2021 SUG meeting week #1 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Outer Garden – The Farthest Light – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 5th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.

There were no planned deployments for 2021 week #1. It  is hoped that the deployment schedule will resume in week #2, depending on their run through QA.

SL Viewer

There have been no changes to the current crop of official viewers, leaving them 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 6.4.12.553723, December 15.
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.552100, November 12.
  • Project viewers:
    • Simple Cache project viewer, version 6.4.11.551403, issued on November 12.
    • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.12.552224, December 4.
    • 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.

In Brief

Experience Keys

It is believed that the end-of-year experience keys issue (the XP_STORAGE_EXCEPTION problem, see my 2020 #week #52 update and BUG-229892) has been resolved. However it has been noted that some user may still be experiencing “lingering performance issues” with experience keys. Those experience any experience key issues are asked to contact Support.

Issues and Rumours

There were some issues experienced over the weekend, with users reporting an inability to rez and / or their avatars remaining as a cloud, and poor attached scripts performance. Rumours circulated about the issue being due to a “server” fire, and some reports appeared to have been  exaggerated (e.g. the issuing being open on Grid Status for “several hours”, when in fact it was reported as resolved some 45 minutes are initially appearing). Whilst not going in to specifics, Oz Linden noted that while there were issues, in terms of the circulating rumours, he noted:

It was much much less dramatic and interesting than that.

Map Tiles

Map tiles are still not being regularity updated, however the Lab both identified the cause of the issue and a possible fix. Progress is being made on the fix, however, it appears that it is taking time due to the Map code not having been touched in a good while.

General Post-Uplift Issues

While the core work of transitioning all SL services to AWS systems has been completed, there are still some niggling problems that are being dealt with – such as with the Map tiles (above) and on-going issues with things like the official viewer Splash screen updating, the land store, etc. The Lab is addressing these as they can.

Published by Inara Pey

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

3 thoughts on “2021 SUG meeting week #1 summary”

  1. I know the worldmap ain’t interesting for the labbies, since they don’t see any need to wander/fly/sail/drive/ride around the world so they just ignore it and instead made shit like Sansar with lots of non-connected experiences.
    Well, the user experience is totally different. We wanna be mobile, we fukn need the map, our nav systems depend on it!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. That’s hardly accurate. A number of Lab staff (incl. those from the engineering team) are actually keen explorers and also enjoy travelling by land, water and air vehicles (Rider Linden, for example, is not only a Second Life resident-to-Linden and member of the engineering team, he’s a keen in-world motorcyclist). The issue is simply that of focus vs. impact.

      While the Map is a useful tool, it is code that appears to have been somewhat reliant on assorted oddities when running SL within the Lab’s own infrastructure that are no longer present within the AWS environment (this has happened with a couple of other services), and as such, a deeper dive into the code has been necessary than had first been believed. In the meantime, there are other issues the Lab is trying to get sorted because they are drawing a lot more angst and upset on the part of users, and so have been given a slightly higher priority on the to do list.

      Liked by 2 people

  2. Thanks for the update! I sure hope someone has attached a lifeline to those deep divers mucking around down there in the silt of old code… idk why I just had a mental picture of Phil Harding of Time Team, in his wetsuit, trying to make sense of the archaeology and looking forward to a pint at the end of the day. 😉
    Should we report known areas of Map not updating, or does the Lab know which ones are not working and they will just be fixed when a working fix is implemented? I’m nearly ready to just start drawing some important changes on right on my monitor… which is not a good idea! ;D

    Liked by 1 person

Comments are closed.