Category: SL Tech

2024 week #18: SL CCUG summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Venus by the Water, April 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, May 2nd, 2024.

Meeting Purpose

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work. This meeting is held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
  • In regards to meetings:
    • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.
    • Commence at 13:00 SLT on their respective dates.
    • Are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
    • Are open to all with an interest in content creation.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers Status

  • On Thursday, May 2nd, the Materials Featurette RC viewer updated to version 7.1.7.8883017948.

The rest of the official viewers remain as:

  • Release viewer: 7.1.6.8745209917, formerly the Maintenance Y/Z RC (My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history), dated April 19 and promoted April 23.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes), version 7.1.7.8820696922, April 29.
    • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.6.8758996787, April 23.
  • Project viewers:

Graphics / glTF

  • Mirrors: Geenz Linden continues work on bug fixing (notably the fact that mirrors under Linden Water seem to break) and additional updates to improve usability.
  • PBR Terrain:
    • Cosmic has fixed an issue wherein 2K textures were not rendering on the mini-map.
    • In addition, she is looking into the ability to customise repeats in PBR terrain.
  • It is known that screen space reflections (SSR) do not work well on Linden Water, producing moiré effects. There has been talk within the Graphics team of “ripping out” SSR and replacing it with “something” – but no determination has been made as to what should be used, and it is pending work elsewhere within the graphics / rendering system.

glTF Scene Import

  • Runitai Linden is continuing to work on glTF scene import. This has reached a point where (on test viewers) it is now possible to preview a scene (tied to an in-world object) in-world.
  • Work is now being done to set-up a couple of test region on Aditi (the Beta grid) where this can be more widely tested.
  • The overall status of the glTF scene import work is described as “prototyping with much brokenness”, and the project is liable to continue through summer in order to get it into something of a more productive state.
  • The initial aim is to get to a point where scenes can be imported and seen, and nodes within them updated with both tools in the viewer and / or using LSL, and ensuring they stay in synch with the rest of the scene.
  • Once the above has been reached, then the plan is to start looking at performance, working out a Land Impact accounting schema, etc.
    • In as much as Land Impact is concerned, it is likely that nodes within a scene will have their own Land Impact, with those also involved in skeletal animation having an additional Land Impact.
  • Scenes are liable to use the MSFT glTF extension for Level of Detail (LOD), as this allows LODs to be set per node within a scene, providing more intuitive / consistent LOD switching management (based on screen coverage).
    • For automatic LOD generation, the first pass of work might only use the automatic LODs generated by Blender; if a home-ground automatic LOD generation system is used, it will “almost certainly” be Mesh Optimiser.
    • Overall, glTF scene support should leverage Blender’s LOD generation, as Blender is “way better” at this than LL are “any day of the week”.
    • Managing LODs (e.g. setting a default LOD Factor in the viewer is liable to become more firmly set and managed as glTF scene import becomes available (e.g. all viewers working to a fixed LOD of 3.00 or something).
  • The will be constraints placed on scene imports (e.g. will not be able to have a scene which exceeds the capacity of a region; scenes will not be able to span more than one region (so as to avoid issues with physics, etc.); and so on).
  • It was noted that glTF scene support will require a lot of work in areas such as physics management, update message handling (the object-based messaging currently used will not work with glTF scenes). Not of these aspects are seen as potential blockers – but solving all of them will take time.
  • glTF scenes will present more of a two-way street for creators, moving more seamlessly between a design tool such as Blender and SL when building and testing a scene and, following the upload of a scene, the ability to save it back locally again (subject to the SL permissions system where content has been subsequently added to a scene after its initial upload).

In Brief

  • Animations: it was noted that under glTF there is support for at least eight morph channels (with one vertex attribute being considered a channel, so it could be that 2 morphs change 3 attributes), making animation far more flexible in terms of use.
  • Some using the SL Mobile app have apparently been reporting that PBR terrain textures are not showing in that app, as it currently does not have PBR rendering support – this has been passed to the Mobile team.
  • It was noted that one of the reasons for LL adopting the glTF specification is that it is mobile friendly, so the Mobile team is going to be adding PBR, etc., support.
  • A lot of the meeting was taken up with a general discussion on matters relating to glTF scene import – LOD management, collaborative building, licensing matters (e.g. if an asset is available on a third-party asset store with a specifically licensed use, and importing it to SL potential break that license – should LL proactively block the asset from being imported?), etc., which have yet to be fully determined internally at LL, and so fall outside of this summary.

Next Meeting

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

May 2024 SL Web User Group summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday May 1st, 2024. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

Meeting Overview

  • The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), the forums.
  • As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
    • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
    • In both Voice and / or text.
    • At this location.
  • Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Marketplace Infrastructure Update

  • The Marketplace infrastructure update has been completed, although the work did lead to a few “bumps” and some rapid bug fixes. However, the Marketplace team believe things should be running “just fine now”.
    • If any Merchant is experiencing issues with list / updating items, etc., then it is requested they raise a Canny report through the Feedback Portal.
  • As a result of this work, the Marketplace should be a lot more responsive in terms of page loading, etc., and the work also opens the door to the Lab adding a “lot of cool features” to the MP.
  • Garfield Linden noted that the focus on MP work now is making it “mobile-friendly and making improvements to Marketplace search”.

General Discussion

  • Sntax Linden indicated that the request to allow people to be able to Gift items directly from the Marketplace without having the item transferred to their Shopping Cart is “high” on the list of updates for the MP, but will not be available “soon”.
  • There have been multiple requests for users to be able to have more wish lists / favourites lists, both public and private. Requests to go with additional lists were also given, including:
    • Provision of sort filters added (e.g. newest first / oldest first)
    • Ability to search lists for items previously added to a list.
    • Ability to give lists custom names / create custom lists (e.g. by selecting items in another list / the Shopping Cart and use them to create a new wish / favourite list).
    • General load time improvements (for those with very large lists).
    • An ability to move items more easily between different lists (e.g. from the Shopping Cart to a favourites or wish list, or between wish lists if there are multiple lists available, etc.).
    • All of these were seen as potentially “good ideas” for improving the functionality and usability of lists within the MP.
  • A further request was made for Merchants to be able to respond to poor ratings and / or purchasers to be able to message Merchants through the MP – particularly to help where people have made a purchase and are confused about something and needs a little assistance.
    • A messaging system was seen as particularly beneficial for Merchants who get their IMs capped, as it provides a further channel to track comments and requests, making it potentially easier to help provide customer service support / mitigate bad reviews that are based on misunderstandings.
    • Sntax  suggested this could be handled via a prompt / link could be added to the review option (e.g. “do you need assistance with the items? Contact me by clicking here”).
    • This suggestion was seen as potentially However, there was some opposition to making any message option that “hidden”.
    • Instead, a preference was expressed for a proper messaging system – button, form, an “inbox” for the Merchant to receive messages (rather than them going to e-mail, although this should be offered as an option), etc., – all of which would take significant resource to supply.
  • The above led to a broader request to make it possible for anyone to reply to a review – so even if the creator of a product does not reply, someone who might be able to help (e.g. having gone through a similar misunderstanding) can drop an explanatory reply.
  • A request was made for LL to provide more header differentiation between e-mails sent to users that are off-line Group notifications and those that are actual off-line IM from individuals, with some claiming Gmail often lumps them together after filtering (which could as much be an issue in how the Gmail filter is set-up).

 

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, June 5th, 2024.

2024 SL SUG meetings week #18 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Still, April 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 30th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log and the video by Pantera – my thanks to her as always for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

  • The Main channel was restarted on Tuesday, April 30th with no update.
  • On Wednesday, May 1st, the back-end support for the the glTF updates available in the Graphics Featurettes viewer (e.g. PBR terrain textures and mirrors) will be deployed to all RC channels.
    • Note that these updates require the use of the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer (available from the Alternate Viewers page), or a TPV that has merged with this code.
    • Note also that attempts to upload 2K textures on regions without the back-end support will result in an error message being displayed.

SL Viewer Updates

  • The Maintenance B RC viewer, version 7.1.7.8820696922, was issued on Monday, April 29th.

The rest of the official viewers in a pipeline remain as:

  • Release viewer: 7.1.6.8745209917, formerly the Maintenance Y/Z RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history), dated April 19 and promoted April 23rd.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Project viewers:

In Brief

  • Monty Linden is reported to have noted improvements in region crossings during test – however, he is doubtful that this is the case and is leaning towards the belief his work in trying to improve things isn’t far enough along to be seeing the kind of improvements he has witnessed.
    • Monty further noted that the changes he is making to region crossings are about reducing impact on avatars already in the region as a result of another avatar physically entering it or arriving via teleport – they are not about improving matters for the avatar entering a region – although he is checking this behaviour for possible regressions as a result of his changes.
  • Those wishing to test Leviathan Linden’s new VEHICLE_FLAG_BLOCK_INTERFERENCE  flag to optionally prevent attachments on passengers from pushing the vehicle around (so as to prevent cheating in racing, for example) can do so on the Aditi (Beta) grid regions Mauve and Jigglypuff.
  • Leviathan Linden hopes to update his Game Control regions on the beta grid (LeviathanLove and LeviathanLost) with the upcoming Spring Break simulator update, which contains the latest version of his Game Controller event.
  • The LL server team is now using Gitflow for tracking simulator releases, and it is hoped this might make it easier for providing a web page reporting on the different server update versions.
  • There were further comments on raising the current Mono script cap (64 Kb) and whether LL are going to do so. The reply was:
We have discussed increasing the memory cap but I don’t have anything to report on that at this time.

– Rider Linden

  • Rider added that in the meantime, he would like to have some way for a script to auto recover from a stack heap collision without the need for additional scripts monitoring and attempting to correct.
    • The problem here is that, potential causes of s S/H collision cannot necessarily be predicted (e.g.  if a listen or an HTTP response comes in that is larger than your available memory then you are going to hit the S/H issue – and you can’t predict how much data is coming in), ergo, resolution tends to be re-active rather than via avoidance.
    • In order to help with the identification of S/H collisions, he suggested a llSetScriptFlags function where one of the flags was something like SCRIPT_FLAG_AUTO_RESET_STACKHEAP. This could help reduce reliance on having other script perform “heartbeat” operations on scripts that may trigger a stack heap collision.
  • The above lead to an extended discussion on scripting and script management through the latter portion of the meeting – please refer to the video below for details.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2024 SL viewer release summaries week #17

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, April 28th, 2024

This summary is generally 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.
  • Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.

Official LL Viewers

  • Release viewer: 7.1.6.8745209917, formerly the Maintenance Y/Z RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history), dated April 19 and promoted April 23 – NEW
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.6.8758996787, April 23.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

  • Cool VL Viewer Stable branch updated to version: 1.32.0.19 (PBR); and Experimental to version 1.32.1.1 on April 27 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

Second Life Combat User Group: April 25th, 2024 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Credit: Rider Linden

The following notes were taken from the Thursday, April 25th, 2024 Combat User Group meeting (also referred to as the Combat Committee User Group or CCUG, an abbreviation also used by the Content Creation User Group, and which I’ll not be using in these summaries to reduce the risk of confusion between the two). They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Meeting Overview

  • The Combat User Group exists as a forum to discuss improvements to the Linden Lab Combat System or LLCS to better support combat in Second Life.
    • The core idea is to provide additional events and capabilities which sit on top of LLCS to provide combat creators with better tools with which to create better combat systems for their specific scenarios.
  • The meetings are the result of a proposal document on improving the native damage system in SL, written by Rider Linden, and which is the focus for both the meeting and any work arising from them.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
    • By Rider Linden, with the support of Kyle Linden.
    • On alternating Thursdays (rotating with the Content Creation User Group) at 13:00 SLT. Meeting dates are recorded in the Second Life Public Calendar.
    • Initially in text, although voice might be included in the future depending on feedback from those attending.
    • At this location.
  • Additional details are available via the SL wiki.

Work In Progress

  • Rider is currently fishing up the regions settings for what happens on the “death” of a player in a combat scenario – what happens on death (teleport to spawn point, etc.), hit point regeneration, maximum DPS, options for writing to the combat log, etc.
  • llGetEnv has been updated to allow all of the options to be read from a script (e.g. ALLOW_DAMAGE_ADJUST, RESTRICT_COMBAT_LOG, DEATH_ACTION (0 = Teleport home 1 = Teleport to parcel landing point. 2 = Teleport to region telehub. 3 = No action), etc.).
  • At the time of the meeting, his hope was to have ta simulator version supporting all of this running on the Aditi combat test regions (Thermopylae and Gallipoli) by COB on Friday, April 26th.
  • Rider is also working on a UI mock-up for the new combat options in the viewer, which will have to be vetted / changed / approved by the UI team.
  • Also on his list of work are: OBJECT_HEALTH, SIT_FLAG_NO_DAMAGE, a UUID for the combat log, and some selective unthrottling for llDamage. Once these items are ready, he hopes the simulator code will be set for passing over to QA to poke at.

Comments and Requests

  • A request was made for the new viewer region console settings for the above to be written-up, which will be done – although the variable names will be the same as the llGetEnv key names.
  • It was asked if death_action could be made more flexible – making it possible for  more than one respawn point settable either by this mechanism or by some script intervention? for example, move to point A if in some designated group(s) and point B otherwise.
    • Rather than complicate the options, Rider’s plan has been to let the local combat HUD handle such requirements.
    • This led to the question: what happens if the region setting is something else (e.g. teleport to landing point) but HUD on_death teleports somewhere else? which one wins?
    • Rider’s view was that in such cases, the region setting would win, as the simulator has no idea as to what the HUD may try to do. Therefore, in such situation, Teleport to Telehub should be set, or (possibly) an Experience should be set, so as to enforce the HUD’s settings (although this was seen as both a lot of work for limited return, and off-putting to users who are put off by the Accept Experience dialogue box).
    • There is also the idea of sending people to different locations based on active group. However, Rider is unclear how this can be made to work, so it has been pushed onto a back burner, in case a suitable solution can be identified later.
  • Clarification was requested for OBJECT_HEALTH, with Rider replying:
Basically it would allow a remote script to look at an object and get an idea about how damaged it is. It would just be an integer and it would be up to the script in the object to keep it updated (and to decide what the number means). Default =  0. The object itself won’t monitor or do anything at all with that number. It will be entirely up to the scripts about how to use it.
  • The above led to a wider discussion on damage, hit points, object health and agent health + reporting. In particular a request was made for direct sensor-based identification of objects with health  (e.g. an OBJECT_WITH_HEALTH flag), and feature Request for this was requested.
  • There was also further discussion on the idea of vehicle linkset having multiple hit points, allowing for variable damage to be scored (e.g. the front of a tank has 400 HP, but its rear only has 50, allowing a rear-end hit to brew it more easily than a frontal hit (as is generally the case with tanks). This is something Rider would like to achieve, but he noted that there isn’t a clean way to get object details of a specific link of another object.

 

2024 SL SUG meetings week #17 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hotel Del Salto, April 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log and the video by Pantera – my thanks to her as always for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

  • The Main channels was restarted on Tuesday, April 23rd with no update.
  • On Wednesday, April 24th:
    • Bluesteel RC will be updated with the back-end support for the the glTF updates available in the Graphics Featurettes viewer (e.g. PBR terrain textures and mirrors), joining the Preflight channel.
      • The code currently contains a bug wherein the server can flood the viewer with too many updates to the “Material override” data. The fix for this failed to pass QA to be included in the Blues
    • Le Tigre and Magnum and any other RC channels will be restarted without any new deployment.

Upcoming Deployments

  • There are currently some bugs within the WebRTC voice support, and these caused the planned deployment of this to be delayed. See my Week #12 summary for an outline of WebRTC voice.
  • The above means the Spring Break RC update (which has a fix for the hovering-at-login issue) is being moved to next-in-line for deployment.

SL Viewer Updates

  • On Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024:
    • The Maintenance Y/Z RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history) version 7.1.6.8745209917 dated April 19th, was promoted to de facto release viewer.
    • The Maintenance X RC (usability improvements) updated to version 7.1.6.8758996787, on April 23rd.

The rest of the official viewers in a pipeline remain as:

In Brief

  • Leviathan Linden has finished implementing the new VEHICLE_FLAG_BLOCK_INTERFERENCE which would allow vehicles to optionally prevent attachments on passengers from pushing the vehicle around (so as to prevent cheating in racing, for example).
    • This particularly targets llSetVelocity(), llApplyImpulse() and llPushObject() calls.
    • llMoveToTarget(), llSetForce() were also tested, but did not appear to work on the vehicle, so the code for blocking them in this circumsatances has been removed. However, if an exploit using them can be demonstrated, Leviathan is willing to add the code back into a simulator update.
    • Leviathan hopes to get the functionality in the Spring Break simulator update before that goes to internal QA pre-deployment testing.
  • There is a request to increase the server notecard cache. This is seen by the Lab as “doable”, but has yet to be actioned.
  • The above lead to a lengthy discussion on n/card caching, and how best to define the cache (e.g. by n/card size, rather than the number of notecards) which segued into scripting and a viewer-side LSD editing interface(!).
  • It was indicated that an update to the Bake Service to support 2K textures is “in the plan” – but no indication of when the update might actually take place.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.