2024 SL SUG meetings week #31 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  July 30th, 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. Pantera videoed the meeting, and the recording is embedded at the end of this piece – 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):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice)
  • At this location.
• Meetings 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, July 30th 2024.
• On Wednesday, July 24th:
  • The BlueSteel RC is due to (again) receive Summer Fun simulator update, which includes the initial Combat 2 updates from Rider Linden. Hopefully this third attempt will see it stick.
  • The remaining RC channels will be restarted.

SL Viewer Updates

• Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • WebRTC Voice RC, version 7.1.9.10084807842, July 26.
  • Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling), version 7.1.9.9981869229, July 22.
  • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.9.9555137545, June 21.
  • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.9.9469671545, June 14.

WebRTC Voice Update

Summary

• Replacing the use of Vivox for Voice in SL with WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”).
• Benefits:
  • WebRTC is something of a “defacto standard”, with features such as automatic echo cancellation, better noise cancellation and automatic gain control, etc., and offers much improved audio sampling rates for improved audio quality
  • WebRTC will be supplied within the viewer using a library and wrapper. This will mean no requirement to run a third-party voice plugin (SLvoice.exe, as supplied by Vivox) going forward.
  • The switch to WebRTC also opens the door to adding new features and capabilities to SL Voice, some of which have been long-requested.
  • Care is being taking to address potential security issues (e.g. preventing eavesdropping, exposing users’ IP address (by using an internal proxy server), etc.).
• Feature requests for WebRTC made via the WebRTC board on the SL Feedback Portal are being evaluated and some are being actioned, together with issues being investigated.
• LL will be looking to Linux devs to help give feedback on how well WebRTC is working on their Linux viewers.

Status

• The plan remains to potentially make a switch-over to WebRTC on the back-end in August.
• This is dependent upon third-party viewers picking up the WebRTC updates from LL and incorporating them.
• During the transition period, viewers will connect to either Vivox or WebRTC voice, depending on the service available to them. As such most voice services should be uninterrupted.
• HOWEVER, during the transitional period, there will be some short-term issues around peer-to-peer, Group and ad-hoc voice connections between those on regions running the two different voice services (Vivox and WebRTC).

In Brief

• A further conversation on Lua(u), including supported data types and whether an integer type will be added to LL’s implementation. The answer may be no, going on the Lua FAQ.
• There is a reported uptick in vehicle region crossing issues in the Blake Sea regions, but more than anecdotal reports are required (e.g. information such as timestamps, agents, and regions need to be properly reported which incidents occur.
• Changes related to avatar teleports are due to be included in the Picnic simulator update, which should start deployment as Summer Fun reached the Main SLS channel (or shortly thereafter).
• Monty Linden has some event-queue fixes to bring to life, and would like to get them up on Aditi as a pilot test for various viewers.

This is a re-writing of a fundamental service between viewer and server.  *Not* the LSL scripting event queue – communications event queue between viewers and simulators (we have lots of things called ‘event queue’).  [The] discussion is deep inside this [forum] topic for the interested.

– Monty Linden

• Concern was raised over recent changes to llSensor doubling the number of objects returned, causing some scripts to receive more data than they are designed to manage, resulting in increased stack heap collisions.
  • It was requested that when fundamental changes are made to a function like this, they are used within a new function, rather than changing the existing function. This sparked a conversation on what a new llSensor function (“llSensorPlus” or whatever) might include / work.
  • It was further equested that if llSensor is being updated, news flags / filters are added (e.g. HAS_SIT_TARGET, TOUCH_EVENT, SOUND_EMITTER).
  • A Canny feature request on the latter was requested, with examples of how the flags might be used.

† 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.