2023 SL SUG meetings week #12 summary: “Ban the Bots” Simulator Update

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 21s, 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, March 21st, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator version 577734.
• On Wednesday, March 22nd, one half of the RC channel servers will receive an update to their current simulator release, the remainder will gain the Estate Level Scripted Agent Controls (aka “Ban the Bots”).

Estate Level Scripted Agent Controls (aka “Ban the Bots”)

This is the simulator update referenced in the March 10th Lab Gab session – see: Lab Gab summary: Grumpity, Mojo & Patch – SL Mobile, land, bots & more – Bots and Policies.

• The update includes a console variable that can be set by estate managers to either True or False. When set to True it will prevent Scripted Agents from entering regions in an estate (those required by the estate can be added to the access list so they can continue to access regions).
• This will be supported in time by a viewer UI update to allow the option to be managed more directly – but it will still be a while before this UI change surfaces in the viewer.
• There will be a policy change update published soon which will further cover these changes and the operation of Scripted Agents.

Further changes have been suggested within the Lab – notably to traffic – but it has yet to be decided on whether / when these will be implemented.

Viewer Updates

There have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the various pipelines as follows:

• Release viewer: Maintenance Q(uality) viewer, version 6.6.9.577968 Thursday, February 2.
• 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 6.6.10.578285, February 28 – translation updates and the return of slam bits, together with the Group Chat History functionality.
  • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.10.578270, issued February 24.
  • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.10.578172, February 21, 2023.
• Project viewers:
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.578792, March 15 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

LSL XML-RPC

Linden Lab is going to be picking a date for shutting down LSL XML-RPC functionality completely. This has been deprecated for well over a decade, and and LL has long been warning about shutting it down, and the vast majority of traffic has moved to HTTP-In, as recommended as a secure means of communications. Given the low volume of traffic – given as only a few dozen requests per hour, LL would rather put resources towards new developments, rather than supporting an outdated and insecure service. The next step will be a blog post with a date, and maybe some circuit-breaking exercises where we will shut it off temporarily, to make sure all creators have moved their services away from LSL XML-RPC.

In Brief

• There was a fair amount of discussion concerning the Puppetry project. However, as this will be subject to a meeting on Thursday, Marcg 23rd, for which I plan to have a summary, I’ll leave updates on this work until then.
• BUG-227303 – “collisions makes a script stop running and revert its mono status” – this bug is still awaiting work by LL.
• Please refer to the video below for general discussions.