Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week ending Sunday, May 23rd
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: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23, promoted April 29 – no change.
Release channel cohorts:
Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559046 on May 19th.
Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, updated to version 6.4.19.559726 on May 19th.
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, May 20th, 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
Wednesday, May 19th saw two RCs updated:
The Fernet Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559726. This version includes a set of Voice updates intended to reduce the number of drop-outs experienced when using the Voice plug-in. The full details of these updates can be found in the release notes and in the LL technology blog post.
The Love Me Render 5 (LMR5) viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559046.
The rest of the official viewers in the pipelines remain as:
Release viewer: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23rd, promoted April 29th.
Release channel cohorts:
Project UI viewer, version 6.4.19.559612, issued May 14th.
Project viewers:
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26th.
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
Both the updated Maintenance RC and LMR 5 are the front runners for promotion to de facto release status. From Vir’s comments, there appears to be a lean towards promoting the Maintenance viewer.
Whichever f the above is promoted first may see the Project UI RC viewer leapfrog the other in being the next viewer set for promotion.
LMR 6 is continuing through bug fixing work and being prepared for QA testing. It’s unlikely to appear until LMR 5 has been promoted.
The Legacy Profiles viewer is going through a further UI clean-up, and should be progressing towards either a further project viewer release or possibly an RC release in the not too distant future.
The simplified cache viewer is now being updated with suggestions for improvements submitted via Jira, and a new version should be appearing “pretty soon”.
It’s still hoped the at Apple notifications fixes will be appearing in an RC viewer in the near future as well.
Due to the volume of viewers entering the backlog awaiting release, LL is considering merging some of the upcoming RC versions in a bid to reduce the overall number that could end up in flight, and ease the pressure on the release cycle. This will depend on how suitable different RCs are for merging with one another.
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.
The UI updates for how avatar complexity information is presented to users will likely be made available as a project / RC viewer separately to any updates to the ARC calculations, so when it appears it will display values based on the current calculation formula. The updates to the formula itself will be then be implemented separately as the project progresses.
Jira Note – Reports Failing
There have been instances of reports filed via the Jira erasing the descriptive text when filed. Until the problem is resolved, the recommended workaround is to copy the descriptive text fields to a notepad app or similar, then check the report after submission. If the text is missing, the report can be edited and the information cut-and-pasted back into it.
In Brief
Account / inventory syncing between Agni (the Main grid) and Aditi (the Beta grid) remains broken, but LL are working to fix it. One aspect of the issue appears to be inventory size on Aditi accounts.
As a temporary workaround, it has been suggested that those who can access the beta grid and who have very large inventories, consider deleting unwanted items from their Aditi inventory (not their main grid inventory), as this seems to improve the chances of a successful log-in.
In 2019, a viewer-side change was made to ensure individual objects in a mesh linkset upload would retain their original name (rather than all being converted to “Object” with the exception of the first object in the linkset). However, this change is still awaiting server-side support in order to work, and there is currently no ETA on inplementation.
There have been requests for additional Bakes on Mesh AUXiliary texture channels. However, there is reluctance at the Lab to do so without a substantial use case, as it would require an extensive overhaul of the Bake Service to accommodate the additional channels, which is not something LL wants to contemplate at present.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 18th, 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 been no server deployment thread available for review.
Tuesday, May 18th saw no deployment to servers on the Main SLS channel.
Wednesday, May 19th should see some of the RC channels updated with the new llOrd, llChar and llHash LSL capabilities. A further change is that the updated simulator no longer reports child agents as part of agents, as it has been doing so inconsistently.
The remainder will keep to release 559679 with the llOpenFloater() function intended for use with Linden-owned Experiences – see my week #18 SUG summary for more.
LlOrd() will return the ordinal of the first character in a string, llChar() given an integer will return a single character string, and llHash() is a non-cryptographic 32 bit hash. I was looking for a way to just have an integer that had a reasonable change of being unique for an arbitrary string.
Use case I can see: Given an owner of two objects I want to select a chat channel with a low probability of colliding with other agents in the area.
SL Viewer
The start of the week has seen no updates to the current crop of official viewers, leaving the pipelines as follows:
Release viewer: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23, promoted April 29 – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Project UI viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559612, May 14.
Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.18.558365, dated April 22.
Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.18.558441, dated April 21.
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 Lab has a group working on various simulator physics issues and general health, some of which can generate errors (e.g. “Unable to create object that has caused problems in this region”). No ETA on when these might be deployed.
Thought is still being given as to how to fix the dim ambient lighting seen on the Mainland since the introduction of EEP – a problem that appears to be harder to fix than people appreciate / understand.
Questions have been asked if some of the simulator-side resource issues could be fixed if additional CPU cores could be allocated to support really busy regions – such as events, etc. Responding to this, Mazidox Linden, Lead Server QA Engineer said:
There are various hardware (and *maybe*) some software resources that can be in contention for any given set of simulators on a simhost, network, memory, CPU, IO, things like that. So allocating an additional core to a simulator fixes *maybe* one of those bottlenecks. If it’s the bottleneck affecting your performance. Which is a big if.
There have been reports of teleport failure spiking recently, including viewer disconnects. Rider Linden is hoping to poke at the teleport code some more as time allows, but it appears the issue might be a communications issue between the receiving region and the viewer. Maxidox Linden explained the matter thus:
The destination simulator knows someone is supposed to show up, so it creates some space in the receiving warehouse. No one ever arrives to fill it … Our best guess (and it is a *guess*) is that it involves the destination region and the affected viewer waiting for each other to send something first.
Video
The following video of the meeting is courtesy of Pantera Północy.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week ending Sunday, May 16th
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: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23, promoted April 29 – no chnage.
Release channel cohorts:
Project UI viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559612, May 14th.
The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, May 14th, 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.
This was perhaps the shortest TPVD meeting on record.
SL Viewer
The Project UI RC viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559612 on Friday, May 14th. The remaining viewers in the pipelines remained unchanged through the week:
Release viewer: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23rd, promoted April 29th.
Release channel cohorts:
Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.18.558365, dated April 22nd.
Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.18.558441, dated April 21rd.
Project viewers:
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26th.
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
All three RC viewers are pretty much ready to be considered for promotion to de facto release status. Of these, Maintenance Fernet now includes the fixes for helping with Voice updates, and is with the Lab’s QA team, so it could be the next in line to be promoted.
The Legacy Profiles viewer is finally receiving attention, with some cosmetic UI changes being made, after which it should be appearing as an RC viewer, rather than a project viewer.
LMR 6 is still gathering graphics bug fixes.
The Simplified Cache viewer is still awaiting its turn to re-enter the the pipelines.
The Mac notarisation fixes viewer is also awaiting a time to enter the available viewer pipelines.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 11th, 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 been no server deployment thread available for review.
Tuesday, May 11th saw no deployment to servers on the Main SLS channel previously updated to server maintenance package 558586, in week #18.
Wednesday, May 12th should see the RC channels updated to server release 559341 – for more on this, see below.
Server Update 559341
This update introduces a new Experiences-related LSL function, llOpenFloater();. When invoked, it sends a message to the owning Agent’s viewer, instructing it to open a new browser floater pointed at the URL provided by the LSL script, if the owning Agent’s viewer understands that request.
However, it is important to note that the capability is restricted to Linden-owned Experiences – which are also called privileged experiences – and (in difference to Maestro Linden’s request for feedback on wider applications found in the deployment thread) is not being opened for general use, as the Lab is aware of the potential risks in doing so (e.g. DDOSing / doxing attacks).
As the deployment thread notes, the primary reason for deploying the function is that it will be used with the upcoming work related to the new user experience, which should be deployed this summer.
Group Chat
During the meeting, Simon Linden had this to say on the subject of Group chat:
We just updated the last set of chat servers for this round. I’m not going to promise this will fix group chat, I’ve done this enough times to know that’s not good to say. But I sure hope it helps.
SL Viewer
The start of the week has seen no updates to the current crop of official viewers, leaving the pipelines as follows:
Release viewer: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23, promoted April 29 – No change.
Release channel:
Project UI viewer, version 6.4.18.558718, issued May 3.
Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.18.558365, dated April 22.
Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.18.558441, dated April 21.
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.
Video
The following video of the meeting is courtesy of Pantera Północy.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 