SL Tech – Page 333 – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

SL project updates week 5/2: TPV Dev meeting, group chat, VMM

Posted on January 31, 2015September 27, 2024 by Inara Pey

Linden Lab’s new Winter Wonderland: race track, rinks and Ferris Wheel – blog post

The following notes are taken from the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 28th, 2015, and the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January 30th. A video of the latter 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.

Server Deployments Week 5 – Recap

On Tuesday, January 27th, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to Magnum and LeTigre
On Wednesday, January 27th, the RC channels should all receive a new server maintenance package comprising an Experience Keys / Tools related fix, and internal Experience Keys / Tools improvements.

It was stated during the TPV Developer meeting that this update saw the support for the Avatar hover Height (AHH) capability extend to all three RC channels, although no mention of it was made in the release notes.

SL Viewer

Tool Chain Project viewer

The Lab issued a new Tools Update project viewer, version 3.7.25.298587, on Wednesday January 28th. This viewer has been built using the new viewer tool chain for Windows and Mac builds (which includes the upgrade to Visual Studio 2013 for Windows and, Xcode (5 or 6) for Mac, and the use of the autobuild 1.0 process).

Wiki notes for using the new build tools are in the process of being written / enhanced for self-compilers – please note these are a work in progress. Notes on the new autobuild process can also be found on the wiki.

[06:42] It is anticipated that this viewer will progress through to release candidate status, quite probably in week #6 (week commencing Monday, February 2nd).

Maintenance RC Viewer Issues

Users receiving the Maintentance RC, version 3.7.25.298030, released on Tuesday, January 27th, have reported a series of irritating bugs with the viewer:

BUG-8324 (and duplicate BUG-8333) reports the appearance of the term “nolink>” in numerous places within the viewer – such as toasts and notifications – this issue has been imported by the Lab and a fix is apparently in development
BUG-8331 – some links containing the text secondlife or lindenlab incorrectly open a Place Profile in the Places panel when clicked
BUG-8328 – very jagged pictures created by the snapshot floater
BUG-1028 – the fix for MAINT-2056 “Lots of CURL GET FAILED spam in logs when browsing World Map – Beta viewer only” appears not to have fixed the problem, but rather replaced it with an equally spammy message.

Issues with this viewer can be tracked on the JIRA using this filter.

Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM)

[00:12] Brooke Linden was at the TPV Developer meeting to provide an update on the state of play with the Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM) work, which has been undergoing some beta testing with the project viewer on Aditi.

As a result of this testing, the Lab has been re-visiting the project viewer and incorporating feedback and observations for improvements into it, and are “really close” to having an updated version of the viewer available. When the appears depends on whether the Lab opt to release the updated viewer for limited beta testing on Aditi, or to wait until they’re ready to go with beta testing on the main grid, which is also not too far over the horizon.

The current plan is for more widespread beta testing to commence some time after February 14th (so as not to clash with any Valentines Day sales and promotions merchants may be running between now and Feb 14th), then run the beta for around a month, possibly longer, depending on feedback / issues. After this, VMM support will be deployed as a production tool, and things will move to a migration period which will also last around a month.

All this is still TBC, but a schedule will be posted (presumably via the Commerce / Merchant’s forum) once the Lab has worked through dates and requirements.

Experience Keys / Tools

[03:50] The Experience Keys / Tools project is currently awaiting some final server-side updates to be fully deployed (see the server release notes above). It is not anticipated that the Experience Tools viewer which is currently in the viewer release channel (version 3.8.0.298001) will require any further significant updates, so its promotion to the de facto release viewer is pending the server-side updates.

In the meantime, the Lab has already commenced work on a set of enhancement to the Experience Keys / Tools which will further extend capabilities once they are ready to be deployed.

Avatar Hover Height Project

As noted above, server-side support for the Avatar Hover Height project (see my overview for details) is now on all three RC channels, and the plan is to deploy the server code to the Main channel in week #6 (week commencing Monday, February 2nd). Because of this, the current project viewer (currently version 3.7.25.298129) is liable to be superseded by a release candidate viewer following the server-side deployments for that week.

Now in a project viewer (and soon to be a release candidate: Avatar Hover Height provides a means of adjusting your avatar’s graphical height above the ground / floor / objects, as seen by yourself and others

[18:00] A couple of small issues have been noted with AHH, and which only occur is very specific instances. One is that if an adjustment leaves your avatar floating more than around 1/2 a metre above the ground, an attempt to sit down can result in your avatar going up. In the other, standing on a prim and lowering your hover height into the prim can result in your avatar’s legs buckling as you slide into the prim. On terrain, where there can be limited physical penetration, this can be expected behaviour; but when occurring on a prim, it is suspected that the system may not be accurately assessing your avatar’s position.

[19:38] There have been one or two points of concern raised about the similarity in the name of this function – Avatar Hover Height – causing people to confuse it with the existing avatar hover slider (which will not be retired or removed from the viewer once AHH is fully deployed, as the two capabilities provide different use case solutions). The concerns are being fed back internally at the Lab, and if a name change is thought to be required, it may be slipped into the upcoming RC rebuild for the viewer, or the Lab may opt to wait and see if any confusion does arise.

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OnLive offers SL Go users with an active subscription a free month

Posted on January 30, 2015December 27, 2024 by Inara Pey

Important note: The SL Go service is to be shut down on April 30th, 2015. For more information, please read this report.

If you’re an SL Go user, you’ve probably already seen the e-mail, but just in case you haven’t…

The company has been writing to all SL Go users to let them know that an issue in the SL Go Second Life Viewer (SLV) currently prevents teleporting (although the problem doesn’t affect the Firestorm viewer on SL Go). “SLV had been running fine for months,” SL Go Product Manager Dennis Harper informed me. “Then all of a sudden… people can’t TP!”

Why this should have happened is unclear. Nothing has been changed at OnLive’s end to cause the problem, and while the Lab has also been involved in investigations, no reason or solution has yet been determined.

As a result, OnLive pro-actively sought to contact all users with an active subscription and offer them a free month’s subscription to the service, as noted in the official e-mail, which reads in part:

We understand your frustration and apologize for the inconvenience. We will give all SL Go subscribers a free month of SL Go to make up for time lost. The next time your subscription renews, you will not be charged.

Our goal is to continuously improve the SL Go experience. We are committed to our community in Second Life and hope that you will continue to enjoy the benefits of SL Go.

Note that the offer applies to all SL Go users with an active subscription at the time the e-mail was sent, regardless of whether you prefer to use the SL Viewer or Firestorm with the service – so while the teleport issue may be a nuisance, there is something of a silver lining to the problem, thanks to OnLive’s commitment to their users.

There’s also further good news on the horizon. Not only are OnLive working as hard as possible with the Lab to fix the issue, they’re also in the process of preparing to update the SL Viewer to the most recent viewer code released by the Lab. No date is yet available for when the update will occur (as OnLive understandably want to get the current problem fixed first), but Dennis assures me they’re keen to see it deployed – I’ll hopefully have more on this in the near future.

About SL Go

SL Go is a streaming service provided to Second life users by OnLive. A subscription-based service providing the means to access Second Life from a low-end PC or Mac computer, or via and Android tablet or an iPad with the full graphical riches of a Second life viewer running on a high-end computer. In addition, Firestorm for SL Go (currently only available for PCs and Macs) allows the same degree of rich graphics access to OpenSim grids.

If you have a need to access Second Life while away from your main computer, or if you have a low-end system on which you might like to run Second Life with all of its graphical richness, SL Go might well be worth a look. To find out more, and take a free 7-day trial with the service, follow this link.

If you already have an SL Go account, don’t forget use can also get information through the in-world SL Go support group (profile link) in Second Life.

Addendum on the Issue: At the TPV Developer meeting on Friday, January 30th, Oz Linden confirmed that as a part of on-going investigations, the Lab’s QA team have turned up the logging and have been testing the service themselves in order to generate stats on the failures.

They believe they have found the point where things go “really wrong”, which lies within the handshaking between the two simulators involved in the teleport attempt. However, what remains unknown is precisely what is going wrong between the SL Go SLV, and the simulators in order for the simulator / simulator messaging to go so wrong. OnLive’s engineers are also trying to isolate any possible cause for the issue (which does not affect users running Firestorm on SL Go) as well.

Firestorm’s Tool Tip Tuesday

Posted on January 28, 2015May 25, 2020 by Inara Pey

Firestorm is renowned not only for being Second Life’s most popular viewer, but also for the degree of end-user support provided by the viewer team. With multiple language support groups, in-world classes, a wiki, an in-world support regions, and so on, Firestorm offer users a broad range of support options.

On Tuesday, January 27th, Firestorm added to all of this with a new feature on their You Tube channel, entitled “Tool Tip Tuesday”. In launching the feature, Firestorm Project Manager Jessica lyon describes it thus:

Firestorm has so many features and functions most folks don’t even know about that we decided to do a series of short videos showcasing a hidden or lesser-known feature once a week.

The first of the new videos is just over six minutes in length and provides tips on getting more out of the camera, and short cuts which may help make using the camera easier. The tips include:

Use of the SHIFT and the CTRL/CMD keys with the mouse scroll wheel (if you have one!) to assist in camera movement / placement
Keyboard options to help with camera placement (e.g. CTRL-0, etc.)
Use of the main camera floaters (default and Phototools)
Saving and loading a sorted camera position (which may not be quite what you think it is!).

So why not take a look at the first video in the series and keep a note of Tip Tool Tuesday? Even if you don’t use Firestorm, you may be surprised by what you find.

SL project updates week 5/1: server, viewer, misc news

Posted on January 28, 2015September 27, 2024 by Inara Pey

The Illumination Library, Luminaux – blog post

Server Deployments Week 5

On Tuesday, January 27th, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to Magnum and LeTigre, and which introduced the following changes:

A fix for BUG-8223 “Pictures Fail to Upload and send when Using Email Option from RC Regions”
a fix for BUG-8002 [Experience Tools] Allowed & Blocked experiences are lost with parcel subdivision.
Crash mode fixes
Code clean-up around avatar region crossings.

On Wednesday, January 27th, the RC channels should all receive a new server maintenance package comprising:

A fix for BUG-8247 “[Experience Tools] Issue with llRequestExperiencePermissions() triggering experience_permissions_denied() and XP_ERROR_NOT_PERMITTED_LAND after prior 5 minute no response period.”
Internal improvements for experience tools key-value functions.#

BlueSteel will also retain the Avatar Hover Height (AHH) server code with this release