Category: SL User Group Meetings

November 2019 Web User Group: Premium Plus & Events

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, November 13th, 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 Plus

  • Premium Plus is now to be the official name for the upcoming new Premium subscription level, this having changed from “Elite” following feedback from users.
  • It will not be ready for deployment until after Name Changes has been deployed, and the Lab is currently aiming for “early 2020”.
  • Full benefits for Premium Plus subscriptions have not been disclosed, however it has been indicated that:
    • “A lot” of the current Premium benefits are going to be “even better” for Premium Plus.
    • There will also be benefits that are obviously exclusive to Premium Plus.
    • There will be Marketplace benefits available to merchants upgrading to Premium Plus – but again, what these are has not been disclosed.
  • Despite a rumour being dropped into a public meeting that the new subscription will be “three times” the current Premium subscription, no official word on the pricing for Premium Plus has been given, other than it will be available on a monthly or annual subscription basis (see: 2019 Web User Group week #40: Name Changes and new Premium option).

Events

  • The Second Life Events service is being overhauled.
  • The first pass of this work is to clean-up the service to prevent event spamming.
    • This will involve levying a fee for events to be listed.
    • The fee will be in Linden Dollars. However, it will not be “prohibitive”, but rather enough to “incentivise better event content”.
    • The fee will be lower for Premium accounts compared to Basic accounts.
  • The follow-on work will include providing the means for Premium account holders to set recurring events.
  • Beyond this, there is a much larger tranche of work to overhaul what events look like and the events functionality, which is targeted for an early 2020 deployment.

Marketplace

  • A range of fixes and general code clean-up.
  • New notifications options now available via Marketplace → Account → Notification Options.
    • The options displayed are split between Shopping and Merchant notifications, with the latter obviously only available to those actually selling through the Marketplace.
The new notifications (shown side-by-side for convenience). Note the Merchant options will only be displayed for those selling through the MP. Click for larger size, if required.
  • The Place Order button has been moved to the top of the advert listing page when ordering L$0 items, to make completing the order quicker.
  • Filters for removing demo and / or limited items / gachas from Marketplace searches are very close to being ready for deployment.
    • This work is part of an overall refactoring of the Marketplace search that will continue to see incremental changes and improvements to the search functionality.

In Brief

User-to-User Land Auctions

  • User-to-user land auctions have been suspended due to instances of “abuse” (no specifics provided) that require the Lab to make changes to the system.
  • There is no indication as to when user-to-user auctions will be re-opened, as the Lab has to consider how best to change the system to prevent similar misuse in the future.

Other Notes

  • There has been a general clean-up of the secondlife.com pages.
    • For example: the Account → Contact page has been removed from users’ dashboards as it provided redundant information (your own user name and e-mail address) – this does not impact the Change Password option.
  • Recent general work on all SL web properties has included updating the servers to a new operating system and installing a new site defender that can respond faster to attacks.
  • Release notes for updates to the web services (similar to those for simulator and viewer release notes) are in the works, and could be ready for deploy before year-end.
  • The official viewer log-in splash screen now includes a section for the SL Blogger Network, as well as now displaying the current Second Life time.

2019 Simulator User Group week #46 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hazardous, September 2019 – blog post

Simulator Deployments

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

  • The SLS (main) channel on Tuesday, November 12th, 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 13th, there will be two RC deployments

SL Viewer

The Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, version 6.3.4.532299 and dated Monday, November 4th, has been promoted to the de facto release viewer.

The Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.5.532631 on Tuesday, November 12th.

The rest of the current viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.531949, October 28.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.3.531844, October 21.
    • 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

  • There is a relatively new member of the Lab’s QA team for Second Life: Johngalt Linden.

2019 Simulator User Group week #45 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Whimsies and Dreamscapes, September 2019 – blog post

Simulator Deployments

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

  • The SLS (main) channel on Tuesday, November 5th, leaving it on server release 2019-10-26T00:06:48.532192, previously released on October 30th and comprising:
    • A previously released hotfix to fix teleports being 5%-7% less reliable.
    • A change that makes the simulator take a little bit longer to report as “Up” to the Lab’s internal tools to more accurately reflect when residents can actually access a region.
  • There is a single RC deployment planned for Wednesday, November 6th: version 2019-11-01T18:02:37.532376, which is essentially a rebuild of 532143, originally deployed on Wednesday, October 30th and containing the above updates as well. No release had been released at the time of writing.

Note: a second RC deployment, 532377, comprising an internal update and a script to monitor additional region data during rolls was cancelled after it was discovered in QA it broke script uploading. 

Linden Lab request that if anyone sees messages about “Unable to upload 12345678-90ab-cdef-1234567890ab due to the following reason” on a version that isn’t 532377, could they please file a bug report and provide full information of when, where and how they encountered the message. 

SL Viewer

The Ordered Shutdown RC viewer was updated to version 6.3.4.532299 on Monday, November 4th. At the time of writing, the rest of the viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.3.531811, formerly the Voice RC viewer, dated October 18, promoted October 31 – 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:
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.531949, October 28.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.3.531844, October 21.
    • 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.

Simulator Performance

There are continued reports of simulator performance issues – notably with Mainland regions. The most common description of the problem is that over time, script performance on Full region simulators declines to the point where only around 20% or so of scripts are running per cycle, and the simulator has no spare time, forcing the region holder to submit a ticket requesting a move to a different server. This tends to resolve the problem – at least until the next rolling restart, when the performance degradation starts again.

There appears to be no discernible reason for this. Rider Linden has been making improvements on how scripts – particularly idle scripts – are handled, and at the meeting, Simon Linden noted:

We’ve been looking at scripts and performance and there are some changes in the works that will hopefully help … those are on about 15% of the regions now, and will expand to about 20% tomorrow.

…Rider’s work looked at a bunch of the event distribution code like that, and he made it faster with re-writing it and getting rid of brute-force searching and so on. Of course, that changed some script timing and killed some kittens and pot plants. Sometimes it really hits me what a strange job this is.

The issues have led to speculation that the Lab might be stacking more regions on their servers or are reducing the server resources available to each simulator. Responding to an enquiry on this, Simon indicated that the Lab have not changed either for years. However, he did note the fact that the servers the Lab uses do change, so something may have been introduced to impact performance.

2019 TPVD meeting week #44 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
La Gaspesie (Canada) –blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on November 1st, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording and providing it. This was a relatively short meeting, with some conversation on the viewer building process – error reporting, replacing cygwin with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that are not reflected in the notes below – please refer to the video (between 9:23 and 15:35.

SL Viewer News

[0:22-8:59]

  • On Thursday, October 31st:
    • The Voice RC viewer, version 6.3.3.531811 and dated October 18th, 2019, was promoted to de facto release status.
    • The Love Me Render RC viewer was updated to version 6.3.4.532273.
  • On Friday, November 1st, the EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.532314.

Note that while it has not been tested, it is believed the voice plug-in with the Voice viewer is compatible with other viewers that are otherwise up-to-date with viewer release.

The remaining viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, version 6.3.3.531767, October 21st.
    • Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.3.531784, October 18th.
  • 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.

Upcoming Viewer Improvements

  • There will be further improvements made to voice. These will largely be focused on the overall robustness of voice operations.
  • The first viewer built using the updated build process using Visual Studio 2017 and Xcode 10.3 is currently caught in QA, but should hopefully be appearing “soon”.
  • Once the new build process viewer has gone through the RC process, LL plan to update the Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF – media handling) within the viewer.

Inventory Issue Handling Changes

[2:55-7:28] Broadly speaking, inventory issues that occur at log-in have been largely handled as viewer-side fixes (e.g. the viewer fails to receive data on the Outfit folder, and responds by creating a new Outfit folder). However, these kinds of “fixes” can lead to problems of their own in inventory handling (e.g. it can lead to duplicate folders, requiring Support to run an inventory transform to correct – such as in the case of the Current Outfit Folder being duplicated).

Instead, the Lab is working to give the servers more of a say when the viewer believes it has encountered an inventory syncing issue when logging-in. Instead of the viewer attempting to fix things, it will call back to the servers and have them fix matters by sending / re-sending inventory data.

Currently, the server end of this work is in progress, and a viewer with code changes to support this new approach will be appearing Soon™. These updates will be kept to a separate viewer branch to allow TPVs to absorb them quickly as the reach a state in which they can be adopted.

In Brief

  • [15:38 (text)-19:15] BUG-225655 “Viewer freezes while “Loading world…” – Intel HD 620 / Intel HD 630, Windows 10″ has a new wrinkle, as per Whirly Fizzle’s comment on the bug report. Firestorm has a fix that could be contributed, and LL have indicated a willingness to look at it.
  • [25:41-27:26] BUG-227818 “MapLayerRequest does not appear to work” – this refers to a request type that asks the simulator to relay a list of all the map layers and which is failing to behave as expected. The bug report has been requested in order for LL can look into the problem.

2019 Simulator User Group week #44

Posted on by Inara Pey
Abrahamstrup, September 2019 – blog post

Simulator Deployments

At the time of writing, no deployment notes had been published. However:

  • There was no deployment to the SLS (main) channel on Tuesday, October 29th, leaving it on server release 2019-10-03T01:12:11.531528.
  • There are two RC deployments planned for Wednesday, October 30th:
    • 2019-10-24T19:07:13.532143, comprising further internal script improvements, internal logging changes and improvements to simulator state saves.
    • 2019-10-26T00:06:48.532192, comprising a previously released hotfix to fix teleports being 5%-7% less reliable and makes the simulator take a little bit longer to report as “Up” to the Lab’s internal tools to more accurately reflect when residents can actually access a region.

SL Viewer

The Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer updated to version 6.4.0.531949 on October 28th. The update brings it to parity with the release viewer, but contains not project updates.

. The rest of the viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.2.530962, formerly the Vinsanto Maintenance RC viewer, dated September 17th, promoted October 15th – 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:
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.3.531844, October 21st.
    • 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.

Script Event Order

It was asked if the script updates would affect the order in which script events are handled, Rider Linden stated:

Some events have always had priority just by virtue of the order in which they were collected. The order of collection has changed. For instance, sensor events were collected and posted before chat events and then touch events. Chat events are now posted immediately upon processing in the simulator. It should still be FIFO… just don’t bet on what event gets collected when.

In addition, it was noted in regards to event messages:

  • Generally, event handling should not to be counted on in any sort of coding since it may change again in the future.
  • Link messages:
    • If multiple link messages are sent from a single source to a single receiver script, the ordering should be preserved. Similarly, when using llLinkMessage to send a message from script A to script B in the same prim, they are posted immediately, and the order is maintained.
    • If the same message is sent to link A and then to link B, the order the links get them is not always the same. Similarly, if script A and script C are using llLinkMessage to post to B, all bets are off which gets there first.

 

 

 

2019 Content Creation User Group week #43 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Breath of Nature, September 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 24th 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.

SL Viewers

Pipeline Updates

The Copy / Paste project viewer adds buttons for copying the X, Y, Z co-ordinates for the Position, Size and Rotation of an object to the official viewer’s Build / Edit floater, offering a similar capability to that provided by TPVs

The Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.3.532031 on Wednesday, October 23rd, bringing it to parity with the current release viewer. The rest of the viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.2.530962, formerly the Vinsanto Maintenance RC viewer, dated September 17th, promoted October 15th – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.3.531844, released on Monday, October 21st.
    • 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.

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 trying to gather data on the impact of textures in rendering avatars and objects.

Project Muscadine

Project Summary

Currently: offering the means to change an Animesh size parameters via LSL.

Current Status

  • The server-side support or Muscadine is awaiting an update.
  • The viewer has been merged up to the latest release viewer (no actual updates to the Muscadine code), and is awaiting QA testing.

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

  • The anticipated viewer update has been delayed as a result of a couple of the changes made resulting in unintended outcomes whilst in testing. Plus the viewer now needs to be merged up to the current release viewer.
  • Still no back-end updates while Ptolemy and Euclid continue to get up-to-speed with the SL rendering engine and pipelines.

Other Items in Brief

  • BUG-227585 “[BOM] Display the new Universal wearables between the Skin and the Tattoos ones” is a feature request suggesting the new Universal Wearables for Bakes on Mesh be moved from sitting above the skin and tattoo layers, to being between them.
    • With a noted reservation that doing so will change behaviour so are already using, the Lab has accepted the idea as something they might consider.
    • The Jira includes additional discussion points  / ideas.
  • The meeting included a discussion (voice and text) on alpha sorting and the issues that can occur within it when using alpha blending. Some of these issues are SL specific, others are more generic in nature and found within OpenGL in general. The suggestion was made to allow a certain amount of creator-defined ordering with objects, but there were several concerns raised around this by creators and the Lab, including the potential for performance impacts.
  • The above discussion spiked into one about avatar meshes, the potential for a new “standardised” (or “Lab-driven) “mesh avatar 2.0”, that could be far more rendering efficient than all existing models, th pro (better efficiency of design and rendering) and cons (whole new system incompatible with existing heads / bodies & getting people to use it).
  • Also folded into this was a conversation on how to encourage creators to make more efficient content.
    • One suggestions is to have some form of “scoring” system taking into consideration item complexity, use of textures, etc., that determines how high up on Marketplace searches goods appear & thus are likely to be seen and purchased – the idea being that by trying to “game” the scoring system, creators produce better content.
    • This skips the case of items sold in-world (how are scores enforced on vendors?). And also has a problem of how does an automated system “score” pre-packaged items uploaded to the MP (since it would only be able to assess the packaging, not the content)?
    • Alternatively, Vir pointed out that there is a lot more that the Bake Service could do in assessing the complexity of avatars in-world, and this could be potentially more meaningful in the future as ARCTan progresses beyond the current scope of the project.
  • Overall, and given the amount of legacy content in SL, one of the core ways of encouraging better content  is seen as not only making improvements to the mesh uploader and trying to push creators into making more efficient content – but to give users the tools and reporting that help educate them about what is going on around them, what is causing potential performance issues and then allowing them to start making more informed decisions on how they set their viewer and the kind of content they purchase.
  • Date of next meeting: Thursday, November 14th, 2019.