2024 SL SUG meetings week #48 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 26th, 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

• On Tuesday, November 26th, 2024, the simulators on the Main SLS channel were restarted without no updates.
• On Wednesday, November 27th:
  • An updated version of the Barbecue simulator update should be deployed to the BlueSteel RC. This includes: 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”: 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.
  • The remaining RC channels will be restarted.

Apple Cobbler Update

Currently in testing on Aditi ( regions of Mauve and Jigglypuff for those wishing to test), and includes:

• 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 updates with the current official viewers:

• 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 7.1.11.11750364439, November 12.
  • 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:

• There appear to still be issues around the llTransferOwnership function, which is available for testing on Aditi. See: llTransferOwnership() returns -6 when flag 0x4 is used inside a full-perm-for-owner object.
• A request to fix the long-standing (18 years!) to fix the issue of Modify becoming No Modify on being taken back to inventory if they have a things like No Mod script in their contents (the script should maintain its no Mod permissions, and the object should retain its Modify permission and not inherit No Mod from the script, etc.) as part of the work in tweaking permissions for llTransferOwnership() was seen as “out of scope” for this work.
• A discussion relating to sitting height and a possible change in behaviour resulting from the fix for the recent “hovering on logging-in” issue affecting system shoe height adjustments (and whether the mentioned sitting issue is  / is no a bug) – see Sitting height is now affected by system shoes.
• A further discussion on region crossing and attachments and potential issues.
• Further discussion around people being able to opt-out of the extended llGiveAgentInventory() capabilities so as to avoid things being dropped “anywhere” in their inventory.
  • This saw a re-hash of the idea that all items – whether received via the Marketplace, of in-world transfer, should go to a single, dedicated system folder clearly named, and then to sub-folders within it (e.g. “From Marketplace” and “In world”).
  • The above would help prevent a lot of confusion for newer users, as everything then receive goes into *one* system folder and they can find it). I would also allow users to retain better control over their inventories in terms of where items received finish up. However, it risks breaking functionality such as #RLV (which is in the process of being adopted by LL for their viewer).
  • The discussion also included a request that users be given an override to llGiveAgentInventory(), so that they can set the destination folder on being offered the item(s).

† 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.