Day: May 18, 2021

2021 SUG meeting week #20 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Cherishville II, March 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 18th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes relate to the core points of discussion; other topics may have ben raised without specific feedback from LL as actionable items, so  please refer to the video at the end of this report for the full meeting and all points covered.

Server Deployments

At the time of writing, there had been no server deployment thread available for review.

  • Tuesday, May 18th saw no deployment to servers on the Main SLS channel.
  • Wednesday, May 19th should see some of the RC channels updated with the new llOrd, llChar and llHash LSL capabilities. A further change is that the updated simulator no longer reports child agents as part of agents, as it has been doing so inconsistently.
  • The remainder will keep to release  559679 with the llOpenFloater() function intended for use with Linden-owned Experiences – see my week #18 SUG summary for more.

From Rider Linden’s comments at the week #14 SUG summary:

LlOrd() will return the ordinal of the first character in a string, llChar() given an integer will return a single character string, and llHash() is a non-cryptographic 32 bit hash. I was looking for a way to just have an integer that had a reasonable change of being unique for an arbitrary string.
Use case I can see: Given an owner of two objects I want to select a chat channel with a low probability of colliding with other agents in the area.

SL Viewer

The start of the week has seen no updates to the current crop of official viewers, leaving the pipelines as follows:

  • Release viewer: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23, promoted April 29 – No change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Project UI viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559612, May 14.
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.18.558365, dated April 22.
    • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.18.558441, dated April 21.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

In  Brief

  • The Lab has a group working on various simulator physics issues and general health, some of which can generate errors (e.g. “Unable to create object that has caused problems in this region”). No ETA on when these might be deployed.
  • Thought is still being given as to how to fix the dim ambient lighting seen on the Mainland since the introduction of EEP – a problem that appears to be harder to fix than people appreciate / understand.
  • Questions have been asked if some of the simulator-side resource issues could be fixed if additional CPU cores could be allocated to support really busy regions – such as events, etc. Responding to this, Mazidox Linden, Lead Server QA Engineer said:
There are various hardware (and *maybe*) some software resources that can be in contention for any given set of simulators on a simhost, network, memory, CPU, IO, things like that. So allocating an additional core to a simulator fixes *maybe* one of those bottlenecks. If it’s the bottleneck affecting your performance. Which is a big if.
  • There have been reports of teleport failure spiking recently,  including viewer disconnects. Rider Linden is hoping to poke at the teleport code some more as time allows,  but it appears the issue might be a communications issue between the receiving region and the viewer.  Maxidox Linden explained the matter thus:
The destination simulator knows someone is supposed to show up, so it creates some space in the receiving warehouse. No one ever arrives to fill it … Our best guess (and it is a *guess*) is that it involves the destination region and the affected viewer waiting for each other to send something first.

Video

The following video of the meeting is courtesy of Pantera Północy.

A dreamer’s golden stories in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Itakos Project: Golden: A Journey into the Art of a Dreamer

Currently open at the Itakos Project Art Gallery, curated by Akim Alonzo, is Golden: A Journey into the Art of a Dreamer, featuring the work of Paola Mills.

Spread across the two levels of the gallery are some 29 exquisite avatar studies that incorporate a range of themes, and are linked by the fact that each one forms a single frame story.

The Itakos Project: Golden: A Journey into the Art of a Dreamer

From fantasy to what might be considered beauty shots and going by way of touches of sci-fi, horror, edges of transhumanism, and even a homage to a classic film (Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest (see:Follow the Ageless Tide), these are all stunning pieces. Many carry a degree of subtext through title to further drive their story, although equally, a fair number are untitled – but they still speak clearly to those who study them.

This is because all of the pieces offered here, produced in both colour and monochrome, are marvellously crafted, rich in detail and composition. Within them are to be found stories centred on a range of subjects: identity, love, life, sexuality, emotions, loneliness, memory and more.

The Itakos Project: Golden: A Journey into the Art of a Dreamer

As well as the individual images mounted on the gallery walls, Akim has included an animated slide show system that pages through copies of all of Paola’s pieces in the exhibition. It’s an approach that will a new feature with exhibits at the gallery. Here, with its smooth, gentle animations and cross-fades, the slide show brings together the images in such a way that the transitions from one to the next presents a feeling of shifting dreams in keeping with the sub-title of the exbition. Further, several times during the show, the transition from one image to the next naturally suggests a broader story spanning the art than might be found when viewing in the individual images around the walls.

It is really hard to write about this exhibition, as the pieces are so rich in narrative that they really should be seen first-hand, rather then through the intervening eyes of and thoughts of another. Nor are they pieces to be simply seen; they deserve to be given the time to speak and tell their stories. As such, I strongly suggest paying a visit through the month the exhibition will be available.

The Itakos Project: Golden: A Journey into the Art of a Dreamer

SLurl Details