2024 SL SUG meetings week #5 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 30th, 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):
  • 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

• Tuesday, January 30th saw the SLS Main channel updated with the Fall Colours simulator release. This which includes a fix for collision sounds reverberating; llRezObjectWithParams, llListFindListNext and llGetNotecardLineSync.
• Wednesday, January 31st would have seen the Gingerbread RC update deployed to the BlueSteel channel. However, a late-breaking bug has seen this deployment postponed for a week, so the RC channels will likely be restarted without any simulator version change.
  • Gingerbread includes llComputeHash(), llGetCameraAspect(), llGetCameraFOV(), llGetNotecardLineSync() and llWorldPosToHUD().

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 – No Change.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Emoji RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7453691714, January 22, 2024.
  • 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 fixes.
  • 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.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.

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:
  • Moving from Jira Pt 1 – official blog post.
  • Lab announces Second Life transitioning from Jira for bug reporting, etc. – this blog, with Canny Feedback screen shots.
• The new means of filing bug reports  / feature requests is via the Canny feedback portal.

Combat Committee User Group

• The first meeting of the Combat Committee User Group will be held on Thursday, February 8th, at 13:00 SLT, and so will be alternating with the Content Creation User Group.
• The venue for the meetings will be:  Longfellow/142/255/30.
• The initial format for the meetings will be text-only, but this may become a mix of voice / text according to attendees’ preferences.
• Further details are available on the SL wiki, and the meeting is now on the SL Public Calendar.
• I have pointed out to Rider Linden that having two meetings abbreviated to “CCUG” (Combat Committee and Content Creation user groups), which are held at the same time on alternating Thursdays could lead to some confusion among attendees of either, even allowing for some cross-over between the two, so the Combat Committee may yet see a change in name.

In Brief

• A general discussion on the upcoming llGetNotecardLineSync(), including caching (both when and length of time).
• Further (often negative) feedback on CANNY as the bug / feature release front-end, including news from Signal Linden that the Canny devs are working to take onboard issues raised with them by LL to help improved the system, some of which (such as providing a wider text input field on tickets) will be deployed in the very near future.
•  A general discussion on a “HUDs/dialogue box 2.0 feature” to replace / improve upon the current dialogue box system and scripted HUDs. Suggestions included enabling / allowing dialogue boxes to be generated with radio buttons, dropdown boxes, and checkboxes; offering a client-side scripting capability to provide HUDs (and idea also being tossed around at recent Content Creation User Group meetings), although this got largely derailed by the hoary old (and highly subjective) “Pie Menu is better than Context Menus” debate.
• Details of all above in 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.