SL project updates 30/3: TPV Developer meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

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The majority of the notes in this update are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, July 28th 2017. The video of that meeting is embedded at the end of this update, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. Timestamps in the text below will open the video in a separate window at the relevant point for those wishing to listen to the discussions.

Server Deployments Week #30 – Recap

Please refer to the deployment notice for the week for latest updates and news.

Main (SLS) Channel

There was no deployment / re-start of the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, July 25th, the Main (SLS), which remains on server maintenance package #17.07.11.327548. This update included a fix to allow DJ boards to work, however, any scripts which have not been updated to meet the new requirements may not work. for details, please refer to this forum thread.

RC  Channels

The deployment to the RC channels did not go as planned, after it was discovered the release had a creeping crash bug that could not be reproduced on Aditi, but would be a bad experience for all regions on the RCs. A roll-back was therefore performed, leaving all three RCs on the same server maintenance package as the Main (SLS) channel (#17.07.11.327548).

SL Viewer

[0:10-3:33] The Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 5.0.7.327940 on Friday, July 28th. This update includes two crash fixes, and an update for a pull request fix, which Oz has asked third-party viewers to include as soon as possible. Essentially, some of the very low-level code in the log-in process has a very aggressive approach to retries if it encounters log in delays, and this needs rectifying.

This only became apparent when a main network cable in the Lab’s data centre was severed (by a backhoe!). This shifted log-in attempts to an alternative network connection where the combination of high user numbers and this aggressive retry loop in the code resulted in what was essentially a denial of service attack which overwhelmed the log-in servers. Given the depth of the code in the viewer, it is believed it is present in the vast majority (if not all) viewers. This also means the Maintenance viewer will get promoted relatively soon.

[3:59-5:16] The Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer still has an elevated crash rate and the Lab is making changes to obtain better data on the crashes. The 32-bit version of the viewer in particular is suffering “really high” crash rates.

The remaining viewers in the pipelines remain unchanged:

Web Property, Attachments and ToS Issues

[5:48-7:01] Some users have been experiencing some or all of the following issues during the week:

  • Inability to access various LL web properties (e.g. their own dashboard, the JIRA system, etc). As of the TPV Developer meeting, all web services were believed to be back up and running, although the Lab weren’t sure as a to the cause of the issues.
  • Attachment failures – either on attach or with scripts. These are still being investigated, and a definitive cause has not yet been found.
  • The Terms of Service update, which officially comes into force on Monday, July 31st but which currently requires acceptance by users, has been causing log-in issues for some. Again, the cause isn’t as yet known.

Other Items

Parcel Sounds

[7:55-13:12] There is a discussion on parcel sounds (from objects and avatars). In short: parcel sounds can be restricted from within a parcel going out, but not for sounds from other parcels coming in. As parcel privacy is two-way, this has caused some confusion for some users. The Lab is hesitant to change the scope of the setting (e.g. make it apply to both sounds leaving and entering a parcel), they are possibly amenable to changing the setting to sounds are restricted to parcels by default, or receiving a code contribution / feature request to separately stop sounds entering a parcel.

Sansar Public Beta

[17:58-18:50] During the meeting, Oz Linden indicated that the Sansar public Creator Beta will be launching on Monday, July 31st / during the week commencing Monday, July 31st.

However, during the week of July 24th through 28th, the Lab hosted a series of meetings involving staff, those of us fortunate enough to be in Sansar and creators and bloggers from Second Life who have not been a part of the Creator Preview in which it was indicated the company wasn’t ready to provide a date for the public Beta, other than it being “soon”.

We’ll obviously find out what is happening on Monday, but either way, I’ll have at least one article on Sansar and Second Life coming out quite soon which will delve into the meat of the meetings – so to speak!

Lab’s Second Life Development Summit

[18:00-18:42] Week 31 (commencing Monday, July 31st) marks the next Second Life summit in which Lab staff directly involved in running and maintaining SL (developer, product team, operations, etc), get together to plan out the next several months of work and projects for the platform.

In Brief

[19:51-20:36]  Further Estate Tool Improvements: the work to improve the Region / Estate floater in the viewer to make it easier to manage ban lists, etc., is still in-hand at the Lab, it’s just been delayed due to other work being carried out / completed.

[21:26-22:57] Premium “Goodies”: Grumpity Linden indicated there are some “awesome goodies” in the pipeline for Premium members, which sparked a lot of text-based suggestions.

[22:57-25:46] Group notices being dropped: there are issues around group notices being received by users in certain groups. The Lab has made adjustments to handling the UDP packets which handle group notices to try to improve things, but the issue of dropped notices is hard to reproduce, and therefore hard to diagnose and fix.

[26:51] Place Pages: have been updated to include events.

 

Published by Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

One thought on “SL project updates 30/3: TPV Developer meeting”

  1. I am not optimistic about Sansar.
    It needs a high-end machine running Windows, even for the simple SL-style use with a monitor.

    The Creator Invite I got didn’t tell me that until I signed up, and it felt as though they were deceiving me, another example of the old internet sales scam to build up a mailing list.

    Currently, the weather reports are consistent with Revelations 21:8 so I don’t expect Hell to freeze over any time soon. I shall carry on using Linux.

    Like

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