2023 SL SUG meetings week #33 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 15th 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

• On Tuesday, August 15th, all simhosts on the the SLS Main were restarted, but remain on simulator version 581251.
• On Wednesday, August 16th, the Blueteel RC channel should be updated with simulator update 581292. Included in this release are:
  • The ability to (once more) see channel names via Help → About (and potentially announced via pop-up within TPVs supporting this capability).
  • Objects rezzed by scripts will now be correctly returned by estate managers + the throttle on llReturnObjectsByOwner has been removed.
  • GroupMemberData (used by viewers to return information about the members of a group) has been intermittently returning “well-formed but incorrect data” for several years. With this update, it should return “well-formed and correct data”.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

• The simulator update “Dog Days” is being packaged for QA. This includes:
  • The unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database).
  • A scripted ability to set CLICK_ACTION_IGNORE, allowing an object to be clicked-through to reach an object behind it – a flag supporting this is included in the Maintenance U RC viewer.
  • PRIM_CLICK_ACTION is added to llSet/GetPrimParams so you can set the click action on prims in a linkset.

Viewer Updates

• Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.14.581315, issued on August 15.
  • Ability to display user-customized keybindings in chat, making it easier to provide key binding instructions to end users for vehicles, HUDs or anything utilising custom keybindings. See URI_Name_Space for more.
• The Inventory Extensions RC viewer updated to version 6.6.14.581357 on August 14.

The rest of the available official viewers remain as:

• Release viewer version 6.6.13.580918, formerly the Maintenance T RC viewer, July 14.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.581126, June 26.
  • Maintenance U(pbeat) RC viewer, version, 6.6.14.581101 July 21.
• Project viewers:
  • Emoji project viewer, version 6.6.13.580279, May 30.
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.

Note: the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

Scripting Discussion

• LSL contains a number of long-standing code errors / issues / limitations which have been around so long they have either become expected behaviour or have had a number of work-arounds implemented. This makes any attempt to correct the code difficult, as it can result in unintended script breakage, and because of this, LL has tended to take the attitude of, “we aren’t going to fix that because it is too ingrained.”
• However, one idea now being considered for allowing such script issues to be fixed and hopefully avoid the potential for script breakage in the process, is to introduce a “compatibility” mode to LSL.
• Such a mode would be set via some form of option (check box or button or something).
  • By default, with would be “off”, for all scripts (existing and new), and they would as they do now (“classic” behaviour), preserving any “incorrect” behaviour.
  • When toggled “on” for a script, the script will run in the “updated” mode, allowing it leverage the corrected LSL code / functions and any future behavioural changes.
• This led to an extended discussion on the approach – which was broadly favourably viewed – which touched various ideas such as version numbering and other methods of differentiating “versions” of LSL (given it does not itself have any built-in notion of versions), the historical context on the introduction of Mono, the use of compilers

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for the following:

• There is said to be increasing reports of avatars failing to load correctly following teleporting into a popular location (notably those at altitude) and of inventory attachment queuing and loading taking longer. Some thinking is that this may be interest list related, however, Bug reports have yet to be filed to allow for investigation.
• Leviathan Linden put out a request for feedback:

I’ve been thinking about how to improve vehicles in SL so I’m soliciting input for the next week or so. You can email me directly (leviathan-at-lindenlab.com) you can IM me, or I’m even willing to schedule a chat/voice session if anyone wants to talk about vehicles: cars, airplanes, boats, motorcycles, etc. What got me on this subject were two things: (1) the idea of giving LSL scripts direct access to game controller inputs (joystick, button state, etc), and also (2) different API for configuring vehicles. For example, maybe airplanes would be better described using a thrust, stall-speed, attack-angle, aileron state model.

• The above led to some additional discussion on options – as per the last 20 minutes of the meeting.
• Rider Linden noted that during the LL engineering meeting in week #33, the subject of improved camera controls. Nothing firm on what might be done, but again, this sparked discussion during the last 10 minutes of the meeting.

 

† 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.