2023 SL SUG meetings week #34 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Orcinus Isle, June 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 22nd 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):
  • 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 for the major simulator channels this week, but all simhosts will be restarted.
  • There may be a small deployment to the Snack channel (Yondercane), to test changes to the way avatar arrivals in a region are handled (see below).

Dog Days Roll-Back

  • On Wednesday, August 16th, the Blueteel RC channel was updated with update 581292 (“Dog Days”).
  • During testing, it was discovered the update was causing some worn attachments were being renamed “Object” when edited whilst attached while retaining the correct name when seen in Inventory / detached to Inventory.
  • However, if such an attachment was dropped in-world, it would be renamed “Object”. As this was deemed to not be optimal, the update was rolled back.
  • If all goes according to plan, an attempt to re-deploy the release will be made in week #35.

Viewer Updates

The glTF / PBR Materials viewer, updated to version 7.0.0.581368, on August 22nd. All other available official viewers remain as follows:

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.

Avatar Arrival Update and Other Simulator Work

This is a first pass at working to improve avatar arrivals (AA) in regions and reduce the amount of “freezing” may occur whilst the arrival is processed, with further work indicated in the future, Monty Linden described this part of the work thus:

AA is the first part of an effort to tune the simulator’s main processing loop. There are *many* causes of very long frames currently. One of the worst offenders is avatar attachment handoff and rezzing at region crossings and teleports. AA attempts to break up and time bound that process, particularly when multiple avatars are involved in a crossing, allowing the frame to complete more closely to the scheduled time. [The] goal is to improve interactivity and responsiveness to those *not* involved in the RC/TP at the expense of those crossing having their glorious collections of stuff attached a bit more slowly. This first pass includes some of that monolithic execution breakup and some tuning.

Monty went on to note that the AA update will only be deployed for testing / data gathering prior to being withdrawn rather than being expanded to additional channels, whilst he continues to work on the matter in the background and possibly expands the scope of the work to include things like better script optimisations and hand-offs during teleports / crossings, etc.

This led to an extended discussion on region crossings / teleports which extended across most of the meeting, with Rider Linden noting he’ll attempt to have a list of regions on the channel for the meeting next week (assuming the deployment goes ahead), so that interested parties can test both teleports into them and regions crossings between them. This in turn entered into better / alternate means of script scheduling / management (and refactoring the former to reduce some of the simulator load), together with options for improved attachment / messaging, etc., handling.

As an aside to this work, Monty indicated he is working on a diagram showing the simulator main processing loop which could be published for public consumption, once it has been cleaned-up.

Potential for Improving Vehicle Control Options

Rider Linden raised this towards the end of the meeting for discussion, thus:

We’ve been having some discussions internally about taking controls and expanding the number of keys available and perhaps even allowing analogue input for movement to the simulator. Leviathan and I would love to get some feedback on how people would use that and how you’d like to see something like that work.

To which Leviathan added:

I’ve solicited for input and have received a bunch of input and ideas. I think the first sub project in that direction will be to try to expose raw game controller input (joysticks and buttons) to LSL. With regards to keyboard controls, if you look at all of the feature requests over the years, ultimately people want access to just about ALL of the keys. I was worried about the ability to make a keylogger in SL, however Signal thinks that wouldn’t really be a problem.

The majority of the feedback was for capabilities to be added to enable a broader range or controllers rather than trying to expand keylogging capabilities exponentially, although keystroke capture and use appears to be more of a focus for Leviathan.

Please refer to the last 10-12 minutes of the video for this discussion.

† 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.

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Published by Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.