2023 SL SUG meetings week #7 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 14th, 2023 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

• On Tuesday, February 14th 2023, the simhosts on the Main SLS channel were restarted without any change to their simulator code, leaving them on release 577734.
• On Wednesday, February 15th, 2023:
  • The majority of simhosts on the RC channel will be restarted without and version change.
  • The BlueSteel RC will be updated with release 578100, comprising:
    • New function llReplaceSubString(): find and replace instances of one substring with another string
    • New function llHMAC(): generate the HMAC hash of a message
    • New function llSignRSA(): generate an RSA signature of a message, given a private key
    • New function llVerifyRSA(): validate whether an RSA signature for a message is valid, given the public key
    • New parameters for llGetEnv(): “grid” and “region_rating”
    • Dozens of new parameters for llGetSimStats().

The BlueSteel deployment further includes a fix for BUG-233288 “Scripts do not operate properly under this new server version 577942”. This was cause of the February 1st, roll-back as described in this official blog post.

Available Official Viewers

On Monday February 13th, 2023, the PBR Materials project viewer updated to version 7.0.0.578161, February 14, 2023. This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.

The remaining official viewer pipelines stay as follows:

• Release viewer: Maintenance Q(uality) viewer, version 6.6.9.577968 Thursday, February 2, 2023.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Maintenance R RC viewer, version 6.6.10.578087, February 3 translation updates and the return of slam bits, together with the Group Chat History functionality, as announced in this official blog post.
  • Performance Floater / Auto-FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.9.577251, January 4, 2023.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

• The new Group Chat functionality is currently available in the Maintenance R (above) is also being picked-up by some TPVs. The hope at LL is that once the capability has been available for a while, it will be improved (e.g. allow Group owners set their own parameters for it.
• The code branch which provided the Group Chat history code also contains code which allows for text chat translation. If an external translator is correctly configured, the viewer can send a translation request on receipt of a foreign language group chat.  This has yet to be implemented.
• LL have received requests from residents to be able to submit changes to the XML file used to provide the content for the hover tooltip when writing LSL scripts. This work may be carried out in the next quarter, and the file may be converted to JSON.
• The SL wiki has been unavailable for some, apparently as a result of a CDN issue.
• General discussion on LSL editing, key bindings,