Category: Second Life

2019 TPVD meeting week #44 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
La Gaspesie (Canada) –blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on November 1st, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording and providing it. This was a relatively short meeting, with some conversation on the viewer building process – error reporting, replacing cygwin with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that are not reflected in the notes below – please refer to the video (between 9:23 and 15:35.

SL Viewer News

[0:22-8:59]

  • On Thursday, October 31st:
    • The Voice RC viewer, version 6.3.3.531811 and dated October 18th, 2019, was promoted to de facto release status.
    • The Love Me Render RC viewer was updated to version 6.3.4.532273.
  • On Friday, November 1st, the EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.532314.

Note that while it has not been tested, it is believed the voice plug-in with the Voice viewer is compatible with other viewers that are otherwise up-to-date with viewer release.

The remaining viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, version 6.3.3.531767, October 21st.
    • Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.3.531784, October 18th.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.530473, September 11th.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.

Upcoming Viewer Improvements

  • There will be further improvements made to voice. These will largely be focused on the overall robustness of voice operations.
  • The first viewer built using the updated build process using Visual Studio 2017 and Xcode 10.3 is currently caught in QA, but should hopefully be appearing “soon”.
  • Once the new build process viewer has gone through the RC process, LL plan to update the Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF – media handling) within the viewer.

Inventory Issue Handling Changes

[2:55-7:28] Broadly speaking, inventory issues that occur at log-in have been largely handled as viewer-side fixes (e.g. the viewer fails to receive data on the Outfit folder, and responds by creating a new Outfit folder). However, these kinds of “fixes” can lead to problems of their own in inventory handling (e.g. it can lead to duplicate folders, requiring Support to run an inventory transform to correct – such as in the case of the Current Outfit Folder being duplicated).

Instead, the Lab is working to give the servers more of a say when the viewer believes it has encountered an inventory syncing issue when logging-in. Instead of the viewer attempting to fix things, it will call back to the servers and have them fix matters by sending / re-sending inventory data.

Currently, the server end of this work is in progress, and a viewer with code changes to support this new approach will be appearing Soon™. These updates will be kept to a separate viewer branch to allow TPVs to absorb them quickly as the reach a state in which they can be adopted.

In Brief

  • [15:38 (text)-19:15] BUG-225655 “Viewer freezes while “Loading world…” – Intel HD 620 / Intel HD 630, Windows 10″ has a new wrinkle, as per Whirly Fizzle’s comment on the bug report. Firestorm has a fix that could be contributed, and LL have indicated a willingness to look at it.
  • [25:41-27:26] BUG-227818 “MapLayerRequest does not appear to work” – this refers to a request type that asks the simulator to relay a list of all the map layers and which is failing to behave as expected. The bug report has been requested in order for LL can look into the problem.

A new ensemble at La Maison d’Aneli in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
La Maison d’Aneli: Senka Beck

La Maison d’Aneli, curated by Aneli Abeyante, opened its November 2019 ensemble exhibition on October 30th, once again offering a rich mix of art.

The featured artists for this exhibition comprise IndigoClaire, Gitu Aura, Beertje Beaumont, Senka Beck, Treacle Darlandes, Lala Lightfool and Norton Lykin. With the exception of Treacle Darlandes’ Undiscovered Planet / La Serre, the individual exhibits primarily focus on 2D art.

La Maison d’Aneli: Beertje Beaumont

Beertje Beaumont and Lala Lightfool present their physical world art, with some very different pieces on offer.  Lala presents a display entitled Flowers, a series of watercolour paintings of trees and flowers, some of which are conventionally presented – trees in fields, flowers in pots, while others are more abstract in nature.

For her part, Beertje presents a series of pieces that share a floral theme with Lala’s. However, Beertje prefers working in acrylics, often working them over a layer of sand and gesso. As shown in a number of pieces offered here, this gives them a marvellous textured look that is particularly effective given their subject matter.

Beertje Beaumont: IndigoClaire

With her installation, Senka Beck presents Detoxomania, Reboot, which she describes as her “individualistic version” of her collaboration Detoxomania, presented at La Maison d’Aneli in 2018 (see: Abstract and surreal in Second Life). This is a piece that must be viewed with Advanced Lighting Model enabled (Preferences → Graphics) and with local sounds enabled, presenting a mix of 2D and 3D elements that are best experienced rather than described.

IndigoClaire and Gitu Aura present exhibits that predominantly focus on avatar studies, while Norton’s exhibit comprises a series of pieces intended to be reflections on nature, love, perception and cognition.

Beertje Beaumont: IndigoClaire

Eclectic, diverse and rich in presentation and colour, this is another intriguing selection of art.

SLurl and Links

Above an Endless sky in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Endless Above - The Lost City
Endless Above – The Lost City – October 2019; click any image for full size

In January 2019 we visited Endless, a Full region designed by SombreNyx and a place of untamed beauty suggestive of coastal fens and lowlands (see: Endless: lowland beauty in Second Life). Since that visit, the region has been extended – albeit it not on the ground. Instead, there is an element in the sky Endless Above – The Lost City, that is also captivating to the eye.

Designed by Jackson Cruyff, this is a region-wide platform that offers, as the name might suggest, an ancient and lost city sitting within a forest. It’s a place that appears to be under investigation: the landing point is set within a camp on the south-west corner of the landscape. Others are to be found scattered around the landscape, inviting exploration.

Endless Above – The Lost City

The stone ruins give the impression of great age, in places suggestive of large halls with arched doorways while other offer a limited hint of what might have been homes, together with circular structures, all of which is overlooked by a large structure sitting on the landscape’s lone plateau. Is it a place of former rulers or a place of ancient worship? That’s for visitors to decide.

There’s no set path for exploration per se; while there are blazing torches sitting within and between the various ruins, they offer more suggestions of routes that might be followed rather than set paths. Thus, the best way to explore this setting is to simply follow your feet. Doing so will not only heighten a sense of discovery when seeking the ruins, but also lead you to the beaches to the south and north of the land, both of which offer places to sit and relax.

Endless Above – The Lost City

To be honest, Endless Above is the kind of place that doesn’t require that much description; it does so for itself. The simplicity of design and layout naturally encourages exploration, with repeated motifs among the ruins that offers a sense of continuity as you wander between them.

For those looking for a slightly different location for avatar photography, this is a setting that could be worth investigating; there’s a certain Lara Croft / Indiana Jones suggestion to it. Similarly those looking for a more unusual style of SL landscape to photograph might find Endless Above worth a visit, the setting lending itself well to most outdoor Windlight settings.

Endless Above – The Lost City

There’s apparently a teleport point connecting the ground level setting to Endless Above. It is described as being at a crossroads, but I confess that while we found a roads sign referencing the sky build, we completely failed to find a hint of any obvious teleport – but we could have easily missed it; therefore a direct SLurl is offered in this piece and one for Endless for those who have not visited that location.

Finished with an immersive soundscape, Endless Above offers something of a different setting to Endless below it, but both environments do complement one another and offers similar feelings of escaping civilisation and freedom of wandering that invites visitors to tarry and enjoy the surroundings as they explore.

Endless Above – The Lost City

SLurl Details

Haraiki Bay is rated Adult

April offers a look at the October 2019 woes

Posted on by Inara Pey

The period of Thursday, October 24th through Sunday 27th October, 2019 saw Second Life encounter a rolling set of issues which finally came to a head on Sunday, October 27th. The issues affected many Second Life users and services from logging-in through to inventory / asset handling.

As has become the case with these matters, April Linden, the Second Life Operations Manager, has provided a post-mortem blog post on the issue and her team’s work in addressing the problems. And as always, her post provides insight into the complexities in keeping a platform such as Second Life running.

In short, the root cause of the weekend’s upsets lay not with and of the Second Life services but with one of the Lab’s network providers – and was exacerbated by the fact the first couple of times it happened – Thursday and Friday – it appeared to correct itself on both occasions before the Lab could fully identify the root cause.

April Linden

On Sunday, the problems started up again, but fortunately April’s team were able to pin down the issue and commence work with their provider – which obviously meant getting Second Life back on an even keel was pretty much in the hands of a third-party rather than being fully under the Lab’s control.

Our stuff was (and still is) working just fine, but we were getting intermittent errors and delays on traffic that was routed through one of our providers. We quickly opened a ticket with the network provider and started engaging with them. That’s never a fun thing to do because these are times when we’re waiting on hold on the phone with a vendor while Second Life isn’t running as well as it usually does.

After several hours trying to troubleshoot with the vendor, we decided to swing a bigger hammer and adjust our Internet routing. It took a few attempts, but we finally got it, and we were able to route around the problematic network. We’re still trying to troubleshoot with the vendor, but Second Life is back to normal again.

– Extract from April Linden’s blog post

As a result of the problems April’s team is working on moving some of the Lab’s services to make Second Life more resilient to similar incidents.

During the issues, some speculated if the problems were a result of the power outages being experienced in California at the time. As April notes, this was not the case – while Linden Lab’s head office is in San Francisco, the core servers and services are located in Arizona. However, resolving the issues from California were affected by the outages, again as April notes in her post.

It’s something I’ve noted before, and will likely state again: feedback like this from April, laying out what happened when SL encounters problems are always an educational  / invaluable read, not only explaining the issue itself, but in also providing worthwhile insight into the complexities of Second Life.

2019 Simulator User Group week #44

Posted on by Inara Pey
Abrahamstrup, September 2019 – blog post

Simulator Deployments

At the time of writing, no deployment notes had been published. However:

  • There was no deployment to the SLS (main) channel on Tuesday, October 29th, leaving it on server release 2019-10-03T01:12:11.531528.
  • There are two RC deployments planned for Wednesday, October 30th:
    • 2019-10-24T19:07:13.532143, comprising further internal script improvements, internal logging changes and improvements to simulator state saves.
    • 2019-10-26T00:06:48.532192, comprising a previously released hotfix to fix teleports being 5%-7% less reliable and makes the simulator take a little bit longer to report as “Up” to the Lab’s internal tools to more accurately reflect when residents can actually access a region.

SL Viewer

The Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer updated to version 6.4.0.531949 on October 28th. The update brings it to parity with the release viewer, but contains not project updates.

. The rest of the viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.2.530962, formerly the Vinsanto Maintenance RC viewer, dated September 17th, promoted October 15th – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • Project viewers:
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.3.531844, October 21st.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.

Script Event Order

It was asked if the script updates would affect the order in which script events are handled, Rider Linden stated:

Some events have always had priority just by virtue of the order in which they were collected. The order of collection has changed. For instance, sensor events were collected and posted before chat events and then touch events. Chat events are now posted immediately upon processing in the simulator. It should still be FIFO… just don’t bet on what event gets collected when.

In addition, it was noted in regards to event messages:

  • Generally, event handling should not to be counted on in any sort of coding since it may change again in the future.
  • Link messages:
    • If multiple link messages are sent from a single source to a single receiver script, the ordering should be preserved. Similarly, when using llLinkMessage to send a message from script A to script B in the same prim, they are posted immediately, and the order is maintained.
    • If the same message is sent to link A and then to link B, the order the links get them is not always the same. Similarly, if script A and script C are using llLinkMessage to post to B, all bets are off which gets there first.

 

 

 

2019 Creepy Crawl in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Dreadville – one of the destinations in the 2019 Creepy Crawl

Following their recent call for venues, Linden Lab announced the route for this year’s Halloween Creepy Crawl on Thursday, October 31st, via a blog post by Xiola Linden.

The Creepy Crawl is a tradition whereby Lindens and Residents get dressed up in their best Halloween costumes and roam from spooky spot to spooky spot for music, dancing, and celebrating.

As Xiola has blogged, the event will take place between 10:00 and 14:00 SLT on Tuesday, October 31st, and will be moving through a number of selected venues:

So, if you fancy meeting some of those responsible for bringing us Second Life and having a little fun, conversation and maybe dancing along the way, keep this list of destinations handy on the 31st October, and drop in to any of the venues along the route!