The will be one more week of releases (week 50), prior to the Christmas / New Year code freeze / no change window commencing, which is due to start on Monday December 16th, 2013.
SL Viewer
Two new release candidate viewers arrived in the release channel on Tuesday December 3rd:
Maintenance RC version 3.6.12.284430 comprises a number of fixes, including a fix for the issue of FPS dropping when the Expanded Chat option is enabled in CHUI (MAINT-3375) – download and release notes
Namefix RC version 3.6.12.284383 changes installer naming without modifying channel or application names, but contains no functional changes to the viewer code – download and release notes.
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.
Release notes (all) core updates: Legacy version: removal of SL mesh deformer supporter & addition of some support for Fitted Mesh; addition of “GetMesh2” capabilities support; FMOD Ex updated to v4.44.27; assorted fixes and optimisations; Stable version: as for Legacy plus rednering fixes imported from viewer-bear; Experimental: full support for Fitted Mesh; region caching fix; import of viewer-interesting fix for crashing when TPing across region boundaries; assorted fixes.
As this is Thanksgiving week in the USA, it is a code freeze week with no scheduled deployments for the grid. Deployments will resume in 49.
It was a quite Simulator UG meeting in terms of news from LL due to this being Thanksgiving week (image: stock)
SL Viewer
There are no planned RC releases or updates for week 48, again because of the Thanksgiving code freeze.
Oz Linden is, however, working on getting another maintenance RC together in the near future, although it’s not clear exactly what this will contain at this point in time.
There have also been reports of issues with test versions of viewers built using the latest Sunshine External repository (the SSA “polish” code and AIS v3). The exact cause of the problems is not known, but it is leading to a high number of Current Outfit Folder mismatch issues on Windows. A request has been passed to the Lab to check the automated build process in order to help ascertain if there is a problem in the code, or whether an issue in merging the code is causing problems. These issues don’t affect any released versions of viewers, only those using the latest SAA / AIS v3 code for testing purposes.
Default Object Permissions
A number of TPVs include the ability to specify the default permissions applied to a new prim object (cube, cylinder, torus, etc.) on creation. A similar capability is being developed for the LL viewer (STORM-68) by Jonathan Yap, a long-time contributor to the viewer. However, this work also requires updates to server-side capabilities, and Andrew Linden is now looking into this, and at the moment is specifically trying to figure out how to propagate the default perms through teleports and region crossings.
Other Items
Region Crossing Issues
The three RC channels are all running the same simulator version, which includes a fix for “Sim crossing on vehicle fails when parcel at opposite sim border is full.” (BUG-4152). Describing the issue at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday November 26th, Simon Linden said, “The server was doing a parcel check at the wrong location … you’d cross, and at one point it would check a parcel based on the new region coordinates in the first region. If that happened to be a full parcel, it failed.” This issue has been reported as occurring on Main channel regions as well, under a variety of reports including SVC-8007. As such, it is hoped that when the package currently on the RCs is promoted to the Main channel in week 49, these issues may also be rectified.
In the meantime, and to test whether the fix may work for SVC-8007, the mainland region of Epirrhoe has been moved to the Magnum RC to allow vehicle crossings to be tested between it and the neighbouring region of Jodis, which has been a crossing which has experienced repeated issues with SVC-8007 for the SLRR.
llSetCameraParams([CAMERA_DISTANCE, x])
Many vehicles of all types in SL use llSetCameraParams to establish a “follow camera” which allows the vehicle to be effectively guided by the driver / pilot. However, there has been a long-standing issue the CAMERA_DISTANCE rule, which is clamped to distances far shorter than draw distance. This can make it next to impossible to create a scripted follow camera for very large vehicles such as realistically sized spacecraft, airships and ships.
Clamping with CAMERA_DISTANCE can lead to issues when trying to script a follow cam for very large vehicles using llSetCameraParams
The original JIRA (SVC-3499) was closed as “Won’t finish”. However, commenting on the matter at the Simulator User Group meeting, Andrew Linden said:
If we were to expand the clamp limits then some poorly written scripts will change behaviour. How much do we care about breaking such poorly written scripts? And… I wonder why it was clamped so tight? It would be nice to ask around to see if anyone remembers why some limits were set … Well, it would be possible to expand the distance limit and test to see how it works with different limits. If nothing breaks too bad, then perhaps we could ship it.
A new BUG report has been filed as a feature request for this to be looked at (BUG-4594), which is likely to be looked-at the next time feature requests are sorted, and quite possibly passed to Maestro Linden.
Region Restart and Visibility Issues
An unusual issues has been reported which appears to be related to region restarts and visibility, but it only noticeable on regions which have multiple neighbours, all of which are restarted at more-or-less the same time (within about a minute of one another). The problem can be broken down into a number of related points:
Observers are standing in region A, which is surrounded by regions B, C, and D – all of which are restarted at pretty much the same time
Following the restart, there is a high probability that some or all of regions B, C, and D will not be visible to those observers on region A (which was not restarted), and they show-up as red on the mini-map – something which has been confirmed on both the SL viewer and Firestorm
However, anyone entering region A after the restart will see all of regions B, C, and D as expected. Similarly, anyone on region A at the time the other regions restarted can resolve problems by relogging
Those observers who were in region A at the time the surrounding regions were restarted are able to fly into any of them which are showing as red on the mini-map, and although nothing physically renders for them, they will experience object collisions. Furthermore, it is possible to exit the “red” regions on the mini-map and fly into the void where no regions actually exist.
In tests with a specific set of regions, the above issues occurred in 8 out of 12 tries. That there is a unique problem with the regions on which the tests were carried out has been pretty much discounted. Whirly Fizzle, who has been poking at the issue with a number of people, provided a screen capture show how her alt managed to fly through a “red” zone and into the void where no region exists.
Following a region restart, Droom is shown in red on the mini-map, to observers located in Mote (lower left on the mini-map) at the time of the restart. However, these observers were able to fly through Droom, although nothing would render for them (but collisions would occur), and then into the void space where no region exists (image courtesy of Whirly Fizzle, click to enlarge)
Commenting on the matter, Simon Linden said, “It sounds like it’s getting confused and not realizing the old connection went away … I’d bet on the timing.”
Agreeing with this point of view, Andrew added: “If Region A thinks your viewer can already see into Region B, it wouldn’t initiate the connection,” hence why relogging would appear to fix the issue for those experiencing the problem and those arriving in the region after those around it have been restarted: as you arrive in the region, it (re-)initiates the connection between the viewer and the surrounding regions. This is also why people encountering the situation can enter void areas where no regions exist, as Andrew also explained: “The region you’re on expects the other region to inherit your avatar, o it lets you walk beyond the region boundaries until the other region picks you up. But if the exchange never completes, you get to walk around outside of the region boundaries for a while.”
This can be seen in the image Whirly supplied: while she is clearly in a void space where no regions exist, the title bar of her viewer still reports her as being in Mote (her “region A” during the test), because the “hand-off” between Mote and Droom (shown in red on her mini-map) never completed.
Andrew recently fixed another issue related to connections to neighbouring regions, and has offered to look into the matter himself to find out what is going on and how it can be rectified.
It’s been several months since the release of the last Dolphin viewer update (March 2013). This means the viewer is lagging behind many of the 2013 updates from the Lab, including things like Server-side Appearance, materials, etc.
Lance Corrimal, the man behind Dolphin is not unaware that this is the situation. His real life this year has been such that it has required almost all of his attention (including starting a new job which sees him travelling and away from home a lot of the time), all of which has limited the time he can devote to the viewer, as much as he’d like to be able to do so.
In July and August he gave a couple of short updates on his situation, which I also passed on through these pages, and on November 22nd, he posted a further update on the Dolphin website, which reads in part:
I am not exactly happy about what I have to announce here, but this is how it is going to be:
The next Dolphin Viewer is not going to be around any time soon.
I have looked at the mess that my current state of the sources would produce, and I have (finally but far too late) come to this decision:
I will start from scratch.
Right now, taking the current Dolphin Viewer source and just “shoe-horning” in everything new from the official sources produces a terrible mess that does not compile cleanly, let alone works. Besides, the last Dolphin Viewer has a quite large number of features that don’t work any more, due to changes that the Lab has made in the meantime, temp uploads being one of them.
So, I’ll basically have to reinvent everything. That will of course take some time. I’m guessing “several months” right now, not the least due to the fact that with my new job that I have been doing since April, I’m travelling a lot, so I’m not even home all that much. I’ll see how much I can do on my company laptop.
I will go back to my usual “release early, release often” policy, as soon as I have something that is properly branded as Dolphin Viewer and has more to offer than just the name. I will plan to release at least a public beta as soon as I have something.
This would suggest that an updated Dolphin viewer is unlikely to emerge before the end of the year, and that we may be a few months into 2014 before one does. However, the upside of this is that Lance is not abandoning the viewer, which has enjoyed a loyal following. Patience remains the order of the day as he tries to balance the demands of real life and Second Life on his time.
One additional consequence of everything going-on for Lance right now is that he plans to eventually stop building / providing openSUSE rpm packages for some of the other third-party viewers; as he notes himself, he just can’t seem to pack more than 24 hours into a day.
Further news / updates from Lance will be reported as they become available.
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 which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy (and of which I am aware), including
By its nature, this summary will always be a week in arrears
The Current Viewer Releases 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 Current Viewer Releases 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.
Updates for the week ending: November 24th, 2013
Official LL Viewers
Current Release version updated on November 21st to version 3.6.11.283787 (dated November 15th) – formerly the GPU table updates RC (download page, release notes)
Fitted Mesh viewer 3.6.11.283899 released on November 20th – This viewer adds new “collision bones” to the standard avatar skeleton. Properly rigging mesh objects to those bones will cause the garment to adapt to changes in the avatar shape made using the avatar editor sliders and avatar physics (download and release notes)
Black Dragon updated on November 18th to version 2.3.8 (Maintenance #3) – core updates: UI updates; RLVa update; rendering fixes (release notes)
CtrlAltStudio Experimental version updated on November 18th to version 1.1.0.34376 – core updates: variable-speed walk / fly; Kinect gesture support for avatar movement (release notes)
Kokua updated on November 18th to version 3.6.10.30662 – core updates: parity with SL 3.6.9 / 3.6.10 code base; significant rewrite to area search with context menu active; link to grid support groups (if available in settings file) added to Help > About Kokua (release notes)
V1-style
Cool VL Experimental version updated November 23rd to version 1.26.11.0 and again on November 25th to version 1.26.11.1 – core updates: 1.26.11.0 implemented “project interesting” updates; 1.26.11.1 fixed 2 bugs within the 1.26.11.0 release that prevented cache files to be written to the disk (losing the benefit of caching on return to visited regions) and which prevented object flags (touch, pay, modify, etc) to be propagated from the cache to the rezzed objects on cache updates (making it impossible to touch, pay, edit, etc random objects in the avatar’s field of view) – release notes
Text Clients
Group Tools updated on November 23rd to version 2.2.24.0.
The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday November 22nd. A video, courtesy of Northspring, can be found at the end of this report. The numbers in braces after each heading (where given) denote the time stamp at which the topic can be listened-to in the video.
TPV Developer meeting (stock)
No Change Windows
[00:31-02:26]
Thanksgiving
As has been previously noted in this blog, week 48 (commencing Monday November 25th) is code freeze / no change window due to it being Thanksgiving in the United States. This means there was be not server deployments during the week and there will be no viewer release channel updates for the week.
Christmas
The Christmas code freeze / no change window is scheduled to run from Monday December 16th through until Wednesday January 1st. This most likely means that once the code freeze comes into effect, there will be no major server updates until the 2nd week of 2014 (commencing Monday January 6th, 2014), and viewer updates may be likewise.
Both the Thanksgiving and Christmas no change windows effectively mean there are only two full weeks left in 2013 in which server deployments and major viewer updates are liable to be made. However, it is possible both periods could see project viewer updates appearing. This is because any project viewer which may be available will have limited use (only those particularly interested in using / testing it are liable to run it), and so minor updates, etc., to such viewers are not seen as being potentially problematic in terms of support issues.
Viewer Updates
[00:18-00:31]
As note in part 2 of this week’s report, the release viewer was updated using the GPU table updates release candidate, leaving just the Project Interesting RC in that channel.
There are upcoming RCs in the pipe awaiting release, including an updated version of the Google Breakpad viewer and another maintenance viewer RC, while the Project Interesting viewer is to update an update as well. However, as week 48 (commencing Monday 25th November) is a code freeze week for Thanksgiving, it is unlikely there will be any releases in the viewer release channel during the week.
Fitted Mesh Viewer
[03:36-08:44]
A number of JIRA have been filed in relation to the Fitted Mesh project viewer, and are receiving attention within Linden Lab. “We’re getting the repairs together,” Oz Linden reported to those attending the TPV Developer meeting, “And when we’ve got enough of them together to do a release with, that have been tested, then we’ll do an update to that one.”
Avatar Skeleton Files
The Fitted Mesh viewer actually contains a small number of actual code changes; the majority of the changes lay within the avatar skeleton and its associated filed (e.g. Avatar_skeleton.XML / avatar_lad.XML). This has led to speculation that other viewers can update relatively simply by using the revised avatar skeleton files. Responding to this, Oz said:
Ideally that’s true, but it turns out not to be quite completely true. It turned out that there were some code bugs that the new skeleton and weighting exposed. So there are actually some changes that will be beyond that. That is some code [to be changed].
“Adding bones exposed some limitations,” Nyx added.
One of the code fixes which is in progress appears to deal with the issue of how garments weighted to use the new skeleton appear in viewers which do not have the updates, as demonstrated in my preview article on the Fitted Mesh viewer, and shown below.
Time Frame for Formal Release
While the Fitted Mesh project viewer may well see one or more updates before the end of the year, there are no plans to progress it to a release candidate status before the start of the New Year (again, the no change windows would preclude that, at least in part).
Even with the changes now being made, the number of code changes within the viewer is “very, very small”, so when the code is in a position where the Lab is comfortable with TPVs taking it and merging it into their repositories, it should not create major issues. One thing that is not clear at this time is whether merging and incorporating the Fitted Mesh changes will be dependent upon merging other code releases coming out of the Lab, such as the Sunshine / AIS v3 code and the Project Interesting code.
Project Sunshine / AIS v23 Updates
[09:44-14:41]
Nyx Linden
Nyx Linden reports that the Sunshine / AIS v3 updates are going “really well”, and the Lab is focused on cleaning up the last few bugs of which they are aware, and it is hoped that the code will be ready for QA and then a project viewer soon, possibly prior to the December no change window coming into force. If the viewer does make it to a project release prior to that happening, Nyx will likely hold it over until early January.
In the meantime, the Lab is still keen to get started on more extensive load testing for the new inventory service, AIS v3, using the Sunshinetest regions (1-4) on Aditi. They’d preferably like the assistance of TPVs with this, the latter having been given access to the code a couple of weeks ago so that they could start work merging it into test versions of their viewers for this purpose.
Firestorm released a version of their viewer with the new Sunshine / AIS v3 code updates to their Beta testers in week 47, although this has yet to have the legacy baking code added back into it for the OpenSim version of Firestorm. The team is approaching this cautiously, as there is a need to try to isolate the code used in the legacy avatar baking process (which is still used on OpenSim) so that it does not interfere with / get altered by future merges with code from Linden Lab. Once this has been done, Firestorm plan to make the code available to other TPVs so that they do not have the same headache when faced with trying to reintegrate the legacy baking code into their viewers.
Both Firestorm and Kokua (the latter having integrated the Sunshine / AIS v3 changes into a test viewer at the start of November) have indicated they are now in a position to assist with any load tests. The hope is that this will take place during December.
One of the reasons the Lab is keen to get the load testing underway is so that any remaining issues with the server-side code can be identified, investigated and fixed prior to the code being deployed on any RCs on the main grid. Any initial deployment of the server code on the main grid would likely be handled “pretty quietly”, simply because it wouldn’t be exposed to any viewers that did not have the necessary updates.
HTTP Updates
[14:41-22:12]
Monty Linden
“It is currently still in QA,” Monty Linden reported in reference to his current work with HTTP 1.1 changes within the viewer. while no bugs have so far been found with the new code itself, he did reveal that the work has uncovered “quite a few bugs in mesh in general”, which are being filed internally. Currently, it is predicated that the QA round is unlikely to finish before Tuesday December 3rd, so and project viewer will not be appearing until after that date.
In addition to QA testing not finding any bugs within Monty’s code, all the numbers coming out of the performance aspects of the testing are described as “equal or better than past history”.
In the interim, Monty is continuing to lay the foundations for HTTP pipelining. As indicated in my last update on his work, he’s been going through the third-party libraries and their repositories which are used in the viewer builds and updating them. This has led him into a number of “interesting” discoveries as a result of tracking through all of the repository dependencies, etc., and identifying the various package mismatches and unnecessary libraries which are being packaged with the viewer (noticeably in the Linux version of the viewer), as well as one or two libraries which are not being packaged when they should be, as well as the use of multiple versions of the same library (e.g. 3 different version of Boost, 3 or 4 different versions of zlib, etc.).
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 