Day: August 20, 2024

2024 SL SUG meetings week #34 summary and WebRTC Update

Posted on by Inara Pey
Luane’s World, July 2024 – blog post

Updated with Video: apologies to Pantera, did not see her at the meeting!

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 20th, 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’s video is embedded at the end – my thanks to her 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):
  • 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

  • On Tuesday, August 20th, the Summer Fun simulator release (which includes the Combat 2.0 updates and the new back-end Game Controller support, although the viewer-side elements of the latter have yet to make it into a formal project or RC viewer) was deployed to the SLS Main channel, making it grid-wide.
  • On Wednesday, August 21st, the simulator RC channels will be restarted without any new deployment / update.

SL Viewer Updates

It appears that all RC viewer except Atlasaurus (which now included the viewer-side WebRTC work) have been pulled to allow LL to focus on PBR / glTF issues per my CCUG meting summary of August 15th.

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Atlasaurus RC (Web RTC; PBR fixes; object take options; improved MOAP URL handling), version 7.1.9.10326512121, August 14.

WebRTC Update

On Tuesday, August 20th, Linden Lab issued an update on the WebRTC work.

Project Summary

  • Replacing Vivox for Voice in SL with WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”).
  • Benefits:
    • Move to a “defacto standard” for voice services, 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 can be supplied within the viewer using a library and wrapper, ending the need for any additional third-party plug-in for Voice like SLvoice.exe, as supplied by Vivox.
    • 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.

Key Points from LL’s Update

  • As per my viewer notes above, the viewer-side WebRTC work has been combined with the Atlasaurus RC viewer.
  • There are (at the time of writing) four regions on the WebRTC “Pop Rocks” simulator channel: WebRTC Voice 1 – WebRTC Voice 2 – WebRTC Voice 3 and WebRTC Voice 4.
  • Some of the known issues include:
    • Conference/Group/P2P in WebRTC is not yet available on the WebRTC Voice regions.
    • An occasional popup regarding voice server incompatibility can appear. Restart voice if you see this.  To restart voice in the viewer:
      • Hover over the speaker icon in the upper right corner of the viewer.
      • Wait for the dialogue to appear.
      • Uncheck the voice checkbox and wait a few seconds.
      • Recheck the voice checkbox.
    • Selecting another voice device while in a group, conference, or peer-to-peer call may drop the call.
    • Voice morphing is not available in WebRTC-Voice enabled regions.  If voice morphing had been enabled via an older viewer, you will see a dialogue to let you know the implications of using voice:
Voice morphing notification. Via; Linden Lab
  • As voice morphing is currently tied to Vivox, those currently using it are advised to look at the “many excellent alternatives for voice morphing that have become available to the general public as technology has developed”. In addition an FAQ has been produced to help with questions about WebRTC and Voice Morphing.

In Brief

Map System Update

  • Pepper Linden provided an update on the work to improve the world map and map tile updates (see my week #29 summary for more on this):
We had several deploys related to maps, included among them were changes to fix region surrounds in map tiles, as well as a fix to our maps CDN — hopefully they’ve been acting better for you all. Stale tile pruning is still on hold, as there’s a few regions on the grid that weren’t generating their tile — we have a fix that we’re hoping to get out soon, and once that is out, we’ll finally be able to turn on stale tile pruning. 
Bumping the tile resolution is on the roadmap. The current maps is very limited in what it can render — we’ve discussed moving to a viewer-based bot that would be capable of rendering mesh, etc.
  • Pepper also noted that Maps should load a lot faster.

General

We have some decent tests, found ways to hit weird edge cases, and general improvements are to be had. Vehicles with riders are still hilariously bad. We’ll have to tackle that in subsequent projects. It’s just hard to fathom.

† 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.