Category: SL Tech

SL projects updates week 3 (2): upcoming server releases, Fitted Mesh, HTTP, Oculus Rift & more

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments: week 4

Because Monday January 20th is a holiday in the USA, Maestro Linden has posted details of the deployments which will take place in week 4. Despite the US holiday, the deployments will still take place on Tuesday and Wednesday as usual.

As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for the latest news and updates.

Main Channel: Tuesday January 21st, 2014

The Main channel should received the server maintenance project which has been on the RC channels for the last couple of weeks. As notes in previously SL projects updates in this blog, this comprises:

  • The forced delay in llLoadURL has been reduced to 0.1 seconds
  • New LSL functions for uniformly scaling linksets (integer llScaleByFactor(float scaling_factor), float llGetMinScaleFactor(),float llGetMaxScaleFactor() )
  • Preliminary support for custom default permissions on newly created objects – currently awaiting viewer-side support via STORM-68, which has yet to be released
  • Preliminary support for the viewer fetching the LSL syntax rules from the simulator, for up-to-date syntax highlighting in the script editor – currently awaiting viewer-side support via STORM-1831, which has yet to be released.

Release Candidate Channels, Wednesday January 22nd, 2014

All three RC channels should receive the same server maintenance project, which contains a single fix for a crash mode.

SL Viewer Updates

The following section contains notes taken during the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday January 17th, a video of which is included below. My thanks, as ever, to North for the latter.

Fitted Mesh

As reported here, the Fitted Mesh viewer reached release candidate status on Thursday January 16th, with the release of version 3.7.0.285178, which also includes a number of bug fixes and STORM contributions from third-party developers.

Issues Affecting ATI/AMD Users

There are reports of additional issues arising within the Fitted Mesh viewer which are not apparent in other version of the SL viewer.  These issues appear to impact those using ATI/AMD graphics cards and have Advanced Lighting Model disabled.

In the first issue, non-rigged mesh is invisible when viewed on the Fitted Mesh viewer (see FITMESH-20), which was reported for the new release candidate version of the viewer. In the second (FITMESH-6), worn mesh which is not rigged to the collision bones is seen to stretch away towards the 0,0,0 point of the region the avatar is standing in (which is oddly similar to how viewers without the Fitted Mesh updates render garments rigged to the collision bones in an avatar).

Rigged mesh which is not using the collison bones as seen with the Fitted Mesh viewer
Rigged mesh which is not using the collison bones as seen with the Fitted Mesh viewer when running on systems with ATI / AMD graphics and Advanced lighting Model disabled (image courtesy of Willow Wilder)

Again, these problems only appear to impact those using ATI/AMD graphics cards and who are running with ALM disabled. Initially, the problem had been thought by the Lab to be a  driver issue, but testing reveals the problem to occur across a range of ATI/AMD drivers, including the most recent Catalyst updates.

New Sliders and Asset

Redpoly Inventor has also raised a feature request (see FITMESH-19) for what he calls a “Mesh Clothing Adjuster” which can be used to scale specific parts of the collision skeleton in order to achieve better fitting for the likes of knee boots, tank top straps or any clothing that doesn’t look good with alphas. He also includes code with the JIRA which people can add to their viewer in order to create slider to the shape menu which controls the clavicle volumes.

Continue reading “SL projects updates week 3 (2): upcoming server releases, Fitted Mesh, HTTP, Oculus Rift & more” →

Lab issues Fitted Mesh release candidate viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update January 22nd: As per the comments below, Oz Linden has posted the correct region restart sound to STORM-1980, and the sound is now included in the boday of this report.

On Thursday January 16th, Linden Lab issued a release candidate version of the Fitted Mesh viewer. Given the changes made to the avatar skeleton, the  release sees the viewer’s release number increment by 1, so the Fitted Mesh RC is version 3.7.0.285178.

The upgrade of the project to a release candidate status had been expected to come relatively early in 2014, given that Oz Linden gave a “last call” for issues in which he indicated that a release candidate would be forthcoming “after the holidays”. Speculation that the RC was at the status of Real Soon NowTM was heightened at the Open-source Developer meeting on Wednesday January 8th, when Oz further revealed that as far as the Lab was concerned, there were no further outstanding issues.

It is currently not clear as to how long the viewer will remain as a release candidate prior to promotion to the de facto release viewer.

STORM Contributions

As well as the Fitted Mesh updates, the new release candidate includes a number of open-source contributions from Jonathan Yap and Ansariel Hiller.

Jonathan’s contributions notably include the following, but please refer to the viewer release notes to see all of them:

STORM-1975: IM windows occasionally report false typing status – an annoyance to many for some time has been the situation whereby, during an IM conversation, the recipient of an IM will see the “…. is typing” message (where “…” is the other person’s name), even though the other person isn’t actually sending a message. This update should fix this issue.

STORM-1980: Region Restart Warning Changes – described in the release notes as “World-shaking improvement to region restart warnings”, STORM-1980 is designed to improve the awareness of region restarting message and add a default region restart sound. The sound is designed to be played automatically by the viewer on receipt of a region restart message, adding an additional warning of an approaching restart (for those with their viewer’s sound on!).

STORM-1981: Changes to Tracking Beacons – alters the behaviour of three types of tracking beacon: the avatar tracking beacon, the landmark tracking beacon and the beacon shown as a result of clicking on the map. Under these changes:

  • Beacons begin at a height of 0 metres and extend up to the maximum unassisted flight ceiling (5,020 metres)
  • The beacon colour is blue from 0 metres to the base height of the object being tracked, and red from 5,020 metres down to the height of the object being tracked
  • Users can optionally set the beacon to pulse towards the target object using the CheesyBeacon debug setting (Advanced->Highlighting). The blue beacon will pulse up towards the object, the red beacon will pulse down towards the object.

Ansariel provides two contributions in this release aimed at fixing a couple of issues in the UI:

  • STORM-1979: Groups count in groups list does not display if the floater is resized
  • STORM-1984: Mousing over UI elements does not make them light up.

Related Links

SL project updates week 3 (1) Server and viewer + misc items

Posted on by Inara Pey
Simulator User Group meeting (stock)
Simulator User Group meeting (stock)

Server Deployments: week 3, 2014

There are no server deployments this week on either Tuesday 14th (Main channel) or Wednesday 15th January (RC channels). The latter was anticipated to be the case, after Maestro Linden indicated there were no maintenance or other projects in the RC pipeline during the Server Beta meeting of Thursday January 9th.

While it had been thought that issues relating to STORM-1831 were not sufficient to prevent the RC package deployed in week 2 from being promoted to the Main channel, the decision has been taken to allow the package to run a further week on the RCs.

Week 4 Deployments

It now seems as if the plan is to deploy the RC maintenance project to the Main grid in week 4 (week commencing Monday January 20th), and to issue a new server maintenance project on the Wednesday of that week, although details on this have yet to be finalised.

SL Viewer

The Project Interesting viewer with the viewer-side interest list changes (notably the changes to how region information is cached and re-used by the viewer) gained a further update on Tuesday January 14th, with the release of release candidate 3.6.14.285213, which includes a number of additional bug fixes – see the release notes and download page.

STORM-1831: LSL Syntax Highlighting

This contribution by Ima Mechanic will allow LSL syntax highlighting in the viewer’s LSL editor to be updated and defined using a file obtained directly from the simulator the viewer is connected to, with the intention to eliminate issues of the viewer using outdated versions of the file. The server-side updates for this work are currently deployed to all three RC regions. However, as of the end of week 2, additional work was required on the syntax file itself.

In addition, there are a number of issues which are currently being addressed with the viewer-side code. These are listed on the JIRA for the project – STORM-1831, and require resolution prior to the code being issued  in a release candidate viewer. Most of these are currently being worked on, and are not seen as major show-stoppers, but will delay the code’s appearance in the short-term.

Other Items

Values for brush constants in calls to llModifyLand

One issue which has (again) been raised through STORM-1831 is that the values for brush constants in calls to llModifyLand, used for scripted terraforming operations, are out by 1 each (they are set to 1, 2, 3 and should be 0, 1, 2). This means that, for example, a call using LAND_SMALL_BRUSH will edit an area of 4×4 metres, not 2×2. The wiki documentation for the function notes the error as well. As a result of discussing this issue in the Open-source Developer’s meeting on Monday January 13th, a STORM JIRA was raised to (again) highlight this issue (STORM-2006).

However, as the issue itself is actually related to either STORM-1831 per se and because it will actually require server-side changes, the issue is liable to be moved to a BUG status and triaged from there.

Snapshot uploads to the SL Feeds

“It has to do with authentication under the hood when getting the credentials and then using them to fetch the snapshot config info,” Simon Linden said at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday January 14th. The problem is still being worked upon for those still affected by it (I am), but there is currently no ETA as to a complete fix for the matter.

With thanks to Mona Eberhardt for the meeting notes.

Viewer release summaries 2014: week 2

Posted on by Inara Pey

Updates for the week ending: January 12th, 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 Viewer Round-up 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
  • By its nature, this summary will always be in arrears
  • The Viewer Round-up Page is updated as soon as I’m aware of any releases / changes to viewers & clients, and should be referred to for more up-to-date information
  • The Viewer Round-up Page also 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.

Official LL Viewers

  • Current Release version updated on January 9th to version 3.6.13.284995 (formerly the PackageFix RC) – core update: fix for old versions of the viewer executables not being removed during viewer installation after the executable was remained in the 3.6.12 code (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

Third-party Viewers

V3-style

  • No updates

V1-style

  • Cool VL updated on January 11th to:

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

Kokua Mac test viewer: request for assistance

Posted on by Inara Pey

kokua-logoOn Saturday January 11th, Nicky Perian announced a test version of a Mac build of Kokua is now available, and has also issued a call for assistance from Kokua / Mac users.

The blog post reads in part:

Several hours ago the first Mac build completed and I logged on to Second Life beta grid, Aditi. Rebranding from Second Life to Kokua is needed. If there are Mac users that would like to help in this area please respond and I’ll help set up a build environment on your system. I would like Mac users to test and provide look and feel opinions as comments to this post. If there are bugs please report them to our issue tracker.

Having a Mac build of the viewer has been one of the more popular requests made to the Kokua team, so if you have a Mac system and are willing to help out test-driving the new Mac build and reporting back both opinions (via the Kokua blog post) and on any issues you discover (the latter via the Kokua issue tracker, as indicated above), please download the viewer from the Kokua nightly builds directory.

Similarly, if you are willing to help with rebranding the viewer from Second Life to Kokua (which, as noted above, will require a viewer build environment created on your system which Nicky can provide help with setting-up), do please contact Nicky either directly (via in-world IM or through the comments on the Kokua blog post.

(Please do not leave feedback or offers of assistance on this blog, they may not be picked-up.).

Release Notes

SL projects update: week 2 (2): Fitted mesh, breedable issues and [L4L]-Gestures & Walkers (Freebies) <3

Posted on by Inara Pey

Week 2 Deployments – Recap

  • On Tuesday January 7th, the Main channel  received the server maintenance project that had been on the RC channels for the past few weeks. It contains a single bug fix, related to vehicles becoming stuck in the ‘sat upon’ state (which prevents parcel auto return)
  • On Wednesday January 8th, all three RC channels received a new server maintenance project, which contains some crash fixes and the new LSL functions for uniformly scaling linksets, all of which are immediately accessible using current viewers (see part one of this week’s report for details).  This project also contains updates related to STORM-68 and STORM-1831, both of which require viewer-side updates which have yet to be released by the Lab.

LSL Syntax Highlighting Updates

Related to STORM-1831, these updates, which were deployed to the RC channels as noted above, will eventually see the viewer able to fetch LSL syntax highlighting rules directly from the simulator. However, there are currently some errors in the syntax file as deployed to the RC channels this week (repeating text, bad whitespace, or inaccurate definitions of functions), which require further corrective work. As there is currently no publicly available viewer which can use this new capability, it is unlikely this issue will prevent the server maintenance project from being promoted to the Main channel in week 3.

The file is designed to be cached by the viewer (once the viewer-side updates are released), and is around some 600KB in size. This means that the file should only ever be downloaded and updated if the LSL editor is open, and the viewer detects a version number difference between the file it has cached and the file held by the simulator to which it is connected.

It is unclear when the viewer-side updates for this work will appear. While planned to arrive in a release candidate viewer containing a number of Snowstorm updates, it appears there are still a few bugs in the STORM-1831 code, such as with function arguments being presented in an incorrect order in the tool tips, which may delay its inclusion.

Week 3 Deployments

It is likely the server project currently on the three RCs will be promoted to the Main channel in week 3 (commencing Monday January 13th). However, it is also likely there will be no RC updates for the week, as there are no server maintenance updates ready to go, and no other projects (such as group ban lists) are in a position to be deployed.

The first Server Beta UG meeting of 2014
The first Server Beta UG meeting of 2014

Viewer News

Release Viewer

Thursday January 9th saw the PackageFix viewer (dated January 2nd, 2014) promoted to the de facto release viewer. As per pervious notes in this blog, this viewer has no SL-related functional updates. Rather, it corrects an issue introduced with the 3.6.12 code base whereby the Windows executable name was changed from “SecondLife” to “SecondLifeViewer”, without removing any executable using the “SecondLife” name from the installation folder. As a result, any shortcuts pointing to the “old” executable would allow it to run if used, thus potentially triggering further auto-updates.

With this fix, any executables using the old name (“SecondLife”) are removed from the installation folder, so any shortcuts created to them will cause Windows to display an error message, and the user can then remove them or modify them to point to the correct executable.

Fitted Mesh Progress

Oz Linden is anticipating a release candidate of the Fitted Mesh viewer Real Soon NowTM. There are currently no open issues at present, and work is underway to move it to a release candidate status. Exactly how soon “Real Soon Now” might be, however, is a little up in the air, as Oz went on to note at the Open-source Dev meeting on Wednesday January 8th, saying, “there are a bunch of steps [still to be taken] and I don’t know how long they’ll end up taking.”

Continue reading “SL projects update: week 2 (2): Fitted mesh, breedable issues and [L4L]-Gestures & Walkers (Freebies) <3” →