Category: SL User Group Meetings

2019 TPVD meetings week #50 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Nostalgia Falls, October 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on December 13th, 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.

SL Viewer News

Note: the comments below also include updates given at the Content Creation User Group meeting of December 12th.

[4:29-6:52]

  • Copy / Paste viewer project vewer updated to version 6.3.5.533365 on December 9th.
  • The Wassail RC viewer, version 6.3.5.533275, was promoted to de-facto release status on Thursday, December 12th. This was likely the last viewer promotion to release status for 2019.

The rest of the current viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.532771, dated  November 20th.
  • Project viewers:
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9th.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, dated September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.530473, dated September 11th.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16th.

General Viewer Notes

  • It is thought the Legacy Profiles viewer could be next in line for promotion to defacto release status. However, this viewer is still awaiting the release of an update that integrates the profile feed into the viewer.
  • There are reportedly multiple issues with the Copy / Paste project viewer, some of which are UI related – no specific bug report reference to relay here at present, though.
  • In addition, and awaiting surfacing / further work internally, are further Maintenance viewers and improvements to the mesh uploader.

Mercurial to Github Migration

[0:05-2:51]

Bitbucket, used to manage viewer repositories) will be sunsetting support for Mercurial in early 2020. Because of this, Linden Lab has now started migrating their viewer repositories from Mercurial to Git on Bitbucket.

  • This means the pace of viewer updates might slow down while this work is in progress.
  • A document outlining the steps in migration has been provided specifically for TPVs to allow them to keep in sync with how LL main the viewer code and its branches. See: Viewer Repository Migration (Google Docs).
    • This is not the only way for TPVs to manage their own repositories, but it is the one that LL recommend for those wishing to reflect how LL manages things.
  • [36:48-41:15] Thus far, the Lab have not run into problems in making the migration. It was also pointed out that:
    • There are a number of cheat sheets out on the web for TPVs and self-compilers to make / understand the switch from Mercurial to Git.
    • There will be fewer repositories used by LL for the viewer, as Git provides better support for branching and better matches the LL build process.

Viewer Updates for 2020

[24:27-27:05]

  • Two viewer updates that will be surfacing in 2020 are Name Changes and Premium Plus.
    • With regards to Name Changes, TPVs many what to consider migrating people’s settings and chat histories when they change their names, as all of this information is stored in a local folder  / directory based on the avatar name.
    • This could take the form of switching to using the avatar key UUID, although this isn’t necessarily user-friendly when looking at log files, etc.

Deprecating Windows 7 Support

[27:54-31:54]

  • Windows 7 officially reaches its end of life on January 14th, 2020. After this date, patches and security updates, etc., will no longer be provided, and the company is unlikely to provide any support.
  • As a result of this, it is very Linden Lab will cease officially supporting Windows 7 after that date. While users will still be able to log-in to Second Life on PCs running Windows 7:
    • They will not receive assistance from LL support should they encounter problems.
    • Viewer updates from the Lab will no longer be tested against Windows 7 prior to release.
    • Bugs reported against Windows 7 that cannot be reproduced using Windows 8 or Windows 10 will not be investigated.
    • Around 12% of SL users are running Windows 7, and this applies to them.
  • Obviously, given Microsoft is ending Windows 7, the recommendation is for users to upgrade to Windows 10.

Linden Lab No Change Window

[2:52-4:00]

The 2019 end-of year No Change window is from Friday, December 20th 2019 through Thursday, January 2nd 2020. During this time there will be no simulator or official viewer updates, and TPVs are asked also not to make releases during this period in case they accidentally cause support or operational issues for LL.

In Brief

  • [7:15-9:02] The updates to the viewer build process (to support Visual Studio 2017 and Xcode 10.3) are in a bug hunting mode at the moment, and so will see light of day in early 2020.
    • It is possible that work on updating to VS 2019 might commence later in 2020.
  • [9:07-11:23] One of the projects awaiting the deployment of the new build process is updates to the Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) responsible for handling media in the viewer. It is hoped that when these updates can be provided within the viewer they will help with media support playback and eliminate at least some problems.
    • These updates should help with MP4 playback as more codecs are being added – although again, MP4 is a container with flavours rather than a specific format, so all flavours may not play back equally.
  • [12:08-19:00] Discussion on Bugsplat, the crash reporting tool. This is probably outside the interest of most users, so is not listed below – please refer to the video.
  • [22:40-24:00] Discussion on a Firestorm OpenSim release. Again, this probably not relevant to the majority of readers of the blog (and I’ll be covering it separately as and when it appears anyway), so again – please refer to the video.
  • [32:04-32:40] BUG-227179 – All off-line inventory offers from scripted objects are STILL lost: this bug is still awaiting work.

 

2019 Content Creation User Group week #50 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Shadowlands Retreat, October 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, December 12th 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

  • Bug fixing continues – the estimate is around 18 or so bugs the Lab would like to resolve prior to any potential release.

Project Muscadine

Project Summary

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

Current Status

  • Still on hold due to the focus on ARCTan.
  • There are still requests to allow attachments on Animesh items.
    • This is something Vir hopes to look at in detail later in Muscadine.
    • It may require attachments to be handled differently to how they are managed with avatars.

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 getting things to a state where he can do so practical testing over the holiday period to ensure the relevant data is being collected. This is dependent on whether he has the time to confirm the internal version of the viewer is logging everything it needs to be logging.
  • The work is still very much focused on the data collection aspect, rather than doing anything with the data that is gathered.
  • It is not currently clear whether the ARCTan work will appear in a dedicated project viewer or will form a part of a Maintenance viewer update.

Texture Caching and Loading

  • LL is working on a viewer intended to improve texture loading and texture caching (the latter as part of a general overall of how the viewer caches data).
  • This will hopefully include a rethinking of the order in which textures are loaded (e.g. objects  / faces that all use the same texture may all have that texture loaded together/in sequence, rather than the texture having to be re-loaded each time it is encountered).
  • The improvements should see textures load faster in general. In particular, there is a re-examination of some of the “optimisation” work previously done with textures, as this might actually now be slowing things down, so the hope is the new viewer will streamline how textures are handled and loaded in general, so bringing about improvements.
    • An example of this is switching the viewer from downloading a texture (or grabbing it from cache) and rendering it incrementally to just letting it grab the entire texture, particularly now that most broadband connections will allow this without it becoming a significant bottleneck.
    • This will allow a significant reduction in the amount of checking and re-checking the viewer has to carry out when obtaining and loading textures, which can have an impact.
  • Hopefully, the viewer will also improve the texture load order (e.g. those textures nearest to you or filling your immediate field of view, such as a vendor board on a wall, will be loaded and rendered first, rather than waiting for other textures loading first).
  • There is currently no date on when this viewer might surface for public use.

2019 Simulator User Group week #50 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Boho Refuge, October 2019 – blog post

No major news again this week.

Simulator Deployments

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

  • On Tuesday, December 10th, the SLS Main channel was updated to simulator version 2019-12-04T20:29:26.533447, originally deployed on Thursday, December 5th, and comprising:
    • A build of release 2019-11-15T21:13:13.532828 using new build technology.
    • Addresses some cases of scripts erroneously stopping.
    • Fixes a crash.
  • On Wednesday, December 11th, there should be an RC deployment to the BlueSteel RC. Simulator version 2019-12-06T21:03:45.533558 comprises internal fixes.

Deployment Notes

  • The Tuesday deployment started a little later than usual.
  • Further, as some of the processes managing deployments are being modified to increase stability, some deployments may run longer than usual. Once this work has finished, it is hoped deployments will be faster and more stable.

SL Viewer

At the end of week #49, the following viewers were updated:

  • On December 4th, the Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.5.533275.
  • On December 5th, the Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.5.533347.

On Monday, December 9th the Copy / Paste project viewer updated to version 6.3.5.533365. The rest of the official viewer pipelines are as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.4.532299, formerly the Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, dated November 4th, – No change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd.
    • 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.

 

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.