Day: October 27, 2021

2021 SUG meeting week #43 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Blackwood Farm, July 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 26th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary. Note this summary focuses on the key points of the meeting; where there is something to report, the video should be referred to should full details of the meeting wish to be reviewed.

Server Deployments

  • Tuesday, October 26th saw the simhosts on the SLS main channel restarted without any update.
  • Wednesday, October 27th should see the deployment of  simulator version that includes a revised implementation of PRIM_PROJECTION.
    • For the time being, it will be write only, meaning it can used in llSetPrimitiveParams but not in llGetPP. The associated wiki documentation has yet to be updated.
    • This update will also include BUG-231158 Allow llGetNotecardLine to return more than 255 bytes (to a maximum of 1023 characters).

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to the current crop on official viewers to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: version version 6.4.23.564172, formerly the Apple Notarisation Fix RC viewer, issued September 24 and promoted October 15 – see notes below.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • 360 Snapshot RC viewer, version 6.5.0.564863, issued October 21.
    • Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.5.0.564805, on October 20.
    • Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.23.562623, dated September 17, issued September 20.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Improvements project viewer, version 6.4.23.564530, dated October 12.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

Apple Notarisation Viewer Issue

With the release of the Apple Notarisation Viewer there were updates to many of the viewer’s third party libraries, and some of these updates have be found to cause issues related to playback of certain media types in-world including, but not possibly limited to MP3s and MP4s. LL are working towards a fix, but in the meantime, workaround are offered:

  • Windows:
    • Uninstall the Second Life viewer the usual way.
    • Navigate to your Program Files folder (Win 64-bit) or Program Files (x86) (Win 32-bit); locate and delete the “SecondLifeViewer” folder.
    • Download and install the Simplified Cache viewer (the previous release viewer).
  • Apple Mac:
    • Remove the Apple Notarisation viewer from your system.
    • Download and install the Simplified Cache viewer (the previous release viewer).
    • Read the instructions on this page to work through any occurrences of unwanted notarisation warnings.

In Brief

  • With the on-going work to analyse viewer performance using the Tracy debugger / system analyser (see my TPV Developer summaries for more), the simulator team are looking to try and leverage that work on the simulator side, once the current tools upgrade on the server-side has been completed.
  • There was a 10-minutes discussion around animated particles / revising the particle systems, but there is nothing on the card for immediate work.
  • The upcoming simhost operating system upgrade (also to follow the completion of the tools upgrade) was also discussed. Essentially there is a lot of work to be done, and the potential for regressions or other issues to occur. However, LL are planning things as carefully as possible; no overall decision as to how it will be deployed to the main grid come time for it to do so – mainly because the work has yet to start.