2024 SL SUG meetings week #42 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 15th, 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 Pantera’s video of the meeting, which 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

Quoting Rider Linden:

Two weeks ago we had a bit of a rough roll, so some of the main grid was left on Summer Fun. Last week the entire engineering team was at an offsite and we decided it was probably not a good idea to do anything while we were all distracted. We believe that we have a fix for the issue and are going to be making a final decision later today about doing an off schedule roll on the SLS regions that are still causing problems. Once we have that out of the way we’ll be able to get back to the regular schedule. I believe that that the next in line is WebRTC, but we need to make sure that enough people have upgraded to an RTC capable client.

SL Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week:

• Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10800445603, (formerly the DeltaFPS RC), dated September 11th, was promoted to de facto release status on September 19th. This includes:
  • 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).
• Release Candidate: ExtraFPS RC, version 7.1.11.11074622243, issued September 30th.
  • Performance improvements: enhanced texture memory tracking, broader hardware compatibility and higher FPS gain.
  • Aesthetics improvements: new Antialiasing setting – SMAA; Contrast Adaptive Sharpening; Khronos Neutral Tone Mapping (can be changed to ACES via the RenderTonemapType Debug setting).

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• Leviathan Linden requested a “top five” (or so) features / options people would like to see added to the official viewer. Responses at the meeting included:
  • RLV  – currently, RLV/a code is being submitted to LL by its author, Kitty Barnett, for inclusion in the Official viewer and (I believe) RLV author Marine Kelley may have also provided information on RLV functionality to LL.
  • Client- side animation override (AO) capability.
  • Object derender.
  • Contact Sets (Firestorm).
  • Autrespond outside of Do Not Disturb mode.
  • Automatically rezzing under land Group.
  • ADD instead of WEAR as the default behaviour for attachments.
  • Adjustable toolbar button sizes.
• Leviathan also dropped the following question into the meeting:

Suppose SL added a VR mode that allowed for seeing SL content in stereo vision a-la VR goggles. NOT the ability to be in the avatar body and move the limbs with trackers but just the ability to view SL content as a fly-cam in VR mode… would that be useful to anyone? Would anyone here use it? What would you use it for?

• • Responses were broadly positive, if the capability could be tired to the likes of using a vehicle in world.
  • Concerns were raised over the viewer’s ability to maintain a smooth, high enough frame rate consistently through a VR session.
  • The above does nor mean LL is about to implement and kind of VR / partial VR element within the viewer; Leviathan made it clear he was just looking at feed back in relation to the general idea of a partial VR experience with SL.
• A further discussion on the issue of attachments failing (being dropped / lost / ghosted issues (see: Attachment loss on RC channel 2024-08-29.10619830788) which can be experienced during region crossing (TP or physical) & the fact the LL are working on a fix.  is being
• A discussion on making Media on Prim (MOAP) safer, and which threaded throughout much of the meeting.
• The above drifted into discussions general media handling and also on rendering, colour maps, support for look-up tables for rendering / colour grading in the viewer (e.g. to give post-processed effects).
• A further discussion on editing tools, scripting options, etc.

† 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.