2022 SUG meetings week #22 summary

The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 31st, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

At the time of writing, there was no server deployment thread for the week, or release notes for the RC updates.

• On Tuesday, May 31st, the SLS Main and Event channel servers updated to simulator version 2022-05-20.571998, which includes a couple of fixes, including one for the issue with objects not showing up when you first log-in.
• Wednesday, June 1st should see the RC channels receive an update with fixes in support of the upcoming Premium Plus capability.

Available Official Viewers

There have been no official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the current crop as:

• Release viewer: version 6.6.0.571939 – formerly the Performance Improvements viewer, dated May 25th – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Makgeolli Maintenance RC viewer (Maintenance M) viewer, version 6.5.6.571575, May 12.
• Project viewers:
  • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.571296, May 10.
  • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

In Brief

• To avoid over-/mis-use, Mazidox reminded people when filing bug reports to differentiate between rezzing and rendering. The former only applies to objects being placed into the world; rendering refers to objects already in-world. So, when you TP to a location, the objects within it are not rezzing, they are rendering.
• Options for dealing with BUG-232143 “Substitute with NULL_PARAM whenever a variable of llSetLinkPrimitiveParams is not being changed.”, and this will likely get further discussion at the next meeting.
• Brad Linden touched upon the materials / PBR project the graphics team is working on – see my most recent CCUG meeting summaries for more background. He specifically raised the proposed scripting support for the materials aspect of the work, noting a draft specification of what is being considered will be published shortly. Currently, two functions are under consideration:
  • llSetMaterial(key material_id), with LL thinking this could be framed in a similar manner to llSetAgentEnvironment() and possibly  llSetPrimitiveParams() work.
  • and llSetMaterialParams( parameters TBD), which will override only the specific params that are modified by the function, and will likely be framed in a similar manner to how llSetTexture() works.
  • Those interested in learning more should likely attend the CCUG meetings, with the next due to take place on Thursday, June 2nd, 2022.
• The above topic also incorporated texture preloading (which, given the new materials assets will be called directly by the viewer via the CDN, should have to be used for any pre-loading with them), with an “llPreloadAsset” function might ever be available (would need to be a project of its own), and object culling.