Day: March 5, 2024

2024 SL SUG meetings week #10 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Woodland Café and Library, February 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 5th, 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

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 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).
  • The next update after that will likely be called Spring Break. This might include notecard searches.

Schedule Region Restarts

Once fully deployed as a part of the Heart & Flowers simulator update (see above) this:

  • Will allow region and estate owners / managers schedule region restarts via the region console in the viewer (when updated).
  • Allows schedules to be set on a Daily or Weekly basis (e.g. every day at 06:00 SLT; Monday & Thursday at 17:00, etc.)
  • Has “vaccination” period of +/- 5 minutes of the selected restart time, so that all regions in an estate don’t suddenly restart at exactly the same time.
  • Allows any scheduled restart to be cancelled in the same manner as existing manual restarts.

Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.3.7878383867, the Emoji Viewer, issued February 15, promoted March 1st, 2024.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • 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.
    • 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 has produced a new GameControl viewer.
  • This has new logic that detects the game controller device and produces the GameControl data, and can be used to drive a Flycam around.
  • The viewer leaves SpaceMouse and other 3Dconnexion devices unchanged, but disables the old game controller logic to drive X-Box style game controllers.

Combat User Group Update

  • It appears that after yours truly wibbled about the Combat committee User Group sharing the same acronym as the Content Creation User Group (CCUG), which could cause confusion, it has apparently been agreed the combat User Group will henceforth be know as the RTSS – the Rooty Tooty Shooty Society – which gets a two thumbs-up from me 😀 .
  • Rider has established two regions on Aditi (the Beta grid) – Gallipoli and Thermopylae (both being appropriate names) – with combat support so people can start getting a feel for the new features as he gets them written, and provide feedback at the meetings (the next being on Thursday, March 14th, 2024).

Region Crossings

  • Monty Linden’s update comprises: “We can now throw avatars into the sea twice as fast as before [so] Developer testing continues 😦 “.

In Brief

  • A request was made for functions that could be used to actively detect forces being applied (e.g. in vehicle racing communities its hard to police cheaters using the push or force functions they have in attachments/HUDs). The request was not to change the force/push functions, but detect their usage by another script.
    • This led to an extended discussion on how best to approach this, options, limitations, etc., running through the meeting for around 20 minutes, from the 20:19 SLT time point to the 20:41 SLT time point.
  • A further discussion of llHealth and Damage from around the 20:41 SLT point through to close to the end 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.