Category: SL Tech

2021 viewer release summaries week #24

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

Updates from the week ending Sunday, June 20th

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: Love Me Render (LMR) 5, version 6.4.19.560171, dated May 27th, promoted June 7th – No change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Project UI RC viewer updated to version 6.4.20.560520 on June 14th.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • Kokua updated to 6.4.19.47472 (no RLV) and 6.4.19.50641 (RLV variants) on June 14th – release notes.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2021 CCUG meeting week #24 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Nelipot, March 2021 – 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, June 17th, 2021. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar and the venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates for the viewer since Monday, June 14th, leaving the official viewer pipelines as follows:

  • Release viewer: LMR 5 viewer, version 6.4.19.560171, dated May 27th, promoted June 7th – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Project UI RC viewer, version 6.4.20.560520 dated June 14th.
    • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.19.559726, dated May 19th.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26th, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9th, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22nd, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • The Project UI RC viewer will be the next to be promoted to de facto release status, and this will be in the “next week or two”.
  • The Mac notifications viewer has still yet to surface as a either a project or RC viewer.
  • The revised simplified cache viewer RC is returning to LL’s QA team, and if it passes through testing, should be appearing as a new RC, but this may not be for another couple of weeks.
  • A further CEF (Chrome Embedded Framwork) viewer for web content – media streaming, etc., – is also in the works, that should support more streaming / media codecs and fix a number of streaming-related issues.

ARCTan

Summary: An attempt to re-evaluate avatar rendering costs and the cost of in-world scene rendering, with the current focus on avatar rendering cost / impact, with the in-world scene rendering / LI to be tackled at some point in the future.

  • Work is continuing on the new performance floater. This pulls together information from various menus / debugs to display useable information on avatars / attachments that are heavy in rendering cost, and what can be done.
    • This work is currently separate to the work on revising that actual formulas used for calculating avatar complexity
    • It had been indicated the UI work could appear in the viewer before the avatar ARCTan calculations are updated to more accurately reflect the cost of rendering avatars.
    • However, there is a concern that if this is the case, the new floater will simply be ignored when made available, and will continue to be be ignored after the calculations have been revised.
    • It has therefore been suggested it would be better to revise the calculations first, and then release the viewer with the new information floater and explanations as to why it should be taken note of. LL have indicated they may consider doing this.
  • There is an on-going debate as to how useful information / self-regulating exercises like ARCTan are, compared to the enforcement of hard limits.
    • Self-regulating exercises (users making use of the information provided by their viewer) tend to be ignored (e.g. the Jelly Dolls complexity slide is generally left ramped up to the highest), thus defeating the purpose of such exercises.
    • However, enforcement of hard limits runs the risk of causing a high level of upset (and possible quitting) of a good portion of the user base when they find they can no longer overload their avatars with high-vertices/high texture load/heavily scripted attachments.
    • To  avoid the latter, it has been suggested the viewer should be able to automatically reduce avatar rendering to progressively lower LOD settings based on the load they place on the local system, rather than purely by distance from the camera.
  • It’s also bee suggested that for meshes in general, Second Life should have a robust auto-LODing system at upload.

In Brief

  • A long-standing issue for content creators producing mesh linksets for upload to SL, is that while they could give each element in the linkset a unique name for easier re-assembly post-upload, following upload, only the first element of the linkset would retain its name – the rest would be converted to “Object”, making re-linking an onerous task.
  • BUG-202864 “Change Mesh Uploader to preserve Scene File object names when a full linkset is uploaded” was raised in 2018 as a request for this to be addressed, and a viewer-side change to support this was implemented thereafter.
  • However, as per the week #22 CCUG, the server-side update also required to support this was not made, and the matter slipped off of LL’s radar.
  • Following that meeting, Vir Linden referred the matter to Rider Linden on the simulator team, and he has reported that:
    • The required server-side support will be going to RC, hopefully in week #25 (commencing Monday, June 21st).
    • In the interim, those wishing to test the capability can do so via the Preflight group of regions over the weekend.

2021 SUG meeting week #24 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Bella’s Glade, March 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 15th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes relate to the core points of discussion; other topics may have ben raised without specific feedback from LL as actionable items, so  please refer to the video at the end of this report for the full meeting and all points covered.

Server Deployments

No deployments are planned for the week, other than those related to the SL18B regions. Restarts will be taking place for those servers that have not done so for the last 10-ish days. The (non-)deployment notes are here.

Week #25 (commencing Monday, June 21st) should include a deployment to the RC channels.

SL Viewer

The Project UI RC viewer updated to version 6.4.20.560520 on June 14th.

The rest of the official viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release viewer: LMR 5 viewer, version 6.4.19.560171, dated May 27, promoted June 7 – no change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.19.559726, dated May 19.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

In Brief

  • Group chat remains unsteady, but the Lindens are planning for additional work in an attempt to stabilise things further.
  • The Aditi inventory syncing / log-in issues continue. The root cause appears to have been identified, but fixing it has been referred to as “complex”, although the hope is the issue fixed Soon™. Mazidox Linden further added:
I can’t really get into details because it involves the insides of how logins work. But the best thing you can do on Aditi is log in using an alt with a tiny inventory. That’s more likely to succeed than your account with all the stuff you have on Agni. (The actual issue has nothing to do with inventory, but that’s the only thing you can control from your side to make it more likely to succeed.)
  • Scripts and resources: the core of the meeting revolved around the issue of script usage and its impact on server resource use and simulator performance – notably, but not exclusively – with regards to in-world scripts and the impact of idle scripts. In brief:
    •  Onus tends to be put on avatar scripts (which do have an impact – most notably when an avatar is entering a region and all the data related is being unpacked and all its associated scripts are re-started.
    • However, in-world scripts, even those that are idling, can have an impact on performance. Whilst action has been taken to ease some of this, the impact of have thousands of scripts in a region can and will have a cumulative effect on simulator performance.
    • How better to manage things is a matter of much debate. Should script resources be increased? Would it be better to allow larger scripts rather than making people split functionality across multiple scripts? Do large, multi-function scripts  run better (or worse) than a plethora of smaller scripts doing the same thing? Would it be possible to restructure script handling / LSL capabilities such that scripts that only need to be active in the presence of an avatar can be automatically be disabled when no avatars are within a (creator-defined) proximity, etc.
    • This discussion starts around 22 minutes into the meeting, and full context can be gained through the meeting video below.

Video

The following video of the meeting is courtesy of Pantera Północy.

2021 viewer release summaries week #23

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

Updates from the week ending Sunday, June 13th

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: Love Me Render (LMR) 5, version 6.4.19.560171, dated May 27th, promoted June 7th – NEW,
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Project UI RC viewer updated to version 6.4.20.560422, on June 8th.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • Kokua updated to 6.4.19.47472 (no RLV) and 6.4.19.50641 (RLV variants) on June 14th – release notes.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2021 TPV Developer meeting week #23 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
TokSik Jello, March 2021 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, June 11th,, 2021.

These meetings are generally held every other week.  They are recorded by Pantera Północy, and her video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this report – my thanks to her for allowing me to do so – and it is used with a transcript of the chat log from the meeting and my own audio recording to produce these notes.

SL Viewer

[Video: 0:00-3:26]

There have been no updates for the viewer since the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as follows:

  • Release viewer: LMR 5 viewer, version 6.4.19.560171, dated May 27, promoted June 7 – 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 UI viewer updated to version 6.4.20.560422, dated June 14.
    • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.19.559726, dated May 19.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • The New User Experience project viewer will be the next viewer to be promoted to de facto release status.
  • The Legacy Profiles viewer is still having UI updates made, but is expected to go to RC status when the next update is issued.
  • The notifications fix for Mac systems is still waiting its turn to be made publicly available.

Land and L$ In-Viewer Purchases Issue

[Video 0:58-2:30]

Wednesday, June 9th saw issues occur with in-viewer Linden Dollar and land purchases. Whilst resolved within hours, the issue was traced back to an overly aggressive series of checks the viewer was carrying on on the various software certificates used by Linden Lab. This caused the viewer to throw a wobbly when encountering a new certificate that did not quite meet the expected format.

The certificate involved was massaged so as not to get the viewer upset, fixing the issue; however, in order to avoid similar situations in the future, the Lab plan to implement a viewer-side change to the way the viewer carries out such checks. This change will be released as a part of the normal Maintenance RC viewer updates.

In Brief

  • There have been some questions raised about Vivox end-of-lifing the current Vivox 4 Voice system in favour of the more recent Vivox 5. Linden Lab is not aware of this happening any time in the future,  but is aware that due to the way Vivox 5.x operates on different platforms, when such a change eventually comes to pass, it might required some significant changes in the manner in which SLvoice.EXE interacts with the viewer.

2021 SUG meeting week #23 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Drune Diesel, March 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 8th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes relate to the core points of discussion; other topics may have ben raised without specific feedback from LL as actionable items, so  please refer to the video at the end of this report for the full meeting and all points covered.

Server Deployments

At the time of writing, there had (again) been no server deployment thread available for review. However:

  • Tuesday, June 8th saw servers on the SLS Main channel updated with simulator release 560108, previously deployed to the RC channels. It includes a new LSL function: llGetInventoryAcquireTime(), which returns the “Acquired” timestamp that inventory name was added to the object’s inventory.
  • There is no planned deployment to any of the RC channels planned for Wednesday, June 9th.

SL Viewer

  • The Love Me Render 5 (LMR 5) viewer, version 6.4.19.560171 and dated May 27th, was promoted to de facto release status.
  • The Project UI RC viewer updated to version 6.4.20.560422 on June 8th, bringing it to parity with the new de facto release viewer.

The rest of the official viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.19.559726, dated May 19.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

In Brief

  • The core of the meeting focused on scripts: the need for large scripts, improved script management (including reducing the current cap on avatar scripts – particularly if large scripts are allowed), and generally improving script resources. There is currently no commitment from LL on any of the items raised in the text chat. Please refer to the meeting video for more.
  • Rider Linden indicated that his focus remains on updating the monitoring tools used by the lab to leverage those offered by AWS.

Video

The following video of the meeting is courtesy of Pantera Północy.