Wolvic 1.0 Released
Wolvic 1.0 is finally here! This important milestone comes with a lot of changes and bug fixes, so let’s cover the highlights before we get to the detailed list.
Most importantly for some of you, we fixed the perspective distortion that was happening on Oculus in certain situations. Here’s a comparison of the difference that makes in Moonrider, to pick just one example.
We also dealt with problems where sometimes Wolvic would just refuse to enter WebXR sessions, hanging bugs in YouTube, and a problem on the Huawei VR where Wolvic would crash as users left the security zone. There were also improvements made to our handling of page-slowing scripts.
What have we added? Well, on your Start page, there’s now a category for Streaming which includes links to Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, Netflix, and more. They’re all automatically opened in desktop mode, which is a better epxerience for those kinds of services. So if you want to binge a series on a virtual screen that looks way bigger than anything your living room could fit, now you can.
There are also filter buttons at the top of the Start page, so that you can customize your Start to only show sites that are 3DoF-friendly, or to filter out video services not available on mainland China. We’ll be improving that filtering even further in the weeks to come.
If you’d rather search by speaking your search terms instead of trying to input them on the virtual keyboard, we’ve made the search service configurable, so you can pick your favorite service. Services are listed based on the spoken language you prefer, which is another thing you can select in the preferences.
Speaking of which (see what we did there?), Wolvic 1.0’s UI has been translated to twenty-one languages, with more on the way. And you can help out by contributing translations for languages we haven’t added yet! If that sounds interesting to you, check out our Weblate Info page and see how you can contribute, or just to get a sense of how far along we’ve come in the work.
There’s a lot more to talk about, but we’ll limit it to just two more. Our Github Wiki has been updated, for those of you who really like to get into the technical details. And as the previous screenshots hinted, we’ve updated Wolvic’s virtual environment from an arctic forest to a cyberpunk city. We hope you enjoy it, netrider!
Notes
General Fixes
- Fixed the distortion in XR sessions in Oculus after selecting IPD in positions 1 or 3
- Fixed the situation in which Wolvic refused to enter WebXR sessions even after restarting
- Fixed a few regressions caused by the multibackend migration
- Fixed Wolvic exiting whenever users go out the security zone (HVR only)
Stability Fixes
- Fixed a crash in the crash reporting service
- Fixed a crash in the slow script handler
Websites Compatibility
- Popular streaming services are opened automatically in desktop mode. The list of services includes Netflix, HBOMax, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video
- Several XR experiences work now by pretending to be the Meta browser
Media Fixes
- Fixed a hang in YouTube when closing a window while a YouTube video plays
- Fixed a hang in YouTube when going fullscreen before the video starts to play
Speech Recognition services
- Configurable speech recognition service
- UI only lists the specific list of supported languages for each service
New Translations
- Chinese
- French
- Japanese
- Korean
- Galician
- Spanish
- Portuguese (partial)
- …and many more