2024 SL SUG meetings week #16 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 16th, 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 the majority of RC channels will all be restarted this week (Tuesday / Wednesday) with no updates deployed.
• The exception to this is the Preflight RC channel which will be updated on Wednesday, April 17th, with the back-end support for the the glTF updates available in the Graphics Featurettes viewer (e.g. PBR terrain textures and mirrors.
  • Note that this deployment is for testing only.
  • Support for 2K texture will not be enabled simulator-side as a part of the initial deployment, as these are awaiting a couple of fixes to clear QA. Ergo, support for 2K textures within the preflight channel will be enabled later.

Upcoming Deployments

• Back-end support for WebRTC Voice will be next to be deployed, and this will likely go to a Snack RC channel.  See my Week #12 summary for an outline of WebRTC voice.
• The upcoming Spring Break RC release (yet to go to RC) will have a fix for the hovering-at-login issue.

SL Viewer Updates

No updates to the official viewers currently in the pipeline, leaving them as:

• Release viewer: version7.1.5.8443591509, formerly the Maintenance-W RC (bug and crash fixes), version and issued March 29th, promoted April 9th.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Maintenance Y/Z RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history), version 7.1.6.8632452945, April 12.
  • Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.5.8472515256, April 3
  • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.5.8443777128, April 2.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.

In Brief

• Teleports / region crossings: the question was asked as to which would have the greater performance impact: a avatar with 10 attachments, each of a single linked part in each, or an avatar with 1 attachments of 10 linked parts.
  • The reply from Monty Linden was that – outside of script considerations – the difference is liable to be negligible (scripts being the major performance hit in terms of region crossings / teleports).
• A discussion on attachment point in general, including:
  • An increase to the maximum allowed attachments (38), primarily to help deal with issues as specified in this Feature Request, if providing a function as outlined in the Feature Request was not on the cards. However, it was felt by some that attachment counts should not be increased until the maximums for allowed worn prims / scripts are brought down to realistic figures and enforced.
  • A suggestion that a couple of attachment points by reserved specifically for Experiences.
  • A request for updates to the particle system to work with rigged attachments (removing the need unrigged particle prims). However, as the simulator does not track attachment points (which would be required for this to work), it was seen as not doable.
• A request was made for LL to offer an LSL function so creators could clamp raycasts to the region edge in order to stop the end-points going off-region (/simulator) and causing errors.
  • Whilst seen as doable, it was felt that as raycasting should not have end points beyond a region’s boundaries, a better solution might be to identify and fix the underpinning bug that is allowing it.
  • Fixing the issue might also allow LL to implement the idea outlined in llVisualizeRay – A way to see Raycasts, but using llCastRay rather than adding a new LSL function.
• Please refer to the video for:
  • A discussion on HTTP request throttling.
  • A discussion om script modules / libraries.
  • General thoughts on region crossings.

† 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.