Category: SL Tech

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 25th, 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, May 25th saw simulator release 599669 deployed to all servers on the Main SLS channel, containing the llOpenFloater() function intended for use with Linden-owned Experiences – see my week #18 SUG summary for more.
• Wednesday, May 26th should see the RC channels updated with a simulator release containing internal configuration changes.

SL Viewer

There have been no viewer updates to mark the start of the week. So 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 (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.19.559046, dated May 19th.
  • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.19.559726, dated May 19th.
  • Project UI viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559612, 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.

In  Brief

• During the CCUG meeting on May 20th, the subject of BUG-202864 ‘Change Mesh Uploader to preserve Scene File object names when a full linkset is uploaded’.
  • As noted in my summary of that meeting, the viewer had been updated to make this possible, but simulator-side changes are also required.
  • Apparently, the work had slipped through the simulator team’s net, but is now back on their radar, and will be included in an upcoming simulator maintenance update.
• The region crossing issue when the avatar is unseated from a vehicle, but cannot move, leaving the camera only able to rotate around it, is likely to be an issue of controls failing to release – essentially, the simulator still thinks the avatar is still seated, while the viewer does not.
  • A current solution for this is to try to sit on something in the same region that also takes camera / movement controls (if possible), then standing again.
  • While it has been suggested a viewer-side “release controls” button in the viewer could fix this, it runs the risk of breaking other controls (such as experiences). The ideal solution therefore, is for a simulator-side “fix” to be implemented – although this may take a while.
• People are continuing to see assorted teleport issues (e.g. failures within Experiences, and single failures requiring a re-log in order to re-enable teleports anywhere). LL  are aware of these issues.
• BUG-225742 ‘Server side physics shape reverts to “Convex Hull” for un-analysed meshes with “Prim Physics” connected to linksets with subcomponents animated with llTargetOmega / PRIM_OMEGA parameters upon server restart’, has been a long-standing issue. LL has been looking at the problem, but it is proving difficult to ascertain the root cause.

Video

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

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.

From Rider Linden’s comments at the week #14 SUG summary:

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.