Day: April 25, 2018

2018 UG updates #17/1: Simulator User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey

Motorheadz Café / Route6; Inara Pey, March 2018, on FlickrMotorheadz Café / Route66 – blog post

Server Deployments

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates.

  • According to the deployment thread, on Tuesday, April 24th, 2018, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with server maintenance package 18#18.04.09.514272, previously deployed to the RC channels and containing internal fixes and a fix for BUG-214702. However, a check on the simulator release via Help > About in the viewer reveals the simulator version to be 18.04.13.514504, which doesn’t appear to have associated release notes.
  • According to the deployment thread, there was no deployment to the three main RC channels – LeTigre, Magnum and BlueSteel – on Wednesday, April 25th, which reportedly remain on server maintenance release 18#18.04.09.514272. However, as with the Main (SLS) channel, these channels report as being on simulator version 18.04.13.514504.

Region Crossing Updates

On Wednesday, April 25th, the Snack RC was updated with a release designed to assist with region crossings.

“We’ve made some changes on the back-end with respect to message reliability,” Rider Linden stated at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, April 23rd. “We are hoping makes the transitions [from one region to the next] a bit more reliable … mostly it was a number of internal changes dealing with how agents get passed between simulators during a crossing or teleport.”

The simulator regions with the updated messaging code are:

Blake Sea – Atlantic
 Blake Sea – Galilee
Blake Sea – Cattewater Blake Sea – Crows Nest
Blake Sea – Mizzen
 Blake Sea – Nelson
Blake Sea – Thunderer
 Blake Sea – Hawser
Blake Sea – Indefatigable
 Blake Sea – Jones Locker

All of these can be accessed via the Blake Sea Half Hitch rezzing zone for those wishing to access them. I addition there is a block of region centred on “Est Full2” on Aditi that also have the updated region crossing code.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to the viewer channels so far, leaving them as follows:

  • Current Release version 5.1.3.513644, dated March 27, promoted April 13 – formerly the media update RC.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7. This viewer will remain available for as long as reasonable, but will not be updated with new features or bug fixes.

Other Items

A recent back-end change made to PRIM_MEDIA_CURRENT_URL reportedly broke a lot of content (see BUG-216032), causing a lengthy debate during the Simulator User Group meeting. As a result of this discussion, Oz Linden provided an update on the change and on a further change the Lab has made which they hope will assist those experiencing issues as a result of the original change.

We installed an important security patch, which happened to no longer infer http for a URL that had no scheme (in my opinion a good change). That broke some scripts that had used the field for a URL but left off the scheme (e.g. “myserver.example.com/myapi”) so those were broken. In order to get those slightly sloppy but legit uses working again, we added the scheme for them (but used https because everyone always should).

Storing data in that URL field was never intended to work.

The fact that we broke uses that were never legit is unfortunate, but not something I feel an obligation to maintain compatibility with. We’ll try to help you recover data that’s trapped there, but we won’t change it so you can keep doing that. If you have scripts that you need to get the data back out of, let us know and we’ll try to work with you.

Those still experiencing issues should report them via the JIRA.