Atonement, May 2019 – blog post
The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, June 28th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. The key points of discussion are provided below with time stamps to the relevant points in the video, which will open in a separate tab when clicked.
There are assorted text chat discussions scattered throughout the video covering various topics (e.g. Firestorm code that exposed a viewer setting to show the physics shapes of mesh objects, general discussion of LL hiring, avatar dot colours on the map, and opinions on a “lite” version of the viewer (remember the Basic viewer?), the technicalities of multi-threading, etc). These are not necessarily referenced in the notes below – please refer to the video.
SL Viewer
Recent Updates
- As noted in my Content Creation summary, the Bakes On Mesh viewer is once again available with version 6.3.0.528495. This includes:
- A new inventory icon for the “universal” wearable type.
- A fix for a serious security issue type of bug.
- The Love Me Render RC updated on Wednesday, June 26th to version 6.2.4.528505.
- The Umeshu RC viewer updated on Thursday, June 27th to version 6.2.4.528492.
All of these RC viewer should now have parity with the current release viewer.
Note: at the time of writing, these viewers only appear on the Alternate viewers page; they are not listed on the the index of available viewers.
Viewer Pipelines
The remaining LL viewer list looks like:
- Current Release version 6.2.3.527758, formerly the Rainbow RC viewer dated June 5th, promoted June 18th.
- Release channel cohorts:
- EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.527723, dated June 6th.
- Project viewers:
- Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.2.3.527749, dated June 5th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
- Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17th, 2017 and promoted to release status November 29th, 2017 – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
- Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.
Additional Viewer Notes
- Currently the BOM and EEP viewers appear vying for promotion to de facto release status. A new EEP RC is anticipated in early week #27 (commencing Monday, July 1st). It is hoped that both viewers are now functionally ready for release, and that both will go through promotion to release status by the end of July. Of the two, the more likely for promotion first is BOM – but this is not an absolute.
- [9:40] The potential closeness of BOM and EEP going to release status relative to one another may raise questions within some TPV groups as to how to best handle them (.e.g. individual release or a combined release with both).
- It is hoped that other projects – notably the texture fetching / texture caching re-write project – can start to be carried forward once more, with project viewers surfacing as a result at some point.
- If the texture fetching can be improved, the Lab might also look at inventory fetching, although the two are somewhat different. There is already some work going on with the inventory back-end, which could also lead to opportunities to work on the viewer side of inventory handling.
- [10:55-11:50 and 46:00-47:25] The 360 Snapshot project viewer has been brought up to parity with the current release viewer, and is currently awaiting QA. It should hopefully be returning to the viewer list soon™, and work should resume on the 360 snapshot function itself in the near future.
- [12:52-14:26] Apple OpenGL deprecation: the Lab is working on a strategy to deal with this, but it is “too soon” for detailed discussion, however, part of it is dependent on the Lab getting an additional graphics engineer hired to work on SL.
Viewer Build Process
An issue with the new viewer build process using Visual Studio 2017 / the latest Xcode has been identified and hopefully rectified. The process will therefore be going to QA. Providing all goes well, the build process will then be deployed to the viewer build farm.
Script Processing Issues
The simulator updates that will hopefully improve script run time issues (see BUG-226851 and BUG-227099) mentioned in my Content Creation summary, are unlikely to be deployed until at least week #28 (week commencing Monday, July 8th).
Other Topics
- [7:01-8:00 and 28:22-29:00] There will be no viewer releases at the end of week #27, nor will there be any simulator RC channel deploys on Wednesday, July 3rd, due to the July 4th break. Similarly, there will be a period at the end of July / start of August with no releases / updates, as the SL team will be having their summer planning summit.
- {21:15-25:15] iOS companion app: work has started on trying to get the initial test versions through Apple’s test process. It’s not clear how long this will take.
- As per my summary and audio of Oz and April Linden’s Meet the Lindens session, this will initially be a basic communications app, allowing users to chat to others (users won’t even have an in-world location, per se).
- Obviously, it is planned to evolve the app over time.
- It’s not clear if users in-world will be able to discern if a user is on the iOS client.
- Once the test version is available, iPhone users will require TestFlight on their ‘phones to play with it (hopefully, it should also run on iPads as well, although there may be some configuration differences).
- Some of the back-end infrastructure the Lab is building is support of the app might be applicable to use with a web application, but that is not on the current plans.
- [26:53-27:50] The Lab believe they have identified one of the causes of performance collapse when avatars teleport into a region. This is being queued up to be worked on.
- [28:00-28:18] The latest versions of simulator code changes to help with region crossing and teleport issues should be fully deployed across the grid following the SLS (Main) channel deployment in week #27.
- [32:00-43:30 – chat] Problems have been reported with ASCII characters used in group names displayed by the avatar tag taking time to correctly display in busy regions, which are notably seen with the Firestorm viewer, but which are proving difficult to reproduce in the official viewer. See: BUG26338.
- This topic kicked off a length chat discussion that rolled into avatar dot colours on the map, viewer updates for avatar tags, etc.
- The chat further rolled into a discussion of “why no VR in SL?”. Short answer: performance isn’t consider good enough to deliver a really comfortable VR experience, although non-LL driven tests have continued.
- Having trouble with texture loading? I could be your system, depending on its age, but it also might be your anti-virus software – try explicitly whitelisting your viewer cache in you AV software and see if that helps.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 