Category: SL Tech

2024 SL SUG meetings week #25 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hylia’s Lake, May 2024 – blog post †

Update: following the publication of this summary, Linden Lab announced changes to texture upload costs (mentioned at the end of this article). In short: the Lab will be reducing the cost of 2K texture uploads for Premium Plus and Lifetime Premium Plus accounts to L$0. See here for more.  

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  June 18th, 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):
  • 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.

Simulator Deployments

  • On Tuesday, June 18th, the Main SLS channel was updated with the Spring Break simulator update (which has a fix for the hovering-at-login issue) .
  • On Wednesday, June 19th, the RC channels were restarted without any update.

Coming up as the next simulator update is Summer Fun, which is currently with the Lab’s QA team. Following that will be Picnic, which is still in the process of being put together.

SL Viewer Updates

No updates to the current official viewers, leaving the list as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.8.9130881608, June 10.
    • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.7.8820704257, May 6.
  • Project viewers:

In Brief

Please refer to the video for the following and other topics discussed:

  • This week was a Summer Solstice party, so discussion was semi-limited.
  • As per my recent Combat User Group summary, Rider is looking at avatar rotation / aiming and improving llRotateAvatar, but as the former are controller viewer-side and the later in simulator-side, is making this is proving to be an issue.
  • Simon Linden is “working on chat”, but would not be drawn on specifics, other than “it should be more useful”.
  • The updates required to the Bake Service (and all associated services) to support 2K textures is still on the “to be done” list.
  • It was pointed out that the Lab’s Premium Memberships page still states Premium Plus levies no charges for any uploads (click Even More Benefits to view) – despite this not being the case for 2K textures
  • General discussions on camera offset and llGetCameraPos().

† 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 #24

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, June 16th, 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: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th – NEW.
  • 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:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • Lovesense Viewer version 1.0.1, June 5  – no release notes.

V1-style

  • Cool VL Viewer Stable branch updated to version: 1.32.2 (PBR) on June 15 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

Second Life Combat User Group: June 13th, 2024 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Credit: Rider Linden

The following notes were taken from the Thursday, June 13th, 2024 Combat User Group meeting. They form a summary of the core items discussed and responded to by Lindens, 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.
    • It is not intended to be a complete combat system in and of itself.
  • 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 and at this location.
    • In local chat.
  • Discussion topics, requests, etc., can be found on the SL Feedback Portal Combat Board.
  • Additional details are available via the SL wiki Combat2 page.

Work In Progress

  • The current iteration of Combat 2.0 support on the server-side is due to be included in the Summer Fun simulator update, which is looking to be deployed some time after SL21B.
    • Those wishing to test the system can do so on Aditi on regions Gallipoli and Thermopylae.
    • Issues / feedback should be reported via the Support Portal Combat Board.
    • As noted in my previous update, this will very much be a release to find out exactly what works and what doesn’t for the Combat community/ies in Second Life and will be iterated upon going forward.
  • Rider is looking at avatar rotation / aiming and improving llRotateAvatar, but as the former are controller viewer-side and the later in simulator-side, is making this is proving to be an issue.
  • Rider has also been looking at improving hit boxes / hit box adjustments. However, this work is liable to be in follow-on updates to the initial release.

Comments and Requests

  • There was further request for Linden Lab to adopt the first-person shooter improvements found in the Black Dragon viewer. However:
    • As noted in my previous summary, this can only be done if Black Dragon’s develop provides the code to Linden Lab as a code contribution / code pull request, indication LL can consider / adopt the code.
    • The developer has indicated he can do this, but he might require time to do so for various reasons, including the fact it will probably need a lot more fine tuning and bug fixes.
  • The the above led to a discussion of using some form of IK update or scripted attachment added to hand-held weapons which could act as an animation targets for moving avatar hands to grips, magazines, etc. Some sample weapons have been put out on the combat regions on Aditi, and some sample scripts will be added to the SL wiki Combat Page to allow people to play with this idea.
  • As noted in my last summary, there has been a request made to add a “fast” parameter to llRezObjectWithParams to allow objects to rez at a reduced delay to allow things like higher rates of fire for some weapons without the need for additional rez nodes.
    • There is a potential griefing vector with this idea, so it was suggested that the parameter could be managed at region owner / estate level (e.g. so only enabled where specifically required).
    • At this meeting, Rider noted that implementing it would be a non-trivial task, because script delays are built into the function definition in the virtual machine, and so would require considerable update.
    • He also noted that even with an estate level control to counter issues of griefing on region that do not need it, such a parameter could result in the simulator’s rez queue being swamped by requests. However, it was suggested that this would be avoided because rezzers with too high a request rate would hit the grey goo fence.
  • There was a general discussion on llSensor and searching damageable types, with Rider noting the DAMAGE parameter searches for objects that either process on_damage, final_damage or have a health value, and when used, should combine both ACTIVE and PASSIVE, as it filters results.
  • In terms of damage, Rider noted that negative damage should be unthrottled and not trigger the region damage cap or contribute to the individual call throttle.
  • It was suggested that as a well as damage controls, there should be healing controls as well (e.g. a healing toggle and healing throttle) so as to prevent people making themselves “immortal”. However, it was noted:
    • It would be easier just to reduce all damage to 0, not matter what hits the avatar.
    • Either way, people abusing the system like this would show up clearly in the combat log, with combat region owners to potentially write a monitoring relay that will teleport anyone cheating in such a manner to be teleported home with a warning.
  • During the previous meeting it was asked if the former combat-enabled regions on the old Teen Grid – Lexington, Concord and No Man’s Land – could be brought back.
    • During that meeting, Madori Linden was able to bring back Lexington and Concord, but scripts on both were turned off – as of this meeting, scripts on both regions should be enabled.
    • It is proving difficult to recover No Mans Land, due to the lack of a good archived simstate.
    • A further request has been made to relocate Concord and Lexington to the Combat Sandbox red team and blue team regions, and make both combat sandboxes.

2024 SL SUG meetings week #24 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Bella’s Lullaby, May 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  June 11th, 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):
  • 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.

Simulator Deployments

  • On Tuesday, June 11th, the Main SLS channel was restarted without any deployment due to a bug in the Spring Break release.
  • On Wednesday, June 12th, all RC channels should be updated with the bug fixed version of Spring Break, if it clears QA.

SL Viewer Updates

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

  • Release viewer: Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.7.8974243247, dated May 8 and  promoted May 13 – no change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.7.8820704257, May 6.
  • Project viewers:

In Brief

Please refer to the video for the following:

  • The server team has recently switched over to Gitflow as their workflow. This may enable the team to provide very bleeding-edge simulator channels on Aditi (the Beta grid), where the curious can poke at code that is mostly untried and certainly untested.
  • For the current week, the server team is engaged on a bugsmash run: suspending work on their core projects and spending a week(ish) focusing on resolving bugs and smaller features for inclusion in a future simulator release. Further requests for simulator-side fixes were taken at the meeting.
  • Monty’s work on smoothly the impact of teleports into regions is starting on its way to being included in a simulator update – no time frame on when it will surface, however.
  • Leviathan Linden pointed out that there is a public github repository for the official “master message template”. This is the file which describes all of the “message” blocks that can be packed in the UDP SL protocol, both between the viewer and the server and also between the backend servers, and which can be used during local builds of the viewer. However, the  repository has been stale for 7 years, and he is now updating it with up-to-date information.
  • A discussion on avatar physics shapes, physics on avatar attachment (none), avatar physics shapes and hit boxes (the latter related to future Combat 2.0 work).
  • General discussions on features and options (not all of them simulator-related).

† 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 #23

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, June 9th, 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 – No Change
  • 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:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • Lovesense Viewer version 1.0.1, June 5  – no release notes.

V1-style

  • Cool VL Viewer Stable branch updated to version: 1.32.0.26 (PBR); and Experimental to version 1.32.1.9 (PBR) on June 8 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2024 week #23: SL CCUG and TPVD meetings summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
TheNest : Sunbird, May 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, June 6th, 2024.
  • My audio recording + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, June 7th, 2024. My thank to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meetings 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.
  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
  • For both meetings: dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they re conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers Status

[Video: 0:27-3:03]

  • Release viewer: Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.7.8974243247, dated May 8th  promoted May 13.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.8.9375512768, June 5.
    • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.7.8820704257, May 6.
    • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes), version 7.1.7.8820696922, April 29.
  • Project viewers:

General Viewer Notes (Both Meetings)

  • The latest Graphics Featurettes RC viewer is seen as the last RC update prior to this viewer being promoted, hopefully in week #24 if it passes QA. This will see the official release of Viewer-side setting of PBR materials for terrain; 2K texture upload support; glTF / PBR mirrors.
    • A request has been made to fix an alpha asset mode issue prior to release. This is seen as unlikely, unless QA reject the viewer going to release status.
  • It is anticipated the WebRTC viewer will move from project viewer status to RC viewer status with its next update.
    • The initial RC viewer will support both Vivox Voice and WebRTC, depending on how voice is handled on the back-end for any given region.
    • However, there may be issues when trying to use Voice across different regions / in groups where use of WebRTC and Vivox is mixed.
    • See here for more on the WebRTC project.
  • A planned Maintenance RC viewer (Maint A) is currently pending the resolution of a number of fixes, hence why Maint B and C are currently in the pipeline.

Graphics / glTF

General Notes on glTF / PBR (CCUG Meeting)

  • Cosmic Linden is working on custom repeats for PBR terrain, allowing for higher texel densities to help reduce the “stretching” of textures of elevation changes)  and better support 2K textures.  This work is *not* part of the PBR Terrain updates in the Graphics Featurettes viewer, but will be part of a follow-on set of glTF updates currently contain within a development viewer branch on Github.
    • This branch also includes a improvement specifically for Mac performance related to actions such as editing, moving UI elements around, etc.
  • It has been noted that the current implementation for reading & writing glTF data has some limitations in terms of SL, so there is some internal work to re-write it to better fit the SL systems / services. Part of this work means Geenz is re-writing some of the work on glTF transmission to better fit the SL asset loader.
    • This work will also assist the development work going into the glTF scene import project.

glTF Scene Import (TPVD Meeting)

[Video: 5:18-18:10]

  • Recap:
    • Development of the ability to import glTF scenes (objects, materials, animations, etc.), directly from Blender to Second Life. This includes a node hierarchy which will allow some degree of editing / modification of scene elements once imported. There will also be the ability to export scenes back to Blender for more extensive update by the creator. Both of these latter points (editing / export) will be subject to the SL permissions system.
    • 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).
    • There 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).
  • Status:
    • Rapid prototyping of the ability to upload and preview glTF scenes is progressing. This can be tested via prototype viewer made available through the Content Creator Discord channel (apologies, but due to a request from Linden Lab I cannot provide details on how to join this channel, outside of contact Vir Linden) and on the glTF development / test regions on Aditi.
    • The functionality currently remains that of being able to preview a scene – there is no actual simulator-side representation of the scene (e.g. it is viewer-side only, so only visible in the viewer used for the preview). Obviously, this will change as the work progresses.
    • For those wishing to test the capability, note that there is an known issue with large file uploads for glTF scenes failing. This is being investigated by Pepper Linden.
    • The work is now within the general development branch of the graphics / glTF work.
    • Limits (avatar limits, land impact, number of vertices, faces, etc), will be defined in detail as the project develops, with any defined as a “must” within the glTF specification being a hard line, those defined as a “should” being considered as the baseline.
  • [Video: 20:50-21:55] Transitioning to glTF scene support (when it ready for more widespread availability) will be in a manner akin to the introduction of mesh support back in 2011/12: those running viewers that have not updated to the code supporting glTF scene rendering will not see any scenes they enter, but will instead see “something akin to a little chiclet of a sculpt”.

 

Next Meetings

† 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.