Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates for the week ending Sunday, January 12th
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 version 6.3.5.533275, formerly the Wassail RC viewer, dated November 5th, 2019 – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.6.534234 on January 9th.
EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.534193 on January 9th.
The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on January 10th, 2020. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:
Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point in a separate browser tab for reference.
Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.
The rest of the viewer release pipelines remain unchanged:
Current Release version 6.3.5.533275, formerly the Wassail RC viewer, dated December 4, promoted December 12 – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Xanté Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.6.533748, December 19.
Project viewers:
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16.
General Viewer Notes
Both the Xanté Maintenance RC and the Legacy Profiles Viewer have updates that are “close” to appearing in the current viewers list, with Xanté possibly being close to promotion as the de facto viewer as well.
As per my week #2 CCUG summary, EEP is still pending the fixing of around a dozen graphics-related issues.
The Camera Presets Viewer, designed to allow users to set and save their own preferred camera presets in their viewer without having to use debug settings, is now closing on being “feature complete” and ready for release either as a Project or RC viewer.
This capability is being developed as a viewer code contribution by Jonathan Yap (who was responsible for developing the Graphics Presets options).
More information on the work can be found in STORM-2145.
Bitbucket, used to manage viewer repositories) will be sunsetting support for Mercurial in early 2020. Because of this, Linden Lab has been migrating their viewer repositories from Mercurial to Git on Bitbucket.
Most of the Lab’s viewer development is now processed via Git.
There is some work remaining on converting all of the third-party package repositories, and this is being done as part of the Visual Studio 2017 / Xcode upgrade, rather than being part of the Git migration per se, as these are relatively stable and not seen as a major problem in terms of migrating them.
A document outlining the steps in migration has been provided specifically for TPVs to allow them to keep in sync with how LL main the viewer code and its branches. See: Viewer Repository Migration (Google Docs).
This is not the only way for TPVs to manage their own repositories, but it is the one that LL recommend for those wishing to reflect how LL manages things.
The VS 2017 / Xcode upgrade has been caught with a couple of issues:
The Boost library used to implement coroutines in the build process would not build using VS 2017 & required conversion to Boost Fibre, which it turn had a number of impacts that also needed to be resolved.
Currently, the project is caught on a GIT-related issue, with validating the integration scripts used in the build process, and which is still being worked on.
It’s hoped that the additional work involved in moving the build process to support VS 2017 should make a future move to using VS 2019 easier.
Windows 7 officially reaches its end of life on January 14th, 2020. After this date, patches and security updates, etc., will no longer be provided, and the company is unlikely to provide any support.
[7:55-8:30] There has been no work on the Linux front for official viewer over that last few months, and while still on the road map, is seen as a fairly low priority item, sitting well behind the Git migration, build tools updates, general viewer development and – particularly – the work in transitioning Second life to the AWS cloud.
[9:32-10:55] Week #2 restarts. While not generally a part of TPVD meetings, the issues with the Tuesday, January 7th server restarts was mentioned, with Grumpity noting:
It was a rocky day on Tuesday. It came out of our desire to do things in a less disruptive manner and … once again, the road to downtime was once again paved with good intentions, because that way proved to be in no way less disruptive than if we had done things the regular way.
Essentially, the issue was with some restart code that hadn’t been used in a while, and which LL had thought had been fully tested, but when put to use proved to have issues.
[15:33-20:23] A reminder was given that – particularly after a viewer crash – it is better to wait for a short period, rather than immediately trying to re-log (particularly if the warning about logging back in is displayed). This is because each failed attempt refreshes your avatar presence, interfering with the post-crash clean-up (the “you are currently being logged out” part of the message).
Note: this part of the meeting included an extensive chat discussion on auto-relogging, as can be present in mobile and other clients, such as Lumiya and Radegast that continues through until the end of the meeting. Please refer to the video for more on this.
The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 9th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.
Environment Enhancement Project
Project Summary
A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.
Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will now likely not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).
The EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.534193 on Thursday, January 9th.
Bug fixing continues, notably around alpha rendering issues.
It is believed there are about a dozen remaining issues to be dealt with before EEP may be ready for formal release.
Pathfinding
First introduced in 2012 (and developed over the following year), Pathfinding was intended to provide a means for more interactive non-player characters (NPCs) in Second Life. Unfortunately, the implementation of the system proved to be so cumbersome (and leaving aside some of the incorrect perceptions about Pathfinding on the part of land holders), the it has never really seen that much use in Second Life.
With the arrival of Animesh, there has been renewed interest in using Pathfinding in conjunction with Animesh characters, but again, the current implementation is proving a bottleneck (e.g. highlighting / indicating “walkable” areas in the viewer; whether the navmesh is actually visible; the effort required to Pathfinding, etc.).
A forum thread highlights the issue, and it has been suggested that if a Jira can be raised highlighting the specific problems, it might be something the Lab could take a look at to try to improve some of the visualisation issues within the viewer (Navmesh visibility, etc.).
However, a broader pass at improving / overhauling Pathfinding is not on the Lab’s current road map for SL.
IP rights, UV Maps and “working copies”: there has been recent discussion on the forums, through various user groups (notably Governance, which I’ve been unable to attend for the last couple of months due to RL) concerning IP rights and things like mesh VW maps, compatibility, weight painting etc. The questions have arisen of late due to a mesh appearing on the Marketplace that achieves compatibility with all the other meshes of the same nature by providing amazingly close replicas of them.
Currently, the primary course of response to concerns over potential infringement – imperfect is it may appear to be where this issue may be more esoteric in nature, given that the meshes in question all tend to use things like UV maps derived from originals supplied by Linden Lab – is for a creator with concerns over infringement to file an DMCA complaint with LL.
BOM take-up: Bakes On Mesh take-up is seen as being a little slow. Some mesh body / head makers have yet to fully adopt BOM flagging on their products for example (so while Maitreya support BOM on their current body via a HUD, the body still has some 800 individual mesh elements that the viewer needs to handle, compared to the (roughly) less-than-fifty used by the Slink Redux (BOM) body). Also, there are continued concerns about BOM’s ease-of-use when compared with the use of HUD-based applier systems. While the latter can be more resource-intensive, the form is seen as requiring better scripted tools and / or better inventory visualisation mechanisms (even better base alpha support) in order to be more attractive to users.
The following notes are taken from my recording of the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, January 8th, 2020. These meetings are held monthly, with dates and details of the meetings available via the Web User Group wiki page.
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).
Recurring Events
Recurring Events launched on Monday, January 8th, allowing Premium members to set a recurring events in the Upcoming Events lists available via users dashboards at secondlife.com.
In brief:
Premium members will be charged L$10 for listing one-off events, or L$50 for filing an event that can recur up to 12 times (weekly or monthly).
Basic members are charged L$50 per event listing.
Recurring events are events that share the same location, time, duration, and description but occur on a weekly or monthly basis.
Recurring events are largely set-up exactly the same was as individual events:
Go to your dashboard at secondlife.com and select Events from left side menu to open the Events listing page.
Click on Create A New Event directly below the top left calendar on the page, then read and accept the Event Posting Rules to display the new Event Creation page.
Complete all the fields on the page.
The new Recurring Events drop downs (arrowed) for Premium Members only. Note that when either is set, the event fee (highlighted in red under the form) changes from L$10 (the cost for listing a non-recurring event filed by a Premium member) to L$50.
When selecting an event to repeat either weekly or monthly, the fee charged to your account (displayed at the bottom of the form) change from L$10 to L$50.
There are currently some minor adjustments required for monthly recurring events, as events recurring right at the end of a month may give some incorrect dates for months of different lengths. Such areas can be corrected manually, but updates to be deployed in the near future should correct the problem. In addition, LL will be monitoring the recurring events capability now it is live in order to identify and address any other issues that may arise now it is live.
Future Events Listings Work
Further improvements to events are planned (e.g. better searching for events), but these are dependent on other work being completed first.
This work may include things like being able to push events to your personal calendar (Google Calendar, Outlook, etc.).
Name Changes
No final confirmation on release date (although the hope has been for a mid-Q1 2020 release). The exact release time frame is dependent upon final checks on the capability being completed.
Even if delayed, Last Names will still be deployed before any release of the Premium Plus subscription package.
Over 2,000 entries have been received as a part of the (now closed) Last Names Contest, totalling some 6,000 last name suggestions in all, and LL have started going through them.
It is likely that when Name Changes is launched, users will be able to pick last names from a list of around 20-30.
One of the approaches being considered for changing the available last names is for:
Popular selections being removed from the list and replaced on reaching a certain number of people selecting them.
Having selections that appear “unpopular” (i.e. they are rarely / never selected) replaced if they fail to achieve a certain threshold of use over an (unspecified) period of time.
Marketplace
The new Marketplace limited quantities and demo items search filters options
Marketplace search has been updated with options to exclude / include limited quantity items and / or demo items.
The check boxes for excluding (ticked) or including (unticked) such items can be found at the bottom of the Search Filters panel displayed on the left of Marketplace pages when either Search is used or See All Categories is clicked.
Both options can be found below the search by permissions options.
By default, both options are unchecked, so that searches will include either limited quantity or demo items in their results results.
Work is being put into performance improvements which, as Grumpity noted at the meeting, tend not to be noticed right up to the point where something goes wrong.
An example of this is the ability for merchants to search their invoices should be a lot faster following back-end updates.
There are still “quite a few” things the Lab have queued up to do in relation to Marketplace search, but no specific details are available as yet on what might surface when.
In Brief
This issue with Destination Guide submissions is believed to be resolved.
The thread refers to the SLS Main channel being on simulator release 533895. However:
Following restarts, it appears that simulators on the Main channel (and some on RC channels) have remained on 2019-12-04T20:29:26.533447, which according to previous deployment threads, was the last formal deployment to the Main channel.
According to the release note page, 533895 was deployed on December 19th, but has channel names are now obfuscated, it is not clear which RC received the update.
The thread refer to restarts on the RC channels on Wednesday, January 8th, some RC servers should be restarted, but again without any deployment – although the 533895 version number is given for some when it should perhaps be 53447.
Simulator Issues
Restart Issues
The Tuesday, January 7th restarts were repeated a number of times, for reasons Simon Linden explained:
So we haven’t had any server updates since mid-December. Today we restarted a bunch because that can help performance, and in the middle of that we uncovered a bug that’s been lurking there for months, so it got a bit exciting.
Mazidox Linden added that – as of the time of writing this update – further restarts could not be ruled out.
The bug itself was related to at least one directory required by the Mono compiler not being created correctly, preventing scripts from being saved. It is apparently a bug that has been around for some time, but only surfaced as a result of changes to the way simulator restarts are run. Ironically, the changes were intended to make simulator restarts faster and smoother
Holiday Issues
Numerous region holders reported significant performance issues over the holiday period. According to Grumpity Linden, part of the issue was a failure with an automated tool, itself something of a workaround for dealing with simulator performance issues:
Hi all! I was really hoping my first post of the new year would be more jolly, but here we are. Happy New Year, though!
For a couple of years now, we’ve had automated tools, aptly named “Grid Poking Bot” (GPB for short) responsible for doing region restarts, and this has been working quite well – most of the time. Very unfortunately, there was a problem with the GPB over the holidays, and due to a combination of events, it took us much too long to notice – and we finally caught it in part thanks to this very forum thread and a certain vigilant “Spray Can”. We’re now actively pursuing the least disruptive ways to address this problem as quickly as possible. We’ll have a more detailed post-mortem blog in a couple of days as well.
We’re very sorry about souring your holidays.
It’s possible there is more than one issue causing problems, and investigations are still in progress, including the distribution of poorly-performing regions (e.g. are they on their own on the grid, do they have neighbours) as well as looking at distribution by server.
SL Viewer
There have been no viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the current pipelines as follows:
Current Release version 6.3.5.533275, formerly the Wassail RC viewer, dated December 4th, promoted December 12th – No change.
Xanté Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.6.533748, December 19th.
Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.5.533347, December 5th.
EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.532771, November 20th.
Project viewers:
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.
Destination Guide
Not strictly part of the engineering team’s remit, but it has been reported the Destination Guide is giving errors when trying to submit new destinations. This has been seen by the Web Team, and is apparently being looked at.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates for the week ending Sunday, December 22nd
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 version 6.3.5.533275, formerly the Wassail RC viewer, dated November 5th, – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Xanté Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.6.533748, released on December 19th.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 