The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 9th, 2024 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 meeting is embedded at the end of this summary, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording the meeting and providing 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.
Simulator Deployments
- No scheduled deployments, just region restarts.
- It is hoped the issues with the Fall Colours simulator update (e.g. collision sounds reverberating) have now been addressed, and that these fixes will be deployed across all simulator RCs during week #3.
- A further simulator update – Gingerbread – will be following thereafter.
Viewer Updates
- The glTF PBR Materials Maintenance RC, version 7.1.2.7215179142 issued December 15th, 2023 and featuring numerous bug fixes and improvements (including haze / fog affecting point lights), was promoted to de facto release status on Monday, January 8th, 2024.
- The Maintenance-W RC viewer comprising bug and crash fixes was updated to version 7.1.3.7453541295 on January 9th, 2024.
The rest of the official viewers currently in the pipeline remain as follows
- Release channel cohorts:
- Maintenance X RC, version 7.1.1.7088410646, December 7 – usability improvements.
- Maintenance Y, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
- Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
- Project viewers:
- Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.
Jira End-of-Road
- While yet to be formally announced, as a result of Atlassian changing their licensing model and making it prohibitively expensive for Linden Lab to continue using Jira as reporting tool open to all users, the decision has been taken to replace Jira as a the bug reporting / featuring request filing toll for Second Life.
- In the very near future, Jira will be replaced by a two-pronged approach:
- Bug reports will be taken directly though Github.
- General feedback and feature requests will be made via Canny, from where they will be imported by the Lab as GitHub issues for the purposes of internal tracking.
- Work is already underway internally to move existing open and incoming Jira tickets to Github, and it is anticipated that the switch-over to using Canny as well as Github will be made very soon. An official blog post on the switch-over is expected to be made either later this week or early in week #3.
- The use of Canny has already drawn some strong negative feedback from technical users due to several limitation within the service as it has been developed. These concerns have been noted by LL, who are also providing feedback to the Canny developers.
- However, it was noted that an advantage with Canny is that the Second Life environment there allows users to log-in to it using their SL credentials (just as is currently the case with Jira). However, Github doe not allow this, but requires uses to have dedicated accounts – with the concern this would like be seen as a objectionable requirement by many SL users.
Scripted Camera Control Updates
- Leviathan Linden has been working on some LSL updates for camera control, which are expected to be deployed with the Gingerbread update in the next few weeks. These are:
- float llGetCameraAspect(): returns aspect ratio as known to the camera on the server. Basically width/height of SL window.
- float llGetCameraFOV(): returns “field of view” of the camera as known to the server, in radians. Is a measure of angle of view of the vertical span of the window.
- vector llWorldPosToHUD(vector world_pos): returns HUD position that maps to the world-pos as seen by current camera as known by server. HUD attachment point doesn’t matter: the server figures it out.
- string llComputeHash(string message, string algorithm): returns hash digest of message using the algorithm, without any “nonce salt” as in llMD5String(). Supported algorithms are: md5, md5_sha1, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, and sha512.
- Concerns were raised over the float llGetCameraAspect() being used to “fingerprint” users (e.g. whether two accounts are being used by the same user) through returned information on window size & resolution. In response, it was pointed out the return is only the window aspect ration, which is regarded as more secure against such fingerprinting.
Game Control Update
- Leviathan also encountered a bug in the game controller code he is developing which meant that sometimes bits could be lost in the button_edges argument supplied to the game_control event.
- The fix for this has been a change to the game_control event signatures from game_control(key id, integer button_levels, integer button_edges, list axes) to game_control(key id, integer button_levels, list axes).
- Thus, it will be the responsibility of scripters to compute button_levels as necessary. Scripters who want the edges will have to track a global variable previous_button_levels.
In Brief
- Questions were asked about LL developing a “scripted UI”. These likely arose out people hearing second-hand some comments made at the first Content Creation User Group meeting. For fuller context, please see my notes from that meeting.
- For all other topics, please 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.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 