2020 Simulator User Group week #37 summary

The following notes were taken from the September 8th Simulator User Group meeting.

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for news and updates. However, there are no planned deployments for week #37.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday, September 8th, 2020, the following viewers were updated:

• The Bormotukha  Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.8.548394.
• The Mesh Uploader RC viewer updated to version 6.4.8.548061.

The rest of the viewer pipelines currently remain unchanged from the end of week #36:

• Current release viewer version 6.4.7.546539, dated August 11, promoted August 17, formerly the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer – No Change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.8.547427,August 21.
• Project viewers:
  • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.8.547487, issued August 26.
  • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

Region Crossings

The recent updates to region crossings have generally improved things, but they’ve also led to a lot of “interesting” – to use Simon Linden’s term – side effects and some unpredictable behaviour.

• Some are reporting a possible increase in avatar / vehicle collisions when crossing into regions with damage enabled.
• Others are reporting issues of crossings “hanging” – the vehicle vanishes, the avatar is unable to move, communication, teleport, stand, etc., while the user is still able to cam around but is unable to to cleanly log-out.

This second issue apparently particularly noticeable when the region being entered is not visible at the time of the crossing (see BUG-229312), although this factor may be a separate issue to anything related to region crossings.

Group Chat

People continue to experience issues with group chat disconnecting / failing following a transition to a different region via vehicle or teleport (see BUG-229219).

There is a potential fix for this issue in the works, but whether or not it solves all of the issues currently being experienced or not is an unknown until it is actually deployed.

In the meantime, the group chat issue may be related to to issues being experienced with bots using group chat becoming unresponsive,sometimes after little more than an hour of running.

All of these issues appear to date from a period of back-end updates made in early August.

Cloud Uplift

Questions continue to be asked about changes that will / may be made to simulator services as a part of or immediately following the uplift work to get simulators transitioned to AWS services.

As has oft been stated by the Lab (and reported in these pages), the Lab’s focus is on successfully transitioning all of their services  – including simulators “as is”, without making substantive changes at this point in time. As  Oz Linden stated during the meeting:

Uplift is trying very hard not to make any changes we don’t _have_ to make … A big driver for getting simulators uplifted is that then we can start selling regions again … believe me, that’s pretty great motivation.  When and whether we’ll make other changes to optimize or exploit the cloud is later on.

–  Oz Linden, September 8th, 2020

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