2023 SL SUG meetings week #44 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Grauland, August 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 31st Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and is not intended to be a full transcript. My thanks to Yuzuru Jewell for the meeting transcript – for once, clock changes caught me off-guard, and I missed the greater part of the meeting!

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 SLS Main channel, but the simhosts were restarted.
  • On Wednesday, November 1st the BlueSteel and LeTigre will receive the simulator support for PBR Materials.
    • Please remember: if you have anything that uses PBR materials and you rez that object (or wear it) on a non-PBR simulator,  the PBR Materials will be stripped from the object and forgotten.

Viewer Updates

No updates to viewers for the start of the week, leaving the official viewer pipelines as:

  • Github Actions (GHA) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.6566955269, issued October 20 (with major CEF update and number version numbering) and promoted on October 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:

Games Controller Update

  • Leviathan Linden is having issues getting the viewer to build for Mac.
  • He hopes to have support for arbitrary controllers before this is shippable in the viewer, Which means some way to remap keys and axes.
  • The server-side code has been largely settled for any initial release, although there are some questions about whether some LSL constant names will be added for the various buttons and axes.
  • The documentation for the Game Controller SL event can be found with the SL wiki.
  • A projects viewer is available via Github actions, but per the above, simulator support is pending the Fall Colours RC release.
  • Pending main grid availability, the simulator support is available on Aditi (the Beta grid) within the following regions: Ahern, Cloud Sandbox 3, Cloud Sandbox 4, Mesh Sandbox 2, Sandbox Wanderton, Snark, and Tyl.

SL Combat

  • Rider Linden noted that LL will likely start a “Combat Committee” in early 2024 (presumably a new User Group meeting).
  • He will endeavour to put a strawman put together in terms of what might be addressed and the broad scope of changes which could be implemented ahead of any meetings. Currently, he is investigating the number of combat systems within SL.
  • However, what his is currently considering is an “on_damage() event, which he defines thus:
On damage-enabled regions that event would be called rather than the system simply applying damage. That would allow the combat system to make modifications to the damage (e.g. fire resistance, armour, etc) That event could then apply the damage to the avatar it was attached to. My goal for this project is to provide the tools to build combat systems. Not proscribe one to fit all situations.  
  • This idea received broadly positive feedback from the combat enthusiasts attending the meeting, with the caveat that the event must be able to report any damage source, to allow for moderation where there are differences of opinion over things like hits received.
  • Further suggestions for this idea and combat in general included:
    • on_damage(): the LL damage system should work as a “fallback”,  so people don’t require an attachment.
    • on_damage(): estates should be able to configure “minimum” and “maximum” damage hit limits to prevent people trying to game things via scripted means (e.g. using a scripted attachment to prevent taking any damage at all or weapons which “instakill” all the time).
    • A further request for a capability such as BUG-6707, “[Experience Tools] Feature Request – Parcel/region setting to allow/disallow non-experience scripts”, which  – for combat regions using SL Experiences – could do much to negate scripted means of trying to “cheat” per the above bullet point.
    • An update to the the rez with parameters event to allow those engaged in combat to be able to instantly swap weapons without having to attach all the weapons they might require ahead of entered a combat game.
    • Enabling region owners to set the response to “dying” in combat (/games in general) – such as a flag which allows the “dead” to be teleported to a specific location (e.g. a specific spawn point” or the region / parcel’s landing point), together with a “respawn cooldown” period (e.g. players being respawned receive no damage for a given period of time – preventing someone just taking up shop near a respawn point and picking people off as soon as they arrive).
    • A request for a capability such as BUG-233175 “llSetAgentParams: a way to customize certain agent attributes” – this would not only have general applications (e.g. those outlined in the Jira), it might potentially allow things like the avatar hitbox to resize in accordance with the avatar size.
  • Intermixed with this was a broader discussion both related to and separate from combat in SL, including scripted object collisions (raised specifically with issues of vehicle use and region crossings / striking banlines (e.g. see BUG227303), but which can also impact combat play in SL – e.g. by shutting down worn combat meters on region crossing).
  • As Rider noted, is is still putting together a strawman specification as to what might be considered as having potential to be addressed, scope of possible changes etc., doubtless with at least some of what was discussed in the meeting feeding into it, as he continues to visit combat regions and investigate the current systems in use, etc. As such, this will likely become a more focused discussion once any such “Combat User Group” is up and running.

In Brief

  • It has been noted that on the current PBR RC viewer, texture LOD has apparently changed, breaking the majority of on prim boards at a distance over 20m, and leaving the only way to get clear text on objects such as a sports scoring board is by using individual font character text per face rather than font map/atlas. This issue appears to be awaiting a Jira.

† 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.