Updates for the week ending: Sunday August 10th, 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
New Log-in Screen RC viewer version 3.7.14.292660 released on August 6 – a simple and clean login screen for new users (download and release notes)
Library Refresh RC viewer updated to version 3.7.14.292638 on August 6 – contains an update to a large set of libraries used by the viewer to provide security, stability and consistency improvements to this and future viewers (download and release notes)
Cool VL viewer updated on August 9th – Stable release to version 1.26.12.11 and Legacy version 1.26.8.69 – core updates: please refer to the release notes
There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday August 5th
On Wednesday August 6th, all three RC channels received the same maintenance update, which addresses some miscellaneous bugs, and fixes the JSON issue “Valid JSON numbers like 0e0 no longer valid after 14.06.26.291532″ (BUG-6657) and includes changes from the current Main channel release.
The “fix” for the JSON issue was to in fact roll back the fix for an earlier JSON issue (BUG-6466) which appears to have triggered the more recent issue. A fix for both problems is now currently in the works.
SL Viewer
The Library Refresh viewer was updated on August 6th to version 3.7.14.292638 on August 6th. This viewer contains an update to a large set of libraries used by the viewer to provide security, stability and consistency improvements to this and future viewers (download and release notes)
As anticipated, the Zipper Viewer, intended to improve the viewer’s installation speed, has been removed from the viewer release channel. The reason for this is an incompatibility between the archive format used to zip the viewer skins for faster installation and older operating system versions.
Other Items
Maestro Linden is back from his 3-week vacation and revealed he and Caleb Linden have been working on ‘infrastructure’ updates recently, for some of the central services, which has mostly involved making sure they still work properly after a big OS update which is in the works.
HUDs Detaching / Reattaching Following Teleport
There has been a report that HUDs are acting oddly following a teleport, apparently detaching and then reattaching, but showing as “worn on invalid Attachment Point” until clicked upon. The issue seems to be primarily experienced by people using viewers with the AIS v3 updates, but it may also occur on other viewers.
These issues are somewhat similar (in part to problems previously reported with avatar attachments failing to behave as expected when using the inventory WEAR command ((see BUG-6487 and my notes here). The Lab is going to take a poke at things.
Soul Seize
There have been further reports of the “soul seize” griefing tools doing the rounds. These are objects (both in-world and possibly HUDs worn by others disguised as greeters) which offer to animate your avatar (e.g. hug you or allow you to sit), but which are intended to take control of animating your avatar.
This issue has been around a considerable time (see JIRA VWR-13228). However, a year ago in Agust 2013, the Lab deployed a partial fix for the problem. This was change to the Stop Animating Me option in the viewer (found under the Me / Avatar menu in v3 viewers), to cause it to send a message to the simulator so it revokes all animation permissions for all objects in the region.
The solution isn’t perfect – it doesn’t work where animation has been initiated by a HUD, and at the time the update was made, concerns were raised that griefer might work around it. Whether these latest reports refer to a new flavour of the tool which does get around Stop Animating Me update is unclear.
The Snow Lion, Oceanside dAlliez (click for full size – blog post here)
Server Deployments – Week 32
As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates and status on deployments.
There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday August 5th
On Wednesday August 6th, all three RC channels should receive the same maintenance update, which addresses some miscellaneous bugs, and fixes the JSON issue “Valid JSON numbers like 0e0 no longer valid after 14.06.26.291532” (BUG-6657) and includes changes from the current Main channel release.
SL Server
Release Viewer
The de facto release viewer was updated on Monday August 4th to version 3.7.13.292225, formerly the Group Ban RC viewer. For an overview of the group ban functionality, please refer to my article here (note this is based on the project viewer, although the functionality has not changed significantly).
All other viewer in the release and project channels remain as per my Current Viewer Releases page.
Oculus Rift Viewer and Oculus DK2
Versions of the Oculus Rift DK2 kit are beginning to appear, and those who have received the updated headset are noting that the current Oculus Rift project viewer (version 3.7.12.292141 – see the Alternate Viewers wiki page) is not compatible with the newer equipment, particularly with regards to the updated tracking system and the new display modes (see: RIFT-130).
Given the extent of changes between the DK1 and DK2 headsets, incompatibilities shouldn’t be that surprising, and problems are limited to SL; other applications built for the DK1 are also apparently having their share of niggles with the newer hardware. At the time of writing, it wasn’t clear if the Lab had or had not received their Oculus DK2, so it might still be a while before an updated version of the viewer with DK2 support appears.
User Group Meetings, Week 33
There will be no Open-source Developer meeting or Simulator User Group meeting on Monday August 11th or Tuesday August 12th respectively. This is because the Second Life technical team will be involved in a strategy / team building get-together in the physical world, and so will all be offline for in-world meetings as a result of travelling, etc.
Other Items
Off-line E-mail Issues
There are reports that offline IMs to e-mail are being blocked by certain ISP, most notably United Internet in Germany, which operates a number of web-based e-mail services, including GMX, 1 and 1, web.de mail.com and A1. The problems started in early July (see this forum thread and BUG-6591 and BUG-6717), and was initially seen as an issue within SL.
However, SL user MartinRJ Fayray, himself based in Germany, contacted 1 and 1 and received confirmation that certain IPs from SL have been blocked on account of the amount of “spam” they are generating.
As the blocking appears to be simulator IP-based, the situation has given rise to some confusion, as some offline e-mails do get through to users, and others don’t (depending on where they were initiated within SL), leading to people viewing the problem as Lab-based issue.
This is not the first time issues with IM to e-mail have been encountered. In 2013, many Gmail users found that their off-line e-mails were no longer being received, although that was due to a change in Gmail’s filtering policies which could be rectified by a settings change at the user’s end.
Updates for the week ending: Sunday August 3rd, 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
Zipper Viewer RC viewer version 3.7.13.292263 released on July 30 – faster viewer installation (download and release notes) (note it is likely that this viewer is liable to be removed from the channel shortly, due to older operating systems not supporting the archive format used to zip the viewer skins for faster installation Removed from the channel on August 6th)
Dolphin viewer released a beta version 3.6.99.32369 on August 1st – core updates: mostly under-the-hood changes – download and release notes
V1-style
Cool VL viewer updated on August 1st – Stable release to version 1.26.12.10 and Legacy version 1.26.8.68 – core updates: please refer to the release notes
A TPV developer meeting took place on Friday August 1st, 2014. The core items discussed in the meeting are reported below, with timestamps in the relevant paragraphs indicating the point at they are discussed in the video embedded here. My thanks, as always, to North for the video.
SL Viewers
[00:15] There have been no changes to the RC viewer currently in the release channel or to the project viewers. The limited release log-in viewer which is being used for some unspecified A/B testing is still in the wild as well, although this is not available for manual download via the Alternate Viewers wiki page.
The Zipper viewer (for faster installation), which reappeared as a RC viewer on Wednesday July 30th (version 3.7.13.292263), is reported as doing “pretty terribly” crash-wise on older operating systems which may not support the archive format used to zip the viewer skins for faster installation. As a result, the Lab is currently unsure as to whether the project will be continued or not. Until a decision has been made, TPV developers have been advised not to port the code.
The Oculus Rift project viewer was updated to the current viewer code base in week 30. However, it is not currently clear when any updates related to the Oculus DK2 kit will start appearing in the viewer.
As indicated in part 1 of this week’s update, the Experience Keys beta project is going well. There are some issues to be addressed, although these are describing as being “nothing major”, and it’s not clear if they are viewer-related or not.
Unsupported Operating System Versions and Windows 8.0
[38:03] A reminder was issued at the TPV Developer meeting that the Lab will no longer be providing assistance with unsupported operating systems. This includes Windows XP and, once the Library Refresh RC viewer reaches a release status, Max OS X 10.6.
[39:05] It was also reiterated that Windows 8.0 users who are experiencing crash issues with the viewer should consider the free upgrade to Windows 8.1, which has a much lower crash rate, with overall improvement in viewer stability being described as a “really big difference”. A blog post on this subject (and viewer crashes in general) was posted by the Lab towards the end of July 2014.
Group Chat
[03:00] Following-on from the discussion about group chat and the initial testing of updates which took place at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday July 31st, Oz said of the work, “we’re continuing with making back-end changes, there’ll be another roll-out of some experiments shortly and we’ll see how they go. Like I’ve said before, we’re not going to generally announce when those happen, because we don’t want to change the experiment by changing people’s perceptions.”
[10:27] Although at the moment the focus is very much on what can be achieved on the back-end services without the need for changes within the viewer itself, Oz gave notice that the Lab may want to talk to TPVs about possible changes to group functionality and viewer behaviour at some point in the future. One of the questions being asked within the Lab is whether or not the members list needs to be displayed for all groups. Some groups, for example have a “no chat” policy and / or are only for the outward flow of information (e.g. product update groups); so are these a category of group for which the updates of people coming on-line or joining / leaving the session are no actually relevant, and could be eliminated or suppressed, thus reducing the volume of update messages?
On Tuesday July 29th, the Main channel was updated with remaining recent feature changes and bug fixes previously deployed to the RC channels – release notes
There were no RC deployments.
SL Viewer
The Zipper viewer, offering a faster install, reappeared on Wednesday July 30th, after vanishing from the Alternate Viewers wiki page in May. There are apparently an issue with the XUI Preview Tool being broken, which has now been resolved.
The new version of the viewer – 3.7.13.292263 – appeared as a release candidate in the release viewer channel, rather than a project viewer, where it resides with the group ban viewer and the library refresh viewer, both of which were updated in week 30, are likely the strongest candidates for promotion as the next de facto release viewer.
Group Chat
Testing of on-going group chat updates took place during the Server Beta meeting on Thursday July 31st.
Simon Linden is once more digging into the group chat code
As noted in a previous report, one of the major causes of issues with group chat lies not with the actual messages being sent back and forth, but rather as the chat server tracks who in online or not. The server maintains a list of who is online and in the group chat at a given moment, and is constantly updating the list as people join / leave the session; these updates are then sent to everyone else still active in the group, which interferes with the sending / receiving of actual messages.
“Imagine a popular group with, say 120 people online,” Simon said during the meeting. “Let’s guess the average online time is an hour … and that number varies widely, as there are a LOT of people who are connected for only a minute or two, maybe just checking IMs, see who’s online, or trying to fix something. But with 120 people … that’s very roughly an update every 30 seconds [14,400 updates an hour], sent to the whole group.”
Not only does this impact the sending / receiving of chat messages within the group, it can also impact other group chat sessions which are running on the same back-end server, as they are being starved of resources.
The code being tested on July 31st had been set to delay the sending of these updates from the server in order to see if it improves the throughput of actual messages. The downside of this is that the member list updates are somewhat delayed; however, this would seem to be a small price to pay in order for an increase in the reliability of messages actually getting through the system. As it is, the delay is configurable, so Simon was gathering data to see how the updated code works in terms of people joining / leaving chat sessions and sending messages. The results are liable to be known next week.
One possible future option for group chat is for people to be offered the ability to opt-in or out of receiving group chats until such time as they join a group chat (some TPVs already have an option to disable group chats until such time as you opt to join them).While this may help with the “I’m here!” messages sent to all groups on log-in, and which exacerbate the problem somewhat (again as described in the update linked-to above), such an approach is not seen as optimal, as it is possible users won’t change their behaviour, but will simply opt-in to all group chat sessions anyway.
Simon has also been tracking down an odd bug with joining a group and being able to open a chat session with it. “It’s really an odd one where opening the group is very slow or times out,” he said at the July 31st meeting, “and then can be immediate the next time you try. From what I can tell the chat server isn’t getting the messages … so somewhere between the viewer, simulator and chat server it gets lost.”
Other Items
BUG-6736 is a feature request for the updating or removal of the current limit on the distance at which objects can be linked (see linkablility rules). The advantage in increasing the limit is that it could allow for bigger builds (in terms of footprint) without having to rely on scripted rezzing systems. A problem here is the if increased, there is a risk that the ability to link objects over greater distances might cause issues were said distances are close to or exceed the draw distance / interest list distance.
“You will get some really funky update issues if the link size is larger,” Simon said at the Server Beta meeting. “As soon as it gets close to your draw distance, things go bad, as in … you stumble against something you can see.”
Commenting on this, Lucia Nightfire added, “I noticed a selection bug/gripe with multi selection and one prim being out of interest range on rez, you deselect everything by clicking on something else then if you pull your cam back you magically select stuff that was out of your interest range.”
Responding to this, Simon said, “Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that can get confusing, you won’t see what you expect because the root might be farther away than your draw distance … That said, I understand the builder desire to make larger parts, but those limits are there because it can conflict with the interest list logic about your updates.” As such, it would seem unlikely that there will be much in the way of change to the linkability limit.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 