Category: SL Tech

2020 SL project updates week #30: TPVD summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Paris for Ara, June 2020 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, July 24th, 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.

SL Viewer News

[0:00-3:47]

The promotion of the Tools Update RC viewer to de facto release status didn’t go as intended, resulting in the promotion being rolled back to viewer version 6.4.4.543157, dated June 11th, promoted June 23rd, formerly the CEF RC viewer. In addition, a further version of the Tools Update viewer was issued in RC form.

The roll-back was due to the Tools Update viewer causing incoming new users to crash on arrival at the welcome islands. Presumably, the arrival of a second Tools Update RC viewer is to allow comparative testing between the two versions in an attempt to understand what is happening, the Tools Update 2 viewer having some form of internal differences to the Tool Update viewer.

There are reports that the Tools Update viewer also has a deadlock issue associated with it – see BUG-229110.

In the interim, the recommendation is for TPVs not to release version based on or incorporating the Tools Update viewer code.

Therefore, this leaves the current viewer pipelines as follows:

  • Current Release viewer version  6.4.3.543157, dated June 11th, promoted June 23rd, formerly the CEF RC viewer – ROLL BACK
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Tools Update 2 RC viewer, version 6.4.6.545538, July 24.
    • Tools Update RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544639, July 17 – ROLL BACK TO RC STATUS.
    • Arrack Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544465, July 6.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544028, June 30.
  • Project viewers:
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.4.543141, June 11.
    • 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

  • The “big push” is now on getting the Love Me Render (LMR) viewer promoted to release status. There are currently just “a few” open issues with the viewer, and the hope is these can be closed and the viewer cleared by QA for promotion “soon”. This is the viewer that includes several EEP-released fixes for things like HUD issues, specularity, etc.
  • The Legacy Profiles viewer has had some back-end web integration issues that have prevented it from progressing to RC status as had been hoped at the last meeting.
  • A further Maintenance RC viewer is close to being ready for issuing.

In Brief

  • [9:36-19:33] EEP issues:
    • People continue to report noticeable performance degradations with running EEP enabled viewers. The current work-round is for users to disable Linden Water rendering (CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-7), which appears to work even when Linden Water is totally occluded.
    • This is a recognised problem, and is being actively investigated. However, there may not be a single fix that resolves all performance issues, so this work may not delay the promotion of the LMR viewer, bu could end up being addressed as one or more “future fixes”.
    • There are also reports of increased sudden viewer freezes / stalls within EEP enabled viewers. Again, LL is aware of such reports and is investigating them.
    • In addition, there continue to be major questions as to the real value of EEP when compared to issues such as the overall impact on people having to remodel custom environments, ease-of-use within the tools, performance hits, etc.
    • Firestorm’s preview release of EEP has already resulted in considerable negative feedback even amongst a limited subset of users; there are concerns that when released, it could result an large-scale user backlash.
  • [20:54-24:18] Increasing the official viewer’s texture memory allowance: currently, the official viewer is pegged at using 512Mb of memory for texture handling, which can result in performance hits due to texture switching issues.  This is on a list of changes LL “would like to get to” – although Kitty Barnett has offered LL a code patch (already used by some TPVs, and baed on Runitai Linden’s own code) to help.
  • Reminders:
    • The fix for off-line inventory offers failing is now grid-wide. This is still awaiting an update in the official viewers, but TPVs capable of using the capability can now “go ahead and use it.”
    • Those wishing to test how regions running on AWS servers can do so on Aditi, the beta grid, as follows:
      • Regions Morris and Ahern (and possibly now Dore and Bonifacio, although this hasn’t been clarified).
      • The majority of the Blake Sea regions – see: Blake Sea in the cloud on ADITI.

 

2020 Simulator User Group week #30 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Frogmore, June 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken during the Simulator User Group meeting of Tuesday, July 14th, 2020.

Simulator Deployments

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

  • On Tuesday, July 21st, the majority of the grid was updated with server maintenance update 544832, designed to resolve issues with some internal service updates, chat range improvements and capability improvements.
  • On Wednesday, July 22nd, the should be a single RC deployment comprising “a few internal changes (mostly logging)”. At the time of writing, the server deployment thread had yet to be updated with the release notes reference.

SL Viewer

The Tools Update viewer, version 6.4.5.544639, was promoted to de facto release status, Friday, July 17th. This viewer uses the new viewer build tool chain, but does not include any user-facing updates outside of bug fixes.

The remaining official viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • Arrack Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544465, July 6th.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544028, June 30th.
  • Project viewers:
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30th.
    • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.4.543141, June 11th.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

Further Regions in the Cloud

Following from the announcement concerning Ahern and Morris on Aditi, the beta grid, being in the cloud (see my previous Simulator User Group update),  most / all of Blake Sea has been cloned to Aditi and is now running in the cloud, specifically for the purposes of  region crossing tests with vehicles.

Again, just to emphasise, this is Aditi, the beta grid, only (at least one person has reported on region crossings on Agni (the main grid) in relation to this announcement). For more information, refer to my blog post Blake Sea in the cloud on ADITI.

Blake Sea is now on Aditi and running in the cloud for those wishing to test vehicle region crossings

What is Simulator “Sleep Time” and how are Scripts Processed?

The viewer provides a set of stats related to both itself and the simulator your user is on (CTRL-SHIFT-1). Most of the stats proved in this window are relatively self-explanatory, although some can cause confusion or can be misrepresented. One area of confusion  – what is simulator “sleep time”  – was raised in the forums recently, and Rider Linden took the time to explain it and a couple of other things in the stats panel. As his reply may help others, I’m including it in full here:

The short answer is that sleep time is the mean amount of time in ms per simulator frame that the simulator has spent idling over the last minute.
The long answer is that the simulators attempt to keep a constant number of processing frames (one cycle through the main loop) per second. This number is displayed in the statistics window as Sim FPS. This value is not the same as the Viewer’s FPS. When the Sim FPS starts to fall below 45 you will begin to see lag events like delayed movement and rubber banding, among other symptoms.
A single frame should take about 21ms. (21ms * 45) = ~1 second (less about 50ms overhead). If a single simulator frame takes less than that 21ms we need to add a few extra ms in order to maintain the constant rate. This extra time is reported as “Sleep Time” and tracks closely to “Spare Time”.
Every frame on the simulator is divided into a number of phases. The big ones are network message processing, advancing the state of the physics simulation, processing agents in the region and updating their interest lists, and executing scripts.
The amount of time allowed per frame to execute scripts is capped. The simulator will attempt to execute all the scripts in the region in that allotted time slice, if it can not make it all the way through the list it will stop and pick up where it left off on the next frame (this gives you the “Scripts Run %” statistic.) Since the time for script execution is capped you can see situations where the % of scripts executed per frame begins to fall even though there is idle time reported on the simulator.

– Rider Linden, July 23rd, 2020

2020 viewer release summaries week #29

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

Updates for the week ending Sunday, July 19th

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 6.4.5.544639, formerly the Tools Update RC viewer, promoted to de facto release status, Friday, July 17th – NEW.
    • Uses new viewer build tool chain, but does not include any user-facing updates outside of bug fixes.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • No updates.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

Speedlight: group functionality and other updates

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Speedlight

It’s been a little over a month since my last update on Speedlight, the browser based Second Life client, so here’s a quick round up of the major updates since then.

Note that unless otherwise stated, the following notes apply to the browser version of Speedlight, as at the time of writing they had yet to be applied to the dedicated Android app version or (so far as I’m aware), the beta iOS app version.

Group Support

Perhaps the most noticeable update to the browser version of Speedlight since June is the expansion of Group related capabilities, specifically:

  • Search your groups.
  • View group notices and send  group notices.
  • Leave a group.
  • Invite someone into a group.

Obviously, all group actions are subject to the group permissions assigned to your role within the group.

Notes:

  • Groups are accessed via the Group option in the Speedlight client menu.
  • The Group option will display your current groups as a searchable list, via the Search option at the top of the list.
  • When using Speedlight on a mobile device, the group list is displayed as an overlay to the main group information display, and is shown / hidden by tapping the Groups>> link displayed at the top of the options menu.
  • Tapping on the name of a group in the list will open the Group Info panel, shown below (and auto-close the Group list mobile devices).
The updated group display panel showing: 1. The pre-existing Group Chat button; 2. the new Group Notices button; 3. the Button to Join / Leave a group; 4. the Group Invite button.

Group Notices

Note: at the time of writing, the group notices functionality was only available to the browser version of Speedlight (any browser / device).

  • To view your group notices, click / tap the Group Notices button.
  • The Group Notices panel will open and load any available notices.
  • Click / tap on any notice to display it below the list of available notices.
  • Note that notice attachments cannot presently be viewed / opened, but are listed in the text of the notice.
View a group notice in the Speedlight browser version

The Group Notices panel has two buttons associated with it:

  • Send New Notice – described below.
  • Schedule a Notice – this option is either awaiting implementation or a Gold / Patreon subscription option. As I currently do not have either of the latter, I was unable to check, ergo it is excluded from this article.

Send a Group Notice

Subject to group permissions you can also create and send group notices from Speedlight:

  • From the Group Notice panel, click the Send New Notice button at the top of the panel.
  • The New Notice panel is display. Here you can:
    • Enter a title for the notice.
    • Enter the text of the notice. Note the character counter will turn red if you exceed the 512 character count for a notice, and the text beyond that point will be truncated when the notice is sent.
  • Click the Send Notice button when you’re ready to send your notice.

Send a Group Invite

Subject to group permissions you can send a group invitation to one or more users from Speedlight:

  • From the Group Info panel, click the Invite to Group button.
  • The Invite to Group panel is displayed.
Speedlight Invite to Group panel
  • Role To Invite: select the required role (if available) that will be offered in the invite.
  • Resident Name: enter the avatar name of the person whom you wish to receive the invite.
  • IM Message (optional): if you wish, you can send the person you are inviting an IM alongside the group invite – such as an explanation on why you’re sending it, etc.
    • Note you can use the listed variables to personalise the IM. For example, clicking the %FIRST_NAME% option will precede your IM with the recipient’s first name, while %GROUP% can be used to display the group’s name in the IM.
  • When you’re ready to send the invite, click the Invite button.

Additional notes for group invites:

  • Pressing ENTER after typing the recipient’s name will actually send the invitation, so if you want to send an IM with the invite, be sure to click / press TAB / tap to position the cursor in the IM field.
  • You can also append “sent from Speedlight” to the invite IM (and any other initial session IM you send to someone) by going to Settings in the left menu and then checking Append “Sent from SpeedLight” to my IMs (first message of the conversation only) .

Other Updates

Search Functionality

The Search functionality has been tweaked so that you can now:

  • Search for friends in your Friends List.
  • Search for IMs in you IM history by sender’s name.
  • Search for a group in your groups list (as described above).

Teleport Offers

You can now accept / decline teleport offers via the Notifications bar.

Multi-Line Text Entry (Chat and IM)

Both IMs and local chat accept multi-line text entry – use SHIFT-ENTER to start a new line / offer a paragraph break.

RLV Support

RLV support is now available to Speedlight Gold and Patreon users. However, it is not clear if this is Marine Kelley’s RLV API or Kitty Barnett’s RLVa API.

Android and iOS App Versions

  • The Android version has yet to receive the multi-line text input option and the group updates, as noted. However, it has received a series of bug fixes and allows errors or issues to be reported back to the developers.
  • The iOS version version of Speedlight is available for Speedlight Gold and Patreon users, and requires Apple’s TestFlight app to be installed on the device using it.

Feedback

The group updates are good to have, with the promise of more to come. Further performance improvements are in the offing as well, apparently. This may well be a good thing, as it appears the issue from April of an avatar refusing to stop moving once set in motion in the 3D World view, is back, and once again requires a relog to stop it. I’ve no idea how widespread this issue is, or if it is encountered on Android devices (as my poor little Nexus 2013 HD cannot run Speedlight’s 3D rendering, being stuck on Android 6.0.1), but for me, it is consistent and appears to be a regression. I shall await further updates with interest.

Related Links

2020 Content Creation User Group week #28 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Wision, May 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, July 2nd 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.

This meeting featured a lot of general chat on possible features and / or performance improvements that might (or “should”) be made to SL, comparisons in the pros and cons of incremental changes over “radical” changes (e.g. the former can be turned around more quickly, but can be finite in pact; the latter can dramatically change/ improve SL, but on a time frame that means that when they are delivered, they’re not what users are looking for / they don’t actually deliver what had been anticipated), etc.

SL Viewer

Currently, the official viewers remain unchanged from the start of the week:

  • Current Release viewer version 6.4.3.543157, dated June 11, promoted June 23, formerly the CEF RC viewer – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.4.543141, June 11.
    • 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

  • The Tools Update RC viewer is on track to be promoted to de facto release status, possibly on Friday, July 17th, or more likely week #29 (commencing Monday, July 20th).
  • The Love Me Render viewer is still seeing additional EEP fixes added to it, as well as some other issues that are being looked into.
    • The upcoming version of the LMR viewer will include a fix for the EEP specularity issue (see BUG-228781 and BUG-228581).
    • BUG-229079 “[EEP] Density multiplier does not allow full range of settings to be saved/loaded”, requires adjustments to be made to both the viewer and the simulator code.
    • BUG-229031 “[EEP] Water has a large performance hit on EEP” has been accepted, an analysis has yet to be completed.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering either in the viewer. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

As of January 2020 ARCTan has effectively been split:

  • Viewer-side changes, primarily focused on revising the Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) calculations and providing additional viewer UI so that people can better visibility and control to seeing complexity.
  • Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.
  • The belief is that “good” avatar ARC values can likely be used as a computational base for these rendering calculations.

Current Status

  • It’s still not clear in the Jelly Doll updates will appear in an ARCTan project viewer or within a project viewer of their own. These are more generic Jelly Dolls that improve their rendering.
  • It might be preferable for the Jelly Doll updates to move to their own project viewer, as ARCTan is awaiting a Bake Service update, which is in turn held up due to the on-going cloud uplift work.
  • There was a scare that the ARCTan updates might cause a performance hit – although this might be down to a system configuration issue and is still being investigated.

In Brief

  • There is some background work going on to update the Second Life systems requirement page. Not so much because SL’s requirement have changed, but simply to bring them more in-line with modern systems.
  • The data the Lab does gather on client systems indicate that a lot of users are based on laptops using on-board graphics and “a lot on older systems”.
  • Next meeting: Thursday, August 20th, 2020.

2020 Simulator User Group week #29 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Empire of Dreaming Books, May 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken during the Simulator User Group meeting of Tuesday, July 14th, 2020.

Simulator Deployments

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

  • On Tuesday, July 14th, the majority of the grid was updated with server release 544419, first deployed to the RC channels on Wednesday, July 8th. This should resolve issues with off-line inventory offers and group notice attachments, although a viewer-side update is also required, which is in the current Arrack RC viewer.
  • On Wednesday, July 15th, the RC channels should be updated with server maintenance update 544832, designed to resolve issues with some internal service updates, chat range improvements and capability improvements.

SL Viewer

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

  • Current Release viewer version 6.4.3.543157, dated June 11, promoted June 23, formerly the CEF RC viewer – 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):
  • Project viewers:
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.4.543141, June 11.
    • 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

I don’t know if any of you have looked at AWS, but it’s a huge and complex system, so the learning curve on how to build servers, get them deployed, set up networks, security, etc etc etc is pretty tough … Not a surprise, just a lot of learning and work.

– Simon Linden, SUG Meeting, July 14th

Two publicly-accessible regions  – Morris and Ahern – on Aditi (the beta grid) are now running in the cloud. Aside from outbound HTTP messaging and e-mail, they should function with no discernible difference to regions within the Lab’s co-lo facility.

Ahern and Morris on Aditi (the beta grid) are now operating from the cloud

Commenting on the HTTP messaging / e-mail situation, Oz Linden stated:

There are abuse constraints in AWS that we need to make sure we don’t violate. Both outbound HTTP and Email are ways that scripts could cause problems. We have a way to regulate HTTP out that we’re pretty sure of, and which you should be able to test fairly soon on main grid simulators. llEmail may get some new constraints and/or more severe throttles … still studying that one. When we have some updates on that, we’ll post in the LSL forum.

– Oz Linden, SUG Meeting, July 14th

It is believed that the current HTTP / e-mail out issues should not affect HTTP / e-mail between regions. The issue also shouldn’t affect llTargetedEmail, since the caller cannot specify an arbitrary email address.