2023 SL SUG meetings week #18 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  May 2nd 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, May 2nd, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 579248.
• On Wednesday, May 3rd, the maintenance release made to the Bluesteel RC channel in week #17 will be deployed to the rest of the RC channels.
  • One of the updates in this release is designed to fix issues “in the vicinity of” BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating”. At the time of the week #17 deployment, it was noted that all instances of the issue may not have been fixed, and the time the release has been on BlueSteel proves this to be the case.
  • Similarly, while this update helps fix an issue with avatars colliding with their vehicles on region crossings, it does not fix all region crossing issues; more will be addressed is an upcoming simulator update which should be “heading for RC soon”.

Viewer Updates

No official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

• Release viewer: Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579629, promoted April 25.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579766,  April 25.
  • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
  • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

PBR Materials

With the promotion of the PBR Viewer to Release Candidate status, the plan remains to deploy the server-side code to a Release Candidate channel on the main grid “real soon now”. The code will initially go to the Preflight RC channel with a limited number of regions. Should it prove stable there, it will be expanded to the Snack RC prior to gaining promotion to one (or more) of the “major” RC channels.

In Brief

• A discussion on region crossings and also an apparent uptick in teleport failures. Again, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence here that might be causing incorrect conclusions to be drawn:
  • Those doing a lot of consecutive region crossings in relatively short order (e.g. through flying, boating, driving) believe issues are “increasing”, and thus drawing the conclusion failures are widespread / endemic, and that those who are not seeing the same issues elsewhere is simply down to those other regions being routinely restarted.
  • Those making region crossings / TPs on a more  extended basis (e.g. interspersed with some amounts of time with each region, rather than just passing through / hopping one to the next) are not seeing the same issues, even within regions subject to heavy use (as with Fantasy Faire), and therefore questioning whether there is any real increase in issues.
  • (Which is not to say region crossings are not problematic; just that they can be subject to subjective responses rather than objective measurement.)
• BUG-233784 “Add sensor type LOW_SCRIPTED as an option” sparked a debate on whether it should be a feature request or BUG report. This has been raised because the existing SCRIPTED sensor flag only locates objects that have used a substantial amount of CPU time recently, rather than ALL objects with any script in them set to “running”, as someone might reasonably expect when using it; so it is essentially a request for a new flag.
• BUG-233829 “llSetEnvironment() in neighbouring regions can cause issues with the viewer” –  it has been noted that if llSetEnvironment() (EEP) is set within an adjoining region to one where it is currently being set (and the avatar attempting to set it is registered as a child agent within the ormer region), this can impact attempts within the latter region to change its settings through the EEP options. Whether this means the simulator should be updated so as local environment settings are not sent to child agents, or the viewer should be updated so it does not ask for neighbouring region EEP settings has yet to be determined – as has the time frame for either change to be made.
• There is a further discussion on llMessageLinked, and the idea of an llMessageListLinked function towards the end of the meeting and script sleep cycles used in llRezObject and llCreateLink. Please refer to the video below for specifics.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.