Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week ending Sunday, October 3rd
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 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF update viewer, dated July 24th, promoted August 10th – No change.
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, September 30th 2021 at 13:00 SLT, and the TPV Developer’s meeting of Friday, October 1st, 2021 at 12:00 noon SLT.
With the meetings once again falling on the same week, and with the degree of overlap in content between the two, core discussion points from both have been combined into this one summary. The TPV meeting was also recorded by Pantera Północy, and her video is embedded at the end of this article, for those wishing to refer directly to that meeting.
Meeting Details
CCUG meetings are held on alternate Thursdays each month (generally the 1st and 3rd Thursday, subject to the vagaries of month length), with dates available via the SL Public Calendar. The venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.
TPV Developer meetings are generally held on alternate Fridays each month, although dates are not currently listed in the SL Public Calendar. The venue for meetings is at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
Both meetings are generally chaired by Vir Linden, and are led using Voice, although attendees can use either Voice or text to provide input / feedback (with text generally being the preferred medium).
SL Viewer
Viewer Updates
Release viewer: version version 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF Update RC viewer, issued July 24 and promoted August 10.
Apple Notarisation Fix RC viewer, version 6.4.23.564172, issued September 24 – this should remove the warning messages which are currently popping up.
Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.23.564063, on September 21.
Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.23.562623, dated September 17, issued September 20
Project viewers:
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.4.23.563579, issued September 3.
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
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 Apple Notarisation Fix RC viewer is liable to be the next viewer promoted to de facto release status.
The combined Maintenance RC viewer will likely be the viewer to follow it to release status in a couple of weeks.
The Legacy Profiles viewer is still awaiting some simulator-side updates that have (again?) dropped back behind other simulator work. As such, it is described as being “kind-of on ice” at the moment.
The focus on viewer work is squarely on performance improvements.
With the initial deployment of multi-factor authentication (see here and my own blog post for more), the Lab’s viewer teams are discussing how it can be added to the viewer without massively impacting the user experience.
Let’s Encrypt Certificates Issue
As per this Grid Status Report, an expiration issue with Let’s Encrypt certificates resulted in in-world LSL scripts making HTTP calls to websites secured with a Let’s Encrypt certificate failing. This particularly impacted a number of popular Second Life merchants and assorted pet / breedable systems, etc.
After extensive investigation a fix was deployed to a small number of simulators overnight on Thursday, September 30th / Friday October 1st, which appeared to work. As a result, the main grid (Agni) has been subject to a rolling restart to fully deploy the fix to all regions. At the time of writing, this deployment was still in progress.
In Brief
Vir Linden was out for both meetings, each of which was somewhat briefer than usual, with the CCUG in particular primarily being a WIBNI style of meeting (WIBNI = “wouldn’t it be nice if”), rather than dealing with actual projects / work in progress.
[CCUG] The Graphics team currently remain primarily focused on drilling down into the data being gathered by the Tracy debugger / system analyser, which is available internally to the Lab.
This has already revealed a number of high latency artefacts within the main loop rendering code, which the graphics team will be looking to eliminate or move to their own threads or update loop so they no longer interfere with the core rendering loop.
The code for Tracy is liable to be merged into another viewer rather than appearing in a dedicated project or RC viewer.
[CCUG] Some of the discussion was around improving performance / simplifying clothing options. In the latter regard, Mayastar 7.0 will include an automatic alpha baking for clothes. Some final touch-up (by the creator) may be needed via Maya after the option has been used, but it offer an improvement in wearing clothes made via Maya / Mayastar.
[TPVD] The Catznip team have been continuing to work with adjusting the viewer so it simply does not render Linden Water where it is not visible (e.g. when hidden by terrain), which has been yielding significant viewer FPS increases. LL have indicated they have found it difficult to get a good occlusion culling result with horizon water and also in trying to programmatically deal with water that may / may not be visible (Catznip appear to have “just” gone for across-the-board occlusion culling). Both LL and Catznip will discussing ideas / approaches.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 28th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary. Note this summary focuses on the key points of the meeting; where there is something to report, the video should be referred to should full details of the meeting wish to be reviewed.
There are no planned deployments for the SLS Main channel.
The RC channels will be subject to a rolling restart on Wednesday, September 29th. Due to technical constraints this, will update the simulator version number to 564195, however there are no changes in code or configuration from the currently deployed version 563375.
SL Viewer
There have been no updates to the current crop on official viewers to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:
Release viewer: version version 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF Update RC viewer, issued July 24 and promoted August 10.
Apple Notification Fix RC viewer, version 6.4.23.564172, issued September 24 – this should remove the warning messages which are currently popping up.
Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.23.564063, on September 21.
Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.23.562623, dated September 17, issued September 20
Project viewers:
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.4.23.563579, issued September 3.
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
In Brief
Some are reporting an uptick in 502 responses to outgoing HTTP requests that is described as “not common, but common enough” to cause concern, although the requests usually go through as expected on retry. The uptick appears to coincide with the updates to HTTP-out proxies. The usual Jiras on target URL, source regions/objects, owners, etc., have been requested from those experiencing these issues.
Some are also reporting issues with texture loading taking longer of late, including textures that should be locally cached by the viewer. The simulator and messaging is being pointed to as a potential culprit, although a) this shouldn’t affect cached textures; b) aside from the initial object and texture information, textures (as with all assets) come via the CDN, not through the simulator.
It’s been suggested that changes to the Interest List in support of the 360º Capture project viewer could be the cause, and this hasn’t been ruled out.
Similar issues had been noted with Firestorm following its release. However these have tended to be in terms of initial viewer start-up at the start of a session (when VFS load seems to take abnormally long), but these do not appear to be related to this issue, as this appears to occur across all viewer flavours – official and TPV.
Again, Jira reports on the issue giving viewer details, locations and actual timing snapshots (using ALT-CTRL-3 to display the texture queue) would be useful to the Lab. Also tests using the TextureTest2 and MeshTest2 regions on Aditi (which are structured to test exactly this sort of thing) that can be reported would also be useful.
BUG-231113 “PRIM_POINT_LIGHT sets the wrong colour (not a duplicate)” has been accepted (and pending more detailed investigation). It is not clear if the viewer is amending the script-supplied light parameters prior to sending them to the simulator, or whether the change is on the simulator side of things.
The last part of the meeting comprised grumbling about blog reports apparently not being addressed (or possibly more correctly, not being addressed in a time frame those experiencing an issue – which may not be everyone or even a majority or users – want it to be addressed). In response, it was pointed out that there is a lot of working going on under-the-hood that is not user-visible, but nevertheless is of a high priority.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week ending Sunday, September 26th
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 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF update viewer, dated July 24th, promoted August 10th – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Apple Notarisation Fix RC viewer, version 6.4.23.564172, issued on September 24th – this should remove the warning messages which are currently popping up.
Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.23.564063, on September 21st.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 21st, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary. Note this summary focuses on the key points of the meeting; where there is something to report, the video should be referred to should full details of the meeting wish to be reviewed.
There is little to report, given the meeting was also another Solstice party.
Server Deployments
At the time of writing, the server deployment thread had not been published.
All remaining simhosts were updated to simulator release 563375 on Tuesday, September 21st, 2021, the maintenance release containing changes related to llChar(), llUnsit() and extended internal logging.
There are no planned RC deployments during the week.
HTTP-Out Proxy
Monty Linden deployed the new HTTP-out proxies in week #36. It wasn’t entirely glitch-free (but not as bad as the August attempt), with issues occurring in a part of the configuration that didn’t allow for immediate correction. Monty hopes that the lessons learnt with make future deployments smoother.
SL Viewer
The Simplified Cache viewer updated to version 6.4.23.562623 on Friday, September 17th (issued Monday, September 20th).
The rest of the pipelines remain as:
Release viewer: version version 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF Update RC viewer, issued July 24 and promoted August 10.
Maintenance RC viewer version 6.4.23.563789, issued on September 16 – combines the Grappa and Happy Hours RCs.
Project viewers:
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.4.23.563579, issued September 3.
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
In Brief
Some are reporting issues of not being able to easily teleport back to a location previously visited in a session, a similar problems that manifested for some using Malwarebytes. In this case, the issue seems to be exceptionally slow teleport when trying to go back, with some incidence of the viewer shutting down.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week ending Sunday, September 19th
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 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF update viewer, dated July 24th, promoted August 10th – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Maintenance RC viewer version 6.4.23.563789, issued on September 16th – combines the Grappa and Happy Hours RCs.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 