On Saturday 14th September 2013, the Firestorm team hosted another informal question-and-answer session. While the meeting was recorded, the Firestorm team are aware that many of their users have hearing difficulties, and / or prefer to read text. It is because of this that this transcript has been provided. When reading it, please remember:
This is not a word-for-word transcript of the entire meeting. While all quotes given are as they are spoken in the video, to assist in readability and maintain the flow of conversation, not all asides, jokes, interruptions, etc., have been included in the text presented here
If there are any sizeable gaps in comments from a speaker which resulted from asides, questions to other etc,, these are indicated by the use of “…”
Timestamps are provided as guidance should anyone wish to hear the comments in full from any speaker on the video
Questions were asked in chat while speakers were talking. This inevitably meant that replies to questions would lag well behind when they were originally asked. Therefore, to provide context between questions and answers, questions in the transcript are time stamped at the point at which each is addressed by a member of the Firestorm team
Some questions were asked and answered purely in text. These have been excluded for one of two reasons. Either a) they lacked context with the voice conversation, or b) the seating arrangements in the auditorium meant there were some questions or answers which didn’t appear in my local chat window.
Please note: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. As such, questions on technical issues relating to Firestorm and / or project-specific questions cannot be answered here unless one of the Firestorm team drops by.
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.
Updates for the week ending: September 15th, 2013 (with extras)
Official LL Viewers
Current Release channel updated to version 3.6.5.280370, formerly the Cocoa RC viewer, on September 9th (download page, release notes)
Release channel cohorts:
Maintenance update RC 3.6.6.280939 released on September 13 (download and release notes) – support for new particle capabilities; automatic avatar render limit and feedback system
CtrlAltStudio Experimental version (Oculus Rift): updated on September 15th to version 1.1.0.34268 – core updates: added Max OSX support; added looking around with the Rift in 3rd person view; various fixes (release notes)
Eagle-eyed (or given his avatar, should that be owl-eyed? :)) Daniel Voyager spotted a pointer that a degree of Facebook support is coming to the SL viewer for those who already have a Facebook account.
The new capability is called Second Life Share, which is being aimed at the viewer 3.6.6 code base (although it isn#t a part of the latest Materials RC viewer, 3.6.6.280797 released on September 11th).
When it does appear, the capability will be opt-in, an important point to remember. Nothing happens vis-a-vis the viewer and Facebook unless you want it to happen (and you have a Facebook account). It will apparently consist of a new viewer floater, itself comprising a number of tabs:
Account Tab: will allow those with a Facebook account to connect their SL account to it for the purposes of posting from SL to Facebook
Check-in tab: will allow someone to share the SLurl for their current in-world location via Facebook, together with a short comment on the location and a map image if they wish
Status tab: will allow someone to share a text comment with friends via Facebook
Photo tab: will allow someone to upload a snapshot to their FB account. As with the current Profile Feed option in the snapshot floater, the resolution of the image can be selected at upload (minimum 800×600), and an optional SLurl / comment can be included with the image.
Details on the capabilities are outlined in Viewerhelp on the wiki, which also references a new Knowledge Base entry, Second Life Share. Unfortunately, clicking the link generates a 404 error, and a search of the Knowledge Base at the time of writing did not yield and further relevant results. I’ve included the link here in anticipation of the issue being fixed by LL.
Whether the title of the new functionality is “Second Life Share” is indicative that it may be extended to include other social media options remains to be seen. It will also be interesting to see what it might mean for the future of the snapshot floater – if anything at all – if this is the case.
I’ll follow-up on this post once the new functionality is visible.
Update: The maintenance release viewer with the particle capabilities is now available – version 3.6.6.2.80939 – release notes and download.
Server and RC Deployments
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for news, updates and feedback.
In a change to the usual server-side deployments, the Main channel and all three RC channels have had their deployments and restarts made on Tuesday September 10th. The reason for the single pass was to apply updates server-side relating to recent Vivox service maintenance.
Details of the updates can be found in part 1 of this week’s update.
Server and RC Deployments Week 38
While the final decisions on deployments will not be made until that start of week 38 (week commencing Monday September 16th), it currently appears as if the following are likely to form part of the deployments:
The server-side HTTP updates will be promoted to the Main channel
A small server maintenance release will be deployed to at least one RC, which includes a number of crash fixes and an update to parcel access priorities “making it so that avatars who are on the ‘allowed’ list can bypass some of the other access restrictions (payment info on file was listed specifically)”
Particle System Viewer Imminent
Back in week 12, the Lab indicated that the SL particle system would be getting new capabilities, specifically:
Glow
Ribbon effects
Blending options.
Ribbon particle example
The server-side support for these capabilities was duly deployed, but have since been awaiting the viewer-side support in order to be accessible to users.
Commenting on the situation at the Server Beta meeting, Maestro Linden indicated that a release candidate viewer should be appearing with the necessary viewer-side support for the new LSL particle functions and parameters on Friday September 13th.
In preparation for the release, Maestro has also updated the wiki with details of the new particle parameters.
“The new particle glow options are pretty simple,” he said. “If you look at the wiki page, we’ve just added PSYS_PART_START_GLOW and PSYS_PART_END_GLOW, which take a float in the 0.0 to 1.0 range. It basically looks the same as the prim glow setting on prims.”
He went on, “particle blending takes 2 parameters, PSYS_PART_BLEND_FUNC_SOURCE and PSYS_PART_BLEND_FUNC_DEST, and each of those takes one of the 8 ‘values’ listed underneath, so there are actually 8*8 = 64 blend options! You can do crazy things, like having particles invert the thing underneath.
“Anyway, the blend parameters are pretty technical. It’s basically exposing OpenGL’s glBlendFunc to LSL. And the main glBlendFunc documentation at http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man/xhtml/glBlendFunc.xml goes into the details better than I can.”
For those who can’t wait for the RC viewer with the necessary support to appear, an autobuild version is available.. However, keep in mind this is a test build for the capability, and as such is liable to be behind the curve compared to the RC version in terms of bug fixes, etc., so be sure to update to the RC version when it appears on the wiki page. The RC version is now available.
An example of how the now ribbon capabilities might be used in SL, showing the arc of the sword through the air, supplied by Maestro Linden (courtesy of Hollowfear.com)
The new ribbon capability should allow for much better particle effects for things like ropes and chains links between objects (amount other things), using a ” go-from” prim/position (the prim centre), and a “go-to” prim/position (defined by PSYS_SRC_TARGET_KEY), the advantage being there would no longer be any gaps in the particle stream. However, there may be times when the ribbon effect may not be facing your camera (so there may be times when you need to reposition your camera in order to see the effect).
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for news, updates and feedback.
In a change to the usual server-side deployments, the Main channel and all three RC channels have had their deployments and restarts made on Tuesday September 10th. As a result, there will be no RC restarts on Wednesday September 11th.
The reason for the single pass – Main channel first, followed by the RCs – is to apply updates server-side relating to recent Vivox service maintenance.
Main channel: received an update related to the recent voice service maintenance and no other changes – release notes
Nerfing of recursive rezzing. Again, this was outlined in my week 35 (1) report. Under the new code, the copy of the original object will inherit the temp-on-rez and parcel time of the originating object and so be returned at the same time
Crash mode fixes
The update related to recent voice maintenance
These channels also no longer have Monty Linden’s HTTP updates on them).
Magnum remained on the HTTP update package deployed in week 36, and also received the update related to the recent voice maintenance.
Region Crossing Update
In addition to the updates listed in the release notes, Bluesteel and LeTigre also received a threaded region crossing update. This is not expected to have a major visible improvement on vehicle crossings, or as Andrew Linden put it at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday September 10th, “It doesn’t mean the death of region crossing problems, but the data streaming on the way OUT of the region is now threaded, which doesn’t make the crossing any faster, but may reduce lag spikes as witnessed by everyone else.”
Kelly Linden added, “The threading change Simon mentioned moves vehicle serialization only into the same thread as agent serialization to fix a rare server crash mode due to a race condition serializing scripts in some very specific cases.”
SL Viewer Updates
On Monday September 9th, the Cocoa release candidate viewer was promoted to the de facto release viewer – version 3.6.5.280370 (release notes). This currently leaves just the materials updates as a release candidate viewer, although further viewer releases (either RCs or project viewers) are expected soon.
Group Ban Lists
Baker Linden is finishing-up the work prior to it going to RC (server and viewer), which is still a “few weeks” away. However, he’s planning / hoping on having the server code on Aditi by the end of the month, for which a “test viewer will be provided”.
Anti-griefing
Commenting on the update to the Auto-return capability to nerf recursive rezzing, Andrew indicated he took the discussion which followed his initial raising of the subject in the week 35 Simulator UG meeting back to the Lab, where there was discussion about limiting the functionality to “unattended” self-rezzing objects (i.e. those for who an owner is not present in the same parcel). He went on:
However after an internal discussion we decided to not open up that exception since it causes inconsistent behavior: different autoreturn times depending on whether the owner is present or not can lead to confusion, and also it would bypass the spirit of the autoreturn feature which parcel owners are expecting — that objects get autoreturned.
He went on to say that there is no single project at the top of his list, and that the anti-griefing work is one of a number of projects he’s juggling with at present.
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.
Lumiya updated to 2.5.4 on September 4th – core updates: advanced rendering on PowerVR;
ability to resize HUDs; support for llTextBox function in scripts; fixed issue with avatar shape not being updated after changing outfits (release notes) – Google Play , Android Pit
On Saturday 14th September 2013, the Firestorm team hosted another informal question-and-answer session. While the meeting was recorded, the Firestorm team are aware that many of their users have hearing difficulties, and / or prefer to read text. It is because of this that this transcript has been provided. When reading it, please remember:
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 