Category: SL Tech

Second Life project updates 22/2; server and viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey
Obedience, LEA 1 - blog post
Obedience, LEA 1 – blog post

Server Deployments, Week 22 – Recap

The planned RC deployment scheduled for Wednesday, May 27th was rolled back as a result of a back-end issue. This currently leaves grid as a whole on the same server release.

Commenting on the roll-back at the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting on Thursday, May 28th, Simon Linden said, “there was a minor issue but it was worth reverting; some internal tools weren’t running right and sending postcards was broken. [However] that code will likely be back next week, [as] I’ve already fixed the bug.”

These issues aren’t related to the region restart issues / caps failure people have noticed with some regions following a rolling restart, and as reported in my week 21/2 report, and which Simon indicates have yet to be looked into in-depth.

SL Viewer

Thursday, May 28th saw the Avatar Layer Limits viewer, version 3.7.29.301305, updated to the de facto release viewer. This viewer removed the limit of only being able to wear a maximum of 5 items per clothing layer (e.g. a maximum of 5 jackets and 5 shirts and 5 pants, etc), with a global limit of 60 layers which can be worn in any combination (e.g. you can wear 58 jacket layers, a tattoo layer and a pants layer if you wish).

This leaves two RCs in the release channel at present: the Avatar Attachment fixes RC (aka Project Big Bird and currently version 3.7.29.301943), and the Experience Keys viewer (currently version 3.8.0.300963, and which is awaiting the completion of back-end updates to the Experience Keys services). Both of these viewers will be updated to match the new release viewer, and it is anticipated that they will be joined by a new Snowstorm RC viewer in the near future (see below), which is currently awaiting some fixes prior to release.

General

Project news coming out of the Lab is a little light at the moment. This shouldn’t be taken to mean there isn’t a lot happening with Second Life. There are several projects that are in the pipeline – Viewer-Managed Marketplace and Experience Keys (/ Tools) being two that people are aware of.

The Lab don’t talk too much ahead of time as to what is going on, but it’s clear to see from Simon’s back-end work around avatar counts in regions, that there are various things which are being looked at. Again, we only recently had it confirmed that the Lab have, as a part of continuing work on improving the CDN services, shifted to another provider – and they are looking to move the delivery of more asset types to the CDN in the coming months.

In the meantime, we can expect to see more RC viewers appearing  – notably the next Snowstorm RC viewer with Avatar Complexity, and which should include STORM-2082, the ability to save and load graphics settings to assist with viewer performance, depending on the environment you’re in.

Jonathan Yap is working on the ability to various graphics settings in the official viewer, allowing users to quickly change between saved settings depending on their performance needs - this should be appearing in an upcoming Snowstorm contributions viewer (note the finished panel may not resemble the one shown left, above)
Jonathan Yap is working on the ability to various graphics settings in the official viewer, allowing users to quickly change between saved settings depending on their performance needs – this should be appearing in an upcoming Snowstorm contributions viewer (note the finished panel may not resemble the one shown left, above)

 

Second Life project updates 22/1; server, viewer, avatar rendering

Posted on by Inara Pey
Stand: Relay D'Alliez
Stand, Relay D’Alliez – Relay for Life Exhibit – blog post

Server Deployments, Week 22

Update, May 28th: a back-end issue with the RC deployment has meant that all three RC channels have been rolled-back to the their previous release, leaving the grid as a whole on the same server release.

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates / news.

There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, May 26th, due to there having been no RC deployment in week #21.

On Wednesday, May 27th, all thee RCs should receive a new server maintenance package, comprising:

  • A change logic on accessing group member lists for large groups
  • Internal server logging changes.

SL Viewer

Due to Monday being Memorial Day in the United States, the Lab was closed for normal office business, and there was no meeting to discuss potential RC viewer promotions. However, the most recent update to the Attachment Fixes RC viewer (Project Big Bird, currently version 3.7.29.301943) is showing a must reduced crash rate compared to the previous release (and which prevented it from being promoted to the de facto release viewer).

The crash rate is still slightly high than for the current release viewer, but speaking at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, May 26th, Oz Linden described it as “probably not a statistically significant difference”. Whether this means the viewer will be promoted to release status later in the week or not, remains to be seen.

Increasing the Number of Avatars Per Region

Simon Linden: looking at ways an means to make it easier for the simulator and a viewer to better handle large numbers of avatars
Simon Linden: looking at ways an means to make it easier for the simulator and a viewer to better handle large numbers of avatars

“There’s one change that I will follow up on … I added a way so I can adjust the ‘max avatars in a region’ setting.  I’d like to do an experiment soon and see what falls apart if we can get over 100 people into a region,” Simon Linden said at the simulator UG when discussing the upcoming RC deployment.

“This is purely experimental and there are no plans for changing the SL limits,” he went on. “But sometimes regions hit 100 [and] it would be nice if the viewer and simulator handled that better.”

There is already an additional means en route to the viewer by which users can have greater control over how avatars around them in a region are rendered by the viewer, Avatar Complexity, when will draw avatars above a rendering limit set by the user as a solid colour (the so-called “Jelly Baby” avatars).  The will work alongside the existing Avatar Imposters capability already in the viewer.

However, in terms of his experiment, Simon suggested that one way to improve things might be for the viewer to simply not draw everyone within a region; although how this would work, and the criteria used to determine what avatars are drawn and which aren’t, does require careful consideration. Simon suggested the viewer might simply skip drawing those avatars that are furthest away once a threshold number of avatars in the region has been reached. Another (suggest by a meeting attendee) would be for the control to be via the Max Number of Avatars settings within the viewer – so that once exceeded, avatars are again simply not rendered.

As noted, Simon’s work is purely experimental, and primarily aimed at helping the Lab understand what might be done to improve things where there are large gatherings of avatars, and to perhaps try out one or two ideas based on what they learn.

Simon’s Rendering Tricks

As a part of the discussion on avatar rendering, Simon handed out a note card of tips and trick for improving your performance when dealing with complex avatars. While this includes the debugs which will form a part of the new Avatar Complexity functionality, which will be appearing in a a Snowstorm RC viewer soon, as well as suggestions which may already be known, I’m including his suggestions in full here for reference:

From Advanced > Show Debug Settings, set:

  • RenderAutoHideSurfaceAreaLimit   0
  • RenderAutoMuteByteLimit  0
  • RenderAutoMuteFunctions  7
  • RenderAutoMuteLogging  False
  • RenderAutoMuteRenderWeightLimit  350000
  • RenderAutoMuteSurfaceAreaLimit  150

In preferences / graphics, change “Max # of non-imposter avatars” to something like 8. Also try ctrl-alt-shift-4 to hide avatars, or ctrl-alt-shift-2 for alphas.

Note the two debugs shown in green are those related directly to Avatar Complexity and drawing avatars as “Jelly Babies”. Note that RenderAutoMuteFunctions must be set to 7 in order for this to work. Also note that the RenderAutoMuteRenderWeightLimit of 350,000 is purely an advisory starting point. The Lab estimate that this will reduce the very top 3% of very rendering-intensive avatars as solid colours. You may find you have to set the value somewhat lower in certain environments  – such as night clubs and dance venues – in order for it to be effective. I’ve personally found that 150-200K tends to be required in very busy ballrooms, etc.

Black Dragon 2.4.2.5: snapshot floater and cinematic camera

Posted on by Inara Pey

Blackdragon logoOn Saturday, May 23rd, NiranV Dean released version 2.4.2.5 of his Black Dragon viewer, which brings with it three core updates:

  • Revisions to the Unified Snapshot floater
  • An experimental cinematic camera
  • A “lock” feature to synchronise map changes (diffuse, normal and specular) across all three channels simultaneously.

Unified Snapshot Floater Updates

The snapshot floater updates include:

  • An option to save the snapshot upload type
  • Automatic file format changes when switching to profile/inventory upload and back
  • Fixes for auto-refresh
  • Improved world freeze – the entire world is now frozen, and allows proper camming around.

However, what is likely to find favour with a lot of users (assuming it is adopted by other viewers, including LL’s)  is the ability to now preview snapshots in a separate, resizeable texture panel.

The alternative snapshot preview panel can be accessed via the Preview button in the Unified Snapshot Floater
The alternative snapshot preview panel can be accessed via the Preview button in the Unified Snapshot Floater

This is enabled by a new Preview button in the snapshot floater, as shown above. However, do note that this does not “tear off” the existing preview pane, but actually opens a separate panel, linked to the floater – the original preview pane will remain open as well, until such time as it is closed using the << button at the top of the snapshot floater. Also, as it is a separate panel, the resizeable preview panel must also be closed separately to the snapshot floater.

Once opened, the alternate preview panel can be resized by dragging from the sides, the top or bottom edge or from the corners to more readily suit your requirements. note also that in doing so, the image will retain the correct aspect ratio.

The additional preview panel can be resized via dragging from the top / bottom / sides / corners
The additional preview panel can be resized via dragging from the top / bottom / sides / corners

I did encounter a slight problem with the updated snapshot floater – not with the new preview panel, but in the fact that the floater appears to be locked into saving images to disk in PNG format without my having changed any install defaults. On selecting either JPEG or BMP, the floater defaulted back to PNG.

Cinematic Camera

The Cinematic Camera is an experimental option, enabled through a debug setting, UseCinematicCamera. The camera will track head movements as you move – and is most effective if you’re using one of the Black Dragon over-the-shoulder third-person views. You’ll need to ensure your avatar’s head movement is free to follow the mouse as well.

If I’m honest, I didn’t have too much success playing with it – but that could easily be down to me doin’ it wrong. However, Niran has provided a video which may help to demonstrate things:

Texture Sync Lock

build-1The “Lock” option on the Texture tab of the Build floater operates in a similar manner to the Synchronise option found in the official viewer. When set, it ensures that changes made to the spinners for repeats, offsets and rotation on a texture are applied across all three materials maps.

This allows the viewer to use a single set of spinners for adjusting offsets, etc., against a set of maps applied to a surface / object and ensures they are applied across all three maps correctly.

Niran also provides some advice when using the Lock capability:

Note that this might cause the spinners and/or faces to revert sometimes, this is NORMAL behaviour, it’s due to lag which was already present long before this change (sadly). Usually happens if you use the spinners via mouse repeatedly, to prevent it most of the time you should type in your desired values directly and press enter ONCE then wait a bit.

Feedback

An interesting set of updates, and the ability to use a resizeable preview panel for snapshots could fine some popular support given some people have found the default preview panel size in the Unified Snapshot floater to be overwhelming. As such, it’ll be interesting to see how the Lab and other TPVs option to implement this particular change or not (I understand Niran will be contributing the updates to LL, if he has not already done so, as he did with the original Unified Snapshot floater code).

Note also that as well as the features outlined above, this release includes a number of fixes, updates and changes – please refer to the release notes for details of these.

Additional Links

2015 viewer release summaries: week 21

Posted on by Inara Pey

Updates for the week ending: Sunday, May 24th, 2015

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

V3-style

  • Black Dragon updated to version 2.4.2.5 on May 23rd – core updates: updates unified snapshot floater; experimental cinematic camera (release notes)
  • Restrained Love updated to version 2.9.10 on May 19th, and then to version 2.9.11 on May 25th – core updates: bug fixes (release notes: 2.9.10 and 2.9.11)

V1-style

  •  No updates.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

UKanDo goes VMM with a beta update

Posted on by Inara Pey

logoThe UKanDo viewer, maintained by Connor Monaron updated to version 3.7.28.34230 on May 11th.

As the version number suggests, this brings the viewer to parity with the Lab’s 3.7.28 code base, and specifically with the Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM) functionality.

For those who may not recognise VMM, and keeping things relatively brief, the aim of the project is to enable merchants to manage the creation and management of Marketplace product listing through the viewer, bypassing the need to use the Merchant Outbox (and have copies of items stored on the Marketplace inventory servers) or using Magic Boxes.

It does this by adding a new Marketplace Listing panel to to viewer, which will eventually replace the Merchant Outbox entirely, and by adding additional back-end and web functionality which allows merchants to carry out a number of tasks associated with their Marketplace listings from within the viewer, and by enabling products to be delivered to customers directly from the Lab’s asset servers, rather than having to store them as separate inventory on the Marketplace servers.

Rather than go into a detailed explanation of all the functionality here, if you haven’t come across VMM before, please read my notes from the initial testing in 2014.

The Merchant Listing Panel for VMM, as see in the UKanDo beta, with some of my migrated items
The Merchant Listing panel for VMM, as see in the UKanDo beta, with some of my migrated items

The key point here is that, at the time of writing, VMM is still very much undergoing beta testing, and the viewer-side code has yet to reach a release candidate status in the official viewer, so the 3.7.28 release of UKanDo is slightly ahead of the curve – the Lab prefer that TPVs don’t release code which the Lab themselves have not issues in release candidate form.

To this end, Connor has clearly indicated this 3.7.28 release is a beta version of UKanDo, and the earlier 3.7.27 update remains available as the full release.

It’s also worth pointing out that initially, the current VMM beta was by invitation, so if you want to try the functionality either using the UKanDo beta or the Lab’s own project viewer, you’ll have to apply to join the beta via the link towards the bottom of your Merchant Home Page on the Marketplace.

All that said, I’ve been driving the VMM version of UKanDo over the last couple of days, using it to gradually convert my own modest store on the Marketplace from Direct Delivery to VMM (as shown in the image above right, taken as I got started), and have found absolutely no issues with it – not that I was actually expecting any.  Everything works smoothly, and updates made via UKanDo are accurately reflected when checked in the official VMM project viewer.

For Merchants who prefer using UKanDo over the official viewer, and who would like to try-out VMM as the Lab moves it gradually towards full deployment (which could occur in June 2015), the 3.7.28 presents an opportunity to do so.

Note that as a VMM beta release, the 3.7.28 update does not contain any other functional or other updates compared to the UKanDo 3.7.27 release.

VMM allows merchants to carry out some Marketplace listing related tasks from within the viewer (subject to how they have web browsing set-up) - here I'm editing a listing associated with an item in my Merchant Listing Panel
VMM allows merchants to carry out some Marketplace listing related tasks from within the viewer (subject to how they have web browsing set-up) – here I’m editing a listing associated with an item in my Merchant Listing panel – click for full size, if required

 Related Links

Second Life project updates 21/2: general notes

Posted on by Inara Pey
Living in a Bowl
Living in a Bowl, May 2015 – blog post

Server Deployments, Week 21

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates / news.

On Tuesday, May 19th the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to the three RC channel, comprising Internal server logging changes, back-end system bug fixes and a change to Reply-To e-mail addressing on snapshots. There were no RC deployments on Wednesday, May 20th.

SL Viewer

The Attachments Viewer RC (Project Big Bird) was updated to version 3.7.29.301943 on Thursday May 21st. As noted in part 1 of this week’s report, the initial RC release of this viewer had an elevated crash rate compared to the current release viewer, including a crash-on-exit bug, so this release will hopefully address those issues.

Group Chat

A fix for issues around BUG-9130, where some people were unable to see any posts in some or all of there group chats, including their own posts, while everyone else in the same group could see their posts, has started to be deployed across the chat servers, and should be completed on Friday, May 22nd.

“The chat servers got stuck with bad info about where the sender was, so the messages never reached them,” Simon Linden said at the Server Beta User Group meeting on Thursday, May 21st, reiterating an explanation given at a recent Simulator UG meeting. “And unfortunately it wouldn’t fix with relogging or even a chat server restart.”

“Loading…” Issue with Names in Group Chats

This is a viewer-side problem which causes avatar names to appear as “Loading” under certain circumstances in group chat (see BUG-3829 and STORM-2114). A contribution by Ansariel Hiller is currently with the Lab and is expected to be released as a part of the next Snowstorm contributions viewer, which is expected to appear soon.

Other Items

Region Restart Glitch

There has been something of a rise in reports of regions experiencing issues following recent following restarts – most noticeably caps failures. This is something the Lab is looking into, and Simon commented, “we have a suspicion that after rolls, as that server host starts up regions, it’s doing enough of them at about the same time that things get overloaded.   It’s still a theory but makes some sense why we’d get cap failures like that.”