Month: March 2024

2024 SL SUG meetings week #13 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Second Life History at the Primitive Museum campus – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 26th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log and the video embedded below, recorded by Pantera – my thanks as always for her work.

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

  • The SLS Main channel was restarted on Tuesday, March 26th without any deployment.
  • Wednesday, March 27th, should see the Hearts & Flowers RC update deployed to the rest of the RC channels. This mostly comprises internal (non-user visible) updates, together with these 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 (see below).
    • 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).
    • A fix for avatars going into an animation thrash between falling and flying when using llSetHoverHeight() from an attachment.

SL Viewer Updates

  • On Tuesday, March 26th, 2024, the glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.4.8149792635 was promoted to Release viewer status.
  • On Monday, March 25th, 2024, the Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.4.8270899680 was issued.

The rest of the current official viewer in the pipeline stand as:

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.4.8148263040 , March 11, 2024.
    • Maintenance-W RC (bug and crash fixes), version 7.1.4.8113624779, March 6, 2024.
    • Maintenance Y RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history + Maint Z RC integration) updated to version 7.1.4.8114240508, March 6, 2024.
  • Project viewers:

In Brief

  • Was a belated equinox party, so not a lot of discussion.
  • Simon Linden threw out a generic request for feedback on the viewer’s text translation capabilities. Nothing really came back from it.

† 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.

2024 SL viewer release summaries week #12

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, March 24th, 2024

This summary is generally published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:

  • It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
  • By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
  • Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.

Official LL Viewers

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.3.7878383867, the Emoji Viewer, issued February 15, promoted March 1st, 2024 – 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).
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

  • No updates.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2024 week #12: SL CCUG summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Serene Retreat, February 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, March 21st, 2024.

Again, apologies for the lateness of this appearing; a major RL home project is getting finished-up, but it is still taking a good deal of my time.

Meeting Purpose

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work. This meeting is held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
  • In regards to meetings:
    • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.
    • Commence at 13:00 SLT on their respective dates.
    • Are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
    • Are open to all with an interest in content creation.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers Status

No changes to any of the official viewers through the week, leaving the list as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.3.7878383867, the Emoji Viewer, issued February 15, promoted March 1st, 2024 – NoChange.
  • 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 7.1.4.8149792635, March 11, 2024.
    • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.4.8148263040 , March 11, 2024.
    • Maintenance-W RC (bug and crash fixes), version 7.1.4.8113624779, March 6, 2024.
    • Maintenance Y RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history + Maint Z RC integration) updated to version 7.1.4.8114240508, March 6, 2024.
  • Project viewers:

It is possible the glTF Maintenance-2 RC viewer might be promoted to de facto release status early in week ’13 (commencing Monday, March 25th, 2024).

Graphics / glTF

  • Work continues on the GLTF Featurettes viewer.
    • There have been refinements to the applying glTF materials to terrain, notably the UV density was halved in the interest of 2K textures, and further work put into making sure repeats are less noticeable.
    • It will now be possible to have alpha under PBR terrain “under limited circumstances” (e.g. single-sided and alpha masked)
    • Discussions have started at the Lab on the fees applicable for 2K texture uploads, but no decision on what this is likely to be.
    • Mirrors have also bee going through further refinements (e.g. a Hero reflection probe for a mirror can now have similar – but not the same – fall-off as other reflection probes, so it is no longer necessary to have a “really massive” probe to get a reflection; also, a mirror reflection probe now has the ability to go between a box probe or a sphere probe, influencing how it gets masked on a reflective surface).
    • It has been noticed that people trying the pre-release versions of the Featurettes viewer have been very confused as to the placement of things like mirror probes. Therefore, the viewer is going through a further UI/UX review in order to try to make things less confusing.
    • There are also some optimisation issues (again with mirrors) which may have to be revisited.
    • Brad Linden has been working on the server-side support for the Featurettes viewer through QA. If this is successful, it will allow the graphics team to work with the simulator team to get the code into an Agni (Main grid) channel (either as Preflight or as an RC channel).
  • Index of Reflection (IOR):
    • Initially will be a numerical value which can be adjusted, and which will be “bundled” with transmission
    • LL will attempt to get volume and dispersion included at some future iteration.
    • In this, it was pointed out that within the glTF specification, IOR requires both transmission and volume: transmission gives the basics for refraction (e.g. glossy refraction); whilst volume allows for things like colours within the refraction.
    • It’s not clear if attenuation will be used with respect to IOR.

In Brief

  • “Flexi mesh” – a long-standing request to have mesh interact with physics to make it flexible in the same manner as flexiprims (i.e. movement but without collisions being calculated). The response to this was:
    • The flexiprim system doesn’t really work for mesh.
    • What would be required is dynamic bones (as seen on other platforms). However, providing this has a number of pre-requisites (e.g. custom skeletons on hair for hair movement). As such, it is not something that is liable to be implemented in the near-term (if doable).
    • In terms of using Havoc physics interacting with mesh, the short answer is: not possible. It would require Havoc physics libraries which cannot (due to licensing) be made available to the viewer, due to the latter’s open-source nature.
  • Bake Service updates:
    • LL have acknowledged that it has been some time since the Bake Service has been updates, and that there are multiple requests for improvements and additions to the service (e.g. PBR materials support).
    • A potential project to update the Bake Service and implement some of the requested updates is currently being considered. However, a decision on where this will fit in the roadmap and what it will include has yet to be taken.
    • There is a fear among some that if the Bake Service is not updated specifically to support 2K textures when that is deployed, it could see Bakes On Mesh deprecated by creators in favour of applier systems which can utilise 2K textures (even if the system downsamples them on the basis of size).
  • With regards to 2K textures:
    • It appears that LL are trying to make heir use system specific: if a user is on a computer with the capacity to handle 2K textures, then they get 2K; if a user is on an older system (e.g. one limited by VRAM), then the largest textures they get are 1K.
    • For PBR terrain using 2K textures, there are some glTF specification-defined fallbacks the Lab hare leveraging to ease the load on lower-end systems.
  • It appears the PBR release has broken the Render Resolution Debug setting (most often used by RLV(/a) for screen blurring). A fix for this might be in the glTF Maintenance-2 RC viewer.

Next Meeting

† 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 gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

Linden Lab: statement on recent allegations

Posted on by Inara Pey
© and ® Linden Lab

In February 2024, an article was published on the social journalism website Medium¹, making various allegations against Linden Lab and some of its employees and contractors together with various users on the Second Life platform, as well as claims relating to some of the services provided to users of the platform.

At the time of the article’s publication, I contacted the Lab concern its claims and allegations, but other than referencing a broad statement being given to those contacting Support on the matter, and an off-the-record comment, there was no official response for the purposes of quoting. As such, I decided not to comment on the claims or the Lab’s response until such time there was any formal statement on the matter, rather than writing on the basis of pure speculation.

Such a statement was made on Wednesday, March 20th, 2024 (when I happened to be away from Second Life entirely, dealing with an exceptionally hectic personal life, hence the somewhat belated nature of this piece). It came from company owner and Executive chairman, Brad Oberwager, who is, as many know, extremely hands-on with Linden Lab and its products.

If you have not already done so, you can read the full statement from Mr. Oberwager here.

For my part, I’ll simply highlight the core part of the statement, coming as it does after numerous in-world and on-line demands that the Lab publicly respond to the piece published via Medium’s website:

I promise you that we are taking this very seriously. Very. Full stop. 
I promise we hear you. We know you’re angry and you’re confused. We are working to do our best to resolve your concerns and restore your trust in us. These are complicated issues and we want to do things right. We will make mistakes along the way. I wish I could say we will not, but we will. 
As owner of Linden Lab, I have initiated a thorough investigation, both internally and with external partners, to review whether or not there have been any violations of our company and community policies by employees, contractors, or community members. While early preliminary internal investigations suggest that some of the accusations are unfounded, I want to make sure that we get additional investigative support externally to ensure that the process is fair and thorough.
One of our top priorities has been to ensure the safety of our residents, moles, employees, and families. There are real people behind the avatars, and it has been important to confirm that nobody was in actual physical danger. 
Additionally, I am taking proactive steps to review and revamp many of our policies, including a comprehensive review of our Community Standards, Content Guidelines, and Ageplay Policy. Any violation detected will be met with swift enforcement actions to protect our community. We’ll be sharing these revised policies in the coming weeks and, critically, we are turning to the community to help us shape the future of how governance operates within Second Life. 

While there were almost immediate calls on on social media and in-world for the Lab to make known its response to the allegations made and provide “full transparency” (or even a basic “we are investigating”), they were perhaps premature.

Given the seriousness of some of the allegations made (including the potential for them to be defamatory towards the company and the individuals named), caution of approach in even the most preliminary investigation was bound to be required, together with legal circumspection on what the Lab might or could say. This is further compounded by the fact the Medium piece brings together numerous different claims and allegations, some of which are perhaps easier to verify (e.g. issues within the Marketplace), others of which are not (including obtaining some veracity concerning the author of the piece, particularly given its pseudonymous nature²). Ergo, any investigation, either preliminary or in-depth, would / will take weeks (even months) to complete.

Nor, frankly, should there be any expectation that – given a statement has now been made – that the results of any investigation will be publicly disclosed in full once completed. There may well be legal or other ramifications which preclude this from happening.

That said, I do welcome the statement by Mr. Oberwager; it actually speaks well of the company that as soon as they have been in a position to respond to user sentiment on the matter, they have done so, and through the voice of their owner .

Footnotes

  1. At the time of writing this piece, the article in question has been found in violation of Medium’s rules of publication, and is subject to further investigation, and thus suspended from being viewed.
  2. The Medium piece was published under the account name “dantesedmond1844”.This appears to be a intentional reference to Edmond Dantès, the protagonist in Alexander Dumas’ 1844 novel of revenge / vengeance, The Count of Monte Cristo. Which, given the overall nature of the article, to me would appear to be a very curiously coincidental choice of account name (or possibly a contextual choice).

Note: as this piece is related to an on-going investigation onto an article containing unproven (and potentially questionable) allegations against specific individuals, it is requested than any comments offered in response to this piece forgo naming or otherwise discussing those individuals.

2024 SL SUG meetings week #12 summary – WebRTC voice

Posted on by Inara Pey
Bella’s Lullaby, February 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 19th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log and the video embedded below, recorded by Pantera – my thanks as always for her work.

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

  • The SLS Main channel was restarted on Tuesday, March 19th without any deployment.
  • Wednesday, March 20th, should see the next RC update deployed to the Bluesteel RC channel. This mostly comprises internal (non-user visible) updates, together with these 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 (see below).
    • 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).
    • A fix for avatars going into an animation thrash between falling and flying when using llSetHoverHeight() from an attachment.

SL Viewer Updates

No viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the current official viewers as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.3.7878383867, the Emoji Viewer, issued February 15, promoted March 1st, 2024 – NoChange.
  • 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 7.1.4.8149792635, March 11, 2024.
    • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.4.8148263040 , March 11, 2024.
    • Maintenance-W RC (bug and crash fixes), version 7.1.4.8113624779, March 6, 2024.
    • Maintenance Y RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history + Maint Z RC integration) updated to version 7.1.4.8114240508, March 6, 2024.
  • Project viewers:

WebRTC Voice

  • Officially announced on Tuesday, March 18th, is WebRTC (RTC=”real-time communication”), intended to replace Vivox as the Voice component in Second Life.
  • From my TPVD meeting notes from Friday, March 15th (video here) + notes from this meeting:
    • WebRTC is something of a “defacto standard”, being built-in to most web browsers and supporting  wide range of real-time communications tools in common use (e.g. Google Meet), supporting audio, video and data communications.
    • In terms of audio / voice (the primary focus here), WebRTC has a number of standard features expected of audio communications services (such as automatic echo cancellation, better noise cancellation and automatic gain control, etc.) and offers much improved audio sampling rates for improved audio quality.
    • Work has already progress so that WebRTC supports all of the current SL Voice capabilities (e.g. region Voice, parcel Voice, peer-to-peer, ad-hoc and group capabilities, muting, etc.).
      • The service is provided to the viewer as a library with a wrapper – no separate .EXE plug-in.
      • In addition, work has been put into securing the use of WebRTC Voice against attempts to eavesdrop, etc., and to route peer-to-peer communications via an internal server to avoid revealing user’s IP addresses to the risk of doxing, etc.
      • Voice Morphing is not part of the initial implementation.
      • Group voice will be capped at 50 people, but may be extended later.
      • Speech-to-text and text-to-speech  are being looked at by LL, but are not currently part of this project.
    • There are test viewers with the necessary viewer-side WebRTC support (not yet at Project or RC status), and regions on Aditi, the Beta grid (webRTC1 and webRTC2) with the back-end support.
    • Wiki documentation is in progress, and includes links to the test viewers (currently Windows and Mac OS) + a public code repo and other information. Note, this is subject to further update.
    • There is a dedicated WebRTC board on the SL Feedback Portal where issues, etc., can be reported / raised for discussion.
    • There is no backwards compatibility. Regions using the WebRTC back-end will only support voice on viewers using the WebRTC library. Ergo, once fully deployed, older viewer still using Vivox will not be able to access Voice services.
      • LL is working with TPVs to enable the switch to using WebRTC (once deployed to the Main grid) will not be made util there is an assurance that the majority of users will be on viewer supporting WebRTC.
    • The switch to WebRTC also opens the door to adding new features and capabilities to SL Voice, some of which have been long-requested.

In Brief

  • The PBR team is going to be changing llSetColor/llSetAlpha so that they behave on PBR in a similar way to legacy materials – just no time frame on when at present.
  • A discussion on scripting + notecard reading through the latter part of the meeting.

† 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.

2024 SL viewer release summaries week #11

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, March 17th, 2024

This summary is generally published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:

  • It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
  • By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
  • Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.

Official LL Viewers

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.3.7878383867, the Emoji Viewer, issued February 15, promoted March 1st, 2024 – 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).
    • glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.4.8149792635, March 11, 2024.
    • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.4.8148263040, March 11, 2024.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • Alchemy – 7.1.4.2413 (Beta PBR build) March 16 – release notes
  • Restrained Love Viewer updated to version 2.9.34 March 11, 2024 – release notes.

V1-style

  • Cool VL viewer updated to 1.32.0.15 (PBR), March 18 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links