The Forgotten, April 2022 – click any image for full size
The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 14th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.
Nomayo Maintenance RC (Maintenance N) viewer, version 6.6.1.572179, June 1.
Makgeolli Maintenance RC viewer (Maintenance M) viewer, version 6.5.6.571575, May 12.
Project viewers:
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.571296, May 10.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
In Brief
The weekend some some issues with Group chat, with the Lab making some rapid fixes. Longer-terms fixes are still a work-in-progress.
With the disbanding of the Governance user group, it was confirmed that question, etc., on matter of policy should be passed to Support.
Friends Lists:
Some have reported that simulator that are running for “4-5” days are ceasing to send Friends lists to those logging into them, a issue only fixable via a simulator restart. This has been noted by LL and is to be looked into.
BUG-232256 “No longer receiving spare calling card when adding friends” has ben noted has an issue.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week ending Sunday, June 12th, 2022
This summary is generally published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Release viewer: version 6.6.0.571939 – formerly the Performance Improvements viewer, dated May 25th – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Nomayo Maintenance RC (Maintenance N) viewer, version 6.6.1.572179, June 1.
The following notes were taken from the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this piece, my thanks to her as always for recording the meetings) of the Third-Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting on Friday, June 10th, 2022 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and dates for them can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.
Important: as from this meeting, the TPV Developer meeting has moved to a four-week schedule.
Please note that this is a summary of the key topics discussed during the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript of either. However, the video does provide a complete recording of the TPVD meeting, and timestamps to the relevant points within it are included in the notes below.
Nomayo Maintenance RC (Maintenance N) viewer, version 6.6.1.572179, June 1.
Makgeolli Maintenance RC viewer (Maintenance M) viewer, version 6.5.6.571575, May 12.
Project viewers:
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.571296, May 10.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
General Viewer Notes
The Performance Improvements viewer has had a couple of “significant issues” raised against it, which are being pulled into the Maintenance RC channels for resolution. One of these might be BUG-232200 (extreme mouse sensitivity based on DPI), although no specifics provided at the meeting.
The Legacy Profile project viewer (finally) looks like it may be getting some attention in the near future, in the hope it can move forward to RC status at some point.
This work is currently focused on implementing a new materials asset type that will allow materials surfaces created utilising the PBR workflow to be imported to SL and then applied to their desired object face(s).
A parallel piece of work is adding sport to SL for reflection probes to update the generation of the environment maps (because the current cube mapping used by SL is limited and would not work will with PBR).
Current Progress
Simulator-side support for reflection probes is being added, together with updates to the EEP system in support of the changes. This work is being implemented so that (hopefully) viewers without the necessary rendering updates will not see any “breakages” to the environment as the simulator work progresses through Aditi to Agni.
These updates are currently on Aditi on the DRTSIM542 channel (Materials 1, Rumpus Room, Rumpus Room 2, Materials Adult).
LSL support for this work still TBD.
There is now a test version of the viewer for the materials work available through the SL Discord server #content-features channel.
A glTF importer will “hopefully be ready in the next week or so”, although it will be a work-in-progress,
There is a texture streaming overhaul in progress. This changes the number of threads used in texture decoding and how the decoding on the background threads is handled, and should see a noticeable improvement in texture rendering when available & incorporated into viewers.
This work will likely be available ahead of the materials work mentioned above, but it has not been determined if it will form a dedicated project / RC viewer or be folded into a Maintenance RC.
TPV developers who may have been working recently on the texture threads, may want to take note of this and listen to this portion of the video, given that a number of threads have been removed o eliminate conflicts.
Part of this work is focused on trying to get a “good honest answer” from the operating system running the viewer as to how much video memory is actually free for the viewer to use.
In general (and despite the VRAM slider) the official viewer typically uses between 512 MB and 2GB of video memory (when available on a system), but runs into trouble trying to balance using anything over 512 MB with the 512 MB “limit”, thus causing issues of texture thrashing.
This work will likely see the removal of said slider as well.
Once completed, these changes should see the viewer work more “cooperatively” with other applications running on a client system:
As video memory is required by other programs, to the viewer will relinquish it; as video memory becomes available, so the viewer will attempt to use it.
As video memory is relinquished, the viewer will attempt to “intelligently” unload textures – such as those in the background/occluded, those far away, etc., to reduce the amount of visible texture blurring / unblurring as textures are unloaded /reloaded.
This work will hopefully benefit the viewer across all operating systems, although there are issues around getting Mac OS to report the amount of free video memory, and AMD GPUs are also proving a little difficult in their reporting of memory use.
The structure being used for the Windows enquiries can be found here.
In Brief
[Video 22:50-27:52] Discussion on alpha masking on avatars / rigged mesh, including reports on some content with transparent rigged meshes appearing broken as a result of changes to the draw order.
A lot of the reported breakage appears to be the result of creators “cranking the handle” to achieve results, without actually fully understanding either what they are doing or how the viewer’s rendering system works.
The changes being made now are part of trying to make the draw order more logically consistent with a view “maybe someday” being able to explicitly set the ordering priority for the draw order.
[Video 28:11-36:00] Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) vs. non-ALM (aka “forward rendering”). LL are strongly leaning towards getting rid of the non-ALM rendering path, providing it can be shown that this does not adversely impact performance (e.g. ALM runs roughly as well as non-ALM for those using the latter) on the broad cross-section of hardware most commonly operated by SL users.
This may raise concerns among the minority on metered connections (as it will increase the amount of data crossing their network in handling materials, etc.), so consideration is being given to including a “data saving mode” into ALM that will prevent the sending for materials data.
Another problem is that of general education. A lot of people still think that enabling ALM means they “must” run with shadows enabled (which does cause a significant performance hit), without realising they can disable shadows from Preferences → Graphics the Shadows drop down. De-coupling automatic shadows enabling from ALM may help rectify this.
Similarly, local lights can be a performance hit with ALM as the number can be unlimited, as opposed to the cap of six rendered lights under non-ALM rendering), so the suggestion is to have a slider to allow the user define how many local lights are rendered in their view under ALM.
[Video: 38:22-39:48] removing the non-ALM rendering path would also mean the removal of the Atmospheric Shaders checkbox, the avatar cloth checkbox (which user generated content cannot access anyway), the Bump Mapping and Shiny (low, medium high) drop-downs,
[Video: 36:10-40:04] The Performance Improvements Floater viewer (still at Project viewer status at the time of writing, and not to be confused with the Performance Improvements viewer now at release status) makes some changes to graphics pre-sets:
The object mesh detail is not always set to Low (as per some TPVs already).
Changes to max no of non-impostor avatars is based on the graphics quality slider.
The core benchmarking for setting all pre-sets has been revised.
This work is all part of the “auto-FPS” improvements that for a part of the Performance Improvements Floater viewer.
The Performance Improvements Viewer has been the default release viewer from the Lab for the last couple of weeks, and the code is starting to find its way to TPVs. This is a viewer specifically designed by LL to provide a smoother user experience in terms of things like rezzing / rendering times, better FPS.
The viewer represents a lot of work on the part of the Graphics team to improve data handling (including moving various data elements between threads, removing low update processes to their own threads rather than having them stall the main rendering threads, etc., all of which is intended to make the viewer feed more responsive as you move / teleport around SL.
As such, I decided to try a series of basic comparative tests between the Performance Improvements viewer, a version of the official viewer without the code updates and Firestorm (as my TPV of choice at the moment), just to gain a rough indication of how the changes made to the viewer perform. These tests comprised:
Logging-in to my Home location with empty caches, recording the time from clicking the log-in button through to everything loading in my field of view.
Logging-in to my Home location with it locally cached on my hard drive.
Completing a walk around my Home location, recording FPS at the same 9 locations, three times each with Shadows OFF and Shadows ON, and taking an average of all the FPS times recorded.
Teleporting to a busy region (15+ avatars) that is not pre-cached locally (but should be cached at my nearest CDN node(s), given it is a place I visit daily).
Re-teleporting to the same location, now locally cached.
Completing the same walk around the selected location, recording FPS at the same 5 locations, three times each with Shadows OFF and Shadows ON, and taking an average of all the FPS times recorded.
The table below summarises my findings:
Firestorm
SL Viewer – No Improvements Code
SL Performance Improvements Viewer
Home log-in uncached
42.06 sec
27.94 sec
24.00 sec
Home log-in cached
22.34 sec
21.98 sec
20.00 sec
Home walk – no shadows
25.5 FPS
34.5 FPS
53.57 FPS
Home walk – shadows
17.4 FPS
21.4 FPS
42.8 FPS
Uncached location TP
55:41 sec
49.37 sec
44.27 sec
Cached location TP
46:61 sec
35.03 sec
17.57 sec
TP location – no shadows
28.9 FPS
29.25 FPS
45.54 FPS
TP location – shadows
13.5 FPS
22.8 FPS
38.8 FPS
Obviously, there is always going to be a lot of subjectivity in such tests like these, which are dependent upon factors such as the specs of the system running the viewer(s), what else is running at the same time, Internet connectivity with the SL services and to the nearest CDN node, etc. However, in carrying out the comparisons above, I attempted to achieve something of a common basis by:
Using the same settings across the three viewers (e.g. camera and graphics pre-sets; the same RenderVolumeLOD factor; the same attached EEP settings for a consistent environment; the same complexity setting & max no. of non-imposters, etc.) – with the acknowledged caveat that the Performance Improvements viewer would automatically default to Shadows ON for me, based on my system’s capabilities, so needed some adjustment during some tests.
Ensuring all tests were carried out back-to-back to minimise extensive changes due to avatars of different complexity coming / going / moving around.
Closing all other apps I had been running on my PC to maximise the available resources available to all of the tests.
In addition, and for completeness (and as requested by Lance in the comments) – here are my system specifications – which are also available in the link on the right column of this blog.
But even while subjective, I think the results tend to speak for themselves, and there is no denying the qualitative frame speed increase with the Performance Improvements viewer, particularly with shadows enabled.
How quickly these updates are adopted by TPVs is down to their release schedules; but for the official viewer, this marks the first major release of updates intended to improve performance that is currently in flight, with the Performance Improvements Floater viewer (which includes the Lab’s take on auto-FPS function functionality similar to that found in Firestorm) currently at product viewer status.
The Performance Improvements viewer can be downloaded via the Viewer Download page, and the release notes are here.
The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 7th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.
On Tuesday, June 7th, the SLS Main and Event channel servers updated to simulator version .572237, which includes fixes in support of the upcoming Premium Plus capability.
Wednesday, June 8th should see the RC channels will be restarted without any code deployment.
Available Official Viewers
There have been no official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the current crop as:
Release viewer: version 6.6.0.571939 – formerly the Performance Improvements viewer, dated May 25th – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Nomayo Maintenance RC (Maintenance N) viewer, version 6.6.1.572179, June 1.
Makgeolli Maintenance RC viewer (Maintenance M) viewer, version 6.5.6.571575, May 12.
Project viewers:
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.571296, May 10.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
In Brief
Region crossing issues were raised, with some defining them as “the” immersion-breaking issue of SL – a claim that is subjective, based one a person’s particular. Responding to the problem, Rider noted that what is needed is a top to bottom evaluation on the entire transfer protocol. This will take resources that are working on other projects.
The above led to further discussions on the issue of vehicles hitting a parcel ban / ban lines are “bounced” (see: BUG-231802 “Prevent vehicles from entering parcels their riders cannot access”). This work is still pending. However, it in turn saw a general discussion on overly-aggressive security orbs, vehicles, fire-breathing chickens and parcel bans in general, with different viewpoints expressed, per the video, in which it was noted the above Jira won’t help with aggressive orbs.
An issue of point here is an property-holder’s right to protect their privacy either on the ground or in skyboxes) versus the ability for vehicle users to pass through (particularly by air) to travel through multiple connected regions.
The problem is, trying to regulate orb systems so that, for example, all conform to a minimum time delay before ejecting trespassers, would have to be retro-active, and next to impossible to ignore.
BUG-225227 “Report Cause of Teleport to Scripts” entered the last part of the conversation, and looks like it will be put back in the “under consideration” queue for feature requests.
BUG-227303 “collisions makes a script stop running and revert its mono status” was brought up for the Lab’s attention once more.
BUG-6477 “Feature Request: Script operational function or constant for allowing all functions using list inputs to typecast list values to expected types”
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week ending Sunday, June 5th, 2022
This summary is generally published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Release viewer: version 6.6.0.571939 – formerly the Performance Improvements viewer, dated May 25th – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Nomayo Maintenance RC (Maintenance N) viewer, version 6.6.1.572179, June 1.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 