Category: SL Tech

2022 SUG meetings week #8: summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Amore Italiano, January 2022 – blog post

The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms a summary of the items discussed, and a video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

The week #7 Main channel restart and RC channels deployment were described as “bumpy”, prompting the Lab to dig into things. It is believed the cause of the problems has been identified (the failure of one of the tools used by the Lab) and a fix put in place. To this end:

  • There was no deployment / restart of the Main channel on Tuesday, February 22nd.
  • Wednesday, February 23rd will likely see a limited restart “on just one or two small RC channels.”

Available Official Viewers

The J&K Maintenance viewer updated to version 6.5.3.568554 on Tuesday, February 22nd.

This list reflects the rest of the official viewers currently available.

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.2.567427 – Mac Voice hotfix viewer, January 13 – no change.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Improvements project viewer version 6.6.0.567604, dated January 24.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • 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

  • At the week #7 meeting, a suggestion put forward (by a user) was to have a vehicle given the lowest access permissions among those avatars seated on it. That way, if any agent attached to an object cannot enter a parcel, the vehicle would treat that parcel as a solid obstruction – see feature request BUG-231802. At this meeting,
    • Rider Linden indicated the Lab is considering ending the ban line info for an entire region to the viewer  earlier as part of the parcel flag info.
    • The request is listed as Awaiting Review, but Rider intimated to could well enter the queue of work for the Lab.
  • A request was made for the ability to put objects inside the contents of child links (such as animations) and be able to read it and play that animation stored in the child link (see BUG-231848). Rider Linden noted that “it is an interesting idea but it is going to take some thought.”
  • A request was made for the ability to pitch shift sounds (similar to SVC-4373). This would have multiple potential benefits from avoiding the need to upload multiple sound in order to create a meaningful pitch change through to enabling a grater range of musical instruments in SL. As SVC Jiras are no longer active, a request was made for a new feature request on the idea.
  • There was a lot of general discussion on WIMNIs for SL and what might be done by way of improvements to things like region crossings, etc., but nothing that is currently being actioned as a project, so please refer to the video below for these items.

2022 viewer release summaries week #7

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week ending Sunday, February 20th, 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: Mac Voice hotfix viewer 6.5.2.567427, dated January 13 – no change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • No updates.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

  • No updates.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • Radegast updated to version 2.39 on February 17.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2022 CCUG and TPVD meetings week #7 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Perpetuity, January 2022 – blog post

The following notes were taken from:

  • My audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, February 17th 2022 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and meeting dates can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.
  • My audio recording and the Video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this piece) from the Third-Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting on Friday, February 18th, 2022 at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • It is a summary of the key topics discussed, and in the case of the TPVD meeting, timestamps to the relevant point of the video are included.

Available Viewers

[Video: 0:16-3:26 + notes from CCUG]

This list reflects the currently available official Second Life viewers.

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.2.567427 – Mac Voice hotfix viewer, January 13 – no change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance J&K RC viewer, version 6.5.3.567451, issued on January 20th.
    • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Improvements project viewer version 6.6.0.567604, dated January 24.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • 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 Maintenance J&K RC viewer is still the next in line for promotion to de facto release status.
    • Progress of this viewer had been delayed due to the viewer updater needing to be updated from Python 2 to Python 3.
    • This change has now been made, and the viewer is ready to be issued as an updated RC viewer.
  • Work continues on the Performance Improvements project viewer to lift that to RC status.
    • It was found that bump (normal) maps were being processed on the main viewer thread, causing the viewer to exceed 60 fps with Vsync enabled (which should hold it to 60fps), causing frame jitter. Bump map processing has therefore been moved to a separate thread.
    • There has been a pass to improve hardware compatibility with AMD GPUs.
    • An issue with rigged meshes failing to render in the thumbnail panels when editing an avatar’s shape has been addressed,
    • This could be the first in a series of viewers produced under the Performance Improvements banner, with the Lab already discussing additional improvements that could be made in future versions.
  • The Performance Floater viewer is being updated with further options to manually adjust viewer settings to help maintain frame rates.

MFA Viewer

[Video: 3:58-6:43]

  • As noted in the week #5 summary, multi-factor authentication (MFA) is coming to the viewer.
  • The viewer-side code is complete, and had been awaiting the implementation of server-side support.
  • The latter has now been deployed to the Main grid, so it is anticipated that an RC version of the official viewer will be available in the very near future.
  • It is  recognised that TPVs will need time to integrate the necessary viewer-side code into their offerings, therefore:
    • As MFA is implemented in the official viewer, there will be a “grace” period to allow TPV adopt the viewer code.
    • During this period, users will be able to access SL on TPVs as they currently do now, regardless of whether or not they have opted-in to MFA.
    • After this “grace” period, all users who have opted in to MFA will be required to authenticate themselves when using the viewer to log-in to Second Life (with the use 30-day period of valid authentication, as per secondlife.com MFA).
    • Please refer to my week #5 summary for the full list of notes on MFA in the viewer.

In Brief

Content Creation Meeting

  • Honouring joint rotation at mesh upload:
    • There are a number of long-standing bugs and requests concerning support (or lack that of) for maintaining mesh joint rotations at upload – currently, overrides are only provided for position and scaling.
    • The Collada .DAE file format does allow for rotation to be maintained through a number of ways, but currently SL doesn’t support all of them – hence when joint rotations tend to be ignored.
    • The general discussion leaned towards having the ability to override join rotation at upload would be a nice to have, with the view from LL that if done, it would be a check box at upload, so it would only apply to new content being uploaded, and not affect existing content.
  • Preference over the above was expressed for the ability to scale bones via animations.
    • This could allow for things like animals to increase in size as they grow from kitten / cub / pup, etc., to adulthood; possible improvements to clothing; enabling more complex avatar animations etc.
    • One potential issue with this is that scaling by animation might / will conflict with the skeletal sliders.
    • Providing animation scaling adds a further point of complexity, presenting 3 points at which scale is being impacted: within the mesh (from values at upload), trough the application of animations and via the shape sliders. Ergo, some form of ordering hierarchy is potentially required to avoid conflicts between the three.
    • No conclusions were drawn on this in terms of possible implementation or further investigation of options.
  • BUG-225519 “Mesh Uploader] Add option for automatic convex hull physics shape”.
    • Sparked an extended conversation on physics shapes and LI – not all of which, I confess, I could not entirely follow in listening back through the audio, as some of it depended on some in-world testing – and I was absent from my screen through the majority of the meeting, so did not get to see the in-world examples being manipulated.
    • Essentially, the feature request calls for the provision of simpler physics shapes to be available for use when uploading a mesh than are currently available – the simplest being a “cube” mesh physics asset. This is something Firestorm already provides:
Physics models offer through the Firestorm mesh uploader – the shapes being continued within the viewer for application. Credit: Beq Janus
    • The conversation also folded into it requests to have direct access to Havok (the physics engine) primitive physics shapes (sphere, cube, cylinder, etc., and the ability to upload them.
    •  For now, a contribution of the code used by Firestorm has been offered / requested.
    • This is turn lead to a discussion on, if implemented by LL, whether the default upload physics shape (Convex Hull) should be changed to “Cube” – with the preference being to leave it as is, although it was noted that with PBR set for future implementation, the upload mesh form may at some point need to be changed.
    • Given the confusion evident within the discussion, this also perhaps points to the need for the uploader to have a link to relevant and maintained documentation on best practices for mesh uploads, physics, etc.
  • The end of the meeting featured a further request for materials support for Bakes on Mesh (BoM)
    • This is something which, as noted in the past, would require a not insignificant extension to how bakes are handled, together with and expansion of the Bake Service itself – particularly if it was expected that individual layers would have an associated normal and specular channel associated with them.
    • A suggested alternative would be to have a single normal and single specular channel then is applied to the entire bake. While this might work for specularity, it’s not clear how this would work with a normal maps and be effective when trying to define different fabrics through the use of normals.
    • Currently, LL have no direct plans to implement materials for BoM.

TPV Developer Meeting

  • BUG-225696 “All offline inventory offers from scripted objects are lost” is to be the subject of a simulator-side project that is now “gearing up” to fix it “once and for all”, which is “coming for a near value of ‘Soon™’.
  • There are a lot of “new initiatives” in the pipeline with LL beyond those outlined in things like the 2021 year-end review, but nothing that has reached a point where it can be discussed in detail at TPVD (or other) meetings.

2022 SUG meetings week #7: summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Bordeaux, France, January 2022 – blog post

The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 15th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms a summary of the items discussed, and a video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

  • There was no deployment to the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, February 15th, 2022, but the simhosts were restarted.
  • Wednesday, February 16th should see the RC channels updated with simulator release 568051, postponed from week #6, and which includes a series of bug fixes (including one for BUG-230771 “llRequestUsername returns invalid data when invalid key is provided”) and adds a feature to LSL: OBJECT_ACCOUNT_LEVEL flag to llGetObjectDetails(): when called on an agent in the region, returns the agent’s premium status.

Available Official Viewers

This list reflects those viewers available via the first four links in the LL Viewer Resources section, below.

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.2.567427 – Mac Voice hotfix viewer, January 13 – no change.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.5.3.567451, issued on January 20th, combining the Jenever and Koaliang Maintenance viewers.
    • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Improvements project viewer version 6.6.0.567604, dated January 24.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • 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

  • A request was (again) made to have simulator behaviour change such that vehicles hitting a parcel ban  / ban lines are “bounced” (much like they do on reaching an edge of the grid) rather than avatars being unseated / dumped and the vehicle returned to the owner’s Lost and Found.
    • This has been requested before, but rejected.
    • During the meeting, the idea was referred to as something that “might be possible”, although it would require protocol changes, if tackled.
    • An alternative suggestion put forward (by a user) was to have a vehicle given the lowest access permissions among those avatars seated on it. That way, if any agent attached to an object cannot enter a parcel, the vehicle would treat that parcel as a solid obstruction. This was seen as potentially more “doable” idea, and a formal Jira Feature Request was asked for – see BUG-231802.
  • A request was made for a grid-wide KVP (or KVP-style) database (as is available to Premium members under the Experience Keys system) to be made available that could be used as a permanent data store (see BUG-231801) available to all who need it.
    • Some of the ideas put forward around this at the meeting included updating the script engine so that scripts can dynamically write data to note cards – something as seen as problematic by the LL or have the viewer use local storage for data generated for use by the avatar (e.g. from a HUD) – something that could be an issue if data is stored on one machine is needed when on another device.
    • Cost of storage was noted as a possible issue, with the suggestion that perhaps (and whilst not permanent) KVP-like storage could be made available along the lines of Local Textures: the data is available for use for as long as a person is logged-in, after which the storage used would be cleared.
    • A further alternative suggestion made by LL – again, note the word suggestion – was the provision of a LSL API that could be used to access AWS services like Dynamo – that is, LL supply API and data movement, users wanting to use the capability supply the account and credentials. This was suggested with an idea of soliciting feedback on the idea.
    • A suggestion was also put forward for a new asset type specifically designed for read / write data storage, but capped at (say) 64 KB.
    • Again, this was a discussion – there are currently no plans to implement any of the above.
  • An issue with uniformly applying EEP settings across multiple regions in an estate via scripted means and smoothly applying it to avatars into and through the estate. A specific bug requiring rectification via the use of fast timers has been identified, together with a possible improvement to handling EEP settings via script. A bug report (BUG-231806) and a couple of feature requests (BUG-231807 and BUG-231808) have been filed on the matters – please refer to them and the video for more.
  • There was a lot of text chat around Avatar Expressiveness – however, as most of this was was subjective and the Lab is not yet in a position to provide further information on the capability, I’ll leave it to the video, below.

2022 viewer release summaries week #6

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week ending Sunday, February 13th, 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: Mac Voice hotfix viewer 6.5.2.567427, dated January 13 – no change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • No updates.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

  • Cool VL updated to version 1.28.2.59 (Stable), February 12 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2022 SUG meetings week #6: summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
LANA, January 2022 – click any image for full size

The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 8th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms a summary of the items discussed, and a video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

  • There was no deployment to the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, February 8th, 2022, but the simhosts were restarted.
  • Wednesday, February 9th should see the RC channels updated with simulator release 568051, which includes a series of bug fixes (including one for BUG-230771 “llRequestUsername returns invalid data when invalid key is provided”) and adds a feature to LSL: OBJECT_ACCOUNT_LEVEL flag to llGetObjectDetails(): when called on an agent in the region, returns the agent’s premium status.

Please refer to the forum Server Deployment thread for further updates.

Available Official Viewers

This list reflects those official viewers currently available.

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.2.567427 – Mac Voice hotfix viewer, January 13 – no change.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.5.3.567451, issued on January 20th, combining the Jenever and Koaliang Maintenance viewers.
    • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Improvements project viewer version 6.6.0.567604, dated January 24.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

Multi-Factor Authentication

  • Following the announcement that LL are developing viewer-side multi-factor authentication (MFA)  – see my week #5 TPV Developer meeting summary – there have been renewed calls for LL to broaden the means by which MFA can be used beyond the need for a phone phone an authenticator app.
  • These requests are for e-mail support as a bare minimum.
  • However, and to point out yet again:
    • MFA with SL is opt-in, rather than opt-out.
    • For those who wish to use it, the Lab have provided a bare-bones means for users to use MFA using a unique key reference available via their account dashboard at secondlife.com. See: Second Life Multi-Factor Authentication: the What and How.

In Brief

  • There was further discussion on region crossings and future work. A lot of this centred on corner crossings.
    • In short, SL doesn’t really support corner crossings (avatars  / vehicle must first pass from the “departing” region to one sitting to one of the cardinal points, and then from that region to the “destination” region).
    • This can result in a lot of timing issues and data hand-off, etc.
    • LL acknowledge more work needs to be done in terms of better handling, data checking, etc., between the involved simulators and the viewer.
    • Currently, no significant project in planned for region crossing work – which does not men it will not be looked at.