Day: February 20, 2024

2024 SL SUG meetings week #8 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Grauland, January 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 20th, 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, February 13th, but the simhosts were restarted.
  • Wednesday, February 21st will see the Gingerbread RC update (containing llComputeHash(), llGetCameraAspect(), llGetCameraFOV(), llGetNotecardLineSync() and llWorldPosToHUD() ) rolled-back from the Bluesteel RC channel simhosts.
    • This is due to a bug found over the weekend which prevents scripts restarting when crossing into a region on the Bluesteel channel. It also means the 32 sensors return count (responsible for the issue) will be pulled from Gingerbread, and will be moved to the upcoming Hearts & Flowers simulator update, once Gingerbread has been rolled to the rest of the grid.

Upcoming Simulator Release

The simulator update that will be following Gingerbread will be Hearts & Flowers (probably named for the time of year!). This mostly comprises internal (non-user visible) updates, together with two notably user-visible additions:

  • llSetLinkSitFlags/llGetLinkSitFlags – allow you to adjust the sit flags for a prim. It supports the existing two SIT_FLAG_ALLOW_UNSIT and SCRIPT_ONLY.
    • At some future point, SIT_FLAG_HIDE_AVATAR should also be added, so you don’t need to play an animation that squishes the avatar so they aren’t visible in something like a very small vehicle.
  • A feature for estate managers that will allow them to schedule automatic region restarts.
  • A new constant in llSPP PRIM_SIT_FLAGS it will contain all the sit flag information, (including ALLOW_UNSIT and SCRIPTED_ONLY (the two older constants will still be available).
  • A new capability to load item inventory lists via HTTP (so items with large contents will load faster when accessed, although this will require a viewer update as well).
  • The 32 sensor count capability, mentioned above.

Rider Linden summarised what he plans to achieve in future simulator updates by saying:

I’ll give a Reader’s Digest version. I’ve split up a lot of the work that’s proposed into bite sized pieces and gotten it onto my schedule. (Right after I fix the sensor issue) I’m probably going to start with a couple of pieces of very low hanging fruit. llGetHealth() and fixing the issue where health is not transferred on a region crossing. 

Viewer Updates

glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer (bug fixes, etc.) updated to version 7.1.3.7821226606, on February 20, 2024.

The rest of the official viewers in the pipeline remain 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 7.1.3.7878383867, February 15, 2024.
    • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.3.7721015131 , February 14, 2024.
    • Maintenance Y RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history), version 7.1.3.7790341084, February 9, 2024.
    • Maintenance-W RC (bug and crash fixes), version 7.1.3.7701974306, January 31, 2024.
  • Project viewers:

Jira End-of-Road

  • All bug reporting/feature request submissions are now transferred to Canny / Github, with the URL for the Second Life Jira now automatically redirects to the Canny Second Life Bug Reports page.
  • Public bug reports (and feature requests) filed via Jira are mostly archived on Github.
    • Due to the different permissions environments within Jira and Github, there are some edge cases which have yet to be archived.
  • Note that any ticket that previously had restricted access e.g. (Linden Only / Originator + Lindens) is not part of this archive.

Game Controller Update

  • Leviathan Linden is working to get an updated viewer this week. Hopefully it will include:
    • Support flycam with new GameControl measurements.
    • Get custom mappings to save to / load from settings.xml.
  • Both of these will bring the code “pretty close” to where he want sit to be for submission to the viewer dev team.
  •  If a new installer is available for download, Leviathan announce it in SL Discord #scripting and also in SL Sports #vehicles.

In Brief

  • A general discussion on the new notecard capabilities within the Gingerbread update, and the results of testing them on Bluesteel regions.
  • Region crossings:
    • User-generated documentation on region crossings and their behaviour is being written-up on the SL wiki.
    • Monty Linden has been untangling results from internal testing, trying to understand what’s part of region crossing and what’s just bugs/mis-design in other areas. He describes his work as “looking good” by potentially requiring further pile-on tests.
    • He has also been trying to simulate massive simultaneous region crossing using libremetaverse.

† 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.