Day: February 28, 2024

2024 SL SUG meetings week #9 summary

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

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 27th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. No video this week, I’m afraid.

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 27th, but the simhosts were restarted.
  • Wednesday, February 28th will see the Gingerbread RC update (containing llComputeHash(), llGetCameraAspect(), llGetCameraFOV(), llGetNotecardLineSync() and llWorldPosToHUD() ) re-deployed  to the Bluesteel RC, together with Ferrari and Preflight. It includes a fix for the issue of scripts being prevented from restarting when crossing into regions running on the update.

Upcoming Simulator Release

  • The simulator update to follow Gingerbread remains  Hearts & Flowers, which will likely be deployed in the next couple of weeks. 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 next update after that will likely be called Spring Break. This might include notecard searches.

Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week:

  • 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 (bug and crash fixes), version 7.1.3.7983616888, February 22, 2024.
    • glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7821226606, February 20, 2024.
    • 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.
  • Project viewers:

Game Controller Update

  • Leviathan Linden is still working on trying to get the viewer’s Flycam capability (SpaceNavigator) with the new GameControl logic rather than old system.

Region Crossings

  • Monty Linden is working on the region crossings code (both physical region crossings and all that goes into them when vehicles, etc., are included, and teleports).
  • There has also been independent and on-going investigations by users into crossings. Some of the more recent has been around the issue of the EstablishAgentCommunication (EAC) event between the simulator and viewer (see this forum post for specifics).
  • As it turns out, the server engineering team have been working on an entire simulator to address EAC, which is seen as both problematic and potentially hiding other bugs in the code – and potentially causing issues for the SL Mobile app.

In Brief

  • The Sever Team has a new member – Pepper Linden.
  • There is an upcoming fix to go into a simulator maintenance release for the detach bug stopping all animations started by other attachments or sit objects – see github issue BUG-225288.
  • A further confirmation that the client-side scripting environment will be Luau, a Lua VM implementation developed by Roblox.
    • Note that this project does not encompass delivering client side scripts from inside SL simulator; it is purely viewer-side. Any such capability is seen as being so far down the line as to not be on the roadmap, although the use-cases for such interaction were noted.
  • Rider Linden is looking at llCloseDialog, allowing a script close a dialog that it had previously opened.
  • A general discussion on Experiences – extending the scope of possible controls (not on the immediate roadmap) and making the Join Experience dialogue lees frightening / off-putting to users.

† 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.