2024 SL SUG meetings week #15 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 9th, 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 by Pantera – my thanks to her as always for 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

• The Main and RC channel will all be restarted this week (Tuesday / Wednesday) with no updated deployed.

Upcoming Deployments

• Week #16 should see the back-end support for the glTF / PBR Maiantenance-2 release viewer deployed to the Preflight RC simulator channel, bringing Mirrors and PBR terrain to regions on that channel.
  • If all goes well, the deployment will expand to BlueSteel in week #17 (commencing Monday, April 22nd, 2024).
• The deployment of the PBR-2 support is liable to be followed by a simulator update with the promised WebRTC Voice (see my Week #12 summary for an outline of WebRTC voice). This may initially only goa a small Snack RC channel of simulators.

SL Viewer Updates

• On Tuesday, April 9th, the Maintenance W RC ((bug and crash fixes), version 7.1.5.8443591509 and dated March 29, was promoted to defacto release status.

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

• Release channel cohorts:
  • Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.5.8472515256, April 3.
  • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.5.8443777128, April 2.
  • Maintenance Y RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history + Maint Z RC integration), version 7.1.5.8448596295, March 29.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.

In Brief

• Monty Linden is trying the get back up to speed with region crossing / teleport fixes after working on other aspects of SL recently. Currently the work he has completed in looking “good” and he is planning a possible pile-on test at some point ahead of shipping the updated code.
• Leviathan Linden has been working on implementing the “prevent passenger attachments from influencing vehicle” optional vehicle flag, but hasn’t quite finish testing it due to some modes of pushing a vehicle (without the flag) not working as anticipated. It is possible this work might make it into the Spring Break simulator update, which is still in development at the time of writing.
  • This is in response to a request to help solve the problem of cheaters sitting on competition vehicles. Someone sits on the object and uses a HUD with llSetVelocity() or other calls to push the vehicle faster than it would normally go.
• Leviathan also hasn’t got back to working on the game controller event due to providing assistance to the glTF project.
• A repeat of a request for slide on Y axis for llSetTextureAnim was made –  as requested in BUG-6443 (now Jira archive 14302). This is seen as “doable” on the simulator side, but would require additional work within the viewer.
• A fix for llSetAlpha() and llSetColor to work with PBR is in the works.
• Please refer to the video for:
  • Some general discussion on Combat issues, which will likely be part of the upcoming Combat Group meeting on Thursday, April 11th.
  • A general discussion on avatar walk speed and making it scriptable / adjustable.
  • A discussion on increasing the server notecard cache (per this request).

† 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.