2024 SL SUG meetings week #45 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 5th, 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 the 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

• No deployments for this week, just rolling restarts across the grid.

Simulator Deployment Plans

• The next simulator maintenance update will be Barbecue (or BBQ), which is currently awaiting further bug fixing. This should include:
  • Support for “alpha-gamma” which will allow an object owner to adjust some of the PBR alpha values that were impacting legacy things like hair.
  • llSetAgentRot.
  • A new warning on receiving direct IMs from Scripted Agents (“registered” bots). Rider describes this as “Bot confessions”:

Oh. One of the other items coming in BBQ. Bot confessions. With IM sessions with bots there will be a warning sent to the receiver that they are having a conversation with a bot. Also, for viewer developers, there will be a bit of metadata attached to the IM_NOTHING_SPECIAL that indicates the sender is a bot.

• Following Barbecue should be Apple Cobbler, which should include:
  • llTransferOwnership which enables a prim give itself to a new user (subject to owner permissions already set).
  • An extended llGiveInventory to allow for a destination folder (system folders + RLV/a) to be specified as well (+ the use of a parameter list, so further options can be added in the future).
  • llMapBeacon – like llMapDestination, but a) does not necessarily open the map window; b) can optionally open the map, with or without focus. This will also require a viewer update.
  • A new function for detecting attachments. If it is running with an experience it will be able to detect HUDs that also have scripts with the same experience (e.g. to ensure the correct HUDs are being used – this will not allow anyone to script to find out all the HUDs someone is using).

SL Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week:

• Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10800445603, formerly the DeltaFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, etc), dated September 11, promoted September 17 – No change.
• Release Candidate: ExtraFPS RC, version 7.1.11.11565212741, October 30.
  • Performance improvements: enhanced texture memory tracking, broader hardware compatibility and higher FPS gain;  additional code to improve texture streaming on rigged attachments (e.g. if an earring is made with 2K textures, the viewer will correctly calculate the required resolution for the textures and download them, rather than downloading the full 2K textures), etc.
  • Aesthetics improvements: new Antialiasing setting – SMAA; Contrast Adaptive Sharpening; Khronos Neutral Tone Mapping (can be changed to ACES via the RenderTonemapType Debug setting).
  • UI Optimisations.

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• LL are still holding back on throwing the WebRTC switch across the grid, waiting for more users to move to WebRTC-enabled viewers.
• The new function for detecting attachments  / HUD in an experience, noted above, sparked a slightly interwoven conversation on “missing” attachments” and the detection of HUDs.
• A discussion on the SL Lua(u) implementation and LSL. The official place for information on this is in this FAQ in the SL Wiki. A resident-written entry is also in the SL Wiki. In terms of LSL / LUA interoperability, see this section of the official FAQ.
• Further discussion on llTransferOwnership, including the fact the end use need to accept the transfer of ownership in some kind of a dialogue, as per any other inventory transfer.
• The “Bot Confessions” function sparked a further conversation on bots  / Scripted Agents & identifying them (e.g. adding an indicator in the Profile of registered Scripted Agents), their use, 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.