The Concierge & Land user group meeting is generally held on the 4th Wednesday of the month “intended for discussion & education of SL topics such as current known issues and bugs, project viewers and new features, and general Mainland issues.” Attending the Wednesday, 26th January, 2022 meeting from the Lab were Wendi, Izzy and Vix Linden.
Please note, this is a summary, not a full transcript – so only those topics related to SL services, etc., managed / provided by the Lab on which there is general discussion and feedback from the Lab staff at the meeting are recorded below. For general audience comments, non-LL topics (such as TPVs) please refer to the video by Pantera embedded at the end of this article, and my thanks to her as always for recording the meetings.
2021 Review of the Year
[Video: 2:55-6:12]
Vix Linden raised the Lab’s December 2021 blog post looking back at 2021 and ahead to 2022.
- Highlighted the upcoming new features – avatar expressiveness, Premium Plus, Mobile solution new user avatar customisation, script improvements, etc.
- Noted that there are no ETAs for any of the work (although improvements in scripts running on simulators has been an improvement due to the recent tool update), as it is all either in progress or in the planning stages.
- Pointed to the fact that with the Uplift transitional work completed, 2021 allows LL to focus on bedding-in services on AWS and starting to offer performance improvements.
High Fidelity Spatial Audio and Vivox
[Video: 6:34-8:52]
- Following the announcement that High Fidelity Inc, has invested in Linden Research (money, skills sets and patents) there was speculation – emphasis intentional, as some of it has been on this blog – that High Fidelity’s spatial audio might at some future point be integrated into Second Life.
- In response to questions on this, the general feedback from the Lindens at the meeting was that this currently isn’t being planned or discussion in-house, and that as such, voice will remain on Vivox for at least the foreseeable future.
Simulator Updates
[Video: 20:44-23:03]
- Vix re-iterated that the script performance improvements currently being seen is part of an overall “re-tooling” project that has been underway for some time that has involved changes to the hardware configurations used by the simhost servers and changes to the simulator code to better leverage the AWS servers and their supporting infrastructure.
- In short: lower script time in the simulator stats (CTRL-SHIFT-1) – so 5ms instead of 15ms = script run improvements.
- As noted via the official blog post on the subject and via my weekly Simulator User Group summaries, this change should manifest in better script run times and improved overall performance within a region.
- A cautionary note with this is that with these improvements may come increased throttling elsewhere within the code (e.g. such as with, but not limited to, remote services accessed via llHTTPRequest), or where regions were already until a heavy script load.
- Also referenced the deprecation of various older protocols (e.g. 1.0 and TLS 1.1, libopenmetaverse).
In Brief
- [11:52-12:33] The research questionnaire referenced in this official blog post were mentioned, and the fact that the e-mails containing it (for those who receive them) will be coming from research@secondlife.com, which is a legitimate Lab e-mail address. It was also stressed that the Lab will never request user divulge things like account passwords within this type of e-mail contact.
- [16:22-16:50] Mention is made of the Tilia Inc., / Unity partnership announced on Wednesday, January 26th that will see Unity make Tilia’s services available to their community of developers – see the official press release and my own blog post for more.
- [17:50-20:00] background was given to the Lab’s approach to employing outside of the United States, having offices elsewhere in the world, etc. The comments were predicated on some noting that Tilia Inc., (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Linden Research) has / has had a registered office in the UK since 2017. This segued into a discussion of LL providing 24/7 coverage by staff and the cost of doing so.
- [31:07-32:10] A re-iteration to the changes made of off-line e-mail notification preferences (also see: Lab announces change to e-mail preferences for Group notices), and which came into effect from December 15th, 2021 – with a note that future options to control receipt of certain notifications via e-mail might be added at some point in the future.
- There have been some reports that altering the settings can prevent the receipt of all off-line notifications via e-mail – which may well be confusion over setting the check boxes; a request was made for people to double-check their settings (links in both blog posts above) if they are encountering problems in receiving off-line notifications.
- [35:19-36:30] A reminder that the Valentines Shop and Hop event is on the horizon (Wednesday, February 2nd through Tuesday, February 15th, 2022), and that there will likely be the usual Valentines themed Last Names, the Hug a Linden, etc., activities, and so on.
- This included a reminder that suggestions for possible Last Names can be submitted through this form.
- [37:52-42:05] There are currently no known plans to extended the region / parcel ban list to support large numbers of names – those feeling it needs to be extended are asked to file a feature request jira.
- Izzy Linden also indicated he has submitted an internal request to have listed automatically updated on the basis of account status (e.g. for accounts flagged as Closed are automatically removed from ban lists).
- Izzy also warned about the “airlock” issue (as Izzy calls it) that could accidentally exclude people from region / parcel access (wherein there are allow / ban lists at both the region level and the parcel level, both of which have to be checked, but before the check is complete, users on slower connections time-out on their attempt to reach the region / parcel and so cannot reach it).
- [54:50-56:40] In response to a question on the general mood at the Lab in the wake of recent changes / announcement, all they Lindens at the meeting indicated that they are personally “very charged” (positive) towards the direction in which SL is moving (including the move to AWS and what is being planned / implemented).
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 