2022 SUG meetings week #40 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 4th, 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

At  the time of writing, there was no published deployment plan for the week.

• On Tuesday, October 4th, the Main SLS channel were restarted with no deployment, leaving them on simulator release 574921.
• On Wednesday, October 5th, the simhosts on the RC channels should receive simulator release 575421, which did not have an release notes available at the time of writing
  • This is the release from week #39, which was ultimately postponed as a result of an 11th hour bug showing up in QA testing.
  • These release should contain two new functions llGetObjectLinkKey (specified under llGetLinkKey) and llSHA256String.

Available Official Viewers

The Performance Floater / Auto-FPS project viewer updated to version 6.6.5.575378, on October 4th.

The rest of the current crop of official viewers remains as:

• Release viewer: version 6.6.4.575022 – hotfix for Crash at ~LLModalDialog() – promoted September 15 – 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).
  • Maintenance 3 RC viewer, version 6.6.5.575257, September 23.
  • Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.5.575055 September 19.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.574545,  issued on August 30.
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.

Experience KVP Change

Rider Linden offered a heads-up on a forthcoming change to Experience Key Value Pairs (KVP), which can be used to store large amounts of data related to an experience in-world, and make them accessible anywhere, any time, within the experience. Rider described the changes thus:

We are doing some work on the Experience KVP. The new tech that we are using doesn’t let us easily monitor the number of bytes that have been used be any particular experience. SO the proposal that is on the table is that we change the limit to a number of keys [and]:

• • A field would be tacked on to the end of llCountKeysKeyValue() that would be the allotted number of keys.

  • llDataSizeKeyValue would be changed to return the number_of_keys*4096 (which is the maximum size of the value that a key can store.

– Rider Linden

This sparked a discussion, and those who use experiences – or use the KVP table in an experience for any form of data storage, should refer to the video [29:21-end] in order to gain the full context of the proposed change and the discussion.

In Brief

• BUG-232037 – “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” has been a bone of contention for many for the last few months, Commenting on the issue, Rider linden there are at least a couple of points in back-end communications where the problem might occur, but it will take time to properly diagnose.
• Viewer-side: as noted in recent TPV Developer meeting summaries, there is a lot of work going on on the viewer build side of things (move to github for repositories, tool and library updates, etc. Whilst not strictly a part of the SUG meeting, Signal Linden wanted to get a couple of points out for viewer devs to note. One of these points relates to 3rd party code contributions to LL, the other on a library location under the new github structure:

So, some minor early notes wrt to opensource development. We are reviewing our contributor license agreement (CLA) and the process for collecting signatures. Ideally, I’d like for the CLA to be able to be signed in PRs on github. This will take some work with legal, and I don’t have anything definitive yet 🙂

Also, if you are not on the opensource-dev mailing list, the llsd python serialization library has been moved to its own repository; https://github.com/secondlife/python-llsd We are also starting to finally get the PyPI packages updated for autobuild.

– Signal Linden