2022 SUG meetings week #31 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Golden Hair, June 2022 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form 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

No deployment plan notes were available on the forums at this time of writing this update.

  • On Tuesday, August 2nd, the simhosts on the Main SLS channel were restarted without any deployment, leaving them running simulator version 573176, comprising infrastructure updates.
  • On Wednesday, August, 3rd, all RC channels will be restarted, also with no deployment, also leaving them on simulator version 573176.

This means that the anticipated new scripting items (llSetEnvironment and llReplaceEnvironment and a new flag STATUS_DIE_AT_NO_ENTRY will now not be deployed until week #32.

Available Official Viewers

  • On Monday, August 1st, 2022, the Maintenance Optimisations RC viewer updated to version 6.6.2.573023.

The remaining official viewer pipelines remain as:

  • Release viewer: version 6.6.1.572458 – formerly the Maintenance M(akgeolli) RC viewer, promoted June 29 – no change.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Project viewers:
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
    • 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.
    • Copy / Paste project viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

In Brief

  • There was a general discussion on chat relays and the means to deliver chat to all avatars in a large parcel (e.g. such as those attending a presentation) that adheres to parcel boundaries in a way that current scripted chat extenders do not, and in lieu of the server-side chat range extension being generally available. Please refer to the video for details and:
  • Simon Linden has been working on Group Chat to try to further improve it. In discussing the work, he indicated that the Group Chat server cluster is now running with 4x the servers it had previously.
    • His work is currently focused on a disparity between the viewer and the group chat servers, where the viewer believes it is part of a Group Chat, but the controlling server for the chat doesn’t believe the viewer is connected to it.
    • He also noted the issues users have where the are suddenly disconnected from a Group Chat Session but not reconnected without manually closing / reopening the Group Chat session, or where a log-log fails to re-connect to a Group chat.
    • Part of the problem with Group Chat and other services is that while they run on server clusters separate to the simulators running regions, the simulator is currently the *only* connection point between the viewer and the rest of SL, so it has to act as a form of “relay”, and this can be unreliable (due to TP disconnects, etc.).
    • What would be preferable is a more reliable form of connection – such as the log-in service – which could monitor the viewer more so that when it re-connects to SL after a crash / disconnect, the service “orders” the viewer to re-connect to the additional services like the Group Chat servers it had previously been using.
    • This is something Simon indicated he’d personally like to see, but it would require considerable work.
  • For the rest of the meeting, please refer to the video.

Published by Inara Pey

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