2023 SL SUG meetings week #28 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  July 11th 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.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice)
  • At this location.
• They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Server Deployments

• No deployments are planned for the week, but all simhost channels will be restated on the Tuesday and Wednesday slots.

Upcoming Updates

One (or more) upcoming simulator code updates will include:

• A fix for the bug on the simulators running the recent LSD additions (llLinksetDataCountFound() & llLinksetDataDeleteFound()) being unable to save scripts.
• The changes to UUID generation on certain items (e.g. textures, notecards, materials (particularly the upcoming PBR Materials)) to reduce the amount of duplication. These changes will not impact  UUIDs for objects rezzed in-world or made by the viewer. for further background, see my week 26 SUG meeting summary.

Viewer Updates

• On Monday, July 10th, the Maintenance T RC viewer updated to version 6.6.13.580918.

The rest of the official viewer currently in the pipeline remains as:

• Release viewer version 6.6.13.580794, formerly the Windows 32 + macOS pre-10.13 RC and dated June 30th and promoted on July 5.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.580782, June 30.
• Project viewers:
  • Second Life Project Inventory Extensions viewer, version 6.6.13.580808, July 6.
  • Emoji project viewer, version 6.6.13.580279, May 30.
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.

PBR Materials

There continue to be a lot of questions as to when PBR will be deployed across the entire grid. In response to such questions at the SUG meeting, the following observations were made:

The server has to go through the full RC process still, once it is deemed ready for that. the messaging formats and api interfaces are expected to be stable, but if a showstopper bug is found that can change if needed to fix it.

– Brad Linden

I am about 80% confident the interface is complete and also about 80% confident that we have some server side changes to behaviour within the confines of the existing spec (things like: what can you do with reflection probes). Internally we’re answering questions like “can you kick a reflection probe like a soccer ball? Can you put a reflection probe as the root of your physical vehicle?”

– Maxidox Linden

It almost goes without saying that there are a lot of significant changes in the glTF server & viewer. It’s a case where it is much better to be safe than sorry.

– Rider Linden

In Brief

• The Asset store is now standing at 2 petabytes.
• BUG-233853 “Scripts failing to receive rapid touch_start events under LL viewer” had had been seen as fixed in The Maintenance T RC viewer. however, it has been reported the issue has still present, so the bug report has been re-opened.
• Refer to the latter part of the video for:
  • A general discussion on bots.
  • A discussion on using estate_environment command to update EEP settings across an entire estate / the issues around updating Mainland on a continent-wide basis to overcome the current somewhat darker (than private regions) default environment (short form: it is hoped PBR with its updated environment settings will help matters).

† 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.