Day: December 11, 2020

2020 TPVD meeting week #50: summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Legend of Wooley Swamp, October 2020 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, December 11th, 2020.

  • These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary.
  • The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.
  • Note these summaries are not intended to be a full reporting on all topics discussed, but focus on those items that are more directly user-facing.

Another exceptionally brief meeting, with some user-user discussion in chat at the end (post-meeting) on Open Metaverse, so please refer to the video as well.

SL Viewer News

[1:55-4:44]

There have been no updates to the current group of official viewers in the pipelines, leaving things as:

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.11.551711, formerly Cachaça Maintenance RC viewer promoted on November 12 – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Dawa Maintenance RC Viewer, version 6.4.12.553053, released December 3rd.
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.552100, November 12.
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.12.552224, December 4.
    • Simple Cache project viewer, version 6.4.11.551403, issued on November 12.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
    • 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.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • Both the Key Mappings and Dawa Maintenance RC viewers are approaching the point where either one could be considered ready from promotion to de facto release status. However, give the low crash rate and high stability data coming from the current release viewer, is is possible that neither one of these RCs will be promoted before the new year.
  • Two more RC viewers should be appearing shortly:
    • The Simple Caching viewer that replaces the current VFS cache with a much simpler mechanism. This is currently in review for promotion as an RC viewer.
    • The current Jellydolls project viewer is also approaching the point of being promoted to RC status.
  • [7:03-7:53] There are a number of EEP issues that have been flagged as “priority”, but its not clear if these will be addressed in the next Love Me Render (LMR) RC viewer or not (due to voice break-up as Vir was discussing).
    • There is an expectation within LL that any updates to the rendering system (including what are regarded as “critical EEP fixes” by some users) will be condemned as further “breakage” in EEP.

In Brief

  • [0:48-1:54] Simulator Issues:
    • Thanksgiving Bakefail: LL believe they now have a fix for this issue, which is awaiting deployment.
    • BUG-229824: “[EEP] Cannot apply any EEP setting to ANY parcel or region:” reported on December 11th, a fix for this issues has been deployed, which should correct it. HOWEVER, any settings assets uploaded between 14:40 SLT on Thursday, December 10th and and 11:50 SLT on Friday December 11th, will not work. They will need to be deleted and replaced.
  • [5:24-6:23] The Lab is “fast closing in”on having all SL services transitioned to operating via AWS. The percentage of remaining systems to be migrated in being put at around 3%.
    • Again, please note that this is only the migration work; there will be further work to come with regards to fine tuning, performance updates, etc. For now the focus is on gathering statistics on how simulators, systems and services are all running.
  • [8:29-13:50] general discussion in chat and voice on how best to manage user  / creator expectations on what may “break” or be altered as a result of upcoming work on the viewer’s rendering system.
    • There may well be “breakages” / changes because an overhaul of the rendering system is unlikely to try to achieve a “like for like” swapping of issues between one rendering pipe and another, but to try to improve things as and where possible; as such, so “breakages” are perhaps inevitable.
    • One problem here is the number of workarounds that have been employed over the years in order to circumvent perceived / actual issues within the current rendering system, and which may not continue to work as expected as changes are made.
    • Another issue is when to try to inform users and creators – the rendering system work is liable to be long-term, and made not yield immediately changes; ergo, providing notification too early could lead to a lot of upset and concern, only for it to evaporate and the warning of changes to be forgotten, if the changes are not immediately implemented.
    • Further to this is just how to inform the majority – many users do not read official blog posts and forums (and even when news is pushed through third-party blogs, such as this one, it still only tends to reach a narrow audience). The viewer message of the day also has limited impact, simply because the official viewer is not the most widely used viewer in SL.
    • Plus, even with forewarning, the natural course of things is for people to keep using with which they are familiar right up to the point where changes are made.
    • However, once the Lab has a better idea of what subsets of rendering elements are likely to change, efforts will be made to communicate these to users in advance.
  • [13:55-16:25] Another change with the viewer is the on-going removal of code that is not longer being actively used. A  further example of this is that there are two protocols used for handling requests for logging-in to SL. One of these (XML-RPC) is almost never used nowadays, so this code may well be removed – with warning beforehand – in the future.