SL Tech – Page 347 – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

SL projects update week 28/1: server and viewer updates

Posted on July 9, 2014September 27, 2024 by Inara Pey

Server Deployments

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

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday July 8th, the Main channel was updated with the server maintenance project that was previously on BlueSteel and LeTigre. This project adds the ability for LSL functions to view and modify the render materials (normal map, specular map, and diffuse texture alpha mode) properties on prims, via new prim parameters – release notes.

Release Candidate (RC) Channels

On Wednesday July 9th, the three release candidate channels should be updated as follows:

BlueSteel and LeTigre should receive the same new server maintenance update. This project addresses some miscellaneous bugs, and improves L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects.
Magnum remains on the Experience Tools project, and receives the same updates as the Main channel, so LSL support for materials will be grid-wide following the deployment.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday July 8th, the Snowstorm RC viewer, version 3.7.11.291465 was promoted to the de facto release viewer. The viewer includes multiple contributed updates from the SL open source community, including (but not limited to):

STORM-68 Allow setting of default permissions on creation of objects, clothing, scripts, notecards, etc.
STORM-1831 Obtain LSL syntax table from simulator so that it is always up to date
STORM-1972 Restore particle debug display
STORM-2011 Improve loading of Group member list
STORM-2015 Region restart sound alerts play only locally.
STORM-2020 Restore RenderSpecularExponent.

With the new release viewer, users can now set their own default permissions for newly-crated prims, textures, etc. — With the new release viewer, users can now set their own default permissions for newly created prims, textures, etc.

Windows XP users please note: with this release, you must have either Service Pack 3 (Windows XP 32-bit) or Service Pack 2 (Windows XP 64-bit) installed on your system in order to install this and future versions of the SL viewer – see the release notes. Please also note that no Windows XP operating systems are supported by Linden Lab.

Other SL viewers remain as per the Alternate Viewers wiki page and my Current Viewer Releases page.

Experience Keys (Tools)

There was a Q&A session at the simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday July 8th with Dolphin Linden, to discuss the Experience Keys (Tools) project. For ease of reference, I’ve included notes from that session in a separate report.

Viewer release summaries 2014: week 27

Posted on July 7, 2014March 16, 2020 by Inara Pey

Updates for the week ending: Sunday July 6th, 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: 3.7.10.291134 June 23rd – unchanged (download page, release notes)
Release channel cohorts (See my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
- No updates
Project viewers:
- No updates

LL Viewer Resources

SL Alternate Viewers wiki page – LL
Viewer Source Repositories wiki page – LL
Test Builds wiki page – LL
Supported Viewers wiki page – LL
Viewer release process overview – this blog
SL Viewer updates and reviews on this blog

Third-party Viewers

V3-style

Black Dragon updated on July 2nd to version 2.3.9.9 (c) – core updates: fix for motion blur issue as a result of fitted mesh updates to avatar skeleton – change log

V1-style

Cool VL viewer updated on July 5th – Stable release to version 1.26.12.6 and Legacy version 1.26.8.64 – core updates: please refer to the release notes

Mobile / Other Clients

No updates

Additional TPV Resources

Third-party Viewer Directory – LL

Firestorm Mac 64-bit: coming soon

Posted on July 5, 2014May 25, 2020 by Inara Pey

Over recent months we’ve seen 64-bit versions of some third-party viewers arrive, notably Singularity and Firestorm, both of which are available in Windows and Linux flavours. Their arrival has raised questions both on when we might see a 64-bit version of the official Linden viewer and – more particularly in this case – when users might see a 64-bit Mac viewer arrive for Firestorm.

Well, the answer to this second question might be in the famous phrase, Real Soon Now^TM.

Tonya Souther, a member of the Firestorm development team, brought word on Wednesday July 2nd that a 64-bit version of Firestorm for OS X should debut with the next Firestorm release – although it is liable to be a few months before that release is made.

Tonya has been building on the work started by Cinder Roxley – whom she acknowledges in the blog post – and has been getting things to a point where it is possible to compile a 64-bit version of Firestorm which will run on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later.

A major part of this work has been in rebuilding the third-party libraries used in compiling the viewer, and Tonya explains some of the bumps in the road she encountered along the way to getting things sorted out. She also offers her own code repository for people to see what she has done in bringing everything together.

The results of Tonya’s efforts now resides in the Firestorm master repository, and will build successfully in either 64-bit or 32-bit, should anyone who self-compiles the viewer wish to give it a try.

Tonya advises anyone who does so, that in order to build a 64-bit Mac version, they must use Nicky Dasmijn’s version of the autobuild tool and specify the -m64 switch, although nothing else changes.

Tonya also goes on to state in reference to self-compiling:

If you’re switching from building a 32-bit Firestorm to building a 64-bit version, you should probably specify --clean to make sure you start fresh with everything at 64 bits. You also need to do a --clean when building for OS X from repository revisions after the change (revision 42327 or higher) if you’ve previously built for revisions before the change (42298 and lower).

As noted towards the top of this article, .DMG files for the Mac 64-bit build will probably not be made available until the next formal Firestorm release for all three platforms, so please do not request them from the Firestorm team before then. Also, and as with all 64-bit viewer versions, there will be no SL-specific version of the Mac 64-bit release when it does officially arrive, until such time as the Lab provides a 64-bit version of the Havok library used within SL-specific viewers.

Finally, and as advanced warning, Tonya notes that once the 64-bit version of Firestorm for Mac officially debuts, the Firestorm team will cease their support of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard – which is in keeping with the Lab’s ceasing support of OS X 10.6 in April 2014.

For further information, and for technical enquiries, please see Tonya’s blog post.

SL projects update week 27/2: server updates, Experience Keys

Posted on July 4, 2014September 27, 2024 by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Recap

There were no deployments to the Main channel or to the BlueSteel and LeTigre RCs. Magnum received an update to the Experience Tools project, intended to provide a fix for BUG-6438 “Objects attached via llAttachToAvatarTemp to object owner detach when script is removed from prim inventory” and UI updates. – release notes.

Week 28 Updates – LSL Support for Materials

Subject to last-minute hiccups, it is likely that the LSL support for materials (normal and specular maps, and diffuse texture alpha mode) currently on BlueSteel and LeTigre will be promoted to the Main channel and to the Magnum RC in week 28 (week commencing Monday July 7th).

LSL support for materials looks as if it will go grid-wide in week 28 (week commencing Monday July 7th)

There is still no additional throttling in place for the LSL materials functions, as testing revealed they may not be any need for them. adding to this, Maestro Linden said at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday July 3rd, “It’s throttled via the normal script time throttles, there’s no special X/minute throttle. Well, also there’s a throttle for accessing the materials list by viewers. So even when your viewer knows that an object got material X via the update, it may have to access the RenderMaterials capability to look up the render parameters, and that capability access is throttled (the viewer knows to request at a rate below the throttle so that it doesn’t hit failures).”

Experience Keys

There is liable to be a discussion of the Experience Keys project at the next Simulator User Group meeting, to be held on Tuesday July 8th, with members of that project team in attendance. The meeting will take place in Denby, on the main grid, commencing at 12:00 noon SLT.

Webkit News

As I’ve previously reported on a number of occasions, Webkit is a third-party library used within the viewer for a number of tasks. For example, it powers the built-in web browser, and is used to display profiles (unless you’re using a viewer supporting legacy profiles). It is also used with like Media on a Prim (MOAP) and many in-world televisions. There have been an increasing number of issues with Webkit which have caused some pain (see BUG-4763 and FIRE-12642, and FIRE-11057), and Monty Linden has been poking at as a part of he ongoing work with the third-party libraries used in the viewer build process.

A major problem here is that Webkit itself has deprecated, leaving the Lab needing a replacement. Speaking at the Future of SL meeting, hosted by the Firestorm team on Wednesday July 2nd, Oz Linden indicated that a decision has been made to replace Webkit with the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). There is no indication of how long this work will take, as it is a very non-trivial effort which is leveraging work already carried out on the Lab’s next generation platform and other internal services.

GPU Updates

Also during the Future of SL meeting, Oz indicated that there are two upcoming changes which will affect GPUs and GPU memory usage. Both are currently with LL’s QA team.

The first eliminates using the GPU card name as a means of recognising the card’s capabilities. Once released, the viewer will be able to recognise GPUs a lot more dynamically. One benefit of this is that people with state-of-the-art GPUs should no longer experience the viewer failing to recognise their card and defaulting to basic graphics

The second is a fix for how the viewer uses a GPU’s memory. “Many of you will have noticed that we don’t use all of the video memory on your video cards,” Oz said of the fix at the meeting. “It turns out that’s because of a very old bug that plagued us a long time ago and we sort-of arbitrarily, in order to avoid tickling the bug, we capped how much memory we would ever use.”

With the fix, the viewer will be able to measure the amount of GPU memory and then allocate itself what is liable to be a reasonable share of that memory.

SL projects update 27/1: server updates, HTTP, group chat hardware updates

Posted on July 2, 2014September 27, 2024 by Inara Pey

Server Deployments – Week 27

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread in the technology forum for any latest news, updates, issues on this week’s deployments.

As many noted on Tuesday July 1st, there was no Main (SLS) deployment, although there was a period of grid-wide maintenance.

There will be no deployments on the BlueSteel and LeTigre RC channels on Wednesday July 2nd. As such, these channels remain with the following simulator releases:

Main channel: inventory updates (AIS v3) – 14#14.06.13.29103 (release notes)
Bluesteel and LeTigre: LSL support for materials (normal and specular maps, and diffuse texture alpha mode) – 14/#14.06.20.291351 (release notes – Bluesteel; LeTigre is the same).

On Wednesday July 2nd, the Magnum RC should receive updates to the Experience Tools project, intended to provide, “user facing fixes to address both UI and long-standing HUD updates included in this build.” – release notes.