Updates for the week ending: Sunday February 22nd, 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
Current Release version: 3.7.24.297623 – no change
Login Viewer RC viewer version 3.7.25.298971 released on February 17th – core updates: reduces the login buttons on the splash screen to one (download and release notes)
Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 3.7.25.299021 on February 17 – 30+ bug fixes and improvements (download and release notes)
Stable branch updated on February 22nd to version 1.26.12.32
New release of the experimental branch, version 1.26.13.0, released on February 22nd – core updates: Viewer-managed Marketplace support (additional notes on this release)
On February 6th, residents and Lindens met in-world for what proved to be a challenge met with gusto and delight: the first in-world snowball fight involving Linden staff in a fair while.
As I was able to report from the front lines (when not picking myself up off the floor and dusting myself down after getting splatted by a certain Mr. Gibson Firehawk … several times 😛 ), the event was held in the Winter Wonderland created by the Lab and the Moles to help demonstrate the forthcoming experience keys / tools.
But will Strawberry “Snap Shot” Singh be on-hand this time? …
Well, with Winter Wonderland liable to be closing its doors in March, due to springtime arriving, the gauntlet has been once again laid down, with a challenge handed out to one and all for a further snowball fight – only this time it comes from the Firestorm team!
The challenge was given out in a Firestorm blog post, which reads in part:
The Firestorm team wants to do it again! Snowball fight pt 2! For those who couldn’t make it to the first one this is your chance to get involved and have some old school fun! We have extended an invitation to the Lindens as well and hope some of them will join in too.
February 6th proved to be a huge amount of fun for everyone involved, something which even recalcitrant weapons vendors and a healthy smattering of lag amidst the snow could do little to dampen.
… and who might find they’re in need of a bit of a sit-down amidst all the excitement? (And will hot cocoa also be available this time?)
So… if you missed out the first time around, or if you want to do it all over again, be sure to be in-world at the Snowball Warzone in Winter Wonderland by 13:00 SLT on Sunday, February 22nd!
As will already be known, there were no server deployments this week.
SL Viewer
A new release candidate viewer appeared in the release channel on February 17th in the form of a new login viewer. Version 3.7.25.298971 sees the three log-in options buttons on the original log-in screen update replaced with a single button.
LL viewer log-in updates: as they first appeared after an initial log-in following the 2014 revisions to the log-in / splash screen (top); and as they are now displayed in the new RC viewer, version 3.7.25.298971 (bottom) – click for full size, if required
February 17th also saw updates made to the Maintenance RC viewer, which was updated to version 3.7.25.298971, while the Tools update project viewer was updated to version 3.7.25.298862, having been held over for release from week #7, due to the Valentine’s weekend / President’s day no change window.
Group Chat
The was a further back-end update to the group chat servers during the week, further implementing the stability improvements the Lab has been working on to solve issues of chat appearing to freeze when switching between tab / issues with the chat servers themselves locking-up.
Other Items
Attachment Issues
As per my last report, there is still considerable debate about the nature of attachment issues, particularly those reported via BUG-6925. A concern is that while (as noted last time), the Lab considers there to be multiple issues occurring, BUG-6925 has already had some initial investigations carried out by the Lab, and these might be getting missed as the Lab considers the wider problems and attempts to categorise things. There is also a concern that the BUG-6925 issue in particular is AIS-v3 related, which could result in a significant increase in reported issues should that code be released by Firestorm as a part of their planned update.
Suggestions have been made on additional logging that might be added to the viewer to further pin-down precisely what is happening in the various circumstances where attachments are detached / re-attached or appear to be detached but aren’t, etc., and the issues are continuing to be examined by the Lab.
On Tuesday, February 17th, the Firestorm team launched the latest in their Tool Tip Tuesday series, with Jessica taking a look at Contact Sets.
Contact Sets provide a way to organise your friends – and other people – into sets or categories, using your own criteria. Thus you can create sets of friends, colleagues, business contacts, and so on. They aren’t necessarily for everyone, but for those who are a member of different role-play groups or combat groups, etc., or who need to manage lists of customers or tenants, etc., and perhaps need a quick way of identifying people, they can be very useful.
By assigning a colour to a Contact Set you can, for example, make it easier to identify members of that group in your Friends list or on the mini-map, or through their name tag in-world – or even in group, IM and nearby chat. So identifying a customer or tenant in a crowd becomes very easy, helping to smooth any communications which take place, while spotting people on the mini-map is also made easier.
And if you have problems reading fancy text people sometimes use in their display names, Contact Sets lets you assign an alias to contacts who do, making it it easier for you to identify them without struggling to read their display name.
Contacts Sets allow you to organise your contacts in a wide variety of ways, making them a powerful tool when needed
Contact lists can also be be shared across accounts. This means that if you use alts for a specific tasks (such as customer care) you can copy one or more Contact Sets from one account to another, making the management of your customers that much easier when using your various accounts.
However, the very power found in Contact Sets can make getting to grips with them a little bewildering – so if you’ve ever wondered what they are all about, but have fought shy of diving into them, Jessica’s introductory video should be just the ticket for you. In it she provides an uncomplicated overview of the major features in Contact Sets and demonstrates how to get started within using them.
Should you want to know more about Contact Sets after watching the video, then be sure to check the Firestorm class schedule for lessons on them, and further guidance can be found in the Firestorm wiki.
Updates for the week ending: Sunday February 15th, 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
Current Release version: 3.7.24.297623 – no change
The following notes are primarily taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, February 13th. A video of the TPV Developer meeting is included at the end of the article (my thanks as always to North for recording it and providing it for embedding), and any time stamps contained within the following text refer to both it and the TPV Developer meeting.
SL Viewer
Avatar Hover Height (AHH)
[09:17] It had been expected that the Avatar Hover Height project viewer (version 3.7.25.298129) might have been replaced by a release candidate during the course of the past week. However, some of the reported issues are still being worked on, most of which are related to the code which tries to keep an avatar’s feet in contact with the ground, and problems which can occur in certain extreme cases. It is now anticipated that the viewer will be updated to a release candidate viewer once these issues have been fixed.
Viewer Build Tools
[14:37] It had been hoped that this viewer would be updated with a release candidate version prior to the long weekend no change window (see below), however it didn’t clear QA in time. Unless something significant happens on the QA side, this viewer should therefore reach release candidate status some time during week 8 (Week commencing Monday, February 16th).
However, it is anticipated it will undergo further updates while at RC status, and so therefore is unlikely to progress directly from RC to the de facto release viewer in a short space of time. One such update might be to include various patches to further simplify the build process, notably for windows, for example.
Graphics Settings and Avatar Rendering
[19:49] This work is a combination of STORM-2082, which allows users to create and save multiple graphics settings defaults, and internal work carried out by the lab to help users improve their viewer performance by defining limited above which avatars with heavy rendering costs are replaced by a solid colour. A viewer with these updates has been under limited testing for a while, and is liable to be appearing very soon, particularly given the Lab’s recent announcement on forthcoming improvements.
Mesh Importer
[23:43] There are a fair number of bugs and issues which have been identified with the current mesh importer project viewer (see the JIRA filter list for details), it is therefore unlikely that it will be progressing in the short term.
Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM)
[00:05] A new version of the Viewer-Managed Marketplace project viewer was released on Friday, February 13th, version 3.7.25.298865. This viewer includes updates as a result of feedback from initial testing on Aditi, and is available for further testing, but again must be used on Aditi in regions ACME D, E, or F.
A number of issues remain open with This update:
VMM-20 Include product listing ID in audit listings window results
VMM-17 Support listing folders at any level of Marketplace Listings folder.
A list of key changes can be found on the forum update announcing the release of the new version of the viewer, and further details on VMM can be found in the SL wiki FAQ.
This viewer doesn’t address all of the concerns raised during testing, as some are still being discussed internally by the Lab, and a decision has yet to be taken on whether to address the additional concerns (which are presumably non-viewer specific) prior to holding a feedback meeting, or whether to push ahead with a further feedback meeting which might encompass the use of the new project viewer. This largely depends on the likely time frame for addressing the remaining issues: it might be as little as a week or so, or it might potentially be a month or so.
Experience Keys / Tools
[06:34] The Lab is continuing to work on back-end issues which need to be sorted prior to the project progressing. It is still believed that none of these issues directly affect the viewer or will require updates to the viewer, however, it is unlikely the viewer will be updated (other than to maintain parity with any other viewer that might be promoted ahead of it), until such time as the Lab is confident they are ready to start pushing things forward again.
Group Chat
The Lab is also continuing to work on group chat, and a further mini-test took place during the Server Beta User Group meeting on Thursday, February 12th. This focuses on testing viewer-side freezes when opening and closing or swapping between group chat tabs, and chat update times when moving across region boundaries either physically for via teleports. The overall results of these tests were that users experienced almost no viewer-side freezes in comparison to the last tests, where some severe viewer lock-ups were experienced.
[10:27] Most of the effort on group chat is now being directed into these issues of stability and eliminating the need for servers to be restarted as a result of server-side freezes, given that one the whole, performance for the majority (all but some of the very largest groups) has been noticeably improved. In terms of the server freezes, progress is being made, with Oz reporting that there might only be once such instance a day now as a result of fixes already implemented, which is currently being iterated upon as a result of the additional monitoring / logging capabilities the Lab have also introduced.
Attachment Issues
[24:52] There have been increasing reports on variations of a problem with attachment rendering following teleports / region crossings (e.g. attachments seem to detach and then re-attach, people see their attachments as missing while other see them as still attached – and vice-versa, and so on). Some of the issues are listed in BUG-6925, and the issues have been noted by the Lab.
The likelihood is that these issues are the result of more than one problem, and possibly the result of various race conditions resulting from the complexities of data packaging and hand-over required in both a region crossing and a teleport (which are both essentially the same things – the packaging and handing of data relating to an avatar and its attachments between simulators, and then passing of updated information to users’ viewers). Some also appear to be directly related to AIS v3 (as per BUG-6925) Currently, the Lab is still prioritising SL issues and problems, and full determination as to what needs to be down to resolve these problems has yet to be made.
In the meantime, if you do encounter the problem, and you’re preferably using the official viewer, you might want to consider filing the following information via BUG-6925:
The specific time, origin region (the place you were crossing / teleporting from) and destination region (the place you were crossing / teleporting to)
Avatar name
The item ID (UUID) for the attachment(s) exhibiting a problem
The viewer log that was recorded at the time the problem occurred.
This will at least provide the Lab with data they can use in further investigations into the issues, once matters have been prioritised.
Other Items
Presidents’ Day
Monday, February 16th marks Presidents’ Day in the United States and Linden Lab will be observing the holiday. This means that there is effectively a no change window in force from February 13th through 16th inclusive. This in turn means:
There will be no Open-source development meeting on Monday, February 16th
Any server-side deployments scheduled for the week commencing Monday, February 16th will most likely take place a day later than usual. So any Main (SLS) channel deployment will probably occur on Wednesday, February 18th and any RC channel deployments on Thursday, February 19th.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 