Day: May 10, 2023

2023 SL SUG meetings week #19 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The White Armory-Silvan Moon Designs, March 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 9th 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 9th, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 579747, previously deployed to the RC channels.
    • An issue occurred during the deployment which caused it to be somewhat protracted, but this was overcome without any need for a roll-back.
  • On Wednesday, May 3rd, a new simulator release will be made to the BlueSteel RC channel. This contains configuration changes on to help support the new “Social Casino“.

Upcoming Simulator Updates

  • It is hoped that week #19 will see a new simulator release to the RC channel which contains assorted updates and fixes.
  • No news on when the back-end for PBR Materials will be deployed to Preflight (and Snack?).

Server Deployment Forum Announcements

  • A long-standing aspect of the Tuesday / Wednesday simhost re-starts / deployments is that they have been highlighted through (almost) weekly announcement posts to the Technology > Simulator sub-forum.
  • In recent months this practice has grown increasingly sporadic and for the last multiple weeks, ceased altogether – which has apparently been a deliberate move, LL viewing the dedicated web pages for server and viewer releases as potentially more useful.
  • In addition, LL are looking to try to produce “more substantial release notes”.
  • HOWEVER: the problems here are that:
    1. The forums are a popular resource for users, and the summaries of deployments there do a lot to keep people informed as to what is going on, and how their specific regions might be affected by rolling restarts and updates contained in releases.
    2. Most particularly, while the server release pages provide a list available active and past releases, they do not make it particularly easy to discover information on upcoming deployments, unless you happen to have the actual release number – something what has only previously been made obviously public through – wait for it – the forum posts.
    3. Ergo, it really doesn’t matter how much more informative LL make the release notes if they cannot be found and read in time to understand what any upcoming releases might hold.
  • Given the above – and as Rider Linden noted in the meeting, it would probably be a useful idea for LL to continue to provide the forum posts on upcoming deployments.

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).
  • Project viewers:
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

  • HTTP work:
    • Rider Linden is currently working on a server-side update to allow the PATCH method for both HTTP out and in. during the meeting, he raised the idea of possibly adding HEAD to both as well – both of which met with favourable responses.
    • He will attempt to add BUG-231657 “http_response body is blank if no Content-Type header was returned” to the current simulator maintenance update, if it can be fixed in time.
  • KVP work:
    • A simulator update is in progress to de-couple the Experience KVP database from land (i.e. so it will work on land where there is no associated Experience running). It is not clear when this will be deployed within an RC – although it will not be in the next RC update.
    • A request as been made to give the KVP database the same search options as LSD has with llLinksetDataFindKeys(). This is unlikely to happen, with the reason given being that the storage system for experience key-value data and object LSD is totally different, so feature parity between the two doesn’t always make sense / isn’t possible.
    • However, additional work on KVP is on the simulator roadmap, but not work has started on it as yet. This work will likely include: updating the server/software that make that operate; a probable change to the way accounting is performed (e.g. rather than giving KVP users a pool of bytes, the limitation would be by the number of keys, with the overall byte pool increased).
    • This latter point gave rise to concerns about the potential for application breakage for grid-wide applications, particularly those which may expand in their use over time if they are related to a popular product (e.g. a grid-wide teleport system with multiple nodes throughout the grid).  Expect more on this as the ideas are more fleshed-out; for now refer to the last 15 minutes of the video below.
  • There are some reports that BUG-232037 “Avatar Online Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” have worsened on the course of the last week, despite efforts to tamp down on some of the causes. LL are to take “another swing at it”.
  • BUG-233384 “Scripts failing to receive rapid touch_start events under LL viewer” – whilst possibly more a viewer-side issue, was raised on account of it being marked as “resolved” (perhaps as far back as the release of the MFA viewer), and the report closed, but the issue still occurring for some. This led to a discussion on touch events (double-clicks vs. long clicks, games requiring both, the nature of the issue, etc. Those seeing the issue should refer to the video below.

† 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.