Category: SL Tech

Kokua and Black Dragon go 64-bit in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

As the Lab’s 64-bit Alex Ivy viewer progresses through release candidate stage and the point where the code is regarded as a stable enough for TPVs to start picking up, viewer developers having been doing just that.

First out of the v5-stage gates at the start of September was Nicky Perian with 64-bit versions of Kokua for Windows and Mac. Towards the middle of the month, NiranV Dean issued a 64-bit version of Black Dragon for Windows.

It should be noted that in neither case are the provided 64-bit viewers the final, polished article. Nicky has clearly labelled his versions as test releases, which Niran is referring to his as an alpha series of releases.

I’ve not driven either viewer to any great extent, so the following is more informational than anything else. Please refer to the links at the end of this article for all download links to the viewers.

Kokua 64-bit

The Kokua 64-bit builds come in both RLV and non-RLV versions. Each is functionally identical to the other, with the exception of … RLV inclusion.  For convenience, I downloaded the 64-bit Windows version with RLV. all of the versions are based on the Lab’s Alex Ivy code base.

The Windows viewer builds include the SL Launcher .EXE, designed to ensure the correct version of the viewer (32-bit or 64-bit) is installed on your PC when updating the viewer. However, at this point, neither actually utilises it directly: the installation short-cut for the viewer points directly to the viewer .EXE. As the Launcher is also intended to start / terminate the viewer’s crash logging, and given – if I recall correctly – Kokua utilises the Lab’s viewer update process, I assume use of the Launcher may / will be folded-into the Kokua’s 64-bit Windows flavours in the future.

Beyond this, the viewer is functionally identical to the last full release of Kokua (5.0.6.41208), with additional updates from the more recent LL viewer releases since that date. This means the 64-bit viewer now includes the Asset HTTP updates from the Lab and the current release version (5.0.7.328060). I understand the 32-bit versions of the viewer have also been merged with these updates, but have not been formally released.

Nicky does note that there are some issues with the Mac 64-bit version of the viewer, some of which prompted an update following an initial release of the test viewers. Some of these have been logged via JIRA with the Lab (such as BUG-41395). For those downloading and trying the viewer, he particularly requests that feedback be given on notifications and taking / processing snapshots, which have caused noticeable issues in merging the code (obviously, feedback on other aspects of the viewer and problems encountered is also welcome).

Black Dragon 64-bit

Black Dragon currently has the SL Launcher removed. This generates a warning on starting the viewer, advising users to run things from the Launcher and to update short-cuts accordingly. However, it doesn’t interfere with the viewer’s operations.

The 2.9.0 64-bit version incorporates Niran’s more recent updates up to his 32-bit 2.8.2 release. For those with hardware which can handle it, Black dragon continues to offer a graphics experience several points above other viewers. For some people, this is somewhat mitigated by the viewer’s menu system presentation, which can take a little getting used to but really isn’t that hard to steer around. The large number of graphics options exposed / added can be a little frightening to those not into graphics tweaking – but again, there’s no real need to play around with any you’re not familiar with when adjusting settings.

In addition to the 64-bit iteration, the viewer includes further refinements to SL shadows, including an attempt to deal with a particular annoyance for photographers: disconnected shadows. That is, shadows which just fall short of actually visually connecting with the object casting them, and which at time no amount of jiggling with settings such as shadow quality and/or shadow bias can fix. A further change is that HTTP pipelining has been disabled within the viewer.

Rough-and-Ready Performance Notes

The benefits in using 64-bit versions of the viewer – for those who can – are much better memory utilisation and potentially a reduced crash rate and, potentially, a boost in overall viewer performance. In terms of the latter, and while direct comparisons are always subjective (and dependent upon some factors outside of your control, such as the complexity of any other avatars in your field of view / in the region, etc), I carried out some very rough-and-ready tests using ~Neive~ as my testing-point, and with the viewers all set-up according to my review system specifications.

Baseline test location: ~Neive~ 199, 155, 27, facing west, with three (or in the case of the Black dragon 32-bit version test, four) avatars within draw distance. All measurements were taken after setting the preferences in each viewer, and clearing object and texture caches before doing a fresh load to ensure each viewer had the scene locally cached. I then launched each viewer in turn, let the scene load from cache, measured, shut-down and launched the next & repeated.

Viewer
 FPS Static FPS panning left / right
Firestorm 64-bit 5.0.7.529121 25 22-28
SL Alex Ivy 5.1.0.508209 38 33-38
Kokua 32-bit 5.0.6.41208 23 20-23
Kokua Alex Ivy 5.1.0.42217 37 34-37
Black Dragon 32-bit 2.8.22 36 33-38
Black Dragon 64-bit 2.9.0 Alpha2 45 33-46

Notes:

  1. Firestorm 64 is currently not using the Lab’s 64-bit code base, and so might be considered an indirect comparison, rather than a like-for-like code base comparison.
  2. Black Dragon has many additional exposed / tweaked graphics options, and a number of defaults somewhat different to the default viewer. In measuring, I attempted to tweak the viewer back more towards the default viewer.

Also note that the static fps numbers are a median based on fluctuations in numbers; the panning figures represent the average high/low fps values when panning. All measurements taken via the Stats floater (CTRL-SHFT-1) to ensure consistency of displayed floaters in the viewer.

As indicated towards the top of this article, I’ve not really played that much with either viewer, so cannot comment in-depth on overall performance  / stability, etc.

Links and Downloads

SL project updates week 37/1: week #36 region return issues

Posted on by Inara Pey

Mother Road; Inara Pey, September 2017, on FlickrMother Road – blog post

Server Deployments for Week #37

As always, please refer to the server release thread for updates and the latest news.

  • On Tuesday, September 12th, 2017, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the same server maintenance package,17#17.09.01.508236, as deployed to the BlueSteel and LeTigre RCs in week #36. It is described as comprising internal fixes.
  • On Wednesday, September 13th, the RC channels should be updated as follows:
    • LeTigre and Magnum should receive a new server maintenance package, 17#17.09.08.508350 containing some internal HTTP fixes, described by Rider Linden as being, “pretty deep in the internals mostly having to do with how the server handles callbacks. [They]  mostly have to do with an issues on the response event. There was a rare case that could cause a crash.”
    • BlueSteel (and the smaller Cake RC) should receive a new server maintenance package, 17#17.09.08.508343, comprising some internal simulator changes.

Week #36 Region Return Issues

Following the RC deployments on Wednesday, September 6th, a number of regions across the grid experienced widespread object returns, resulting multiple forum threads (see here for an example). While some of the reports pointed a finger at the Magnum RC deployment as the cause, issues were also experienced on regions on other simulator channels as well.

The returns were triggered by objects within the affected regions having their physics shapes changed. This resulted in many objects undergoing an increase in their LI, prompting the returns as they exceed region / parcel allowances (see BUG-134270, and BUG-134271) and also meant that some objects which remained in-world, or which were placed out again by their owners could not longer be navigated by avatars (e.g. doorways appeared to be invisibly blocked, stairways couldn’t be climbed).

Commenting on the issue during the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, September 12th, Oz Linden stated:

The problem is pretty well understood, and we’re working on it… it’s actually been around for a long time, but some bad luck has triggered it a couple of times lately it’s a timing thing, and the window where it can happen is narrow … It can happen on any restart, but only if there are other simultaneous back-end problems; fortunately, those are usually rare – or rather, they had some root causes in common.

We do have a change in progress that we think will prevent that kind of large-scale returns … or at least that particular way of triggering them.

One of the critiques in this situation has been the apparent lack of response to the issue by the Lab – and it is one that could have perhaps benefited from a blog post or a response through one of the forum threads to the effect that the matter had been noted and the underlying cause being looked into. Responding to similar criticism made during the SUG meeting, Oz also said, “Actually, I just came from a meeting in which we were discussing how to respond more quickly to things like that on the forums.” Hopefully, the discussions will result in more positive responses to major issues raised through the forums in future.

Week #36 Outage

Week #36 also saw a further significant outage with Second Life services involving the platform, log-in services and so on. So far, there has been no definitive explanation as to what happened, but hopefully a post-mortem blog post will be forthcoming from April Linden or one of the Ops team in the near future.

SL Viewer

On Monday, September 11th, the Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 5.0.8.328951.

The Wolfpack RC updated on Tuesday, September 12th to version 5.0.8.328990.  This viewer is functionally identical to the release viewer, but includes additional back-end logging “to help catch some squirrelly issues”.

The rest of the official viewer pipeline remains unchanged from the end of week #36:

  • Current Release version 5.0.7.328060, dated August 9, promoted August 23 – formerly the Maintenance RC
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer, version 5.1.0.508209, dated September 5
    • Voice RC viewer, version 5.0.8.328552, dated September 1
  • Project viewers:
  • Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Environment Enhancement Project

Rider Linden has recently been pulled away from the Environment Enhancements Project (EEP, aka “Windlight updates”). However, he notes that he is making progress on the viewer side of things. Commenting on his current work with the project, Rider said:

The changes I’m making right now are adding some new classes that can handle the .settings assets. I’m wiring them into the environment on the viewer side. I’m trying to clean up the entire environment manager and the location that the windlight parameters are used/calculated/stored as I go (currently it is spread across about 1/2 a dozen source files for skys alone.).”

He also noted that he has yet to start on the scripted support for EEP, and it is likely that both the new Windlight assets and a project viewer will appear before the new scripting capabilities make their appearance. Quite when the assets and viewer will appear isn’t certain, and Oz Linden noted that there is a certain amount of infrastructure work to be done in connection with EEP.

In Brief

  • There has been some criticism of the server release notes being somewhat vague (e.g. “internal fixes”), the reason given for this is that the Lab prefers to be obscure about some changes rather than offering potential clues on possible griefing vectors / fixes for griefing vectors.
  • The keen-eyed may have noticed that the number of server release packages has changed, from ##.##.##.3##### to ##.##.##.5#####. The “5” signifies the package has been built on the Lab’s new simulator build system, with the increase made to avoid possible collisions between build versions.

2017 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 10th

This summary is 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.

Official LL Viewers

  • Current Release version 5.0.7.328060, dated August 9th, promoted August 23rd – No change
  • Release channel cohorts (notes on manually installing RC viewer versions):
    • Wolfpack RC viewer 5.0.8.328879, released September 8th – this viewer is functionally identical to the release viewer, but including additional back-end logging “to help catch some squirrelly issues.”
    • The Alex Ivy 64- bit viewer updated to version 5.1.0.508209 on September 5th.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V5-style

  • Black Dragon released a 64-bit version, 2.9.0, on September 5th.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

SL project updates week 36/2: TPV Dev meeting + SL in the cloud

Posted on by Inara Pey

Brand New Colony; Inara Pey, September 2017, on FlickrBrand New Colony – blog post

Updated to reflect the release of the Wolfpack RC, which appeared after this article had been uploaded for publishing.

The majority of the notes in this update are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, September 8th 2017. The video of that meeting is embedded at the end of this update, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. Timestamps in the text below will open the video in a separate window at the relevant point for those wishing to listen to the discussions.

Server Deployments Week #36 – Recap

Please refer to the deployment notice for the week for latest updates and news.

Region Return Issues

Whether connected to the Wednesday deployment or the grid-wide issues experienced later that day, but some regions reported significant returns of in-world objects (Mother Road, on the Main (SLS) channel, which I blogged about here, suffered the problem, as Heavenly Views (Magnum RC) also apparently did). Most of these problems seem to have been rectified by a roll-back of the affected regions.

SL Viewer

A new RC viewer, codenamed Wolfpack – version 5.0.8.328879 – was released late on September 8th. This viewer is functionally identical to the release viewer, but includes additional back-end logging to “help catch some squirrelly issues”.

[1:15-4:15] Otherwise have been no further viewer updates since the start of the week, leaving the current pipeline as follows:

  • Current Release version 5.0.7.328060, dated August 9, promoted August 23 – formerly the Maintenance RC
  • RC viewers:
    • Alex Ivy 64-bit RC viewer version 5.1.0.508209, dated September 5th
    • Voice RC viewer updated version 5.0.8.328552, dated September 1st
    • Maintenance RC viewer version 5.0.8.328812, dated August 31st
  • Project viewers:
  • Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

The Alex Ivy and Voice updates bring these RCs into parity with the current release viewer. These updates have lowered the overall crash rates for both viewers, although the Voice viewer’s crash rate is still somewhat elevated compared to the release viewer. This elevated crash rate is something the Lab has seen in the various viewers for the last few months, and are working to lower.

Alex Ivy will likely have two more RC releases before it is ready for promotion to de facto release status, as there are a couple of issues the Lab wants to clear up before any promotion of this viewer.

It is hoped work will shortly be resuming on the 360-degree snapshot viewer, part of which will also be bringing it up to parity with more recent releases.

New Viewer Splash / Log-in Screen

[4:25-8:07] The Lab is in the process of revamping the official viewer’s splash / log-in screen. This should be inherited automatically by those TPVs using the Lab’s splash screen. This will see the screen have a different look and feel, with the information arranged a little differently, with the grid status made somewhat more prominent. Some of the information widgets associated with the splash screen are also being updated as a part of this work, and will require testing by TPVs when available (RSS feeds should not be affected).

This work is being carried out by Phronimos Linden, one of the more recent (3 months ago at the time of writing) Lab staff recruited to work on Second Life.

Moving to the Cloud

[15:52-25:25] As confirmed in a recent Lab blog post, Second Life services are moving to the cloud. There are no specific details on this as yet, but in short:

  • The work will be carried out in stages.
  • It will include providing regions from the cloud (rather than the Lab’s own co-located servers).
  • As many know, the asset services has been in S3 cloud servers for several years.
  • The order of moving services hasn’t been determined as yet, but the aim will be to move services, then test for reliability and performance before opening them up / moving to the next service(s).
  • Some testing has already begun, using services only accessed indirectly by users.
  • The Lab has been working on the infrastructure for this for a while, but none of the major services have been moved.

It is unlikely this will lead to regions of a different size to those presently on the grid, or which can be varied in size (a-la the OpenSim varregions), as region size is very deeply baked into the simulator and viewer code (and probably elsewhere in the overall SL code base); although some at the Lab would love to be able to have such a region capability. However – as indicated in the Lab’s blog post – it may allow the Lab to introduce new region products, possibly ones capable of handling greater loads.

It is hoped that this work will result in lower tier over time, but whether this will be the case of not is still and open question at this time, as it is unclear as to what costs will be involved in terms of cloud instance types., etc., that will be required to support simulators.

Overall, there is a lot the Lab hopes to achieve with the move, but the precise benefits are likely to only become clear once things have been tried and found to work / over time as the work progresses and beyond. However, at this point time scales are TBD, and it is liable to be some time before user-visible aspects of the service move to the cloud (although non-visible services – such as the log-in service, for example – could be moved sooner).

A precursor to this project is the continuing work to update the servers to newer version of Linux, work which is making “good progress”.

Other Items

Asset HTTP Messaging and Asset HTTP Issues

[10:11-10:45 and 12:10-15:23] With the promotion of the Asset HTTP viewer to release status in June 2017, the majority of assets are now delivered to the viewer using HTTP via the Content Delivery Network(s) used by the Lab. This means that UDP messaging for all of the affected asset types will be turned off at the server end at some point.  Currently no date has been set for this, and it looks like it may not occur much before February 2018.

There is still an issue related to fetching assets over HTTP in general which is experienced by some users some of the time   whereby something causes the pipeline textures to get out of sync and things to go awry. As the problem happens for some and not others, the Lab is still trying to determine the root cause for the problem, but it is a matter the Lab is trying to resolve.

Catznip viewer reports issues with textures over HTTP “stalling” for between 5-10 minutes on their pre-release viewer with the latest HTTP updates, but this isn’t something the Lab is aware of as a more general issue.

Estate Tool Ban List Improvements

[10:48-11:43] The Lab did some initial work to improve ban lists at the estate / region level a while ago, but the intended work to improvement to overall layout for the lists, etc., has been delayed do to work on dealing with viewer crashes, etc. This work is apparently now “next in line” once some of the existing viewer projects are shipped.

The conversation from 26 minutes to the end is more general chat on viewer stats, speculation on the reason for the texture load stalls, and an ad for the Firestorm birthday party.

SL project updates week 36/1: server, viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

Savor Serenity; Inara Pey, August 2017, on FlickrSavor Serenity – blog post

Server Deployments Week 36

Please refer to the deployment notice for the week for latest updates and news.

SL Viewer

  • On Tuesday, September 5th, the Alex Ivy 64-bit RC viewer updated to version 5.1.0.508209.
  • On Friday, September 1st, the Voice RC viewer updated to version 5.0.8.328552.
  • On Thursday, August 31st, a new version of the Maintenance RC viewer was released, version 5.0.8.328812, replacing the earlier version, pulled shortly after release due to BUG-134213, [Maint: Moonshine] breaks clickable functionality for certain HUDs.

The rest of the viewer release pipelines remain unchanged from the end of week #35:

  • Current Release version 5.0.7.328060, dated August 9, promoted August 23 – formerly the Maintenance RC
  • Project viewers:
  • Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Feature Request

The Lab  welcomes well thought-out and present feature request via the Second Life JIRA. Not every feature request is accepted – which is not the same as saying they aren’t looked at / considered. Commenting on how and when requests are taken up, coming out os a conversation about script functions, Simon Linden had this to say:

We have a long list of “it would be nice to do” script features. We don’t make final decisions on anything until we get to the point where we’d actually work on them. There’s always a tough choice which one is the best thing to spend limited time on.

When we look at features, we have to juggle how hard it might be to implement, if it’s going to affect a narrow or broad set of customers, if it’s really a new thing or something you might already be able to do (most often with scripting features), potential for lag, griefing or privacy problems, how much would break, etc.

 

 

2017 Viewer release summaries week 35

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 3rd

This summary is 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.

Official LL Viewers

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V5-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

  • No updates.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links