One thing I neglected to mention in my recent review of Firestorm 4.4.0 is the inclusion – by Cinder Roxley – of Vincent Nacon’s alternative cloud maps, which can be used to change / enhance the rendering windlight clouds.
The default cloud layer seen over Extropia, using the AnaLutetia-outdoor windlight setting and the sun adjust to around 10:00.
I’ve no excuse for this, given Cinder actually nudged me on the matter prior to the release; just blame it on me having a blonde moment…
So, what is it all about? Quite simply, Firestorm now includes additional cloud maps made by Vincent Nacon, and which Cinder has added to the Preferences > Firestorm > Windlight tab for easy selection.
The Windlight cloud options
This presents you with four basic cloud types – the default map, Altocumulus (a middle altitude cloud, usually characterised by globular masses or rolls in layers or patches), Cumulonimbus (the familiar towering cloud formations associated with thunderstorms) and a “Layered” map. Do note that selecting any option other than the one already in use appears to require a viewer re-start in order to take effect.
Exactly what effect these different maps will have on your in-world view is a matter of experimenting with the various available windlight settings within Firestorm (a task made easier thanks to William Weaver’s Phototools). However, they can be used to produce some stunning effects – the images here are simply to provide some form of comparison.
Extropia seen under the same windlight setting as the first image in this article, but using the Layered cloud map.
What’s more, as Cinder indicated in her little nudge to me, you can create (or obtain) cloud maps of your own and add them to Firestorm to create your own unique cloud looks. “Drop any 8-bit grayscale tga with a power of 2 size you make or find under app_settings/windlight/clouds,” she comments, “And they’ll be automatically added to the list.”
For those wishing to try the cloud maps on other viewers, Vincent provides forum thread in which his discusses the maps and provides guidelines and caveats on their usage in viewers. Links to download the maps are also provided.
The Cumulonimbus map applied to the sky, using the same windlight setting and time of day – note the “stacking” effect visible in the formations on the right of the image, given the impression of some additional vertical height
The maps appear to be particularly well-suited to sunrise / sunset images, where the combination of sun and clouds can be particularly dramatic and result in some incredible images.
The scheduled server channel deployments took place as planned this week.
The SLS Main channel
As previously reported, this received the update package deployed to the three Release Candidate channels in week 16, primarily comprising the new server-side LSL Animation Override capabilities, complete with a fix for BUG 2164 – release notes
BlueSteel and LeTigre
Both of these channels received the first part of a new experience tools project – referred to as the “Experience Keys project” in the release notes.
Interestingly, the release notes refer to BlueSteel and LeTigre receiving server release 13.04.19.274370; however, the viewer reports both of the channels running 13.04.05.273550. I contacted Maestro on this, who replied, “There was an error during the roll, so a slightly older version (which doesn’t include the changes from this week’s main channel update) was deployed.”
Not too much is known about the new Experience Keys project, although the emphasis on “new” indicates this is more than just a deployment of the outstanding permissions system for the current advanced creation / experience tools, and speculation has been running high. At the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday 23rd April, Simon Linden indicated he was unsure as to what he could / could not say on the matter (particularly as it appeared the documentation was still being written-up).
Commenting on the Bluesteel / LeTigre deployment at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday 25th April, Maestro Linden was also somewhat circumspect on the matter, commenting, “The team doesn’t want to announce the features yet, so I can’t give many details … some other parts need to be released for the new features to be usable. So ideally, nothing visible should change there.”
The reference to “some other parts” which need to be released for these new features may include a viewer update. Whether such an update will appear ahead of or behind the materials capabilities (still currently in a project viewer) is unclear at this point in time.
Magnum
Magnum received additional LSL support for new HTTP contents types, as document in the release notes. It also received a change to how certain message types are handled by the server, which Maestro described thus:
There’s a change to make the server smarter about how it throttles certain messaging types to prevent certain types of ‘DoS’ attacks, where a ‘bad’ object could prevent your avatar from getting llDialog notifications from other objects. All objects owned by UserA share the same throttle for sending llDialog() messages to UserB, but objects owned by anybody else would have a separate throttle pool.
This should hopefully reduce the incidences of iiDialog being used in spamming attacks which can result in the viewer either being severely slowed down or crashing altogether.
SL Viewer
The beta viewer gained a further release (3.5.1.274558) which reached public availability on April 24th, containing further CHUI and SSB/A dixes and updates, as detailed in the release notes. The development viewer also received a further release (3.5.2.27469) which also gained public availability on April 24th.
Group Bans
Baker Linden: Group Ban work coming, just not quite yet
Baker Linden has started working on an update to the code for managing groups which will allow group owners / moderators to ban users who create problems (e.g. those who spam groups, people who are persistently abusive in group chat, etc.). This work is in response to JIRA VWR-29337. In my last report on this, Baker has written-up the documentation for the work and was having some other Lindens cast an eye over it.
Attending the Server Beta meeting on Thursday April 25th, Baker provided an update on his activities. “I’m still working on group bans, but I decided to fix a couple small bugs first. They both relate to searching people using the choose resident floater. They’re in the system where I’ll be adding group ban stuff, and now that I can test the changes, I can get them pushed to an RC. However, he did go on to say, “It’s going to be a while before Group ban stuff is ready.”
Second Life and Oculus Rift
There has been considerable interest in the Oculus Rift headset and its potential for use within Second Life, as reported back in week 14 and more recently. Jon Brouchoud in particular blogged on why SL would be a “killer app” for the headset, and a video I featured back in week 16 has also appeared on numerous SL blogs (hardly surprising, given it has pretty much gone viral where the Oculus Rift is concerned 🙂 ).
On Wednesday April 24th, Hamlet Au covered the fact that the Lab is already looking to integrate the headset into Second Life, and have given official confirmation, with company spokesman Peter Gray (Pete Linden) quoted as saying, “We plan to strongly support Oculus Rift. That means code, client, and server-side, to make the Oculus Rift experience excellent in Second Life.”
The blog post says it all – “old school” – a simple message with a lot of meaning. Kirstenlee Cinquetti has been twiddling under the hood with the S19 (v1-style) version of Kirsten’s Viewer with the result that an updated version – code-named “Blackbird” (version S19.404 at the time of writing) was released via Google Code on Wednesday 24th April.
This is the second time there has been a surprise update to one of Kirstenlee’s viewers – in September 2012 a couple of updates were made to the v2-style S22 viewer. As with those updates, the new release of S19 does not mean that Kirstenlee is returning to the field of viewer development per se. Nor is this a complete update – although it does incorporate a lot of v3 code and is Server-side Baking ready. As it stands, the release – as with the S22 releases in September 2012 – is offered “as is” and without support – and there is no time scale or firm commitment where further updates are concerned.
As readers, know, I’m not a fan of the v1-style interface, but I admit there is something pleasing about loading and running this release – quiet possibly because it is one of Kirstenlee’s builds, which, despite the odd hiccup between the viewer and my hardware, I’ve always felt pretty much at home with. Perhaps it’s the green :).
Some of the New Bits
I’m not proposing an in-depth review, but here are some of the main features in the update.
Server-side Baking / Appearance: as mentioned above, this update is “server-side baking / appearance ready – it will render avatars correctly on SSB/A-enabled regions and avatars using the viewer will render correctly to others. However, the new “hover” mode partial z-offset “fix” is not included in the Edit Appearance floater.
SSB/A-OK: O the left – S19 Blackbird rendering my Alt (on the SL SSB/A beta viewer) and I correctly on an SSB/A-enabled region; on the right – I render correctly in my Alt’s view
Mesh Uploads: Nicky Dasmijn’s mesh uploader is included in this release of S19, again bringing it into line with other viewers and the age of mesh.
Anaglyph [3D] rendering: Kirsten’s first introduced 3D rendering in the S22 viewer. While still very experimental, with all the interest in Oculus Rift, its inclusion in S19 with this release is perhaps a little pertinent and timely as a means of generating a 3D view in a viewer.
If you have 3D glasses, Kirsten’s latest S19 (404+) gives you a 3D world
Restrained Love: RLV comes to Kirsten’s viewer with a dedicated preferences panel which includes the ability to set a “profile” against your RLV use – one of “BDSM Persona-Player”, “BDSM Role-player” and “Non-BDSM”. These define how many (and which) RLV controls can be blacklisted (i.e. prevented from operating), so that, for an example, someone using the “Non-BDSM” option can make use of options such as automatic chat redirection, shared folders for changing outfits and “forced” teleports which necessarily having to also have the more restrictive RLV options active.
RLV comes to Kirsten’s Viewer – complete with a set of “profiles”
Pathfinding: Kirsten’s Viewer S19 also gains options to display pathfinding information on linksets and characters. These options are on the Tools menu. As S19 supports OpenSim, there is no navmesh visualisation as there is no Havok sub-licence agreement.
Comments
Overall, this is a sudden and interesting update to Kirsten’s original v1-style viewer, incorporating a lot of v3 code which more than makes it capable of running on today’s grid. On the whole I found it to be stable, and with performance levels I’ve tended to get from Klee’s builds (somewhat lower than with other builds for reasons I’ve never fully fathomed). I did encounter an odd issue – while I could run the viewer in deferred mode, when I enabled shadows, my in-world view turned black, and refused to come out of its sulk until I disabled shadows once more. Whether this was due to a problem with the viewer, or simply another of the hiccups which seem to occur between my hardware an Klee’s viewer builds at times, I couldn’t say.
There are a few bits missing from the update as well – no Depth of Field for photographers, for example, (although Dawny Daviau, Kirstenlee’s partner, tells me this might be coming). So don’t expect it to be fully up to S22 / v3 standards in terms of options, etc.
Again, this release is not a return of Kirsten’s viewer per se, although there is an open invitation for those who like the viewer or the v1-approach to give it a go. Just remember, support isn’t given – and it may be a while before a further update arrives.
In the meantime, some more 3D, this time courtesy of a video demonstration from Chantal Harvey, filmed back when the capability first appeared in Kirsten’s Viewer.
At the Open-source Dev meeting on Wednesday April 25th, Whirly Fizzle raised a concern on the status of JIRA SVC-7653, which relates to Current Outfit Folder (COF) corruptions leading to an avatar being unable to log-in to Second Life which may have an impact on the forthcoming Server-side Baking / Appearance switch-over.
The problem was first publicly reported by AngusGraham Ceawlin in February 2012, and at the time became of the focus of a campaign to Free Angus. After a total of some 63 days unable to log-in and with the (particular) support of Whirly herself and Nicky Dasmijn, Paspund Resident and Izzy Linden, Agnus was indeed freed. However the problem has become a matter of concern again because SVC-7653 remains marked as “unresolved”, and a workaround developed for it looks set to be “broken” when SSB/A goes live.
The “Free Angus campaign poster” produced by Sparkles Alchemi and used in a number of blog posts in early 2012 to highlight Angus’ situation
The COF Corruption Issue
When this particular issue occurs, the user has no clear indication that there has been an inventory corruption specific to the Current Outfit Folder. There are only tell-tale clues, which Whirly Fizzle documented (on behalf of Kitty Barnett) as being:
Only one account is affected
A crash or timeout disconnect will occur at log-in, usually around “Downloading clothing…”
The affected account will crash/disconnect on any V3-based viewer or a viewer that uses COF
A clean install, cache clear, replacing outfit on a non-COF viewer will not fix the problem
Generally (but not always) followed by numerous warnings:
WARNING: newview/llappearancemgr.cpp(2891) : WearablesOrderComparator::operator(): Warning # 0: either item1 or item2 is NULL
Followed by a crash or a timeout.
The Workaround
While LL’s support staff do have scripts to deal with various inventory corruptions and issues, under current rules, they will only run these scripts for Premium accounts. While it may be possible to get further assistance from the Lab if you’re not a Premium account holder, it is certainly going to take a good deal longer to gain assistance. As a result, Kitty Barnett developed a workaround for non-Premium members, which Whirly included in her comments on SVC-7653:
Use a viewer which does not have COF support and log-in to SL. Currently, Imprudence is possibly the most easily obtainable such viewer
Replace outfit with a Library avatar. Thus must be a complete outfit change (every layer / attachment)
Log out of the viewer
Launch a TPV which uses the VerifyInitialWearables debug setting (such as Catznip, Exodus, or Firestorm – note that the official viewer does not have this setting)
At the log-in splash screen:
Go to the top menu bar and select Me/Viewer > Preferences > Advanced and tick Show Advanced Menu
From the top menu bar, go to Debug > Debug settings > VerifyInitialWearables and set it to TRUE
Login to SL.
This should result in a message being sent to the server by the viewer using the VerifyInitialWearables which will result in the COF corruption being “fixed” and the avatar being able to log-in successfully to SL. A change of outfit should then verify that all is well.
The Workaround and SSB
Tests carried out by TPV developers have shown that the VerifyInitialWearables message sent by the viewer is ignored by the SSB/A servers. This has resulted in concern that unless the Lab have developed a resolution for this issue, anyone encountering it once SSB/A is “live” will not be able to utilise the documented workaround, and they’ll effectively be unable to log-in to Second Life unless they are a Premium member (or upgrade).
The matter has apparently been brought to the attention of the SSB/A team (led by Nyx Linden), who have been engaged in a wide range of inventory updates and associated work, “More than they hoped would be needed,” as Oz linden put it at the Open-source Dev meeting. But whether or not their work extends to fixing this particular problem is unclear. SVC-7653 remains “unresolved” but inactive – so it is perhaps possible a fix has been developed internally by the Lab without SVC-7653 being updated. However, until greater clarification is given, this is likely to be a subject of note at User Group meetings which deal with SSB/A matters.
On Tuesday 23rd April, the SLS Main channel received the update package deployed to the three Release Candidate channels in week 16, primarily comprising the new server-side LSL Animation Override capabilities, complete with a fix for BUG 2164, wherein the new capabilities could conflict with built-in animation poses in chairs, etc., as discussed in my week 15 updates. This deployment additionally includes the slight region performance improvement when there are no pathfinding characters present. Release notes are available.
Release Candidate Channels
On Wednesday 24th April, the RC channels should receive the following updates:
BlueSteel and LeTigre: should gain a new project which brings preliminary server-side support for experience permissions – release notes
Magnum: should gain a new server maintenance project. This update brings some new minor features to LSL, and fixes some crash modes – release notes
So the long-awaited experience tools / advanced content creation tools permissioning system looks to be finally on its way, a little under a year since an exploit caused them to be withdrawn after their initial deployment.
Viewer Updates
Development Viewer Updates
The SL development viewer has been through a rapid series of updates over the last few days of week 16 and the start of week 17, with version 3.5.2.2744 released on Monday April 22nd. While release notes are not available, it is thought it includes (among other things), the fix for music stuttering every few seconds when using FMOD EX, as submitted to LL by Latif Khalifa (see OPEN-173).
Particle Project Viewer Soon (?)
It appears a new particle project viewer may be on the horizon in the near future. If it does appear, it is likely to be primarily aimed at testing a new capability to help deal with griefing attacks which use particle emitters. Speaking at the Simulator User Group meeting, Simon Linden said:
We’re doing some testing and may get a project viewer out, which would allow you to test it and (I believe) let other viewers check out the source code. This is right-click on a particle, and it kills the generator … We’ve tossed around a few ideas about blocking particles in other ways but definitely want to get these first steps out the door.
This sparked further discussion on ways and means to help stop particle griefing, which has been on the increase across the Mainland of late. However, given that particles are a viewer-side effect, “stopping” them is actually easier said than done from a server-side perspective. One idea which gained some interest, if it is feasible, would be a block of any particle emitters belonging to an avatar banned from a region / parcel.
In the meantime there are means of stoppingthe viewer from rendering all particles – such as CTRL – Alt – Shift – +, or going to Preferences > Graphics > and dropping the Particle Count slider to zero. These again only work in your own world view, and while not always ideal, do present an option.
Asked if such a particle project viewer might include the new LSL particle capabilities already deployed server-side, Simon could only say, “Hopefully yes … I’ve been working on getting that chunk of code solid for the last few days. Unfortunately it’s pretty easy to crash at this point and so it’s not ready for consumption.”
The particle ribbon effect is a particle which repeats the texture horizontally, and can follow the object creating them, which offers a lot of potential uses, as which forms a part of the new particle capabilities – soon to be seen within a project viewer? – Time will tell.
Server-side Baking / Appearance
The viewer-side code for SSB/A is starting to appear in more TPVs:
Cool Viewer has had SSB/A support in the “Experimental” branch for a while, and this moved to the “Stable” and “Legacy” versions on April 20th – see the Cool VL website and release notes
Kukua has had an experimental / development version since the start of April (version 3.5.1) which also incorporates SSB/A.
The status of the SL beta viewer with the SSB/A code will take place around the middle of week 17, when a decision taken as to whether to incorporate the code into the SL release viewer or run a further beta release. The expectation is that the code will move to the release channel unless a last-minute significant issue is found within the code which prompts a further run in beta.
Assuming the code does make it to the release channel, it is likely that a release viewer will appear early in week 18 rather than late week 17, due to the time required to test and QA a build.
SUN-72 – Fix Submitted
One issue which is known to exist within the current beta release of the SSB/A viewer code and which has caused considerable problems is SUN-72 – if you have inventory items with special characters (including the likes of asterisks) in their names, they will fail to load. Similarly the use of accented characters (e.g. such as René) in things like chat log path names, the logs are not saved.
Nicky Dasmijn of the Firestorm team developed a patch for this specific problem which is already incorporated into the recent Firestorm 4.4.0 release, and which has been contributed to, and accepted by, the Lab for integration into the SSB viewer code. Hopefully, it should be appearing in the next SSB viewer release, whether beta of SL release viewer.
Sun-38 – Avatar / z-offset
As noted in my last major update on SSB/A, the ability to offset an avatar’s height on-the-fly to accommodate various animations (e.g. kneeling), or to adjust an avatar’s height when sitting / walking of floors, etc., and which will effectively be “broken” as reported in SUN-38, remains an issue for many.
While the Lab have produced an alternative approach which addresses some issues around avatar height offset using new appearance sliders, and which Nyx Linden and others have been continuing to tweak, there is no solution on the horizon for maintaining any form of on-the-fly adjustment; nor does the proposed solution work with no-mod shapes, as noted when I first reported on the “fix”.
During the Content Creation User Group meeting on Monday, April 22nd, a request was made for the Lab to not shut-down the existing baking service until such time as SUN-28 is “solved”, which prompted Nyx to comment:
SUN-38 is not currently considered a blocking issue for our initial release. It’s on our list to investigate, but we don’t have a patch or update immediately. There is a new hover parameter, which should work for attachments that affect your avatar, but the bug reported is also discussing the need to adjust the offset on the fly without changing wearables. Having both the new and the old system enabled is not an option … We are investigating options, but it is not a hard requirement for the initial release.
Update April 29th: Don’t forget my additional piece on the new cloud options in Firestorm 4.4.0.
Firestorm 4.4.0.33720 made its formal debut on Monday 22nd April, although it has been well and truly put through its paces by both the Firestorm beta testers and the preview group for some time now, in order to ensure it is as ready for mainstream release as possible. It includes a huge number of updates and revisions, both from the Firestorm team and their contributors and from Linden Lab.
Given the size of the release, this is not intended to be a review of absolutely everything within Firestorm 4.4.0 – please refer to the release change log for that. Instead, this review focuses on what I regard as the key updates / changes. As always, credits for the various updates and contributions to Firestorm which re mentioned here can be found in the release change log – again, please check them there.
Server-side Baking /Appearance Support
Note that this item is Second Life-specific.
This isn’t actually a visible change to the viewer in term of UI, etc., – but it is an important one.
Server-side Baking / Appearance is a major change within Second Life which is primarily aimed at reducing or eliminating issues of “bake fail” (when the avatar skin & clothing layers fail to render correctly and with remain blurred or show the avatar wearing the “wrong” outfit). This capability is being introduced in two parts: viewer-side support and server-side support.
Viewers which do not have the viewer-side support will not work with the Server-side Baking / Appearance service once it starts being deployed on the grid – people using them will increasingly see grey avatars around them. Therefore, it is essential that Firestorm users update to Firestorm 4.4.0.
Server-side baking and how others see you: (l) if you continue to run a viewer without SSB support when the new service goes live, others will see you as a cloud, (and, other than attachments, you’ll see them as grey); (r) when you’re running a viewer with SSB support, you’ll appear correctly to everyone else – and they will to you.
For further information on Server-side Baking / Appearance, see the following blog posts:
This release sees a large number of Preferences updates, all of which are reported in the change log, and which include:
Chat:
General: new option to select display name format for IM tabs – a drop-down list of: Display Name, Username, Display Name (Username) and Username (Display name)
Notifications: a new option to Show group chat in chat console (useful if you opt to hide chiclets – see below); new drop-down option for IM receipt sounds: Play sound only if not in focus
Graphics:
General: the Quality and Speed slider incorporates additional settings (Low-Med, Med-High and High-Ultra); Lighting and Shadows is renamed Advance Lighting Model (as per the LL viewer); the Depth of Field check box is moved to the Depth of Field tab; the Windlight Sky Detail slider and the Avatar Physics slider swap positions
Rendering: Max number of concurrent HTTP GET requests slider removed; check box to Enable rendering of screen space reflections added
Sound and Media > General: uses radio buttons to show stream title notifications in chat, toasts or to be turned off
Move & View:
View: new check boxes to: disable the mouse wheel from controlling camera zoom; Show user interface in Mouselook; Enable context menus in Mouselook and Leave Mouselook after regaining focus
Firestorm: new check boxes to Reset camera position on avatar movement and Show the default camera controls mini-floater always as opaque
User Interface > General: new check boxes to open group profiles, teleport history, landmarks, place details, block / mute list in their own floaters; adds an option to show / hide the media control in the menu bar (useful when using a skin which includes the media controls elsewhere) and an option to hide IM and group chat chiclets completely (the notifications envelope and the number of IM’s will remain on the screen all the time whether or not chiclets are disabled)
New User Interface > General options
Skins: new colour option (Ectoplasma) for AnsaStorm
Firestorm:
Windlight: new capability to define cloud texture
Build: options to default prim settings, texture and permissions on creation – see the Firestorm Custom Prim Parameters video tutorial and the Firestorm wiki
Backup tab – see below.
Custom Quick Preferences
A popular feature with Firestorm is the Quick Preference floater which, as the name suggests, provides fast and easy access to some of the most frequently used options in the viewer without having to open the “full” Preferences floater.
With release 4.4.0, the Quick Preferences floater has been made somewhat customisable – essentially allowing almost anything which is a debug setting to be added to the floater. However – be warned that this capability is considered to be for advanced users, and does require a willingness to delve deeper into the viewer than some users may be used to. Further, not every debug setting can be added to the floater.
Cutomising Quick Preferences (click to enlarge)
For those wishing to find out more, Firestorm have produced a tutorial video on using the Customise Quick Preferences option, and a Firestorm wiki page.
Settings Back-up
Often, when installing a new version of a viewer, the recommendation is that one performs a “clean install” – removing all cached and settings files. This can make any viewer installation labour-intensive, as settings all need to be restored after the installation is complete, and this can take time and effort.
Firestorm 4.4.0 attempts to ease some of the pain by presenting users with a Preferences option which allows them to back-up many of their global and account settings to a local hard drive. Once done, the back-up can then be restored to an updated version of Firestorm following installation; so providing the back-up is kept up-to-date, restoring the majority of preferred settings is no longer a chore.
The Preferences Backup tab and options
The back-up option can be found in Preferences > Backup. To use it, simply select a folder on a local hard-drive as the back-up location, then select those options which are to be saved; you can then delete all files associated with Firestorm prior to performing a clean install.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 