Update, May 28th: The Lab reports this work is now complete.
On Tuesday May 27th, Linden Lab gave warning that there will be a period of scheduled maintenance on Wednesday May 28th which will see log-ins suspended for around one hour, from approximately 06:00 SLT.
The Second Life Service will be closed for logins for approximately one hour on Wednesday, May 28 beginning at 6am PDT.
Residents in world will not be logged out, but may experience loss of supporting services such as search and inventory. New logins will not be accepted, and Residents in world should not attempt to transfer or manipulate L$ or valuable (no-copy) assets until the ALL CLEAR is given.
As always, if the scope or the schedule of the work changes, we will update this post.
Please check with the Grid Status page for updates nearer the time of the maintenance.
The maintenance work is most likely the work planned for Thursday May 22nd, which had to be postponed as a result of significant issues in Second Life services encountered on Tuesday May 20th. Among other things, those issues resulted in the server-side deployments for that day being curtailed, which directly impacted planned activities for the rest of the week.
Assuming the work is the same as that originally planned for May 22nd, it would appear to be focusing on database hardware, with the result that sims should have slightly faster access time after the work has been completed, although the emphasis has been that if this is the case, it will not be major or noticeable.
Following the problems encountered in week 21, Landon Linden issued a blog post explaining some of the causes of recent problems within the platform, which is recommended reading for those who haven’t yet done so.
Earlier in May I reported on Dave Rowe’s work integrating the Xbox 360 controller with his CtrlAltStudio viewer, allowing it to be used with the Oculus Rift or Stereoscopic 3D viewing options in that viewer, as well as with the normal display mode.
On Saturday May 24th, Loki Eliot tweeted that he’d been working on a similar approach, using the Xbox 360 controller and a dictation feature of OSX Mavericks to provide greater control over his avatar when using the Oculus Rift.
Since tweeting, Loki has produced a blog post on his work, including links to the software he’s used and tutorials to help get things sorted out. his original video was posted to Telly, which WordPress.com doesn’t like, embedding-wise. However, Draxtor has, with Loki’s permission, reposted it to You tube, and so it’s that version I’ve embedded here.
Loki is the first to admit this approach doesn’t solve all of the Oculus related issues when using Second Life – he has a few wry observations as to where things will “suck” (his expression – not mine!). He also gives some musings on how technology might further assist things in the future.
Loki’s work on integrating the Xbox 360 controller for use with SL and the Oculus Rift (image via Loki Eliot)
The use of HMDs brings with it a lot of challenges – some of which, the Lab freely admits in releasing its Oculus Rift project viewer, it has yet to really tackle. Seeing experiments like this is therefore interesting, as they demonstrate potential alternative (and not necessarily hyper-expensive) means of providing control over basic aspects of using SL with a headset which are not reliant on the keyboard and mouse and, in this case at least, also not dependent upon in-world voice (which many people don’t like to use for a wide variety of reasons). I wonder if approaches like this and Dave Rowe’s work with CtrlAltStudio might raise an eyebrow or two of interest at the Lab …?
We’re all aware of the recent unpleasantness which hit Second Life over the past few weeks and which culminated in the chaos of Tuesday, May 20th, when the disruption not only caused issues with log-ins, but also caused both a curtailment in server-side deployments on Tuesday and a rescheduling of both deployments for the rest of the week and the postponing of a period of planned maintenance.
As noted in my week 20/2 SL projects update, Simon and Maestro Linden gave an explanation of Tuesday’s issues at the Serve Beta meeting on Thursday May 22nd. However, in a Tools and Technology blog post, Landon Linden has given a comprehensive explanation of the broader issues that have hit second Life in recent weeks.
Landon begins the post:
When I came to Linden Lab over five years ago, Second Life had gone through a period of the coveted hockey-stick growth, and we had just not kept up with the technical demands such growth creates. One or more major outages a week were common.
In my first few months at the Lab, we removed more than a hundred major single points of failure in our service, but several major ones still loomed large, the granddaddy of them all being the core MySQL database server. By late Winter 2009 we were suffering from a core database outage a few times each week.
It is that core MySQL database server that has been partially to blame for the recent problems, having hit two different fatal hardware faults which forced the Lab to stop most SL services on both occasions. As the blog post explains, work is in-hand to remove some of the risk in this database becoming a single point of failure by moving it to new hardware. This will be followed over the coming weeks and months to try to further reduce the impact of database failures.
But the MySQL issue wasn’t the only cause of problems, as Landon further explains:
A few weeks ago there was a massive distributed denial of service attack on one of our upstream service providers that affected most of their customers, including us, and inhibited the ability of some to use our services. We have since mitigated future potential impact from such an attack by adding an additional provider. There have also been hardware failures in the Marketplace search infrastructure that have impacted that site, a problem that we are continuing to work through.
Landon Linden: explaining why SL has suffered servere issues of late
He also provides further information on the issue which impacted users and services on Tuesday May 20th, expanding on that given by Simon and Maestro at the Server Beta meeting.
At that meeting, Simon briefly outlined Tuesday’s issues as being a case of the log-in server failing to give the viewer the correct token for it to connect to a region, so people actually got through the log-in phase when starting their viewer, but never connected to a region.
Landon expands on this, describing how the mechanism for handing-off of sessions from login to users’ initial regions is a decade old and relies on the generation of a unique identifier (the “token” Simon referred to). Simply put: the mechanism ran out of numbers – but did so quietly and without flagging the fact that it had. As a result, the server team took four hours to track down the problem and come up with a fix.
Referring to this particular issue, Landon goes on:
Having such a hidden fault in a core service is unacceptable, so we are doing a thorough review of the login process to determine if there are any more problems like this lurking. Our intent at this point also is to remove the identifier assignment service altogether. It not only was the ultimate source of this outage, but is also one more single point of failure that should have been dispatched long ago.
Such open honesty and transparency about technical matters is something that hasn’t really been seen from the Lab since the departure of Frank (FJ Linden) Ambrose, the Lab’s former Senior VP of Global Technology, who departed the company at the end of 2011. As such, it is an excellent demonstration of Ebbe Altberg’s promise to re-open the lines of communication between company and users, and one which is most welcome.
Kudos to Landon for his sincere apology for the disruption in services and for such a comprehensive explanation of the problems. Having such information will hopefully aid our understanding of the challenges the Lab faces in dealing with a complex set of services which is over a decade old, but which we expect to be ready and waiting for us 24/7. Kudos, again as well to Ebbe Altberg for re-opening the hailing frequencies. Long may it continue.
The scheduled maintenance planned for Thursday May 22nd, which would have seen Second life logs-in suspended for about an hour from 07:00 SLT onwards, has been postponed.
The announcement was made as an update to the original Grid Status page maintenance announcement, and reads in full:
[Updated 10:46 AM PDT, 21 May 2014] The maintenance originally scheduled for tomorrow, 22 May at 7am has been postponed. We’ll post a new scheduled date as soon as possible.
Readers are advised to keep an eye on the Grid Status pages for further updates.
On Wednesday May 21st, Linden Lab publicly released the Oculus Rift project viewer. Version 3.7.8.289834 of the viewer offers initial support for Oculus Rift, and is focused on getting started with the Oculus Headset (which has yet to be commercially released, although there are currently some 75,000 SDK 1 models in the world, and shipping will commence soon on the updated SDK 2 version).
For Windows, Oculus Rift requires Windows Vista or later, and with Mac OS X, version 10.7 or later is required.
The blog post announcing the release reads in part:
The early beta testers of our integration have provided some valuable feedback, identifying bugs as well as providing suggestions for additional features and options that would improve the experience of using the Oculus Rift with Second Life. Today we’re pleased to announce that our Oculus Rift integration is now available as a Project Viewer, the first step toward becoming a part of the default Second Life Viewer.
Like our initial beta release, this Project Viewer is more about making it easy to get started using the Oculus Rift to view Second Life than it is about optimizing the UI for headset users. We’ve made some minor adjustments to the regular Second Life UI in order to present it in head-mounted display (HMD) mode, but the UI headset users will experience with this project Viewer is still essentially the same as you’d see without an Oculus Rift.
A new Toolbar button makes toggling the Oculus Rift on / off easy
Features in the viewer include:
Full Oculus Rift Hardware Support – includes automatic hardware detection and display calibration for quick and easy setup
HMD Mode – activated via Me > Display Select or via CTRL-SHIFT-D / CMD-SHIFT-D or via the HMD Mode toolbar button. This command also allows one to display the stereo rendering output intended for the Oculus Rift on their primary display
HMD configuration via Preferences > Move and View > click the HMD calibration button
Display A new Preferences pop-up provides additional display configuration options
Full UI Support – users can access the entire Second Life UI and HUDs while in Oculus Rift mode, so there are no limitations on what a user can do in-world while using the headset
Avatar Head Motion – Oculus Rift head-tracking data is mapped to the avatar, so users’ avatars look where they do
“Align to Look” [Q] – allows users to quickly start moving the direction they are looking
New First-Person View – allows users to enjoy the immersion previously available with Mouselook mode, but allows the mouse to be used to control the cursor, allowing for interaction with the UI and objects in-world
Action Key – [“X”] It is now possible to activate action items (i.e. Opening Doors) from Mouselook mode. Aim the crosshairs at the item you’d like to activate, and press the “X” key. In First-Person mode, the Action Key [“X”] will have the same functionality as clicking the mouse button in Mouselook mode (i.e. it will “trigger” guns or other held items).
To display the viewer with the best results, Linden Lab recommend that the Oculus Rift is configured as an Extended Desktop in Windows (do not Duplicate Displays), and that Mirroring Mode (Settings > Displays) is enabled on Mac OS X.
There are some known issues with the viewer, as noted in the release notes. These include, but are not limited to:
Alt+Tabbing out of the viewer confuses the Rift – RIFT-22
File Browsers cannot function in HMD mode – RIFT-20
Snapshots disabled while in HMD mode because:
HUD and UI elements always drawn in snapshots –RIFT-30
Save to my Computer adds a blank screen between refreshes when trying to take snapshots – RIFT-31
Toggling HMD mode sets the focus wrong and you have to click in world before doing anything else, on Macs – RIFT-110
There are also known limitations with the Action Key [“X”] – please refer to the release notes for a list of known issues and to JIRA raised under the RIFT project.
To go with the project viewer launch, the Lab has also created a new Oculus category in the Destination Guide, which is intended to list “places that are particularly compelling with the Oculus Rift.”
The blog post includes an introductory video, embedded below. Please note, this video refers to downloading the release version of the SL viewer – this is incorrect. The Oculus Rift capabilities are only available via the Oculus Rift project viewer, which is correctly linked-to in the blog post.
With the SVVR Conference and Expo underway in California, now is perhaps a timely opportunity to take a peek at what is being billed as an open-source competitor to the Oculus Rift.
Techcrunch, along with several other technology blogs / websites, covered the news a few days ago that a Chinese start-up, ANTVR Technology, is developing an open-source, cross-platform virtual reality gaming set, called the ANTVR kit.
The kit is said to be compatible with games designed for the Oculus Rift and with most PC and console platforms. It can connect to any device offering direct HDMI output, or via an HDMI adapter if no direct HDMI output is available. Supported systems include computers, games consoles, iOs devices, Android devices, and even Blu-ray players.
The ANTVR kit headset design (image courtesy of ANTVR Technology)
The new headset is currently a part of a Kickstarter campaign, which despite the backlash over the eventual acquisition of Oculus VR by Facebook, has already seen 450 people commit (at the time of writing) almost $170,000 of the $200,000 goal in just seven days, suggesting that if the rate of pledges is maintained, the ANTVR Kit could end-up going that same way as both Oculus VR and Technical Illusion’s castAR, and exceeding its modest target by a good margin.
The headset unit has a 1920 x 1080 high definition, 1.03 megapixel per eye, display with a 4:3 ratio offering a 100-degree diagonal field-of-view. A dual aspherical lens arrangement is apparently included to help eliminate image distortion when projecting standard ratio images. Like the Oculus Rift, it has an internal 9-axis Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for head rotation and movement tracking, and it can be worn with prescription lens glasses.
Comparing the ANTVR with Oculus SDK2 (which actually has a 5-inch screen) and Sony’s Morpheus (credit: TechInAsia)
A novel aspect of the headset is the inclusion of a “glance window”, a slide-up port on the front of the unit which can be pushed up to allow the wearer to re-orient themselves in the real world or their keyboard. While still not a real solution for those needing to use the keyboard and can’t re-orient finger positions easily (no tactile indicators on F, J, and numeric pad 5, for example), it at least means the headset itself doesn’t need to be pushed up to the forehead to see things.
Is it a Controller? Is it a Joystick? Is it a Gun? It’s all Three – and more
A further interesting feature of the kit is the inclusion of the multi-function handset controller. When completely assembled, this forms a gun which can be used in first-person shooter games and the like. However, the “barrel” of the gun can be detached, and the “pistol grip” becomes a joystick, suitable for use with flight simulators, etc., or as a Wii-style controller. This further opens-out into a game controller handset.
A further unique aspect of the handset unit is that it also includes a 9-axis IMU, which tracks body movement and actions, allowing the wearer to control a degree of on-screen character movement via both head and body movement, and to simulate a range of actions (crouching, jumping, throwing a grenade…).
The dual 9-axis IMUs translate body movements into on-screen character movements (stills via ANTVR promotional video, YouTube)
An additional WHDI unit can be added to the assembled handset (and is shown in the image above), allowing for a reported low-lag (less than 1ms) fully wireless gaming experience. The WHDI unit is not supplied as standard, but the company states it will offer it for $200.
As with the Oculus Rift, a software development kit (SDK) is to be made available with the ANTVR kit. The open-source nature of the kit means that there is potential for it to be used with a range of systems beyond those for which it initially supports.
“We wanted to make a gaming system that is universal, but it’s very difficult to make your product compatible with every kind of gaming platform,” Qin Zheng, ANTVR Technology’s founder, said in the Techcrunch report. “We’ve worked on making it compatible with Xbox, PC, and PlayStation, but there are many other gaming systems. If there are developers with other gaming systems or just device developers, they can choose to modify the firmware inside our hardware.”
The Kickstarter campaign is being run along very similar lines to the Oculus VR, up to and including an opportunity to visit the ANTVR Technology studios in Beijing for those willing to pay-out $5,000 (plus meeting their own airfares, etc.), which will also include guided tours of China’s capital. For $270-$300, supporters get the ANTVR kit and other goodies, while for $470-$500, supporters get the kit with a WHDI wireless unit as well.Those offering less that $270 get to choose from other reward options. Qin hopes that following the kickstarter campaign, ANTVR Technology will be able to start shipping kits in September 2014.
The following promotional video examines the ANTVR kit, and shows it in use with the additional WHDI wireless adapter.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 