Category: SL User Group Meetings

December 2019 Web User Group summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
© and ™ Linden Lab

The following notes are taken from my recording of the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, December 4th, 2019. These meetings are held monthly, with dates and details of the meetings available via the Web User Group wiki page.

When reading these notes, please keep in mind:

  • This is not intended as a chronological transcript of the meeting. Items are drawn together by topic, although they may have been discussed at different points in the meeting.
  • Similarly, and when included, any audio extracts appearing in these summaries are presented by topic heading, rather than any chronological order in which they may have been raised during the meeting (e.g. if “topic X” is mentioned early in a meeting and then again half-way through a meeting, the audio comments will be concatenated into a single audio extract for that topic).

Premium

Winter Promotion

  • As many have already seen, the winter Premium promotion is currently open through until the end of the month.
  • For the first time, the promotion applies to Annual plans (previously, any discount on Premium subscriptions have only applied to Monthly and Quarterly plans), with an offer of 10% off of the cost of the annual subscription (normally US $99) when an account is upgraded to Premium.
  • It is likely that, as with the mid-year Premium fee increase, there will be an opportunity for Premium users to pre-pay a further year’s annual premium membership “locked in” at the discounted price.

Other Premium Notes

  • There is no further news on Premium Plus or its benefits.
  • There are no plans at this point to add other levels of Premium either “above” or “below” the current Premium + benefits. This might change at some point in the more distant future.

Legacy Profiles Viewer

  • The Legacy profiles viewer has cleared the last issue blocking it from update, so a new version of the viewer should be appearing soon. This update will include the profile feed embedded in the viewer.
  • Once this viewer reaches release status, the web profiles are to be retired.
  • The removal of the web-based profiles means that things like the privacy settings (which only worked for the web anyway), will no longer be available. However (and if I was understanding Grumpity correctly), at some point the profile viewer will include the ability for a user to determine what information within their viewer profile is visible to others who view it.

Marketplace

  • Store De-listings:
    • The Lab is work to fix the issue of Marketplace stores being de-listed as a result of using banned keywords.
    • It was re-iterated that, for a number of reasons – including people attempting to game it – the banned keyword list will not be made public.
    • Instead, the Lab has been working to make the algorithm used to scan for keywords is being made “smarter”, so it more correctly identifies banned words, which will hopefully reduce the number of unlistings occurring. There is still more work to be done on on this.
  • Improvements to the Marketplace search (demo items, gachas, etc), is now “very, very close” to being ready for release.
  • BUG-9984 “blank folder names” (in inventory) is another issue that has been looked into a number of times, but again, the Lab has been unable to determine the cause. However, they will give it a further pass in an attempt to find a cause or provide a workaround.
  • Feature requests BUG-227919 “Marketplace Sales Function” and BUG-227072 “Ability to give specific marketplace customers discounts” are both being considered by the Lab (but no commitment at this point in time that they will be implemented or when).
  • Overall, the Lab feel that the last 12-18 months have seen significant improvements to the Marketplace when compared to prior years.

In Brief

  • The last blocker for an update to the legacy profile project viewer has been cleared, and an update to the viewer, which will include support for the profile feed within it, should be surfaced for users to test Soon™.
  • As noted in my November summary, user-to-user land auctions will remain on hold for the time being, as the Lab is focused on other web-based work.
  • BUG-11555 “Setting certain characters in Display Name results in DN changing twice within minutes and resulting DN changes to Korean.” is a long-standing issue, and while it has been looked at, the Lab has yet to work out how to fix it.

2019 Simulator User Group week #49 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Butter, October 2019 – blog post

Update, December 5th: a deployment was made to the grid. Server update version 2019-12-04T20:29:26.533447 comprises:

  • A build of release 2019-11-15T21:13:13.532828 using new build technology.
  • Addresses some cases of scripts erroneously stopping.
  • Fixes a crash.

Hopefully, this addresses the recent issues with scripts failing until a region is restarted (see BUG-227864).

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for news and updates:

  • On Tuesday, 3rd December, the planned Main SLS channel deployment was cancelled. Had it been deployed, it would have comprised server maintenance release 2019-11-19T22:26:38.532992, built with the updated server build tools, and which includes:
    • Improved crash detection during shut-down.
    • Fixes for some race conditions with LSL scripts that could cause them to handle the same event more than once during a roll.
    • Updates to improve simulator security.
  • The planned RC deployment for Wednesday, December 4th, comprising server update has also been cancelled.

The reasons for the cancellation are related to the return of recent issues with scripts failing until a region is restarted (see BUG-227864) and which has been an intermittent issue recently, with Simon Linden noting:

We originally had planned to update the main channel regions with the version that’s on the RC channels, but held off as we are looking into issues about scripts not running. It appears to be an old issue that’s always been there but is worth investigating … we’re trying to get an update together for tomorrow morning [Wednesday, December 4th]. It was a very small percentage [of scripts affected] but that’s enough to be painful when there are millions running.

– Simon Linden

So again, keep an eye on the server deployment thread / technology → second life server sub-forum for updates.

Simulator Performance Issues

There is a forum thread concerning simulator overload issues that occurred over the Thanksgiving weekend (see: Huge intermittent sim overload). These issues were further confirmed at the SUG meeting by others seeing similar problems on other regions. Linden Lab do not currently have an explanation for the problems, but Maxidox Linden, one of the Second Life QA team members, did take a moment to address claims in the thread that LL “not caring” about issues like this:

I’m going to let the devs here handle this topic but I just want to chime in that I’ve read that thread and we absolutely do care about issues like this, and don’t put our development time solely into new feature work (I’m the one who tests a bunch of the stability and performance change.

– Mazidox Linden

The discussion on this topic raised questions on the simulator statistic Simulation Time and what it actually records, given it is often tied to simulator issues – as is the case with this issue. Exactly what it records has been a subject of discussion for around the last decade, and came up again in terms of whether it might point to a possible cause. After taking a look, Simon Linden noted:

So I did some digging. “Simulation Time” seems to be a catch-all category that includes odds and ends like dealing with terrain layers, some physics synchronization, parcel info. So not a lot to use tracking this issue down.

SL Viewer

There have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the week.

2019 Simulator User Group week #48 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Fox Road, October 2019 – blog post

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for news and updates:

  • On Tuesday, 26th November, servers on the Main SLS channel were updated with server maintenance release 2019-11-15T21:13:13.532828, previously deployed to a release candidate channel. It comprises:
    • Improves crash detection during shut-down.
    • Fixes some race conditions with LSL scripts that could cause them to handle the same event more than once during a roll.
    • Includes updates to improve simulator security.
  • On Wednesday, 27th November, there should be a single RC deployment 2019-11-19T22:26:38.532992, which is functionally the same build as 532828, but compiled using updated server build tools.
    • Given the issues with Tuesday deployment (see below) the status of the deployment was in a state of flux at the time of writing.

Tuesday Deployment Issues

The Tuesday server updates required an extended deployment window, together with more restarts of the updated simulators than is usually the case. Given the simulator version had been deployed to RC servers in week #47, the issues encountered with the deployment took LL by surprise:

This is one of those situations where we are left trying to figure out what went so wrong; we don’t know of changes that would have caused this much churn. That is the big difference between our Tuesday and Wednesday updates. Tuesday is more than 2x bigger, and divided up differently. Seeing something happen and knowing why it happened are two completely different things. Given that last week was OK, I suspect it is a scaling problem however.

The real frustration is that there isn’t a good way to test or simulate the scale where the issues happen. Updating one or two servers can be perfectly fine; but then do a few hundred and something goes up in smoke.

– Simon Linden, commenting on the November 26th deployment issues

Currently, the Lab is digging into what may have gone wrong (e.g. by checking server logs, etc.). They have already tracked down what might be a contributing factor, but the overall root cause analysis will take time. However, as the issues appears to be with the deployment process itself rather than the updated simulator code, at this point in time it is unlikely the simulator update will be rolled back.

SL Viewer

The following viewers were updated during the latter half of week #47:

  • November 22nd:
    • The Wassail Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.5.533043.
    • The Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999.
  • November 20th

The remainder of the viewers in the current pipelines are as follow:

  • Current Release version 6.3.4.532299, formerly the Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, dated November 4th, – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.

Name Changes

  • There are concerns over how long names might be cached within services, how changes might be tracked by external databases (e.g. customer lists for things like redelivery terminals), etc.
    • To help ensure user-developed tools, etc., can keep up with Name Changes, Linden Lab plan to offer a REST API (REpresentational State Transfer) that can be used to perform a name<-> avatar key translations and that will always return the same key for any name an account has ever had, and the key will always return the current name.
    • Creators are again reminded that their products and tools should utilised the avatar agent key, no avatar names.
  • LSL enquiries on agent key will return the current name for an avatar, not any past name(s).
  • There was concern that Name Changes could lead to issues in tracking griefers. However, as was pointed out in the meeting:
    • There are fees associated with Names Changes – signing-up to Premium and then for each change. These are unlikely to find appeal with griefers.
    • Griefers already create multiple accounts, and this will remain likely remain their preferred means of causing upset.
  • BUG-216397 “llName2Key, llRequestUserKey both accept a lone “R” as a surname for “Resident” agents” has been raised with the Lab again, and has been marked for inclusion in the next internal maintenance fix for Name Changes.
  • Once again, a “fee” figure was mentioned at the Simulator User Group meeting (US $20) – but it is important to note this is only a guess on the part of a user, and not any form of statement from Linden Lab. So If you hear it anywhere in the next month or so, ignore it.

2019 Simulator User Group week #47 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Gentle Breezes, October 2019 – blog post

Updates, November 20th, 2019:

  • Regarding BUG-227179 “All off-line inventory offers from scripted objects are STILL lost”. As per the notes below, this was believed fixed in the Wassail RC viewer. Testing has confirmed the issue hasn’t been fixed, and can be more confusing  – see BUG-227901.
  • Following the discussion about the error message, “Wire Chewed By Rabbit”, April Linden offered the following explanation via the forums:

/me raises her paw!

Soooo, uh, I was working on some server code a few years ago, and figured “no one’s gonna see this anyhow, so I’m gonna have some fun with it!” hehehe. 😝

You never know where the GridBuns might be lurking…!

Although she admits why the error surfaced with regards to Singularity is a bit of a mystery.

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for news and updates:

  • There was no update to the Main SLS channel on Tuesday, November 19th, leaving it on server release 2019-11-01T18:02:37.532376, previously deployed to an RC and comprising: internal script improvements. internal logging changes and improvements to simulator state saves, which should make rolls smoother.
  • On Wednesday, November 20th, there will be a maintenance update to RC servers: 2019-11-15T21:13:13.532828, comprising:
    • Improves crash detection during shut-down
    • Fixes some race conditions with LSL scripts that could cause them to handle the same event more than once during a roll.
    • Includes updates to improve simulator security.

An SLS deployment had been planned for the Main channel, however, at the meeting, Simon Linden noted:

We didn’t have an update this morning as we found an issue preventing the RC code from going forward. It isn’t anything visible or buggy from your point of view, but was about some internal data routing. To be on the safe side, we decided to get that sorted out first.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to the current SL viewer pipelines, leaving them as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.4.532299, formerly the Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, dated November 4, – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.532780, November 15.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.531949, October 28.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16.

In Brief

  • Simulator Deployments Causing Script Issues? -There have been reports that recent simulator deployments are causing running scripts to be reset when regions come back up, rather than  being restored to their previous state. Potential issues linked to this – impacting breedables – are indicated as being BUG-227688 and BUG-227897. As far as the  Lab is aware, there have been no back-end changes that would cause such script issues.
  • BUG-227179 “All off-line inventory offers from scripted objects are STILL lost” – it is believed that a fix for this is in the Wassail release candidate viewer (if not recorded in the release notes) – tests are being made to verify whether this is the case or not.
  • Error message: “Wire Chewed By Rabbit” in log files following log-in with missing textures / time-outs – this appears to be an issue specific to the Singularity viewer, and believed fixed in the most recent nightly / alpha / beta builds. If you are on Singularity and encounter it when examining your viewer log files as a result of texture load issues, please file a report with the Singularity team.

2019 TPVD meeting week #46 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Unconditional, October 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on November 15th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:

  • Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point in a separate browser tab for reference.
  • Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.

Simulator Script Management Improvements

[1:25-2:35]

These continue to be deployed across the grid, with the Lab believe the results have been “mostly good”, but noting that there may still be some scripts that may be affected by the changes (and some have been reported – such as BUG-227864).

Those that are experiencing issues are asked to file a bug report, as the Lab is willing to offer assistance. Note that example scripts may be requested as a well.

SL Viewer News

[2:45-6:33]

  • On Friday, November 15th:
    • The Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.5.532739.
    • The Copy / Paste project viewer updated to version 6.3.5.532780.

The rest of the current viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.4.532299, formerly the Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, dated November 4.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.530473, September 11th.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.

General Viewer Notes

  • A further update to the Legacy Profiles viewer is close to being made available. If the comments from the Web User Group are correct, this will see Profile Feeds appearing in the Profile floater, presumably in a new tab on that floater.
  • The first of the viewer builds using the updated Visual Studio 2017 / Xcode 10.3 (?) that had been anticipated as appearing “soon” at the last RPVD meeting apparently did not pass QA testing, and is now subject to debugging code changes that were made to some of the coroutines in the viewer.
  • It appears that work has resumed on the contribution towards viewer camera presets (STORM-2145), with “good progress” being made, but no indication on when a project viewer will surface.
  • The Lab is trying to generate bandwidth to implement mesh uploader improvements (these are most likely based on the Firestorm improvements to the uploader, the code for which has been contributed to LL).

Two-Factor Authentication

[15:43-16:46]

Two-factor authentication for log-in has been s subject of comment and requests from some time. Linden Lab is actively working on it, noting it is “firmly on the roadmap”. However:

  • There is no time frame at present on possible deployment.
  • The work is dependent / linked to other work, requiring things are approached in order and care is taken to ensure that in making all the collective changes, nothing is broken.

SL Share

[16:50-18:55]

SL Share, the capability for sharing SL snapshots to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter via LL server-side support, is to be discontinued.

  • The Facebook upload capability was removed some time ago after Facebook made changes to their API that broke the ability for the viewer to share to their platform, and did not implement any fix.
  • More recently, the Flickr and Twitter uploads have suffered issues (the Flickr upload is currently broken in viewers using the Lab’s upload back-end).

The reason for discontinuing SL Share is due to Flickr and Twitter making frequent changes to their connecting APIs without any notice that require LL to update their back-end support, which is regarded as a “big distraction” from other server-side work.

TPVs are free to continue to offer their own viewer-side means of uploading to the likes of Flickr that do not require LL’s back-end support, if they so wish. Firestorm has already done this.

In Brief

  • Singularity is apparently “very close” to a formal release to bring it up-to-date with current viewers.
  • [7:22-15:15] There is a discussion on region issues that are specific to the London City regions. Whilst somewhat outside the normal remit for TPVD meetings, it might be worth listening to by region / estate owners who may have experienced recent restart issues.
  • Emojis are coming to the viewer, courtesy of a code contribution that’s heading to Linden Lab.
The emoji capability is being contributed by the Catznip viewer team
  • Next TPV Developer meeting: Friday, December 13th, 2019.

2019 Content Creation User Group week #46 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kinglet Sound, September 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, November 14th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will now likely not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

Current Status

  • Merging with the last set of viewer releases has caused issues, and these are currently being addressed.
  • Beyond the above issue, clearing the remaining EEP bugs is “a priority focus”.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

Current Status

  • Vir is working on providing a means for data collection across a range of different viewer-side hardware specifications.
  • His previous work on textures and texture handling / loading have revealed it is hard to quantify in terms of accounting for performance impact, as textures don’t result in the same kind of impact as mesh triangle complexity.
    • With mesh, there is a clear complexity correlation between the number of triangles and performance /  complexity hits.
    • The number of textures on a object don’t behave the same way, other then during initial loading or if they push against memory limits, so, there’s no gradual degradation in performance with texture that can be seen with mesh, making it harder to produce accurate calculations.

Avatar System

The avatar system has become considerably more flexible over the years, but also far more complexity to use. Given this, Vir put out a question on whether there is anything creators would like to see Linden Lab do in terms of managing the avatar behaviour and configurability.

For example, one aspect of avatar system management is HUDs, which can be impactful in a number of ways  – resources simulator side, texture use viewer side; general ease-of use. Discussion on this raised some suggestions ideas:

  • Presenting them through (if possible) a dedicated floater in the viewer that could be dragged around like any other floater, minimised, etc.
  • Possibly extending llDialog to prove better support for HUD-like actions via dialogues.
  • Providing an HTML-based means for HUD-style interactions.
  • Having a “favourites” inventory folder sub-set, floater and toolbar button, a-la Firestorm that users could use for their various HUDs and (hopefully) encourage them to only attach (via the toolbar button / floater) when required – thus assisting with reducing VRAM usage for users / eases resource loads when avatars move between simulators. This idea has been discussed at the Lab.

A further discussion on this involved avatar shapes and applying / managing parameters.

  • Currently the body shape is a “container” for all body parameters (head shape, body size, leg length, torso dimensions, etc).
  • This can make it hard when trying to carry out localised modifications to a part of a body (e.g. applying head parameters to a “preset” shape designed for a specific head brand).
  • There have been suggestions to help improve this, including:
    • Providing a means of exporting specific shape parameters for making new body shapes (see feature request BUG-216131).
    • Manipulating the shape via LSL (not seen as necessarily user-friendly).
    • Having some form of wearable that can be associated with specific body area parameters so that when used, would cause the currently worn body to adopt those parameters.
    • Provide a means to support some kind of “mask list” that just governs which bones they affect. This would allow for quite arbitrary sub-sets (as defined by the shape creator), but is seen as not that user-friendly, and potentially introducing added complexity into shape manipulation.
  • Some of these suggestions have a potential hit with increased UI complexity, but the idea of having explicit sub-set of shapes (e.g. one for the head, one form the upper body (or torso), etc.,) that have an obvious link to the sliders they would affect / be affected by, would seem to be the easiest for users to understand.
  • To address the head issue noted above, the most direct solution would be to separate the head shape from the body.

Other Items in Brief

  • Rider Linden is working on the texturing download and caching updates for the viewer, but these have run into merging problems with the current release viewer, so there is nothing available for public consumption on this work.
  • Several creators have noted issues with Bakes on Mesh and the left arm / leg, Universal wearables, tattoos and skins (see this forum post as an example, together with this feedback thread post). No precise solution has been offered (there has been a suggestion for LL to provide a means to convert existing skins to universals for left arm and left leg, but it’s not clear how well this would work in practice).