Category: SL Tech

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 29th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

This week will see all simhosts on all channels restarted, but no deployments.

There should be a new RC release available in Week #49 (commencing Monday, December 5th, 2022. This should include a fix for BUG-229301 “Maximum Memory allowable by scripts not being reset until teleport or relog”.

Available Official Viewers

On Monday, November 28th:

• The Performance Floater / Auto-FPS project viewer was promoted to RC status with the release of version 6.6.8.576737.
• The Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer re-upped to version 6.6.8.576812.

The rest of the official viewer currently available official viewer remain as follows:

• Release viewer: version 6.6.7.576223 – MFA and TOS hotfix viewer – November 1 – No change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • VS  2022 RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576310, issued November 4 – utilises Visual Studio 2022 in the Windows build tool chain.
• Project viewers:
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.576331, issued on November 3.
    • This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.575529,  issued on October 12.
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.

In Brief

Refer to the video below for more information on the following:

• There has been a noticed uptick of objects failing to rez / render (see this forum thread). Whilst the issue has been around long enough to have been reported at least once (see: BUG-9439) and for workarounds such as ALT-zooming out  a long distance from a region and the using ESC to “jump” back to it, it is thought it issues might be related to the Interest List (simply put, the exchange of data between simulator and viewer as to what is in the region, what you should be able to see, how / when it is updated, etc). LL have noted the uptick  in issues, although no underpinning cause has been indicated, although there is an internal lean towards the Interest List theory.

I’m fairly certain that the current vanishing object issue is in the Interest List. I’m not sure what we changed that could have aggravated though. I’ve been seeing it pretty regularly for about a month now.

– Rider Linden

• • The discussion of this issue takes up the majority of the meeting, and touches other issues related to object rendering, / rezzing / re-rendering, and also includes views on improving the robustness of the Interest List as a whole – including a capability function (for which LL has requested a Feature Request Jira).
• There is some further discussion on combat in Second Life,  and the need for improved projectile systems and generally improving the current capabilities. This follows on from the last meeting, and involves this forum discussion.
• The final 10 minutes of the meeting touches on potential updates to the recently release Linkset Data (LSD)

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 22nd, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

At the time of writing, a server deployment thread had yet to be published.

• On Tuesday, November 22nd, the Main SLS and Events channels were updated with the single fix designed to keep regions from running out of voice connections (BUG-229984 “Voice chat is not working” and BUG-7371 “Voice cannot connect”).
• On Wednesday, November 23rd, simhosts the RC channels will be restarted without any deployment.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

The run of simulator updates through to the new year will likely comprise:

• Link sounds will most likely the last roll of the year (this should behave exactly as though you had a script in the linked prim and called llPlaySound from that prim).
• llGetSimStats updates are liable to be the first update of 2023.
• llHTTPRequest updates (see below) will likely follow later in January 2023.
• LSDFindKeys sorting updates will most likely be fixed in the first simulator maintenance release for next year.

Available Official Viewers

No changes to any of the current batch of official viewers, leaving them as follows:

• Release viewer: version 6.6.7.576223 – MFA and TOS hotfix viewer – November 1 – No change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.8.576431 on Monday, November 14.
  • VS  2022 RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576310, issued November 4 – utilises Visual Studio 2022 in the Windows build tool chain.
• Project viewers:
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.576331, issued on November 3.
    • This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.575529,  issued on October 12.
  • Performance Floater / Auto-FPS project viewer, version 6.6.5.575378, October 4.
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.

In Brief

• BUG-232171 “Issue with regions becoming full, but still showing available prims” – this is been causing noticeable issues recently, with a lot of speculation that it may be a griefing vector. However, the important point with the issue is that LL know what the cause actually is, and will be addressing it.
  • BUG-229382 “Vehicles stopping dead at region borders” may be related to this issue.
  • BUG-BUG-227303 “collisions makes a script stop running and revert its mono status” was also raised later in the meeting in relation to Mono concerns.
• Concerns have been raised about bout removing the LSO bytecode compiler (non-Mono), leaving only the Mono compiler (the run-time environment for LSO scripts would remain – it just wouldn’t be possible to compile new scripts via the LSO compiler or re-compile updated scripts using it).
  • These issues (apparently related to rapid rezzing of objects  and / or some vehicles the Mono control scripts behaving badly at region crossings) have not been the subject of any bug report(s) and so lack documented details. A Jira has been request.
• A core part of the meeting was given over to combat systems and providing improved means of projective operation (in part related to the Mono discussion above) – please refer to the video for details.
• BUG-37727 “Regex for LSL” may have a better chance of being implemented now that Regex is exposed to LSL via Linkset Data.
• With the implementation of LSD, an suggestion has been made to add publicly editable key-value pairs that could be set in the build window via object owners, and then accessed via scripts using an interface similar to Linkset Data. A  similar suggestion has also been made within the forums, however, that does not appear to be a feature request Jira for these ideas (at least at the time of writing this summary).
• BUG-232551 “We need significantly more RAM for scripts in non-attachments” was raised in discussion;  it has been accepted by the Lab, but no indication of when it it  might be actioned, or how.
• Rider Linden is playing some enhancements to LSL for 2023, including (but not limited to) allowing a response to an HTTP request with the contents of a notecard.