2024 SL SUG meetings week #18 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 30th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log and the video by Pantera – my thanks to her as always for providing it.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice)
  • At this location.
• They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• The Main channel was restarted on Tuesday, April 30th with no update.
• On Wednesday, May 1st, the back-end support for the the glTF updates available in the Graphics Featurettes viewer (e.g. PBR terrain textures and mirrors) will be deployed to all RC channels.
  • Note that these updates require the use of the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer (available from the Alternate Viewers page), or a TPV that has merged with this code.
  • Note also that attempts to upload 2K textures on regions without the back-end support will result in an error message being displayed.

SL Viewer Updates

• The Maintenance B RC viewer, version 7.1.7.8820696922, was issued on Monday, April 29th.

The rest of the official viewers in a pipeline remain as:

• Release viewer: 7.1.6.8745209917, formerly the Maintenance Y/Z RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history), dated April 19 and promoted April 23rd.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.6.8758996787, April 23rd.
  • Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.5.8472515256, April 3rd.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11, 2023.

In Brief

• Monty Linden is reported to have noted improvements in region crossings during test – however, he is doubtful that this is the case and is leaning towards the belief his work in trying to improve things isn’t far enough along to be seeing the kind of improvements he has witnessed.
  • Monty further noted that the changes he is making to region crossings are about reducing impact on avatars already in the region as a result of another avatar physically entering it or arriving via teleport – they are not about improving matters for the avatar entering a region – although he is checking this behaviour for possible regressions as a result of his changes.
• Those wishing to test Leviathan Linden’s new VEHICLE_FLAG_BLOCK_INTERFERENCE  flag to optionally prevent attachments on passengers from pushing the vehicle around (so as to prevent cheating in racing, for example) can do so on the Aditi (Beta) grid regions Mauve and Jigglypuff.
• Leviathan Linden hopes to update his Game Control regions on the beta grid (LeviathanLove and LeviathanLost) with the upcoming Spring Break simulator update, which contains the latest version of his Game Controller event.
• The LL server team is now using Gitflow for tracking simulator releases, and it is hoped this might make it easier for providing a web page reporting on the different server update versions.
• There were further comments on raising the current Mono script cap (64 Kb) and whether LL are going to do so. The reply was:

We have discussed increasing the memory cap but I don’t have anything to report on that at this time.

– Rider Linden

• Rider added that in the meantime, he would like to have some way for a script to auto recover from a stack heap collision without the need for additional scripts monitoring and attempting to correct.
  • The problem here is that, potential causes of s S/H collision cannot necessarily be predicted (e.g.  if a listen or an HTTP response comes in that is larger than your available memory then you are going to hit the S/H issue – and you can’t predict how much data is coming in), ergo, resolution tends to be re-active rather than via avoidance.
  • In order to help with the identification of S/H collisions, he suggested a llSetScriptFlags function where one of the flags was something like SCRIPT_FLAG_AUTO_RESET_STACKHEAP. This could help reduce reliance on having other script perform “heartbeat” operations on scripts that may trigger a stack heap collision.
• The above lead to an extended discussion on scripting and script management through the latter portion of the meeting – please refer to the video below for details.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.