2024 SL SUG meetings week #50 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, December 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 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, December 10th, 2024, the simulators on the Main SLS channel were restarted with no update.
• On Wednesday, December 11th,the RC channels will also be restarted. The planned deployment of the Apple Cobbler update to BlueSteel has been postponed for a week to allow further QA testing.

SL Viewer Updates

No updates to start the week 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 7.1.11.12150664210, December 5.
  • 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:

• A forum thread concerning “elephants in the room” in terms of SL’s “immersion breakers”. As is pointed out in the thread, what may be a “elephant” to some might not be so much so to others. Nevertheless, as Soft Linden also points out, there are lots of issues long-term users of SL have learned to “eat around,” but using the thread to highlight issues which could impact matters of retention, etc., could be useful.
• A discussion on an LSL function for text rendering based around this feature request (or should that be “feature suggestion”, given Signal Linden filed it?! The discussion also touches on the possible use of markdown and other alternatives and the use of Media on a Prim.
• A discussion on the upcoming llTransferOwnership function and possible issues.
• This spun out to a wider discussion on LSL functions, including an idea for a function called he calls “llTempWearFromInventory”:

[It] would allow you to put on a wearable from an object’s inventory, but I’ve never gotten a lot of traction to get it done. The idea was to get rid of alpha cuts on bodies by allowing mesh clothing to have it’s own alpha layer that gets applied when it is worn. On the attach from inventory, I might take the approach of it rezzes the item and attaches it as a single LSL function.

– Rider Linden

Again, this is an idea, not a function actually being worked upon. However, it sparked a conversation on the subject of alpha masking / alpha cuts, etc., with clothing.

• Rider Linden also offered a FYI – there is an LSL call coming that will allow a script to set terrain textures at the estate level.

† 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.