Day: September 3, 2024

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 3rd, 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):
  • 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

• On Tuesday, September 3rd, the SLS Main channel was restarted without any deployment.
• On Wednesday, September 4th:
  • The BlueSteel and Ferrari simulator RC channels will receive the Picnic simulator update (which includes: llFindNotecardTextSync, llDerezObject, for the viewer side, group member lists can now be retrieved in a paginated manner).
    • The existing WebRTC regions of WebRTC Voice 1, WebRTC Voice 2, WebRTC Voice 3 and WebRTC Voice 4 might also be updated with Picnic.
    • Picnic also include the first of the region crossing improvements Monty Linden has been working on. These should see a) avatars already in a destination region getting better frame rates as others arrive in the region; b) crossing avatars with too many scripts will experience slower but smoother crossings.
  • The remaining simulator RC channels will be restarted without any new deployment / update.

SL Viewer Updates

No updates at the start of the week, leaving the currently available public versions of official viewers as:

• Release viewer: version 7.1.9.10515727195, formerly the Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling) promoted August 26.
• Release channel cohort: DeltaFPS RC, version 7.1.10.10622905308, issued August 30.
  • Performance boosts. Memory management has been optimized and users will experience a higher FPS across various systems. A comprehensive range of bug fixes are also provided. This includes better PBR material handling and resolving frequent crashes. See the release notes for more.
  • UI for scheduling region restarts now available via a new button located in the Region/Estate floater. (Note: there is currently an issue with scheduled region restarts working correctly and a fix is due to come in the next server release).

In Brief

• The recent updates to the SL Map system appears to have been generally well received, with those providing feeding at the meeting noting the Map does appear to load a lot quicker and that changes to regions are more timely in being reflected on the Map.
  • The ability to see ground-level details of regions using regions surrounds where the scale is > 256*1.33 on either the x or y axis (rather than them appearing a flat grey) has been particularly appreciated.
  • The next element of this work will include improvements to pruning “ghost” regions from the Map (i.e. regions that appear on the Map but are no longer a part of the grid).
  • This sparked a general discussion on the Map and its capabilities and possible updates.
• Github issue: [PBR] PBR Material resets to legacy material after teleport. #853 – while there is no fix for this at present, it sparked a discussion on issues related to broken meshes, which appear to result from the simulator and viewer not agreeing on how many faces a mesh has. Some of this may have been fixed in the Altasaurus release viewer, and Brad Linden noted, there are more coming in the 7.1.10 (DetlaFPS) RC and the viewer to follow it.
• A reminder that if people have issues where log files might help LL with investigations, this article provides information on where to locate said logs for attaching to a bug report.
• Need a function for easy PBR alpha switching: Brad Linden indicated he had started working on this, but he’s had to shift over to doing some viewer-related work, so things are currently on hold.
• A discussion on a means for scripted Group join invites, rather than requiring a bot – please refer to the last third of the video.

† 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.