2023 SL SUG meetings week #14 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 4th 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, April 4th, the SLS Main channel servers were updated with the simulator release 579022 which adds several new LSL methods, including methods to hash strings, replace substrings, and get additional data using llGetEnv and llGetSimStats. It also cleans up some unused codepaths to make future improvements easier.
• On Wednesday, April 5th:
  • The majority of RC simhosts will be restarted and remain on simhost 579022.
  • The Bluesteel RC channel simhosts will be updated with simulator release 579248, an update to 579022 containing a series of bug fixes and doubles the linkset data memory limit to 128KB.

Wiki entries for the above functions are still in progress.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

The next two week or so should see simulator release intended to address some long standing bugs:

• The issue with a vehicle colliding with the avatar that was riding it on a region crossing.
• Throttling on erroneous llReturnObjectsByOwner.
• A number of internal bugs plus some further issues if the fixes can be completed an passed to QA.

Viewer Updates

On Tuesday, April 4th: Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version updated to version 6.6.11.579238.

The remaining viewer pipelines stand as:

• Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
• Project viewers:
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.578921, March 23 – 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.

llReturnObjectsByOwner() and OnwerID

• Leviathan Linden has been looking at a non-public bug, BUG-11770, regarding throttle behaviour for llReturnObjectsByOwner().
• He has noted that if returns are too fast, it will block the owner_id, potentially indefinitely.
• While there is a workaround – where if you try to return a different owner_id, then it will unblock the first – this is described as “not very useful” as it requires a 2-hour wait before it really has an effect, and even then might not work without a region restart.
• Instead, Leviathan has suggested a more optimal throttle would be one that limits the rate of return if it threatens to kill the database service, but then gradually opens up again as the database catches-up with the returns requests.
• Other suggests included:
  • Rather than llReturnObjectsByOwner() simply finding all the objects on the parcel and trying to return them all in a single operation (thus hitting the database service), the object are effective batched and returned by said batches, with a further suggestion that while this is happening, the selected objects are locked / frozen to prevent them being used / moved until returned.
    • One concern with this approach is people arriving during a return operation and witnessing objects in-world mysteriously vanishing.
  • If  BUG-8383 “Feature Request: Parcel and script options to return no-copy objects and delete copy objects” were to be implemented, it would reduce the strain on the data servers; however concern was raised that deletion of copy items could lead to lost work on sandboxes.
• It was also suggested it would be useful if there was an LSL function to detect the amount of objects (e.g. a “llCountObjectsByOwner” function), which could compare it to the upper limit of returns, so that people could know if a return operation will fail due to the throttle before making the attempt.
• Leviathan is taking the feedback gained to consider what can be done.

In Brief

• The issue of Friends not correctly showing as on-line (or off-line) is receiving attention within LL, and apparently “multiple issues” have been found, which are likely to take “a bit of time to get them all fixed”.
• Please refer to the video for the rest of the meeting discussions.