SL project updates week 43 (1): Server releases, interest list

Server Deployments – Week 43

As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for the latest news and updates.

Second Life Server (Main Channel) – Tuesday October 22nd

The Main channel was updated with the server maintenance project that was previously on all three RC channels.  The package includes:

• A fix for “Group member access to parcels fails when ‘Sell passes to’ is enabled”
• Fixes for two region crossing issues:
  • “‘Ghost’ avatars and vehicles sometimes appear to an observer at the sim border”
  • “Vehicles which exit a region with a passenger are incorrectly auto-returned and become ‘ghost shapes’ in the physics engine”
• Extremely high Avatar Render Weights reported to the server are now capped at 500,000
• A performance issue fix for avatar loading speed in the experimental ‘viewer-interesting’ viewer.

Second Life RC BlueSteel, RC Magnum, and RC LeTigre – Wednesday October 23rd

There are no updates planned for the three RC channels, as a result, there was no rolling restart across the RCs.

SL Viewer Updates

The Google Breakpad RC was removed from the viewer release cohorts at the end of week 42.

Interest List Viewer

The interest list RC viewer is once again delayed.  Commenting on it at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday October 22nd, Andrew Linden indicated the hoped-for schedule for its appearance is before the end of the month, but there is something of a low confidence level in the estimate.

Apparently, there is still a performance issue to be dealt with (whether this is the same issue Richard linden mentioned in discussing the interest list viewer at the TPV developer meeting on Friday October 18th is unclear). Also, it seems that the recent issues of objects steadfastly refusing the render in the interest list viewer without a relog  – thhought to have been resolved in week 42 – have also regressed into the viewer code with recent builds.

Andrew also clarified that the definition of objects which are cacheable by the viewer has been revised such that it is now objects which have not changed outward appearance or transformed in the last two minutes, rather than the one minute Richard Linden indicated, so as to allow for temp-on-rez objects (otherwise additional logic would have been required to check on these). The changes to the definition also mean that some scripted objects which have certain script calls in them, but which do not change appearance as a result of the calls, can also now be cached by the viewer.

As an adjunct to the interest list viewer discussion, Andrew indicated his “before / after” video for scene loading has received the “Torley treatment”, and the results are “impressive”. This is for the changes already implemented server-side, and which should already be visible to people without the Interest List viewer. There’s no date as to when this video may make its public debut.

Other Items

LSL Control for Materials

There have been renewed enquiries for the introduction of scripted control for materials. This has been requested in the past, and was always considered “out-of-scope” for the initial release of materials. A (further?) JIRA has been raised on the topic (MATBUG-359), but is light on suggestion on what might be required, etc.

Those Lindens attending the meeting (Andrew, Kelly and Simon) could see the advantages of extending LSL to handle materials (and Brooke Linden has indicated she feels the JIRA is a valid request). However, how best to achieve this, and the time-frame in which it might be achieved (not just in terms of a technical approach, but also in terms of the Lab’s internal priorities and workload) are unclear at this point.

Both and Andrew and Kelly felt that requiring the normal / specular maps to be in the object contents might be a means by which to both enable and constrain the use of LSL manipulation of materials because of the lack of permissions associated with UUIDs  and concerns of misuse. While no promises were made as to whether the work would proceed, Simon Linden suggested a further step would be to lay out a clearer proposed API and the exact behaviour required for manipulating materials via script. Andrew also indicated he has a “few” LSL calls to add, so he’ll try to take a look at the materials system o see how hard it would be to give script access to it.

llGetObjectDetails() and keyframe animation states

Simon Linden indicated that there has been some talk within the Lab of adding some new parameters to llGetObjectDetails() which would return an object’s keyframe animation states, so it would be possible to get the step number, state (paused, looping, ping-pong, etc.). Again, if / when this might appear is unclear; Simon appeared to be putting the idea out for feedback from the meeting attendees.