Day: September 11, 2024

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 10th, 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 10th, the SLS Main channel was restarted without any deployment.
• On Wednesday, September 11th:
  • There will be a further attempt to deploy the Picnic simulator update to the Ferrari simulator RC channel. A bug was found in llAvatarOnSitTarget() last week, which has now been fixed. The hope is that Picnic will now progress to the rest of the simulator RCs during week commencing September 16th, 2024, and thence to the SLS Main channel the week after.
  • The remain RC channels will be restarted.
• Monty Linden indicated he is very interested in feedback about avatar region crossings  / TPs, particularly with with Ferrari versus the rest of the grid.

Future Deployments

Currently, and following on from Picnic, upcoming simulator deployments currently have the following order:

• Doubtfire, which has some internal changes, will follow Picnic.
• Then will come the WebRTC deployments to make that code grid-wide.
• After WebRTC will come a new simulator update called BBQ, which is still gathering updates for inclusion.

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 cohorts:
  • DeltaFPS RC, version 7.1.10.10708851543, updated September 5.
    • 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

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• Issues have been reported with attachment behaviours. for example:
  • Attachments would disappear from everyone’s view except owner, who would be unable to detach, reattach, or interact in any way with the affected attachment, as the server no longer register them as attached.
  • This Canny issue (simulator release specific)).
  • Some of these are currently under investigation, and the subject led to an extended discussion through the first half of the meeting.
• Pepper Linden noted further updates to the Map service are due to be deployed, and that pruning of ghost regions (those no longer on the grid but still showing on the Map) should commence later in the week.
• 2K BoM texture bakes: it is possible that code for this may be deployed to Aditi (the Beta grid) some time in the next week or two, bugs allowing. Hopefully an update at the next SUG or CCUG meeting.
  • The rule of thumb is that the bake resolution will match the maximum of any texture. So, if all the textures are 1024×1024, then the bake will 1024×1024. But if one of the textures is 2048×2048, then the bake will be 2048×2048.
  • The exception to the above will be eyes, which are limited to a maximum resolution of 512×512.
  • The deployment of 2K Bakes on Mesh will have an associated official blog post as it becomes available.
• Add flag to llSetLinkSitFlags, SIT_FLAG_INVISIBLE is now being actively tracked by LL. The hope is to have the request in the simulator release after BBQ.
• Lua work:
  • There are no plans on LL’s part to provide a translate from LSL user-code to Lua user-code.
  • Luau will likely be in 32-bit mode, until LL get the simulator binary building in 64-bit mode.
  • LL do not intend to define standards on how to write a Lua script for Luau; they are hoping that the community will consolidate and settle on particular design patterns and approaches, and once the dust settles, LL may then standardise the most common approaches
• A general discussion on on throttling for llRegionSay and llRegionSayTo.
• Leviathan Linden indicated the a dedidcate Game Control viewer is on hold as he is currently engaged on other work, and the code needs to be tested in relation with the Lab’s updated Linux support.

† 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.