Category: SL Tech

2021 TPV Developer meeting week #15 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Centre for Mindfulness, February 2021 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, April 16th, 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

[0:00-3:35]

The current run of official viewers is as follows:

  • Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27 – 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 – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.18.557782, dated April 12.
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.18.557797, dated April 7.
  • 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

  • LMR 5 could now be set for promotion in the next week or so. No further active work is being carried out, and the current RC version has an “acceptable” crash rate.
  • Love Me Render 6 (LMR 6) is already in preparation with a further mix of fixes, including some that are EEP related (e.g. rendering the Moon with haze).
  • The current Maintenance RC viewer is also in good shape, and also have a further Maintenance RC rolling along behind it that is getting close to being ready for issuing.
  • The Legacy Profiles project viewer is now on hold pending the outcome of internal discussions related to it. These are related to whether or not there needs to be further UI changes within the viewer or changes made on the web side of things.
  • The Simplified Cache viewer has been overhauled, and should be re-appearing as an RC viewer very soon.
  • A viewer focused on correcting the problems of Apple notifications popping-up when trying to run the viewer on a Mac system is also getting close to appearing as a project viewer.
  • The “518” viewer (the Lab’s internal reference for an in-development viewer project) that has the UI updates specifically geared towards the new user experience changes LL have been working on is liable to be appearing “fairly Soon™”.

Fee Changes, 2FA and Map Tile Generation

[6:05-8:00 for map tile and 2FA / TPV comments]

The recently announced changes to Linden dollar “buy” fees, together with the upcoming (at some point in the future) shift to Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) has apparently given ground to worries it could spell the end of third-party viewers, and an update on map tile generation were all mentioned during the meeting.

All all three have broader interest than represented by those who follow viewer news, I’ve provided a separate summary of all three – please see: Linden Lab: L$ buy fee changes + 2FA and Map tiles news.

In Brief

  • [8:56-most of the rest of the meeting] Object spamming: the issue of widespread IM-to-e-mail spamming by a range of in-world objects (e.g. scanners that record your avatar UUID and then send out IMs on “offers” and “sales”, regardless of whether or not you’ve joined a related group) is a topic that does get periodically raised within the Lab, but tends to get pushed to one side while other issues are dealt with. It is possible something might be done to mitigate the problem, but further time is needed to determine what and how.

2021 CCUG meeting week #15 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Where Our Journey Begins, February 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, April 15th. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar, and the venue is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

The current run of official viewers is as follows:

  • Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27 – 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 – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.18.557782, dated April 12.
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.18.557797, dated April 7.
  • 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.

Graphics Work

LMR 5 may have a further update in the coming week and is now “close” to being ready for promotion as the de facto viewer. Love Me Render 6 (LMR 6) is in preparation with a further mix of fixes, including some that are EEP related (e.g. rendering the Moon with haze).

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 to be tackled at some point in the future.

The UI updates for how avatar complexity information is presented to users now looks as if it will be presented as a project / RC viewer separately to any updates to to the ARC calculations.

In Brief

  • Feature request BUG-227670 “Official Viewer: New default of 32m DD on installation when low end GPU detected” – this was put forward to help those logging-in to Second Life for the first time and arriving at a gateways only to encounter loading delays.
    • While accepted, it has the problem that a 32m draw distance is less that the potential size of a linkset, and so may cause issues of its own (what should be drawn within the linkset if it extends beyond the viewer’s 32m cut-off?).
  • Creator  owner permissions issues: it appears that some are seeing various losses of permissions on items that have created / owned (e.g. a full permission object of their own becoming No Mod or No Copy after being rezzed in-world.
    • This is a long-term (12+ years – see VWR-16097 and SVC-6185 for example), hard-to-reproduce issue that some are reportedly seeing re-surface.
    • It can sometimes be down to a single linked item in a complex build randomly changing its permission, requiring a careful comb-through of the entire linkset.
    • It appears to happen more frequently to objects located within high traffic regions and where there can be a noticeable delay (e.g. between pulling an object from inventory and in-world, or taking it from a scene back into inventory), which may point to a simulator / viewer race condition.
    • An updated bug report of the issues being encountered has been requested.

Date of Next Meeting

Thursday, April 29th, 2021.

2021 SUG meeting week #15 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Nekomachi Street, Tonarino – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 13th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest news and updates.

  • Tuesday, April 13th saw the SLS Main channel servers updated with simulator release 557694, defined as containing “internal fixes an tweaks”.
  • There are no planned deployments to any of the RC channels. However, regions will be subject to a rolling restart.

SL Viewer

The start of the week saw the Eau de Vie Maintenance RC viewer update to version 6.4.18.557782, dated April 12th, brining it up to par with the de facto release viewer.

:All other official viewers remain unchanged from the end of last week;

  • Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.18.557797, dated April 7.
  • 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

  • BUG-229871 “Unable to re-enter or teleport to a region that I’ve been to during same session” – now appears to be related to the use of Malwarebytes security software; or at least the vast majority of those experiencing the issues are reportedly using MWB. Whitelisting the viewer .exe filepath for all installed viewers with MWB appears to resolve the issue.
  • Issues continue to be seen with group chat following the changes made by the Lab (see Maestro Linden’s April 5th forum post). These aren’t the last changes to be made, and the Lab fully intends to keep working on issues and trying to improve the service(s).
  • Map tiles are “getting closer but not ready yet. So, as per my recent SUG summaries, those needing more reliable access to the world map might try the following:

2021 viewer release summaries week #14

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

Updates from the week ending Sunday, April 11th

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: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24th, promoted March 27th – No change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Eau de Vie Maintenance RC updated to version 6.4.18.557782,  dated April 12th.
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer updated to version 6.4.18.557797, dated April 7th.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • Kokua updated to versions (Non-RLV) and 6.4.17.47200 (RLV variants) on April 6th – release notes.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

April 2021 SL Web User Group summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes are taken from my recording of the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, April 7th, 2021. These meetings are generally held on the first Wednesday of the month, with dates and venue details available via the SL public calendar.

When reading these notes, please keep in mind:

  • This is not intended as a chronological transcript of the meeting. Items are drawn together by topic, although they may have been discussed at different points in the meeting.
  • Similarly, and if included, any audio extracts appearing in these summaries are presented by topic heading, rather than any chronological order in which they may have been raised during the meeting (e.g. if “topic X” is mentioned early in a meeting and then again half-way through a meeting, any audio comments related to that topic that might be included in these reports will be concatenated into a single audio extract).

Web Properties Updates

  • General post-Uplift internal work is continuing, particularly the fine-tuning of various web services.
  • The secondlife.com home pages have received a “spring refresh” with new images. etc..
  • A general clean-up of web pages is in progress. This includes things like:
    • Enabling unicode support in the DMCA complaint form (important for those with accented letters in their names).
    • Web profile fixes: removing a bug that prevented interests from being deleted on web profiles;  correcting an issue that caused an error to appear at the top of the About section of a web profile; (finally) removing the link to “Open Groups in the sidebar” that hasn’t existed in the viewer for almost a decade…
  • A  number of the Lab’s own tools for managing / maintaining the Marketplace were also worked on, but no details supplied.
  • Resident search has been updated to ensure all those who should be showing in searches are showing in searches.
  • Additional work on Search in general is still on-going.
  • The problem people are having in being suddenly logged-out of Marketplace for no accountable reason (such as going from browsing to the check-out page or when editing a listing) is still being looked into.

Marketplace – The “Catwa Incident”

At the end of March, Catwa ran a Marketplace-only promotion for a fully feature Bento Head priced at L$1. The resultant demand overloaded the Marketplace system. The outage lasted several hours, causing considerable upset, some of which was exacerbated by the poor quality error message that was given to those trying to reach the MP, and which included commentary on the state of the infrastructure in being unable to scale with the load placed on it.

  • In terms of the error message, this has apparently been updated to give more meaningful information should a repeat situation occur in the future.
  • As a result of that situation, the Lab has now implemented changes that should allow the MP to better leverage the AWS environment and correctly scale to meet similar massive increases in demand, should they occur in the future.
  • The was the first time the MP had faced such a massive demand, one which far exceeded anything previously seen the the MP’s history.

Mobile Client

  • iOS Version:
    • The app didn’t make it back to Apple for further evaluation before the end of March, but is now “very close” to being ready to go.
    • The Lab will be running an internal test with the updated app during the upcoming week or so.
    • Assuming no issues are found as a result of this testing, the app will be passed to Apple once more for their evaluation.
  • Android: nothing to report.

In Brief

  • Linden Homes: the Chalet theme (see: Lab announces Linden Homes Chalet Theme released) is now regarded as “mostly released”. The total volume of available Linden Homes means that the Lab is no longing “selling out” of new homes immediately on a release or batch release.
  • Last Names: at the start of April, the Lab introduced a couple of “limited time” last names to the Premium Name Changes capability. The two names, UwU and OwO, were introduced specifically for the furry community, among whom they have apparently proven popular.
    • According to a tweet from Soft Linden on April 8th, the two names will be removed from the active list “shortly”. So, if you want either one – now’s the time to grab it.
Twitter comment from Soft Linden on the two “limited time” last names for Premium members.
    • At the WUG meeting, Keira Linden indicated that the Lab is considering doing more such “limited edition” last name options from time-to-time and that may be geared towards particular events or holidays, or towards a particular community. The next example of these “limited offers” is liable to come around the time of the Second Life Birthday celebration in June 2021.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, May 5th, 14:00 SLT.

2021 SUG meeting week #14 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Wythburn Village and Arts Community – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest news and updates.

  • There are no planned SLS Main channel deployments.
  • Wednesday, April 7th: the SLS RC channels should all be updated with simulator release 557694, defined as containing “internal fixes an tweaks”.
Last week we ran into an unanticipated glitch and had to push the RC roll back to this week. So, this week we’ll be pushing out the next Maintenance simulator to all the RC channels.

– Rider Linden on the upcoming deployment

SL Viewer

There have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27 – NEW.
  • 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 – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.17.557412, dated March 25.
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.14.556118, dated 23, 2021.
  • 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.

Group Chat

On Monday, April 5th, Maestro Linden posted on changes made to Group Chat to try to improve overall message handling. The change appears to have met with with mixed results, with some seeing no real change in how their group chat sessions are affected. There may also been some related unintended consequences, some some reporting the following:

  • Some people are finding they have to make multiple posts for group chat to finally open and their chat to be seen by everyone, otherwise their group chat remains silent. It is not clear if this happens across all their groups, or just some.
  • Messages for some still appear to be failing with a degree of measurable regularity.

Commenting on the situation, and in lieu of Jira reports, Rider Linden commented:

As far as group chat. We know that it is a problem and we’re going to continue to work on it from our end.

New LSL Capabilities?

This from Rider Linden:

I’m proposing the following three LSL functions llOrd, llChar and llHash. 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.
This approach wouldn’t be cryptographically secure, but would be convenient.

This many be the start of ongoing work to provide new  / improved LSL capabilities, with it being indicated that feature requests BUG-227663 “[Feature Request] llGetInventoryAcquireTime()” and BUG-227641 “Play/Loop/Stop sounds in linked primitives other than the primitive where the script exists” may also be considered  for implementation.

In Brief

  • Some people are reporting Voice issues – Voice failing to start, or Voice simply not working in a region unless others are already there and using it. It’s not clear have widespread these issues are, or whether bug reports have been raised.
  • BUG-229871 “Unable to re-enter or teleport to a region that I’ve been to during same session” – Linden Lab is still trying to consistently reproduce this issue. In discussing the problem, Maestro Linden noted:
One interesting case was somebody reporting that they were able to reproduce the issue 100% of the time until they replaced a faulty coaxial cable  – which makes me think that packet loss could somehow be to blame (disconnecting from the simulator the first time in some unclean manner due to time-out?).
  • Getting inventory syncing between Agni and Aditi working once more is also being worked on, with the hope that the fix will be available Soon™.
  • Work on Map tiles is progressing, but still no ETA on when the remaining fixes are liable to be deployed. Again, in lieu of a fix, people can use the following alternatives, each with its own functionality: