Category: SL Tech

2020 Simulator User Group week #38 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Mount Campion, July 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the September 15th Simulator User Group meeting.

Simulator Deployments

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

  • There was no deployment to the grid’s main SLS channel on Tuesday, September 15th, 2020, leaving the simulators running on release 547626.
  • On Wednesday, September 16th some – or all – of the simulator on the RCs channel should be updated to simulator maintenance release 548903, containing updates related to the cloud uplift work which contain no user-visible updates.

SL Viewer

There have been no viewer updates to mark the start of week #38. This leaves the current pipelines as follows:

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.7.546539, dated August 11, promoted August 17, formerly the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Bormotukha Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.8.548394, issued September 8.
    • Mesh uploader RC viewer, version 6.4.8.548061, September 8.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.8.547427,August 21.
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.8.547487, issued August 26.
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

Cloud Uplift

Region Testing

As the Lab has announced, and I’ve reported – see Play Linden Realms in the cloud and help the Lab –, the Linden Realms have been cloned to Aditi and are running on AWS  servers. Interested users are asked to help in testing the regions by logging-in to Aditi and spending time playing the game. Follow the links above to find out more.

LSL HTTP Changes

As a part of the move to AWS services, there will be changes to the use of HTTP once cloud-hosted simulator come into use. It is Linden Lab’s hope that these changes will not cause significant issues, however, in order to provide scripters with as much information as possible, Oz Linden posted a forum update providing an outline of the areas of impact: llHTTPRequest – Outbound HTTP and lRequestURL or llRequestSecureURL.

A number of regions on Aditi have been set-up to allow for testing, comprising:

  • Morris
  • Cloud Sandbox 1
  • Cloud Sandbox 2
  • Cloud Sandbox 3
  • Cloud Sandbox 4

Further information and the continuing discussion can be found within the forum thread.

Changes are coming to LSL HTTP calls – for details please refer to LSL HTTP Changes Coming

Group Chat

People continue to experience issues with group chat disconnecting / failing following a transition to a different region via vehicle or teleport (see BUG-229219). As per last week’s update, there is a potential fix for this issue in the works, but whether or not it solves all of the issues currently being experienced or not is an unknown until it is actually deployed.

2020 viewer release summaries week #37

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

Updates for the week ending Sunday, September 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

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.7.546539, dated August 11, promoted August 17, formerly the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • The Bormotukha Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.8.548394, issued on September 8th.
    • Mesh uploader RC viewer updated to version 6.4.8.548061 on September 8th.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2020 Simulator User Group week #37 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Eris Isle, July 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the September 8th Simulator User Group meeting.

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for news and updates. However, there are no planned deployments for week #37.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday, September 8th, 2020, the following viewers were updated:

  • The Bormotukha  Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.8.548394.
  • The Mesh Uploader RC viewer updated to version 6.4.8.548061.

The rest of the viewer pipelines currently remain unchanged from the end of week #36:

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.7.546539, dated August 11, promoted August 17, formerly the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.8.547487, issued August 26.
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

Region Crossings

The recent updates to region crossings have generally improved things, but they’ve also led to a lot of “interesting” – to use Simon Linden’s term – side effects and some unpredictable behaviour.

  • Some are reporting a possible increase in avatar / vehicle collisions when crossing into regions with damage enabled.
  • Others are reporting issues of crossings “hanging” – the vehicle vanishes, the avatar is unable to move, communication, teleport, stand, etc., while the user is still able to cam around but is unable to to cleanly log-out.

This second issue apparently particularly noticeable when the region being entered is not visible at the time of the crossing (see BUG-229312), although this factor may be a separate issue to anything related to region crossings.

Group Chat

People continue to experience issues with group chat disconnecting / failing following a transition to a different region via vehicle or teleport (see BUG-229219).

There is a potential fix for this issue in the works, but whether or not it solves all of the issues currently being experienced or not is an unknown until it is actually deployed.

In the meantime, the group chat issue may be related to to issues being experienced with bots using group chat becoming unresponsive,sometimes after little more than an hour of running.

All of these issues appear to date from a period of back-end updates made in early August.

Cloud Uplift

Questions continue to be asked about changes that will / may be made to simulator services as a part of or immediately following the uplift work to get simulators transitioned to AWS services.

As has oft been stated by the Lab (and reported in these pages), the Lab’s focus is on successfully transitioning all of their services  – including simulators “as is”, without making substantive changes at this point in time. As  Oz Linden stated during the meeting:

Uplift is trying very hard not to make any changes we don’t _have_ to make … A big driver for getting simulators uplifted is that then we can start selling regions again … believe me, that’s pretty great motivation.  When and whether we’ll make other changes to optimize or exploit the cloud is later on.

–  Oz Linden, September 8th, 2020

aaa

2020 viewer release summaries week #36

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

Updates for the week ending Sunday, September 6th

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

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.7.546539, dated August 11, promoted August 17, formerly the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • No updates.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • Mobile Grid Client updated to version 1.25.1276 on September 2  – release notes.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2020 SL project updates week #36: TPVD summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Pony Box, July 2020 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, September 4th, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.

Two length text conversations dominated the meeting. The first focused on mesh heads and brains, the second on graphics and users and system updates.

SL Viewer News

[0:14-3:05]

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.7.546539, dated August 11, promoted August 17, formerly the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Bormotukha Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.8.547468, issued August 28.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.8.547427,August 21.
    • Mesh uploader RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544027, July 27.
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.8.547487, issued August 26.
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • All three RC viewers have updates that are being queued for issue.
  • It is possible the Bormotukha Maintenance RC viewer will be promoted to release status at the start of week #37 (commencing Monday, September 7th).
  • As  noted in my previous CCUG summary, a new Love Me Render (LMR) RC viewer should be available soon (it is currently in QA, so could potentially appear in week #37). This viewer will have further EEP fixes, although not all of them may be in the initial RC release.
  • The Legacy Profiles viewer is awaiting a back-end update to the feeds, which may be being worked on.

In  Brief

  • [4:09-7:00] there is an intermittent problem of people viewing the Lab’s own web pages via the viewer’s built-in viewer finding at time that the website doesn’t see them as logged-in (although it should pick this up from the viewer).
    • This appears to be the result of a validation issue with the token generated at log-in and which should be passed to LL’s websites to allow the viewer to access them without the need for a further log-in.
    • LL are hesitant to fix the issue at the moment, as the back-end service handling the tokens is in the process of being moved to the cloud. Once the service has been transitioned, then the matter will be investigated and rectified.
    • This issue may have been triggered by changes make to the way server certificates are validated, which may have had an unintended knock-on impact.
  • [9:07-15:20]  a general discussion on performance issues that are most often tied to Linden Water, and suggestions on how it might be dealt with.  This largely matches the discussion summarised in my previous CCUG summary. These again included the idea of an update to prevent the viewer attempting to draw the Linden Water plane when above a certain altitude (and the majority of users cannot see it when at that altitude or above), or f having a UUID that can be set via the environment controls that effectively stops Linden Water Rendering when applied. Again, these are just *suggestions*, not things that have / are / will be implemented.
  • [21:12-23:12] OpenGL replacement: LL are not considering “seriously starting” on any OpenGL replacement work within the viewer until they have reasonable confidence the worst of the EEP bugs have been dealt with, simply because this is consuming the majority of the rendering team’s bandwidth.
    • Currently efforts are focused on gathering data on people’s systems – how they are running in terms of graphics options, what they are capable of running allowing for their GPU., etc., in order to hep the Lab better define parameters they need to consider. The code for this is in the current release viewer, and is propagating to TPVs as they merge and release that code.
    • One problem is that there are users who have hardware capable of running Vulkan, but they’ve not updated their Windows OS to a version that can support it.
  • [32:08-33:03] Viewer stats: by log-in session, the official viewer currently has a average of around 76% of sessions using Windows 10 64-bit; 15% using OS X, and the rest split between other Windows + Linux flavours. In terms of average users, Firestorm believe that have around 6% of users on OS X, perhaps 2% using various Linux flavours and the rest on various versions of Windows (32-bit and 64-bit).

 

2020 Content Creation User Group week #36 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Aspen Fell – The Notebook, July 2020 – 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, September 3rd 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

EEP Fixes

Love Me Render

  • The current Love Me Render (LMR) viewer (version 6.4.8.547427 at the time of writing) contains a number of EEP fixes (as well as other rendering updates) These include:
    • BUG-229107 [EEP] [Improvement] Ice level Slider Graduation.
    • SL-13539 [EEP] Large reflection on the water when facing certain angles.
    • BUG-228992 [EEP] Appearance lighting is broken when ALM is enabled.
    • BUG-228914 [EEP] Deferred Soften Shader fails to link when Atmospheric Shaders are disabled. This causes Debug viewer builds to crash.
    • BUG-228882 [EEP] Disabling glow rendering while ALM is off results in massive rendering flicker.
    • BUG-228781 [EEP] Specular color interpreted wrong (too bright) from point lights.
    • BUG-228581 [EEP] Specular map reflections are way too weak.
    • BUG-228840 [EEP] cloud texture is rendered backwards.
    • BUG-228431 [EEP] Water lighting is wrong at certain camera angles.
    • BUG-228752 [EEP] Sky turns black when render quality is lowered to Low-Mid.
    • BUG-225784 [EEP] BUG-225446 regression – HUDs are again affected by environment setting and BUG-225446 [FIXED] [EEP] HUDs are affected by Atmosphere & Lighting changes.
  • These a further EEP updates to come, likely in the next LMR viewer, which will hopefully be issued in the next week or so. These should include a fix  to allow horizon haze to modify the Sun’s light and tint when it is close to the horizon.

Additional EEP Issues

  • Moonlight: the Lab is also aware of a number of lighting issues related to the Moon (attenuation of moonlight through clouds, for example. Again, these will be addressed in time.
  • Mainland ambient lighting: users have repeatedly noted that the default Mainland environment remains darker than under Windlight.
    • This is the result of an error made during the EEP deployment that now requires a simulator-side configuration update to be made that is slightly complex in terms of implementation.
    • Essentially, a code fix needs to be made, and then a new estate setting added to the simulator code to manage it, together with code to ensure the update is correctly propagated to the affected regions.
    •  Currently, the resources required to develop, test and implement the required changes are all heavily engaged in cloud uplift work.
  • Density Multiplier issue: this is the result of the simulator restricting the multiple value. A fix for this is an upcoming simulator release.
  • Linden Water / performance issue:
    • As noted in previous CCUG summaries, rendering Linden Water appears to impact viewer performance to a greater degree than previously (leading to some simply disabling Linden Water rendering (CTL-ALT-SHIFT-7).
    • LL currently don’t have a solution for this, in part because the precise point in rendering where the bottleneck seems to occur is proving hard to pin down.
    • Some  suggestions for dealing with it were put forward at the meeting, including:
      • As there does not appear to be occlusion culling for water, perhaps auto-disabling Linden Water from being rendered in the viewer above a certain altitude (where the water generally isn’t visible anyway).
      • Or adding a special texture UUID that, when set via EEP in a region / parcel,  resulting in Linden Water rendering being disabled (CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-7, effectively) for all viewers within the region / parcel, rather than people having to manually disable Linden Water rendering. This could be helpful for major indoor shopping events, etc.
      • Note: both of the above were user-made suggestions, not ideas that have been implemented.
  • Specularity issues: EEP has altered specularity rendering such that specularity in point lights can appear too bright, and in Sun / Moon light, too dim. Fixes for this are in the currently LMR viewer referenced above, but there is some disagreement as to how well (or not) they correct issues.
    • Part of this may be the result of EEP making adjustments so the specularity in objects appears more realistic, but creators have previously had to manually compensate for a weakness in specular map rendering in the past.

ARCTan

  • Vir’s work in updating Jelly Dolls is now available in the Project Jelly viewer, currently availability as a project viewer (version 6.4.8.547487 at the time of writing). This work is also likely to find its way into a Maintenance viewer at some point.

In Brief

  • Date of next meeting: probably Thursday, September 17th, 2020.