Category: SL Tech

Bellefleurs – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, September 7th, 2018. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it.

This is another short TPV Developer meeting, with a lengthy discussion (roughly from 7:00 to 13:15) on the Estate Access Management project viewer, the majority of which is covered by my overview of that viewer, and so not repeated here. There are also some extended silences on the video.

SL Viewer

[0:58-7:00]

The Rakomelo Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 5.1.9.519298 on September 5th.  The remaining viewer pipelines remain as:

• Current Release version 5.1.8.518593, dated August 14, promoted August 20. Formerly the SL Voice 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):
  • Animesh RC viewer, version 6.0.0.518949, August 24.
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 5.1.8.518751, released on August 20.
  • BugSplat RC viewer, version 5.1.8.518305, August 7. This viewer is functionally identical to the current release viewer, but uses BugSplat for crash reporting, rather than the Lab’s own Breakpad based crash reporting tools.
• Project viewers:
  • EAM project viewer, version 5.2.0.518362, August 9 – improved region access control tools; see my overview for more.
  • Bakes on Mesh project viewer, version 5.1.7.518013 August 3.
  • 360 snapshot viewer, version 5.1.6.515934, June 6 (see my hands-on update).
• Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
• Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7. This viewer will remain available for as long as reasonable, but will not be updated with new features or bug fixes.

Assorted Notes on the Viewer Pipeline

• The Bugsplat RC viewer is still awaiting a further update (to bring it to parity with the release viewer), and this update will include some Mac improvements.
• A second viewer with further round of rendering updates will be following on the heels of the current Love Me Render RC viewer.
• EAM Project Viewer:
  • The next update to the EAM viewer may see it promoted to release candidate status.
  • This update will include the ability to set time-based bans on individuals (i.e. banning someone for a period of time, after which they are automatically unbanned).
• The snapshot viewer is still awaiting internal resources at the Lab to be able to resume working on it.
• Both the Bakes on Mesh and Environment Enhancement Projects continue to await the AIS update (see below for more).
  • The Bakes on Mesh project also requires both a simulator update (as does EEP) and an update to the Bake Service. These  will take place some time after the AIS update has been deployed,
  • [7:51-8:49] As a sidebar to the Bakes on Mesh and EEP work, it was found that the existing viewer code did not handle inventory assets types very well if it could not recognise them. This has now been corrected with one of the updates in the Rakomelo RC viewer, so viewers with this code, but which do not have the BOM and EEP code should handle the new asset types delivered by the simulator / CDN for these projects a lot more gracefully than has previously been the case with adding new asset types.
• [6:16-7:00] The Animesh is now down to a small number of must-fix bugs before it can roll to release status; additional bugs have been tiraged and flagged as “fix later”. As noted in my most recent CCUG update, there will be a behavioural change to add a scale limit to the existing translation limit such that Animesh objects can’t become too large or too arbitrarily placed.

AIS Update

[4:00-4:34] As noted above, the AIS (Advanced Inventory System) update contains changes to support both the Bakes on Mesh project and the EEP project. However, it is primarily aimed at running the inventory services on a newer version of their operating system (the Lab is currently engaged in updating the operating system used across their servers, as noted by Simon Linden at the week #36 Simulator User Group meeting). This OS update is also one of the foundational requirements need to start moving more of the SL services to a cloud based infrastructure in the future.

The AIS update has now cleared the Lab’s QA testing, and is expected to be grid-wide in the next week or so.

ARCTan and Viewer Texture Caching

[13:30-14:40] ARCTan and the viewer texture caching updates have been on hold, the former because of the effort being put into the rendering updates in the Love Me Render RC viewer (and presumably its follow-up viewer) and the EEP project. Both ARCTan and the viewer texture caching project are expected to resume “real soon now^TM“.

In Brief

• A reminder that the SL Voice .EXE in the current release viewer (5.1.8.518593) is incompatible with earlier versions of the viewer, and cannot be used with them.
• There is also a report that viewer 5.1.8.518593 can disconnect voice when teleporting a lot more frequently that previous releases. This is to be the subject of the bug report.
• A reminder that the fixes for ensuring off-line Group messages and Friend requests are correctly delivered at log-in by the new HTTP capability can be found in the Rakomelo RC viewer.
• [21:27-22:10] There is still no confirmed date as to when the inventory UDP messaging will be turned off at the simulator end. All inventory messaging switched from UDP to HTTP earlier in 2018, and it had previously been indicated the UDP support would be switched off on the server end in late summer / autumn 2018.  This is in part due to the discovery the messaging system is being used by some “other things”, and this need to stop before UDP messaging can be disabled.