2024 SL SUG meetings week #6 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 6th, 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

• No deployments for the week, but all simhosts will be restarted.
• The Gingerbread RC update (containing llComputeHash(), llGetCameraAspect(), llGetCameraFOV(), llGetNotecardLineSync() and llWorldPosToHUD() ) has been held over for a further week following the discovery of a bug which would have broken scripted notecard reading had the release been made.

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:.
  • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7701974306, January 31, 2024 – bug and crash fixes.
  • 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 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.

Reminders

Jira End-of-Road

• 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.

New Combat 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.
• As I’ve pointed out to Rider Linden having two alternate meetings on the same weekday at the same time called “CCUG” could cause confusion, this UG may be renamed. Apparently the leading contender as an alternative name is “Pugilist Parliament User Group” (PPUG), as the name “Pew-Pew User Group” has already been nixed internally at the Lab.

Game Controller Update

• A new pre-release version of the game controller updates viewer being developed by Leviathan Linden can be downloaded via Github, although Leviathan is trying to get it listed on the official Alternate Viewers web page.
• The game controller functions in this viewer will only work on the LeviathanLove, LeviathanLost and KaijuCorner regions on Aditi (the Beta grid).
• With this update it is possible to remap the “Avatar movement actions” <–> “GameControl Input Channels” via mouse clicks, and it is possible to play with it even if there is no connected controller device. However:
  • Leviathan noted that here are some known oddities in the default mappings between the GameControl <–> Avatar movement actions, which he is hoping to fix soon.
  • If the mappings are customised, they do not currently save to settings as yet, so have to be customised again at the next log-in.
• This sparked an on-going discussion on avatar movement options (such as having variable avatar speeds when moving  / in accordance with avatar size) which became intertwined with the discussion on animations (below).

In Brief

• A request was made for a scripted means to sync worn Animesh animations with avatar animations.
  • This sparked a general discussion on animations + limitations of the current SL approach to handling them.
  • Whilst it was noted that there is a rising number of issues / requests related to the animation system, any work would likely be dependent on the glTF project & form a significant tranche of work in its own right.
• The above segued into various ideas that had been raised within the (still suspended) Puppetry Project.
• Further details 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.