a grid manager for your grids, and on grids without central baking your avatar bakes itself and is seen as you dress it. Large regions show their land past 256 m, with the right parcel lines and positions; the inventory, outfits, wearables and profiles save on grids without AIS; Buy and prices use the grid's own currency helper and money symbol. After a Hypergrid teleport the map, search and links follow the grid you are on, and a trip that would leave worn items behind asks first.
• Fly where you choose: Me › Fly override (Ctrl+Alt+V) flies over land that forbids it, after a word of caution on the risk of a ban.

A photo mode like a real camera

• A viewfinder, full screen: the world under a camera's overlay, with three display levels from everything to the picture alone.
• Autofocus that finds faces: AF-S, AF-C or manual focus. On an avatar the focus locks between the eyes and follows them; the AF point turns green with a double beep.
• Lens rings: focal length, aperture and exposure on rings you drag, or on the mouse wheel; Enter is a two-stage shutter.
• Real depth of field, on by default, with focus peaking in manual focus to see exactly what is sharp.
• Light under control: a live luminance histogram, exposure lock (AE-L), and a level to keep the horizon straight, or tilt it.
• A camera that goes where you want: orbit, free or first person from an on-screen camera pad, and a 2 s or 10 s self-timer to get into your pose.
• Up to 8K: 4K by default, in PNG, JPEG or BMP, to disk, inventory or the profile feed (how to use it).
• A photo roll: the session's last 10 photos pile up in a small stack in the viewfinder; look through them, then upload, e-mail or delete one without taking another.
• Group photos, sharp: Shift + click adds every avatar of a group shot to the focus, while the background keeps its blur.
• Pose without leaving the shot: your HUDs answer clicks in the viewfinder, and its Poser button poses the avatar over the shot.
• Light the shot: a light button above the shutter opens personal lighting, and the sky, water and day cycle can change for the photo only, or stay after it.
• Freeze the world: every avatar, animation and moving thing holds still while your camera stays free, to line up the perfect angle on a pose.
• Camera presets: save a whole shot by name and bring it back in one click: where the camera stands (held by your avatar, at a place, or following an object), the lens, the filters and the light.
• Quiet snapshots: like the Legacy Viewer, the shutter is heard around you and your avatar plays the snapshot animation; one switch keeps both quiet.
• Isolate your subject: your avatar alone, or the avatars and objects you click, on a transparent background: a PNG ready for a poster or a profile, with soft hair and glass kept partly transparent.
• Filters and effects, live: the Legacy Viewer's 30 photo filters, 36 of Aurora's own (film grain, teal and orange, instant photo, halation, chromatic aberration, cinema bars, VHS, glitch, oil paint, sketch…) and your own .cube LUTs from Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve or Photoshop. Stack up to six, each with its strength and its own sliders, and compare before / after with a line you drag. Some read the scene's depth: a haze that grows with distance, a true 3D miniature, a blurred background, the subject standing out. What you see in the viewfinder is what the photo gets, at full resolution.

Creator tools

• LiveMesh: see your Blender mesh in the viewer while you edit it, with nothing uploaded. Rigged meshes follow your own avatar, with their weights, shape keys and materials; static meshes and linksets become local objects you can place on the ground, move, rotate, resize, attach to your body or HUD and detach. The Blender plug-in ships with the viewer and installs itself, with an SL / Bento starter rig, rigging tools and an import with its LODs prepared (details). Preview an animation on a saved local model, to see Bento tails and wings move. Textures in Blender 3.x colour spaces sync, and accessories rigged to an Avastar body dev kit sit where an upload puts them.
• A poser for photos: pose yourself, your own animesh, or nearby avatars who agree to it, joint by joint: body, face, hands, other bones and physics, with a Left / Right / Mirror side choice, a finger grid and whole-pose actions. Save poses to a library, export them as BVH or import them as an animation, with Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y as you go. The pose is seen by you only (details).
• An IK workbench: reusable pose projects that keep chosen bones on their targets, with contacts that compatible viewers apply to nearby avatars (details).
• Build tools that stay out of the way: a compact editor you can arrange yourself, larger material previews for Blinn-Phong and PBR, a live preview of the prim you are about to create, outlines that stay visible while you move transparent objects, edit handles you can make bigger, and parcel boundary shortcuts in the terrain menus. Default permissions (Inventory › New) apply to everything you create or import. In a busy sandbox, select only your own objects, or only the ones you may move; prefer the classic editor? Its Legacy layout is one switch away. A selection rectangle takes only what it wholly surrounds (one switch to take all it touches), objects rez and copy with your active group, BOM textures go in all four PBR maps, and grayscale or 16-bit PNG textures upload as they are.
• Snap to objects and place on surface: set Snap to Objects and what you move goes flush against the objects around it, with purple guides on the faces that meet, never pushing through them. Press P to place the selection on any surface or on the ground, previewed as a hologram, with an offset and the side to put down; a hologram can also show the moving object, or where it started. Stretch Textures holds while you resize.
• Area search: find the objects rezzed around you from World › Area search or a toolbar button. Search their name, description, owner, creator, group or UUID as you type, keep to the current parcel or reach into neighbouring regions, filter by ownership, sale, physical, phantom, temporary or distance, sort the results, then inspect an object, zoom to it or copy its UUID.
• A particle editor: Build › Edit particles shapes an effect on the selected prim, live, then puts the matching script into it or copies it, with no llParticleSystem written by hand.
• Animation explorer: World › Animation explorer shows which object or resident plays an animation on you, previews it on a stand-in avatar, and stops it, revokes the object's permissions or blocks it for good.

An interface made for today

• Flat, calm and readable: glass island bars, a notification center with history you can clear (finished script menus no longer pile up in it), the Inter font throughout and a redesigned performance window.
• Borderless fullscreen: Alt+Enter fills the screen without a title bar or borders, at once and without a restart, and gives the window back exactly as it was (Preferences › Graphics).
• In English, French and Japanese (日本語): the whole interface follows your system language or your choice, applied at once. Japanese uses Second Life's official Japanese terms (インベントリ, 区画, フレンド…), Japanese interface fonts and Japanese dates (details).
• Conversations made for today: a Contacts tab, conversations you can reorder, group pictures, and nearby chat as cards with the speaker's picture. Unread conversations flash softly, three dots bounce on the picture of a resident typing to you, and an item someone gives you appears as a card in their conversation, like the L$ they pay you and the L$ you pay them, with the message. A thumbnail per open conversation waits beside the chat bar with its unread count, and nearby chat can also rise in bubbles above the speakers' heads (off by default).
• Give by dropping: drop inventory on a conversation, a profile or the resident's avatar in the world to give it.
• Conversations in their own windows: pop a conversation out, or drag it out of the list; nearby chat can live in its own window too. The Conversations button flashes when something new arrives, and a right click keeps it quiet for nearby chat.
• Links that show what they point to: pictures from Gyazo, Flickr, Imgur, Lightshot and Reddit pages, Bluesky and X posts, and your own cloud or gallery (Nextcloud, Immich…) once listed in Preferences › Chat; short videos and a YouTube player that play in the conversation, keeping each video's shape and your volume; animated WebP that move like GIFs; and secondlife:/// links shown as names and places in chat, dialogs and notifications.
• Write with ease: a spell checker with suggestions in the chat bars, conversations and notecards, auto-replace (brb…) if you like, @ to mention someone in the conversation, names completed as you type, and / in nearby chat to find and play a gesture. Ctrl+Shift+Enter starts a new line, and pasted paragraphs keep their shape. Arabic and Hebrew read right to left, in name tags, bubbles, floating text and conversations. A long IM goes out as several messages instead of being cut off.
• Messages that matter, in front of you: a message an estate manager sends to the region shows as a card in the middle of the screen, like a friendship offer, and a group notice shows its group, its insignia and its attachment, ready to save.
• Script errors where you look: your own objects' errors show in red in the nearby chat instead of popping a window, and can also go to a chat channel for your logger script.
• GIFs in the conversation: a GIF picker next to the emoji button, with GIPHY and KLIPY. It appears once you add your own free key in Preferences › Chat › GIF.
• Quiet objects, if you like: messages that do not come from a person can take one small line with an icon, and no longer ping you.
• Emoji at your fingertips: a keyboard-friendly picker with shortcodes like :heart:, and Windows Alt codes in every text field. Ctrl+Up brings back what you sent, per conversation.
• Your choice, window by window: every redesigned window keeps its Legacy layout one click away in Preferences › Aurora (bars, people, chat lines, inventory, places, search, About Land, Region / Estate, photos, controls and more).
• Arrange it your way: customizable bottom, left and right toolbars, favourites in a menu, row or dock, and windows that move over the whole screen. The Legacy Viewer's toolbar buttons are all there: Quick preferences, a built-in web browser on a home page you choose, the voice controls, Statistics, Picks, Beacons, Snapshot to disk and Show Friends Only, each one lit while its window is open.
• Right-click menus that do it all: Inspect an avatar, Derender and the asset blacklist, invite to a group, add to a contact set, block particles, give a calling card, and the object menus' entries working as you expect. Arrange the menus of objects, land, avatars, attachments and HUDs yourself.
• A quick library (Ctrl+Space): textures, PBR materials, objects, animations, sounds, notecards, landmarks and scripts from #Aurora/Aurora Library, with search, folders, favourites and recent use. Check several actual item types at once; folder names are only conventions. Objects can be dragged into the world to rez, while documents and media use their native editors and players.
• Notecards in Markdown: read them formatted, or edit the source beside a live preview, with LSL colouring for the code you share.
• An inventory that grows with you: the familiar tree at its usual size; widen it and it becomes an explorer with a folder column, details and filter chips, with columns you resize and choose. Coloured icons by item type, and a CMT button that shows your rights, the next owner's, or both. A second inventory window opens beside the first to sort between faraway folders, and folders opened in their own window get the same layout. The Recent tab can cover a set period, such as the last week. Hover an item to preview its picture, and build an advanced search from visual rules ("objects or scripts, but not no-copy ones"), saved for later, or ask for items similar to one. Give a folder a colour of your own, seen by you only.
• Outfits at hand: the outfit menu on the outfit folders, and a double-click in the inventory to put something on or take it off. Group your outfits in folders right from Appearance, in the list and the gallery. Drag your tattoo, alpha or universal layers into the order you want, and see (and remove) what a script attached to you for a while. Pick several items in an outfit or in Worn with Ctrl- and Shift-click and wear, add or take them off at once; Remove from current outfit works on any folder, a demo or a delivery as well as a saved outfit. Back an outfit up to a JSON file and restore it later, even when some of its items are gone, and cut, copy and paste in Appearance with Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.
• One search for everything: type once and residents, places, events, groups and classifieds come back together, with type chips, filters on one line and the details beside the results.
• Places with a preview: favourites, landmarks and history in one list, with parcel snapshots, a star to add a favourite and, widened, folders and a preview of the selected place. Hold the back arrow of the top bar to list every place of the session and go back in one click, and log in straight at a favourite landmark from the login screen's Start menu.
• People and places at a glance: redesigned resident and group profiles, a People window for friends, groups, contact sets, recent and blocked residents, and a world map with floating controls. Wear a group title chosen by region, and find your experiences and what their scripts did in Me › Experiences.
• Name tags your way: show or hide your own tag, your friends' and other residents' separately, or show them for a few seconds before they fade. Your friends' plates take the friends' colour, so they stand out in a crowd.
• Windows that get out of the way: double-click a window's title to collapse it into a movable bar, then restore it with its size and content. Hold Alt while dragging to attach windows together; Alt+Shift+U hides or restores the interface, Alt+Shift+H the HUDs, and the bars hide automatically in mouselook.
• Ready for your keyboard: movement keys adapt to the keyboard layout on first launch (WASD or ZQSD), and letter shortcuts use the key that carries their letter (M is M on AZERTY too). The Legacy Viewer's menu shortcuts work too (Ctrl+O, Ctrl+Shift+F, H on a build selection…). Search Preferences › Shortcuts by action, category or key. On the Mac, Command works as Control and shortcuts read ⌘ ⌥ ⇧, as macOS users expect. A gamepad's buttons, triggers and sticks are assigned by simply pressing them, and the flycam gets its own zoom controls.
• Copy what you need: click a name in a profile to copy it, select and copy the text of a greyed-out field (a no-modify object's name, a parcel's media address), and copy an outfit's item names and creator credits.
• Made for every eye: an Accessibility page gathers the settings that help (interface scale, text size up to twice the normal size, reduce motion, sounds…), with a button on the login screen. A high-contrast palette, the OpenDyslexic font, and volume sliders that follow your ear are a click away, and the chat can have a text size of its own.
• Your colours: pick the accent, window background and text colours in Preferences; Aurora keeps them readable.
• A clock in the bars, with your local time and its zone, and a balance you can hide when you stream or share your screen (right click on it).
• A clean way out: on closing, a dialog over a blurred background offers Quit, Log out (back to the login screen) and Cancel. Esc cancels; the viewer waits for the logout before closing.
• Updates in one click: at launch Aurora offers the new version, downloads it in the background, checks it against its published hash, installs it and restarts your session, and rolls back if anything goes wrong. Before you agree, it tells you whether your cache and settings are kept. On Linux and macOS it shows the new release instead (details).

Only in Aurora

• Immersive sound: world sounds muffled behind walls, hills and inside closed boxes, heard in front, behind, above or below with headphones (HRTF), and given the reverb of the place around you, changing as you walk through a door. Each part has its own switch in Preferences › Sound; HRTF and reverb are off by default.
• VR headset viewing: look around the world in stereo with an OpenXR headset, tested on Windows and Linux (the macOS path awaits its first headset), from your avatar's eyes or the desktop camera. Viewing only: exit with Esc to chat, build or move (setup and limits).
• Portals to walk through: open a portal to a place, drop a landmark into the world, or drag a place there from Favorites, Places, the teleport history or search results, and walk, run or fly through it to teleport. A portal opens where you may build, like rezzing an object. Other Aurora users see it too: your friends by default, everyone if you choose, and a portal that appears on someone never pulls them in. The portal back home is yours alone on land where you may not build.
• Just your parcel, if you like: hide what stands outside the current parcel, everywhere or only on the parcels you list, with exceptions that stay visible and options for neighbouring parcels of the same owner or group.
• Immersive mode: the whole interface hidden but the chat, for photos, events or simply enjoying the world; faint buttons bring back the name tags, hide your HUDs too, or leave the mode.
• Aurora team and Linden Lab marks: their name tags, lists, chat lines and profiles show who works on Aurora and who works at Linden Lab.
• Link safety check: web links in chat and profiles are marked trusted, unknown or dangerous, judged locally with nothing sent anywhere.
• Parcel permissions at a glance: the icons show everything, green for allowed and red for forbidden, instead of the restrictions only.
• HUDs you can move and resize: Ctrl + drag moves a HUD without opening the build tools, and scrolling with the same key resizes it — even a no-modify one. Sizes are remembered (details).
• Faces in the conversation: local chat bubbles show the speaker's profile picture.
• Quiet from far-away objects: one switch in Preferences › Privacy hides the messages of objects outside your region, or outside your parcel. Your own objects always get through, your friends' too if you wish.
• A password that stays safe: the remembered password is kept in Windows Credential Manager, as a hash only.
• Try it without an account: an offline demo mode simulates a server locally, with no grid connection.
• Just for fun: name tags that jiggle like jelly under the pointer, and a click combo counter that bursts into northern lights. Both off by default, in Preferences › Just for fun.

Open

• Free software (GPLv3), a new codebase in Rust, not a fork; the parts ported from the Second Life viewer and the Legacy Viewer are credited in NOTICE.md.
• Windows, Linux and macOS: every release has a Linux build (install guide), with its sound through PulseAudio or PipeWire, the desktop's notifications, the keyboard layout read from the desktop, the resource monitor and web pages from a Legacy Viewer install's plugins, and a macOS application for Apple Silicon, drawn through Metal, with web pages and video in the world (install guide).

Performance

Aurora shares the work across your processor and hands the heavy lifting to your graphics card. A frame costs the longer of the main and render threads, not their sum: while one frame is drawn, the next is already being prepared.

Who	Does what, side by side
Main thread	The world and the interface: prepares the next frame
Render thread	Draws the current frame, with two helpers that finish the GPU commands in parallel
Frame helpers	Share the big loops of a frame: object placement, draw lists, poses, flexible prims
Background tasks	Decode textures and build meshes at low priority, written straight into GPU memory
Network	Downloads on its own runtime, from 24 up to 192 at once while your connection keeps up, what you look at first
Graphics card	Decides what is visible and draws thousands of objects in a handful of calls (bindless textures, multi-draw-indirect, compute culling)

Built for today's hardware: Vulkan on Windows and Linux, Metal on macOS (Apple Silicon), the dedicated graphics card picked on a laptop, AMD FSR 3.1 on every brand of card, and a texture memory budget set automatically from the video memory your driver grants.

The resource monitor (Performance window) shows the time of each step of the frame on your own PC.

What works today

• Rendering — wgpu / Vulkan, bindless textures, multi-draw-indirect, PBR and legacy materials, shadows, GTAO ambient occlusion with specular occlusion, sun contact shadows, specular anti-aliasing, reflection probes, water, glow, particles, rainbows, 22° halos and depth of field; screen-space indirect light, GPU occlusion and enhanced water effects (all experimental), graphics presets and per-section resets; headset viewing through OpenXR (experimental, view only).
• Avatars — skeleton and Bento animations blended like the Legacy Viewer, server bakes, rigged mesh, complexity limits, impostors and look-at; a shape editor with textured mesh previews, skin, hair, eyes, tattoo, alpha, universal and clothing editors with a local preview, manual and automatic hover height, Quickjump, rebake, skeleton reset and animation controls; gestures with playback, editing, chat triggers and shortcuts; mouselook zoom on the right button, a free cursor with Alt, custom crosshairs and script controls for weapons and HUDs; an Animation explorer; a built-in AO with swimming and water walking.
• LiveMesh — an optional Blender 2.93+ plug-in previews geometry, weight and shape-key edits through a local connection, without uploading assets. Rigged meshes follow your avatar; static objects and linksets can be placed in the world, edited, or attached to the body/HUD.
• Posing — a poser for yourself, your animesh and consenting nearby avatars, with a pose library, BVH export and animation import; an IK workbench with shared contact profiles.
• World — prims, sculpts, mesh with LOD, classic and PBR terrain, EEP environment, sky, water and day-cycle editors, experience environments, world sounds with occlusion, headphone HRTF and room reverb (experimental), parcel music and media on prims, with Aurora's media plugins pack, downloaded once you agree; an area search for the objects rezzed around you, with filters and sortable results; a Sound Explorer with local previews, source camera and sound blocking; walk-through portals shared with other Aurora users, with friend/group access and protection against portals appearing on top of someone; parcel content isolation, a grid status window, and a live particle editor; OpenSim grids and the Hypergrid, with a grid manager, avatars baked by the viewer where the grid does not bake, large regions, and grids without AIS.
• Photos and camera — a full-screen viewfinder with face autofocus, lens rings, focus peaking, a live histogram, exposure lock and a self-timer; group focus, HUDs and the poser in the viewfinder; snapshots up to 8K to disk, inventory or the profile feed; isolation of your avatar or chosen subjects on a transparent background; 66 stackable filters and effects with their own sliders, and your .cube LUTs; camera presets, a frozen world, quiet snapshots; depth of field, a maximum-quality photo mode with 8× MSAA, temporary lighting controls, keyboard free camera and a combined camera / movement Controls window.
• Social — local chat as cards or classic lines, messenger-style IMs and group conversations with a Contacts tab, resident profiles, the People window, contact sets, blocking, notifications with history and friend/IM alerts, region messages in the middle of the screen, group notices with their insignia and attachment, inventory offers and L$ payments in the conversation, a filter for object messages from elsewhere, conversations popped out into their own windows, conversation thumbnails beside the chat bar, optional chat bubbles above heads, picture, post and video link previews, a GIF picker (your own GIPHY / KLIPY key), a spell checker, auto-replace, @ mentions and name and gesture completion, and optional compact lines for automated messages; searchable conversation history kept on disk per account and grid in the Legacy Viewer's text format, imported from the Legacy Viewer and the other approved viewers that write it, and offline messages.
• Voice — nearby WebRTC voice, one-to-one, group and conference calls, invitations, adding participants and per-participant call volume; echo cancellation, automatic gain and noise suppression on the microphone.
• Groups — creation, invitations, notices, roles, abilities, member moderation, bans, land contributions, L$ accounts and experiences.
• Land and regions — redesigned About Land, land purchasing, landmarks, the complete Region / Estate window (Aurora or classic eight tabs) with Top scripts / Top colliders, parcel script information, parcel / region environments, experience permission prompts and region restart alerts.
• Inventory and commerce — Aurora's inventory window (tree, explorer and details) or the Legacy one, fetched whole in the background at login, a second inventory window, resizable columns, advanced searches from visual rules and saved searches, picture previews on hover, giving by dropping on a profile or an avatar, copying or wearing an object's contents, inventory tools, folder colours, outfit backups to JSON, dedicated Marketplace and listings windows, compact import launcher and per-type editors; sound waveform previews, trimming, gain and splitting.
• Interface — in English, French and Japanese; flat Aurora theme, Inter font, Tabler icons, glass island bars, customizable bottom and side toolbars, classic layout options, Aurora search and Places windows, mini-map, world map, preferences and debug overlays; an immersive mode that keeps only the chat; Aurora team and Linden Lab marks; double-click walk / run / teleport and content-rating controls for places and teleport offers; an Accessibility page, a high-contrast palette, custom interface colours, text up to twice the size and the OpenDyslexic font.
• Windows updates — release checks, cancellable verified downloads, installation and restart with rollback. The prompt explains whether cache and settings will be preserved, migrated or reset.

Voice calls, photo uploads, environment saving and several group / region operations are implemented and tested in the offline demo, but still need end-to-end validation on the main grid. TASKS.md distinguishes completed work from features awaiting that validation.

Roadmap

Not there yet

• Depth exports and 360° snapshots.
• Automatic updates on macOS (the viewer points to the new release).
• Automatic installation of updates on Linux (the viewer points to the new release instead).

Voice is WebRTC only; Vivox is not supported.

Planned

• Frame Generation (under investigation).
• Compression for the textures that fast BC7 encoding would harm (they stay uncompressed and are decoded at each visit).
• The water effects out of their experimental stage.
• Immersive sound out of its experimental stage.
• VR beyond viewing: controllers, menus and moving around in the headset.

The detailed list of what is done, in progress and to do is in TASKS.md.

Using Aurora

Accounts and login

The login screen shows your saved accounts as cards, each with its grid, its start location and a picture of the last place you visited. Click a card (or press Enter) to connect: a short password prompt appears only when needed, then the MFA code if the grid asks for it. Left / Right, the wheel or a horizontal drag browse more than three accounts. With no saved account, the full login form appears directly; afterwards Add account opens it.

Logging in again right after a logout or a crash no longer hangs: the grid needs a moment to end the previous session, so the login button counts down the few seconds left (Esc cancels), then connects by itself. Other accounts never wait.

Manage lists the accounts with a search: forget a password or a 2FA authorization, remove an account, or drag the rows to reorder the cards. Each account and grid keeps its own password (a hash in Windows Credential Manager) and, when you tick it, a 30-day MFA authorization.

Language

The interface is available in English, French and Japanese (日本語): system language detection, a choice saved in Preferences and applied at once. The Japanese translation covers every message, with the official Second Life Japanese terms; it draws with Japanese interface fonts (Meiryo UI, Yu Gothic UI or MS UI Gothic) and writes dates the Japanese way. Fluent catalogues make it possible to add a language; see the translation guide.

The viewer first follows the language saved in Preferences › Interface › Language, then the system's if "System language" is selected. English is the fallback. The change applies at once; the "Language visible to scripts" setting is on by default, like the Legacy Viewer. The translations are in crates/aurora-i18n/locales/.

Frame limiter

The frame limiter is enabled at 60 fps by default and can be disabled or adjusted in Preferences › Graphics › Smoothness. Saved preferences are preserved.

HUDs

HUDs can be moved directly with Ctrl + drag (the key is configurable), without opening the build tools. Hold the same key and scroll over a HUD to resize it locally (Shift gives finer steps), including no-modify HUDs. Sizes from 10% to 800% are saved per account by inventory name and creator, then restored on new copies. Right-click a HUD to reset its size to 100% or forget its saved size (the current copy keeps its size). While editing a HUD, scrolling without the HUD key zooms the entire HUD view, revealing off-screen HUDs while keeping their saved local sizes.

RLVa

RLVa is off by default. Turn it on in Preferences › RLVa › Enable RLVa: scripted outfits, furniture and experiences can then restrict and drive your viewer with the RLV 3.4.3 / RLVa 2.4.2 commands. Turning it off releases every restriction of the session and drops the queued commands; attachment and folder locks never outlive the session. What is implemented, command family by command family, is in docs/RLVA.md.

Animation Overrider (AO)

The AO button of the bottom bar opens a compact panel: the set, the previous / next animation buttons of the state being played with the auto cycle button between them, the AO switch, and swimming or water walking. The run and flight boosts are in Settings › Movement. Its Settings button opens the full Animation Overrider, with its movement editor and the animation lists by category (General, Ground, Jumping, Flying, Swimming). Each account remembers its last animation in every list and independent track after reconnecting; automatic cycling continues according to the set's options. Swimming has its own lists at the surface and underwater. Sets are kept under #Aurora/Aurora AO; at first start, the sets of a Legacy Viewer #Firestorm/#AO folder are brought over. Import a ZHAO notecard from the same folder as its animations. The AO is off at first, as in the Legacy Viewer. cao on / cao off turn it on or off; cao sit toggles the sit, cao sit off replaces the sit and cao sit on keeps the standard sit, like the Legacy Viewer. The demo scenario is described in the test options.

Water effects

Preferences › Aurora › Water turns on the experimental enhanced water (off by default): waves, foam, wet shores, caustics, reflections, wakes, spray and an underwater view, each with its own switch, at the quality you choose. They are local visual effects: objects and avatars keep the simulator's physics.

Shape editor

Open Appearance › Edit worn shape, use Appearance › Edit Shape in your avatar's right-click menu, or right-click your worn shape in the inventory and choose Edit. Nine body/face categories and a filter expose the shape parameters as 0–100 sliders and numeric values, with male/female selection and height in metres or feet. The images show the minimum and maximum effect on your body under neutral lighting; clicking one changes the value by one percent. Preview visibility and height units are remembered. Scroll the wheel over the categories to move between them. Hints use the worn head, including rigged and static mesh heads, and retain their images while new assets are prepared.

Changes are previewed locally until Save. Save As preserves the original and wears the confirmed copy; Copy permission is required. Cancel restores the current server appearance. Closing a modified shape offers Save, Discard or Cancel. A shape without Modify is read-only and can only be copied unchanged; a modifiable no-copy shape can be saved in place.

Export your appearance XML

Open Appearance, click the gear menu and choose Export my appearance XML…. Choose where to save appearance.xml. The option becomes available when your own appearance has loaded. The file uses the Legacy Viewer’s appearance XML format, including the shape parameters its wearable editor can import. It contains no texture or mesh files and does not change what you are wearing.

Hover height

Open Appearance › Hover Height to adjust your height from -3 to +3 m. Automatic adjustment is off by default. Enable it to estimate ground contact from your foot attachments and apply your saved offset. A manual height change disables automatic adjustment; the automatic offset controls keep it enabled. Affect camera view decides whether the camera follows the height change. Your hover height is remembered per avatar.

Photos

Open the photo mode from the toolbar or with Ctrl+Shift+S. It opens in the viewfinder: the world full screen under a camera's overlay, its display switched between Full, Essential and Hidden with I. Click the subject to focus: the lens hunts, the AF point turns green on the avatar's face and beeps twice. Enter is a two-stage shutter (held: the focus, released: the photo), the wheel zooms the camera as usual, Alt + wheel drives the underlined value of the bottom bar (the focal length at first, the distance for manual focus with focus peaking), Alt + Shift + wheel the aperture and Alt + Ctrl + wheel the exposure; Alt + click and the camera's drags work as everywhere. N switches AF-S, AF-C and MF, V the avatar or point area, Tab opens the quick menu, H the help, and the dock on the right holds the same for the mouse, with every setting of the photo panel in a drawer. Without the keyboard: the value chosen in the bottom bar becomes a lens ring to drag (or − and +), the focus mode and area are choices at the start of the bar, and the dock's joystick button shows a camera pad (turn, slide, a spring-loaded zoom rocker, the tilt, and orbit, free or first person). L or the AE-L button holds the automatic exposure, and the quick menu has a 2 s or 10 s self-timer. The photo panel anchored on the right and the Legacy Viewer's floater remain in Preferences › Aurora › Photo window.

In the panel, choose a destination (disk, inventory or profile feed), an aspect ratio and a resolution. Disk photos support PNG, JPEG and BMP, with presets up to 8K (4K by default). Inventory uploads use the grid's upload charge; the profile destination offers a caption and an optional location.

Photo quality temporarily raises graphics settings and uses 8× MSAA for the capture. The window also offers depth of field, exposure, time of day, cloud pause and worn-light controls. Closing it restores your ordinary graphics and lighting settings.

Filters and effects: the dock's three-circle button (or the Filters section of the photo window) opens the effects panel. Its tabs hold the Legacy Viewer's 30 photo filters, Aurora's 36 effects in five sections (film, colour, lens, creative, depth) and My LUTs, where Import a .cube file… adds a 3D LUT from Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve or Photoshop; the search looks in all three. Point at an effect to try it live, click to use it. Replace the chosen one swaps the selected effect, Add on top stacks a new one (up to six): each line of Active looks can be switched off, moved up or down, or taken out. The selected effect's Strength and its own sliders (a glitch's amplitude and bands, a grain's size, a haze's distance and colour…) are under the list, with Default values; your settings are kept for each effect. Before / after puts a line on the frame that you drag. The depth effects (Haze, Miniature 3D, Background blur, Subject spotlight) focus where the depth of field focuses, or on the middle of the photo. The photo is drawn with the same effects, at its resolution.

Isolate: the dock's button under the shutter shows All, My avatar (alone) or My choice: click avatars and objects in the scene to add or remove them (a whole avatar with its attachments, a whole linkset), listed by name with a cross each. With a transparent background (the default) the photo has no sky, ground or water and is saved as a PNG whose transparency follows the real edges, soft hair included.

Enable Free camera to move the camera with the movement keys while your avatar stays put. Hold the right mouse button to look, use Shift to move faster or Ctrl to move slower, and press Escape to return. The Controls window provides camera and movement pads, saved camera positions and free camera controls. A classic Legacy photo layout is available in Preferences › Aurora.

Gestures

Open the gesture manager with Ctrl+G to activate, play or edit gestures. Gestures can combine animations, sounds, chat messages and waits, with chat triggers and keyboard shortcuts. Active triggers complete inline in local chat; activation is also available from the inventory's right-click menu.

Notecards

Notecards show images, landmarks and other embedded items with their icon and name in the text. Drag an item from the inventory to insert it; a left click opens it directly, and the right click offers Open or Copy to inventory. Save (Ctrl+S) keeps their permissions. The demo scenarios are described in the testing guide.

Script editor

The editor offers Ctrl+K (or Ctrl+/) for line comments, Ctrl+Shift+K for block comments, and Tab / Shift+Tab to indent or outdent the selected lines. The arrows in the margin fold the blocks between braces; the Edit menu offers Collapse all / Expand all.

Toolbar buttons

Right-click a toolbar and choose Toolbar buttons… to open the command catalogue. Drag buttons onto the bottom dock / bar or the left and right bars, between bars, or along a bar to reorder them. Empty side bars show drop zones while dragging a button. Right-click a button to remove it, or drop it back into the catalogue.

Each bar has its own alignment, button sizing and icon / label mode. The chosen buttons, order, styles and lock are shared by all accounts in the same local profile. The catalogue also restores the defaults or clears all bars. An older per-account layout is adopted from the first account used after the update. Preferences › Aurora offers the glass island and classic bar layouts, including where favourites appear.

Inventory

Aurora's inventory opens as the usual tree. Drag its edge, or use the widen button in its title bar, to get the explorer: the folders move to a column, then a details pane, filter chips and a status bar appear. The CMT button chooses which rights each row shows: yours, the next owner's, both or none. Preferences › Aurora › Inventory brings back the Legacy window.

The inventory's right-click menu offers "Move to…" for a folder, an item or a multiple selection. Type a name in the window's filter, choose the destination folder then confirm with Move.

Reporting a bug during the alpha

The bug icon in the top bar, the Help menu, the login screen and the "Send a crash report" button after a crash open the project's GitHub issue forms in your browser; a GitHub account is needed. Choose the bug report template and describe what you were doing and what happened. After a crash, "Copy trace" and "Open report folder" in the same window give the technical details: the full trace may contain personal paths, review it before sharing. The bar button can be hidden in Preferences › Interface.

Ideas and feature requests go to the feedback board, where everyone can vote for them.

Where your files are

Logs are in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Aurora\AuroraViewer\data\logs\; each viewer writes its own (aurora-<pid>.log), so several viewers open at once do not overwrite each other's.

Conversation history (plain text, one file per conversation) is in %APPDATA%\Aurora\AuroraViewer\config\accounts\<account id>\chat_logs\<grid>\; Preferences › Chat shows the folder, turns logging off and erases it. These files never leave the machine and are never attached to a bug report.

Removing Aurora

Preferences › Language and updates › "Remove Aurora from this computer" (or aurora-viewer --uninstall, see Command line) removes what Aurora registered outside its own folders: the secondlife://, hop:// and x-grid-location-info:// link handler when it opens this Aurora (another viewer's stays), the Windows notification identity, the cache key and saved logins of the system's credential store, and Aurora's Blender add-on. It then lists the folders that remain (settings, cache, logs, media plugins, and the cache or history folders you chose), each with an "Open folder" button: quit Aurora, then delete them and the viewer.

Under the hood

What it is

• A Second Life viewer written in Rust; it is not a fork of an existing viewer's codebase, but many parts are Rust ports of the Second Life viewer and the Legacy Viewer, credited file by file in NOTICE.md.
• It speaks the same protocol as the Legacy Viewer (same messages, capabilities, request rates and defaults), so the servers see a well-behaved, familiar client.
• Open source (GPLv3), with credit to the Linden / Firestorm code it ports logic from (see NOTICE.md).

Rendering engine

• Vulkan (through wgpu) instead of OpenGL.
• The GPU does the heavy lifting: it decides what is visible (culling in compute shaders) and builds its own draw lists.
• Bindless textures and multi-draw-indirect let thousands of objects be drawn in a handful of calls.
• A dedicated render thread draws frame N while the main thread already prepares frame N+1.
• Texture and mesh decoding runs on background threads and writes straight into GPU staging memory, so arriving in a busy region doesn't freeze the picture.
• Textures are kept BC7-compressed in video memory when that leaves them visually intact (each one is checked), about half the texture memory overall, and cached that way on disk: back in a place already visited, they go to the GPU without being decoded again.
• Same look as the Legacy Viewer: PBR and legacy materials, EEP sky, shadows, reflection probes, mirrors, water, glow and particles, checked side by side on the main grid.
• Then modern screen-space techniques on top: GTAO ambient occlusion (XeGTAO) with bent-normal specular occlusion, contact shadows, specular anti-aliasing, coverage-preserving mips for cut-out textures and per-vertex MikkTSpace tangents.

Build

Requirements: Windows 10/11, Rust (stable, selected automatically by rust-toolchain.toml), a GPU with Vulkan support. On Linux, see Installing on Linux; on macOS, Installing on macOS.

Development environment: create a folder for the project, clone this repository into it, then double-click aurora-tools.cmd:

git clone https://github.com/Aurora-Viewer/Aurora-Viewer aurora-viewer

The tools check the environment and offer to repair it: they install whatever is missing (GitHub CLI, the Visual Studio C++ tools, Rust), clone the Legacy Viewer sources next to the repository, and download the Rust toolchain and the crates. Then, driven by the keyboard: release / dev / debug viewers, demo, agents' tasks, disk, logs, live pull requests with Windows notifications, releases (see HUMANS.md).

Without Git yet, this command (in a command prompt, in the project folder) installs everything, Git included:

powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "$f = Join-Path $env:TEMP 'aurora-setup.ps1'; irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Aurora-Viewer/Aurora-Viewer/main/scripts/setup.ps1 -OutFile $f; & $f"

Or by hand, to build the viewer only:

git clone https://github.com/Aurora-Viewer/Aurora-Viewer aurora-viewer
cd aurora-viewer
cargo build --release -p aurora-viewer
./target/release/aurora-viewer.exe

Run the same checks as the CI with ./scripts/check.ps1 (rustfmt, clippy with warnings as errors, tests). Day-to-day development uses the default profile (cargo run -p aurora-viewer): it behaves like the release build without its slow link-time optimization. ./scripts/build-release.ps1 builds GitHub's latest main with --release into ..\RELEASE\.

Every build carries the emoji font (Noto Color Emoji, 10.7 MB) inside the exe, so the exe works from any folder.

macOS

Apple Silicon Macs draw through Metal (aurora_render::BACKENDS), Windows and Linux through Vulkan; MoltenVK is not used. Building, the application bundle and its signing: Installing on macOS. The macOS workflow (.github/workflows/macos.yml) checks every pull request with clippy on a Mac, and the merge queue runs the tests and draws a demo frame on an Apple GPU.

Preferences › Graphics › Smoothness offers a 50–100% 3D render scale. At lower scales, the world is reconstructed and sharpened in one AMD CAS spatial upscaler (Sharpness 0, or HDR off, keeps a Catmull-Rom reconstruction); controls, HUDs and world labels retain the window's native resolution. Saved photos render at their requested resolution. Its Match the display switch follows the display's logical resolution instead (50% on a 2× display, 67% on 1.5×), as the Legacy Viewer draws a Retina Mac's world: on by default on macOS, where a new profile also starts from the Legacy Viewer's Mac Mid-High values; elsewhere it is off and the default remains 100%. With AMD FSR 3.1 as the anti-aliasing, FSR's own mode (Native AA, Quality, Balanced, Performance, Ultra performance) takes the render scale's place. Bindless texture pages use the adapter's binding-array limit rather than its ordinary sampled-texture limit, avoiding the former 79-page ceiling on Metal.

Versions

The Git tag is the reference for the viewer's version: v0.2.0 gives 0.2.0 everywhere (title, interface, logs and network clients). Between two tags, 0.2.0+7.gabcdef123 gives the number of commits and the short identifier. The version of the crates in Cargo.toml is not the viewer's number. A source archive without Git can be built with AURORA_VERSION_TAG=v0.2.0; otherwise it identifies itself as 0.0.0+0.gunknown. The Release workflow checks the version announced by the exe before publishing; the local build also writes it to version.txt.

Command line

Argument	Effect
--title <text>	Names the window "Aurora Viewer - (Dev)" and its log file
--fps-limit <fps>	Caps this instance at 1–500 fps without changing saved preferences
--vr-mode=first-person|avatar|flycam	Starting camera mode when used with --vr
--vr	Enters VR once the world shows, with a headset connected (Windows and Linux)
--language <code>	Forces the language of this instance (en, fr, ja, or another language added to the catalogues), without changing the saved choice
--grid <name>	Selects the login grid: agni, aditi, a saved grid name/nickname or a login URI (--loginuri <uri> too)
--login <first> <last> <password>	Logs in with this account as soon as the login screen opens
<slurl>, --url <slurl>	Starts at this place, or hands it to the viewer already running; must come last
-h, --help	Shows the help
-V, --version	Prints the built version then exits, with no window, log or network
--uninstall	Removes what Aurora registered on this computer, prints it and the folders left, then exits, with no window

• --title: the build profile ends the title (Dev, Release, Debug); the log file is aurora-<text>.log (aurora-demo-<text>.log in demo mode).
• --fps-limit: applies an extra limit to this process, including captures and online sessions; a lower user preference remains effective.
• --vr: what the VR button's "Restart in VR" passes when the headset was connected after the viewer started (VR is set up at startup).
• --language: also accepts --language=fr. An unavailable language falls back to English; the argument is meant for demos and screenshots.
• <slurl>: secondlife://Region/x/y/z, hop://grid:port/Region/x/y/z, x-grid-location-info://grid:port/region/Region/x/y/z, a maps.secondlife.com link or a secondlife:///app/… command (-url as the system's link handler passes it). Nothing after it is read, so a link from a web page cannot add other options. Before login the place is the start location of the next login (the saved choice stays); in the world it opens the place's details; a command runs once in the world. When a viewer already runs, the link goes to it and the new process stops. On Windows, the last focused matching window receives it: a browser launch without --title reaches any online Aurora window, including a titled test window; an explicit --title or offline demo stays isolated. Linux matches the demo mode and --title. Preferences › Language and updates › "Open SLURL and Hypergrid links in Aurora" registers all three schemes for the current user (the registry on Windows, a desktop entry and mimeapps.list on Linux, see docs/LINUX.md). Manage saved grids from the login grid menu or Preferences › Network and cache › Manage grids.
• --uninstall: what Preferences › Language and updates › "Remove Aurora from this computer" does, without its confirmation (see Removing Aurora); it prints each part with its result, then the folders to delete, and exits with code 1 when a part could not be removed. On Windows, run it as confluence-viewer.exe --uninstall | more so the terminal waits for its text. With AURORA_DEMO=1 it is a dry run that removes nothing.
• --login: the account follows the usual "remember" choices; a single user name is written <name> Resident. --grid alone selects the grid of a new account's form.

Demo mode and test switches

The offline demo mode simulates a server locally (a plaza, avatars, objects, chat, notifications…): no connection, no account. It keeps its own settings and cache (…\config\demo, …\cache\demo).

$env:AURORA_DEMO = "1"
cargo run -p aurora-viewer

Variable	Effect
AURORA_DEMO=1	Offline demo mode
AURORA_DEMO_<NAME>=…	A demo scenario: a window, a stress scene, a camera script…
AURORA_DEMO_PIE=1 / 0	Forces the pie menu / the list menu in the demo, without changing the preference; combine with AURORA_DEMO_RCLICK
AURORA_CAPTURE=<file.png>	Saves a capture of a frame
AURORA_PROFILE=1	Writes one profiling line per second to the log

The compact build inspector also accepts AURORA_DEMO_BUILD_TAB=transform|shape; object remains an alias for the transformation section. Window redesign scenarios use the existing inventory, appearance, land, profile, environment and preferences switches listed in docs/TESTING.md.

Local and editing HUD zoom scenarios (AURORA_DEMO_HUDS=scale|scale-copy|scale-touch|scale-reset|scale-forget|scale-ctrl|scale-key|scale-secondary|edit-scroll) are described in the testing guide.

The script editor demos (AURORA_DEMO_SCRIPTS): close-brace / object-close-brace check the outdent of closing braces; colors, color-picker, color-accept and color-cancel show the RGB vectors and the shared colour picker; comment-lines, comment-block, multiline-indent, multiline-outdent, folding and object-folding check the comment, indent and folding actions offline.

The full list of switches (demo scenarios, captures, forced settings, diagnostics) and how to read the profiling output are in docs/TESTING.md.

Contributing

This repository is worked on by humans together with AI agents, each agent on its own task in its own git worktree:

• AGENTS.md — rules for AI agents (testing, safety, PRs, reviews)
• HUMANS.md — how the repository works for humans
• ARCHITECTURE.md — scope, crates and file layout
• TASKS.md — what is in progress and to do; finished work is in docs/TASKS_ARCHIVE.md
• docs/BRANDING.md — palette, logos, icons and UI rules
• docs/TESTING.md — test switches (demo scenarios, captures, diagnostics) and profiling
• docs/HAND_CONTACTS.md — local motorcycle wrist contact prototype and the creator's LSL script
• docs/IK_EDIT.md — frozen-pose skeleton editor, target-prim offsets and general bone-contact authoring for LSL

Pull requests follow the pull request template: a check lists what a description is missing, and maintainers review a PR once its description and its CI are complete. An outside contributor's PR still incomplete 3 days later is closed, and can be reopened once it is complete. Each outside contributor has up to 10 pull requests in review at a time; the others wait in a queue and come back to review on their own, oldest first.

Behaviour follows the Legacy Viewer: its sources are expected next to the repository (../phoenix-firestorm, cloned from FirestormViewer/phoenix-firestorm).

Questions and ideas are welcome on Discord.

AI use

Aurora is made by people: developers, QA testers who test each version on the grid, a project manager, a community manager and moderators. Some contributors use AI coding assistants to help write code, and we say so openly.

• No AI in the viewer you download: no AI feature, no AI model, nothing sent to an AI service.
• AI never sees your password: the AI tools run only on the developers' computers while they write code. Your password goes from your computer to Linden Lab, and nowhere else.
• AGENTS.md is not part of the viewer: it holds the guidelines for contributors who use AI, so that those tools follow strict rules. Its first rule forbids them to connect to Second Life or to handle any user name or password.
• No AI-generated art: images, sounds, icons and design are made by people.
• Every change is tested by a person before it is merged, then by QA testers on the grid.

Questions and answers, and the details: AI use policy.

Privacy

The Aurora team runs no server: the viewer talks to Linden Lab, and to other services only for the features you use. The privacy policy lists what is sent, to whom, and what stays on your computer; it is also linked from Preferences › Privacy. Questions about it: contact@aurora-viewer.org.

License

Copyright © 2026 the Aurora Viewer contributors.

Aurora Viewer is free software under the GNU General Public License v3. Parts of it are ported from the Second Life viewer and Firestorm (originally LGPL 2.1); see NOTICE.md for details and third-party licenses.

The name and the wolf logo identify the team's own builds: a modified version takes its own name and icon, see TRADEMARKS.md. The only official downloads are on aurora-viewer.org and in this repository's releases.

Aurora Viewer is not affiliated with Linden Lab or the Firestorm project. Second Life® is a trademark of Linden Research, Inc.

Experimental headset viewing: cross-platform VR setup and limitations.