Category: SL Tech

SL project updates week 44/2: server, viewer, issues

Posted on by Inara Pey
Darkwood, for a Calas Galadhon Halloween
Darkwood, for a Calas Galadhon Halloween! (Blog post)

Server Deployments Week 44 – Recap

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest information and updates.

  • On Tuesday, October 28th, CDN support was deployed across the Main channel, meaning that the entire grid now utilises the Highwinds CDN for texture and mesh fetching. As the 130 regions deployed to the Snack channel were all originally from the Main channel, they have been reabsorbed into that channel, and Snack has once again be dissolved
  • On Wednesday, October 29th, all three RC channels received the same server maintenance project. which includes some minor improvements, which were described by Maestro Linden at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday, October 30th, as, “just some code cleanup and some extra optional debug logging.”

SL Viewer

On Wednesday, October 29th, the Lab promoted the HTTP Pipelining RC viewer (version 3.7.19.295700) to the de facto release viewer. As I’ve noted in previous blog posts, this viewer:

  • Can issue multiple asset fetches on a connection without waiting for responses to earlier requests. This reduces the impact of a user’s physical location on scene loading and generally improves the experience for everyone
  • Includes significant improvements to inventory folder and item fetches, which can markedly decrease the time taken for inventory to load.

All other SL viewer remain as per my Current Viewer Releases page.

Issues and Problems

Mesh Loading Issues

There have been mixed reports of mesh loading issues, which may or may be linked to some long-standing issues with mesh attachments. During the Server Beta meeting on Thursday, October 30th, the issues of mesh items which should be cached by the viewer being slow to load, don’t show up at all or show up with a low LOD, requiring a relog. Interestingly, the meshes can appear correctly when using one account, but not with another, either though both accounts are drawing from the same viewer cache.

Whirly Fizzle noted that there is a potential (and equally weird) fix for odd mesh loading issues, commenting:

There’s a weird mesh loading issue (not new) that’s “fixed” by deleting a certain per account file. I don’t even know why it should even work but it does. Sometimes a certain mesh gets stuck and will not render for a certain account. Relog doesn’t fix it & neither does a cache clear. You have to delete texture_list_last.xml in the per account settings files.

Texture Load Issues

There have been a couple of reports of texture loading issues which are still under investigation.

In the first, there have been  some reports that textures are getting stuck when “half loaded”, so that they remain blurred or may fail to render. It’s not clear how widespread this issue is, or whether it might be related to BUG-6382, although this is also unclear.

In the second, one content creator has reported customers are suddenly having issues with a HUD-based system for changing the colour of their shoes. When used, the textures rez very slowly, or the shoes get stuck as grey for up to 5 minutes at a time, or get stuck at a 1st level load until the wearer teleports or relogs. This is apparently a completely new behaviour with the shoes in question, and it appears to be exacerbated when using the HTTP viewer.

AMD Catalyst™ 14.9.2 Beta Woes

The latest AMD Catalyst™ 14.9.2 Beta drivers will not render rigged mesh unless hardware skinning is disabled. The current workaround is to either disable hardware skinning (which is not ideal when it comes to rendering mesh in general, and ALM features like materials will not render) or to remain on / roll-back to the 14.9.1 beta drivers if the problem is encountered. See BUG-7653. As was mentioned in the Server Beta UG meeting, this could be particularly confusing to new users running AMD GPUs and who are using the Lab’s default mesh avatars.

The latest AMD Catalyst™ 14.9.2 Beta driver issue: with Hardware skinning enabled, rigged messhes will not render (l); disable it, and they'll render OK (r) - click for full size; image courtesy of Maestro Linden
The latest AMD Catalyst™ 14.9.2 Beta driver issue: with Hardware skinning enabled, rigged meshes will not render (l); disable it, and they’ll render OK (r) – click for full size; image courtesy of Maestro Linden

E-mail Communications Issues for In-world Objects

A further JIRA has been filed in respect of e-mail communications with in-world objects hanging for no readily apparent reason (see: BUG-7554). similar issues have been reported in the past (although this one has a publicly viewable report), and Caleb Linden is currently poking at things.

Continue reading “SL project updates week 44/2: server, viewer, issues” →

SL project updates week 44/1: Server, CDN update

Posted on by Inara Pey

The Pines at Jacob's Pond, Jacob; Inara Pey, October 2014, on FlickrThe Pines at Jacob’s Pond, Jacob (Flickr) – blog post

Server Deployments Week 44

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest information and updates.

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday, October 28th, CDN support was deployed across the Main channel, meaning that the entire grid now utilises the Highwinds CDN for texture and mesh fetching.

As the 130 regions deployed to the Snack channel were all originally from the Main channel, they have been / will be reabsorbed into that channel, and Snack will once again be dissolved.

Release Candidate Channels

On Wednesday, October 29th, all three RC channels should receive the same server maintenance project. which includes some minor improvements.

SL Viewer

There are currently two RC viewers possibly vying for promotion to the de facto release viewer. These are the HTTP Pipelining RC (version 3.7.19.295700) and the Benchmark viewer (version 3.7.19.295759), which should put an end to the use of a manually maintained list of GPUs in order to initially set the graphics defaults in the viewer.

Both of these were updated on Friday, October 24th, which has delayed any promotion to the de facto release viewer while the Lab gathers performance statistics on both of them. commenting on the status of both during the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, October 27th, Oz Linden indicated that all things being equal, the HTTP Pipelining viewer should be promoted in the next 24-48 hours. He also indicated that there may be a further round of updates to come to Benchmark viewer in the offing as the Lab continued to tweak it.

CDN: Next Steps

In the vast majority of cases, the CDN is working as expected for users. There is a very small minority who, possibly because of their geographical closeness to the Lab’s servers or possibly due to issues between their ISP and the Highwinds services, are experiencing slightly worse ping times to their nearest CDN nodes when compared with pinging the Lab’s servers directly.

Even with the deployment to the Main channel, the Lab is continuing to monitor reports from CDN closely. However, as previously mentioned in my CDN coverage, it is likely the scope of CDN usage will be expanding in the future to handle other asset data – sounds, animations etc.

Also, and as noted in my week 43 TPV Developer meeting report, an offshoot of the CDN work is that there is a belief within the Lab that viewer caching may not be working as well as it might be. Internal discussions have held on possibly validating whether or not this is the case, and it is likely some work will be carried out in this area – and may well involve TPVs.

However, where both the viewer cache and extending the use of the CDN to cover other asset data are concerned, there are no time frames currently in mind. At the moment, the focus is very much on get the new tool chain and build process for the viewer finalised and into production, and in dealing with bugs and issues. As such, it might be a while before specific work on the viewer cache and / or work on extending the use of the CDN gets underway.

On a wider front, as well as monitoring the direct effectiveness of the CDN service, the Lab will be “spending quite a bit of time and effort assessing just what the effect of this change has been on operations from a number of perspectives”, to quote Oz.

Other Items

LI Issues?

There are reports circulating of unexpected changes to Land Impact (LI) values. While the Lab hasn’t altered land accounting, there have apparently been incidents of LI suddenly increasing in builds which have gone unchanged; one instance quoted during the Simulator User Group meeting referenced a door which apparently increased from 0.5 LI to 3 LI.

There have been instances in the past of the viewer incorrectly reporting the LI for an item when it is pulled from inventory. Corrections can generally be made either by relogging or by returning the item to inventory and rezzing it again. Altering the physics shape of linksets (from prim to convex and back again) can sometimes lead to problems, particularly if a prim in the linkset is contains torturing (such as a hollow or advance cut / twisting) or a script. However, this issue appears to be new, and a cause is proving hard to identify.

As always, if you have encountered the problem, and it is both persistent and reproducible, please raise a bug report.

Graphics Profiles in the Viewer

A suggestion was put forward during the Simulator User Group meeting for the Lab to allow the saving of graphics profiles. This would mean, for example that you could have a graphics profile where various options – the quality slider, shadows, occlusion, draw distance, etc., could be pushed towards their upper limits; and another where the setting are more conservative and less taxing on your GPU / system.

Then, where you are in a region (your own, or somewhere you know), where you know you can use the higher settings, you can quickly enable that profile, but when you move on to a region where (say) there are a lot of avatars and a lot going on, you can select the more conservative profile and thus reduce the potential performance issue on your system without actually having to go through and manually adjust all your settings.

Responding to the idea, Oz suggested the idea might be best suited to being a code contribution – and there was some potential interest in taking the idea on. However, this does not guarantee the idea will be carried forward – but it will be interesting to see if the idea does move forward at all in the coming months.

Alchemy 3.7.19: mainlining HTTP and enhancing legacy search

Posted on by Inara Pey

Alchemy-logoOn Monday October 27th, the Alchemy team released version 3.7.19.34077 Beta of their viewer. This latest release brings with it a series of updates, nips, ticks and tweaks which collectively move the viewer further towards a full release status.

As with the last release (for which I also provided an overview), the latest version is available for Windows on both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours, and a “universal” Mac offering suitable for both 32-bit and 64-bit (Linux is still “coming soon”). As is common for my reviews of viewer updates, this is not a detailed examination of every change made in the release, but rather an overview of those items which are liable to be of significant interest to users. Details of all updates can be found both on the Alchemy release notice for the viewer, and the change log.

Lab Updates

As this release of Alchemy is based on the Lab’s 3.7.19 code base, it has almost all of the most recent updates from LL, with the notable exception of the revised log-in splash screen – so the log-in area remains in its familiar place at the foot of the screen. And I say “notable” here only because I’ve become familiar with using the Lab’s log-in screen while playing with various versions of the official viewer, not as any indication of anything else.

The viewer does, however, get the latest bug fixes, etc., from the Lab to make it to release status and incorporates things like the updated snapshot floater and AIS v3. More particularly given the deployment of CDN support across the grid, it includes Monty Linden’s latest viewer-side HTTP updates, which should see the viewer handle scene loading a lot faster, as well as generate significant improvements in inventory fetching.

Search

Search has been given an impressive overhaul with this release, allow the use of both the v3-style web search option and also legacy search. Considerable effort has gone into how results in the legacy search options are displayed, so that all the information relating to a specific search item can be shown in the right side of the search panel without the need to open additional floaters (see below).

Alchemy now has full legacy search support, which includes the ability to display all the information on a selected item (such as my profile, as seen above) in a single pane of the search floater
Alchemy now has full legacy search support, which includes the ability to display all the information on a selected item (such as my profile, as seen above) on the right side of the search floater panel

Another nice refine is that when searching for groups, if you select a group you have not joined, only the essential information is displayed – group description and purpose, the JOIN button, creator, who can join, etc. However, should you join the group, simply click on the reload button, and the displayed group will update to show all options and information.

When using the Search option to locate a group you have not joined, the results pane will only display the essential information on the group (l). However, should you then join the group, clicking on the reload button (highlightd on the left image) will refresh the g
When using the Search option to locate a group you have not joined, the results pane will only display the essential information on the group (l). However, should you then join the group, clicking on the reload button (highlighted on the left image) and the group information will update to a full display

World Map

The World Map gets an update with this release, with some trimming and realigning, together with a noticeable move of the legend and search options to the left of the map tile area. If I’m honest, I’m really not sure of how much of a difference this makes. There doesn’t seem to be that much space reclaimed, and the move of the legend, etc., to the left of the map seems as much as change for the sake of change rather than presenting a specific benefit. But then, that is the subjective nature of using viewers – we all see things differently.

Camera Floater

The old and new camer floater - note the button for minimising the controls on the latter
The old and new camera floater – note the button for minimising the controls on the latter

A potentially more appreciable change lies with the camera controls. Until now, Alchemy has defaulted to the v3-style camera floater which, as the website release notice states, takes a fair amount of screen space, a lot of which is made up of a blank panel.

The new Alchemy camera floater is a lot smaller and neater, making it a lot less real estate hungry without losing any of its useability.

For those who would like it almost completely out-of-the-way without having to close it entirely, the control buttons now include a button (highlighted in the lower image, right) which will hide / show the actual camera movement controls, sliding them neatly out of, and into view.

All told, a nice, tidy update.

Chat Updates

Alchemy 3.7.19.34077 includes a number of updates to chat, including:

  • When an avatar is typing in chat, “Typing” is displayed over their head (can be enabled / disabled via Preferences > Chat > Show Nearby Chat Indicators)
  • When someone engaged in an IM conversation with you is typing a message, a pen will appear alongside their name in the Conversations floater, indicating they are typing, and “XX is typing…” will appear in the header bar of the conversations floater, where XX is the other person’s name
  • You can prevent Alchemy from sending those people your own IM typing notifications via checking Preferences > Chat > Don’t Send Typing Notification in IM
  • You can change the nearby chat channel for use with translators and scripts:
    • /setchannel \  will set the desired channel (so /setchannel \1 will set it to channel 1)
    • /setchannel 0 will change it back
  • Alchemy will now allow up to 3096 characters in a single chat message.

Other Items of Note

  • Ability to display a pop-up when people enter / leave a region (People floater > Options > check Radar Alerts)
  • Option to select the display of user names, display names, both, etc., (Preferences > General > drop-down menu under Usernames (the Highlight Friends option the drop-down replaces can now be found under the Colors tab)
  • Preferences > Move & View includes three new check boxes:
    • Always enable flight ability
    • Moonwalk (aka don’t turn avatar around when walking backwards)
    • Nimble (aka don’t run certain animations, such as the landing “splat” when falling, to appear more nimble)
New movement options under Preferences > Move & View
New movement options under Preferences > Move & View
  • Inventory auto-accept options moved from Preferences > Privacy to Preferences > Interface > Inventory
  • Preferences > Interface has two new sub-tabs, Mouselook and Security, and numerous new options throughout all the sub-tabs
  • Teleport progress bar now displays the region to which you are teleporting
  • Geenz Spad’s projectored reflections improvements.

Feedback

A further nice update from the Alchemy team, which adds some neat additions to the viewer – the work on legacy search is particularly impressive. There has also been a lot of under the hood work as well, with memory leak fixes, fixes for bottlenecks, slowdowns, etc., which the Alchemy team say should lead to better performance in addition to the updates that have come from the Lab.

For those who tend to ask, there is still no support for the Restrained Love API as yet, but it the promise is there that it will be added in the future.

Related Links

Viewer release summaries: week 43

Posted on by Inara Pey

Updates for the week ending: Sunday October 26th, 2014

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 3.7.18.295539, released on October 20th (formerly the Browser Fix RC viewer – core updates: SSL 3.0 removal from internal browser due to the POODLE vulnerability (release notes)
  • Release channel cohorts (See my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • HTTP Pipelining RC viewer updated to version 3.7.19.295700 on October 24th – core updates: Pipelined HTTP Operations for Mesh and Texture Fetches; Inventory fetch Improvements  (download and release notes)
    • Benchmark viewer updated to RC with version 3.7.19.295759 on October 24th  – removes reliance on the GPU table for determining the viewer’s initial graphics settings (download and release notes)
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V3-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

  • Cool Viewer Stable Branch updated to version 1.26.12.22 and Cool Viewer Legacy Branch updated to version 1.26.8.80, both on October 25th – core updates: please refer to the release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

SL project updates week 43/3: TPV dev meeting, inc. viewer-managed Marketplace

Posted on by Inara Pey

The following notes are drawn from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, October 24th, and shown in the video above. Time stamps, where relevant, have been included for ease of reference to the video. Note that items are listed according to subject matter, rather than chronologically, so time stamps may appear out-of-sequence in places. My thanks as always to North for the recording.

SL Viewer

[00:10] There have been a couple of end-of-week viewer updates:

  • The HTTP Pipelining viewer was updated on October 24th to version 3.7.19.295700, incorporating the most recent viewer releases
  • The Benchmarking viewer (which removes dependencies on the GPU table) was also updated on October 24th, to version 3.7.19.295759, incorporating the most recent viewer updates.

Both of these viewers have performed well both in the RC role (HTTP Pipelining) and project viewer (in the case of the Benchmark viewer), and it is likely one or the other will be promoted in week 44 (week commencing Monday, October 27th), although the promotion may not occur until later in the week, depending on how these new releases perform.

[01:58] The Experience Keys project viewer is in the “final throes” of bug fixing. However, it is unlikely to appear as an RC viewer until after the next set of server-side Experience Keys have been deployed. When this will be is unclear. It is not “imminent”, but by the same measure, it is not “distant”.

[02:33] The Oculus Rift work continues, but again, this is unlikely to move beyond being a project viewer until such time as the Oculus hardware is more generally available. The Lab will continue to keep the viewer code base current with releases, and will doubtless continue to test and refine as further SDK updates appear (such as the just-released 0.4.3).

Viewer-managed Marketplace

[03:16] Progress is continuing to be made with the viewer-managed Marketplace updates (VMM). There is now a technical wiki page for the web API available, and Skylar Linden was on-hand to provide and overview of the page, which by his own admission, is “pretty dry stuff”, but includes things like:

  • Figuring out if a user is a merchant or not, and how the system will respond (loading the correct page or not)
  • A data dictionary that gets transmitted back and forth between the viewer and the Marketplace
  • Links to obtain listings, create listings, modify listings, associate inventory with listings, and delete listings (which are the Marketplace functions specific to the new capability).

[08:40] The ability to delete listings is a feature that is new to the Marketplace as a result of VMM, although it is somewhat confusing in that  – as Brooke Linden explained in the meeting – it doesn’t actually delete anything, but gives a means for merchants to remove listing information by making it unavailable. As such, listings deleted in this way will be non-recoverable.

VMM Testing

[10:03]  The Lab is now “very close” to getting the VMM updates available on Aditi’s Marketplace. When this happens, testing will initially be with a “small group” of merchants and TPV devs using a project viewer, the code for which will be made available as the testing starts in order to allow TPVs to integrate it into test versions of their viewers. If all goes according to plan, this initial test could start in the next couple of weeks, with the aim of getting initial feedback.

Once this has been done, testing will by opened-up to allow wider involvement. This is expected to happen “within the next couple of months”, and will be aimed at allowing anyone who would like to try VMM. There will be a beta testing application form made available for those interested.

Group Chat

[13:45] The Lab have been continuing to roll changes to group chat, and the thinking is that the results of the changes are “pretty good”, and the Firestorm support team are reporting they’ve seen an improvement as well. As noted in part 2 of this week’s update, the work isn’t finished – Simon is looking at the possibility to improve code elsewhere in the system; there is also liable to be a round of code clean-up as well. However, Oz cautioned that the Lab may have implemented the changes which may have the biggest noticeable impact in terms of improving the group chat experience.

CDN Progress

[14:49] Again, as noted in part 2 of this week’s report, the CDN is now supporting all the primary Server RC channels. so far, the results have been “excellent”, but the Lab is waiting to see how things fair over the weekend, when the grid is liable to see its heaviest use in terms of numbers of users on-line since the RC deployment was completed this week.

The load on the sim host Apache services is described as “way, way, way, down”, which is a good thing, as it means that all the other things the Apache services have to do (such as participating in region crossings) are no longer being impacted by the simulators handing the texture and mesh fetching loads.

One offshoot of the CDN work is that the Lab is likely to spend time validating whether the viewer cache is working as well as it could be, even allowing for the interest list updates. There are apparently differences in how well the cache works across different code-bases, so this is something that TPVs may well be involved in as well.

Z-offset height Adjustment

There has been no further progress on this since the last TPV meeting.

Continue reading “SL project updates week 43/3: TPV dev meeting, inc. viewer-managed Marketplace” →

OnLive issue SL Go iPad rotation fix

Posted on by Inara Pey

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

As I (among others) reported on Tuesday, October 14th, OnLive released a version of their SL Go service for the iPad.

At the time of the release, there was an unexpected rotation issue which meant that the screen orientation was locked in one horizontal orientation – if you flipped the iPad around, the screen would appear upside down, although the input areas might actually flip with the screen but still be displayed as if they were upside down.

This was a particular nuisance for people using a bluetooth keyboard or docking station with their iPad, as it meant the viewer would be displayed upside down when docked with either.

On Friday, October 24th, Dennis Harper from OnLive dropped me a note to inform me that this rotation issue has now been corrected, The app should update for those who already have it, and the fix is now a part of all downloads obtained via the Apple iTunes store.

SL Go on the iPad: rotation bug now fixed
SL Go on the iPad: rotation bug now fixed