2024 SL SUG meetings week #3 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Sakura Cranes, December 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 16th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are 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):
  • 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 SLS Main channel deployment on Tuesday, January 16th, 2024; the simhosts were all just restarted.
  • Wednesday, January 17th should see the Falls Colours simulator update once more deployed to all of the RC channels. This includes:
  • If all goes well, week #4 should see Fall Colours deployed to the SLS Main channel and the Gingerbread simulator update deployed to at least some of the RC channels.

Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week, leaving the list of official viewers as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.2.7215179142, formerly the glTF PBR Materials Maintenance RC, issued December 15, promoted January 8, 2024 – numerous bug fixes and improvements.
  • 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 Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7467259489, issued January 12, 2024.
    • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7453541295, January 9, 2024 – bug and crash fixesz.
    • Maintenance X RC, version 7.1.1.7088410646, December 7 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y RC, 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:

Jira End-of-Road – Reminder

  • Linden Lab is ending its use of Atlassian Jira for the filing of bug reports and feature request, and is instead moving to Github / Canny. For specifics, please refer to the following:
  • Note that this is a work-in-progress (so things like additional ticket categories are being introduced, such as the recent Server Bug category), and both the new system and Jira remain open at this time (although the latter will shutdown in February 2024).

Game Control Update

  • The game_control event for using game controllers has been removed from the Gingerbread maintenance RC to become its own branch / channel (currently on Aditi (the Beta grid), where it can be found on the regions LeviathanLove and LeviathanLost.
  • As per the previous SUG meeting summary, the game_control event signature has changed in that the button_edges parameter is no longer provided to the event and must be computed by the scripter if still needed.

In Brief

  • Further discissions on Leviathan Linden’s LSL updates for camera control, due to be deployed in the Gingerbread update (see my previous SUG summary for details)
  • A general discussion on attachment points – such as reserving some for specific uses, or providing a separate pool of attachment points for HUDs / on-screen attachments (so that they are counted separately, rather than being part of the total limit of 38 attachments).
  • Concerns were raised over the fact the PBR now makes it harder to show / hide prims/object faces (e.g. alpha cuts in mesh bodies) using LSL to set the alpha visibility, with loops now being required to achieve what could previously be done via a single function call.
    • The problem is seen as exacerbated by the fact there appears to be no way for a script to determine if PBR materials is applied, making it necessary for creators to add to their script overheads.
    • It had been thought that a bug report had been raised on this issue, as it has been discussed at the Lab and is seen as a issue which needs to be fixed – although it might not be possible to change the semantics of the current Blinn-Phong alpha setters in LSL without breaking content.
    • llSetAlpha was not expanded to handle this out of concern over mixing semantics of setting legacy and PBR alpha values correctly.
    • This led to a general discussion on possible options to manage this issue, which continued through most of the rest of the meeting.
  • Please refer to the video for these items. and on TTAORAIMWEATCP (the throwing about of random acronyms in meetings without explanation and thus confusing people).

† 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.