Category: SL User Group Meetings

2019 SL User Groups 14/1: SUG; teleport disconnects

Posted on by Inara Pey

On The Other Side; Inara Pey, February 2019, on FlickrOn The Other Side – blog post

Server Deployments

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for updates and news.

  • On Tuesday, April 2nd, the SLS (Main) channel was updated to server maintenance package 19#19.03.15.525315, comprising the simulator operating system update and EEP.
  • On Wednesday, April 3rd, the three RC channels should be updated with at least one server maintenance package (details TBA at the time of writing). Updates should include:
    • The removal of UDP Asset message handling across all RC channels – see below.
    • Some changes that might help with some disconnect issues older viewers have been experiencing, and which appears to be connected to some TCP message handling between the simulator and the viewer.

Removal of UDP Asset Message Handling

The removal of UDP message handing sees the removal of server-side support for asset (inventory) messaging via UDP. All maintained viewers should be using HTTP for all asset handling – and this has been the case for a good few years for several asset types, with the last few moving to HTTP in 2017; as such these viewers will not be impacted by this deployment.

However, it does mean that anyone using very old viewers still reliant on UDP messaging for assets will not be able to receive any updates for the following: animations, body parts, clothing, gestures, landmarks, meshes and sounds whilst connected to regions on any RC channels; this includes the two legacy viewers provided by Linden Lab, the Linux Spur viewer and the Obsolete platform viewer.

In particular, and since  some specific body parts are required to render avatars, user of these older viewers will see their avatar either as a cloud or the “Ruth” avatar, and will be unable to change from it.

SL Viewer

  • The Love Me Render viewer, version 6.1.1.525446, was promoted to de facto release status on Tuesday, April 2nd.
  • The EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.2.0.525808 on Monday, April 1st.

The rest of the viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • Bakes on Mesh RC viewer, version 6.1.1.525409, March 26.
    • Estate Access Management (EAM) RC viewer, version 6.2.0.525404, March 25.
    • Teranino Maintenance RC viewer version 6.1.1.525401, March 20.
  • Project viewers:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Teleport Disconnects

Teleport disconnects continue to be a problem. Some are pointing to the EEP deployment as the cause, and also citing the use of derendering the sky (Advanced menu > Rendering Types > unchecking Sky or CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-6). This seems to work for at least some of those experiencing the issue. However, Maxidox and Rider Linden have been looking into this, with Rider commenting:

The sky thing is much the same as putting a banana in your ear to keep the alligators away.

In other words, while derendering the sky my offer a workaround for the problem, it doesn’t actually resolve the issue.

Simon Linden added:

It’s definitely possible that any difference in network traffic might make the system behaviour change – but I don’t think changing the sky settings produces that much network usage.

The failures I’ve investigated seem to be falling into a middle-limbo where the first region thinks it’s handed you off successfully, but the 2nd doesn’t get all the data it expects and eventually times out.

One suggestion is to keep examinations of physical region crossing disconnects separate to TP disconnect, on account of the former tending to be more generally unpredictable due to the added data being transferred (vehicle as well as avatar(s)) and the manner in which the hand-offs are made. A further possible conflation of figures is the ongoing Singularity disconnect issue.

At the moment, the Lab believe that have one statistic that may show the issue, but as it is only recorded once a day, they are waiting to gather further data from it before determining if it is revealing a possible issue / cause.

2019 SL User Groups 13/3: TPV Developer Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

Sol Farm; Inara Pey, February 2019, on FlickrSol Farm – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, March 29, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. Time stamps are provided to the major topics of discussion, which will open the video in a new tab for ease of reference.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to any viewers since my Simulator User Group summary. The viewer pipelines there remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.1.0.524670, formerly the BugSplat RC viewer February 13, promoted February 28 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:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

[2:22-6:55]

  • The hope is the EEP RC viewer will be eligible for promotion to de facto release status “pretty soon”.  However, as per my CCUG summary, both the EEP viewer and the new-to-RC-status Bakes on Mesh viewer  are awaiting some fixes.
  • The Estate Access Management viewer is good-to-go, but is awaiting some simulator update with a new capability, which is likely to be another couple of weeks, before it can be promoted.
  • All of this means that the next viewer liable to be promoted will be Love Me Render viewer.

EEP Limitations

[7:24-25:00] There are also a couple of user-identified issues with EEP that are being considered:

The first is that EEP doesn’t play well with RLV and RLVa capabilities that use Windlight settings. LL have offered to help see what LSL abilities within EEP might be used to overcome the issues.

The second is potentially more disruptive: the ability to locally change an environment for the purposes of photography is somewhat limited.

Currently, with Windlight, it is possible for a photographer to tweak the local environment in their own viewer (e.g. move the Sun to provide better lighting / shadows, alter the cloud and haze density / colour, etc.).

Within EPP, this ability is limited to only those settings a user has a right to alter, make such minor adjusts potentially impossible to achieve. This is related to the EEP permissions system that has been set to allow EEP assets to be sold by creators.

The only options are either a): completely replace the location environment with one attached to their avatar; or b) trying to build a personal “copy” of the location environment just to adjust the Sun position, etc., or c) trying to employ LSL to make the necessary changes, with b) and c) clearly being hard for most people to achieve.

Whirly Fizzle has raised a feature request (BUG-225921) to bring the matter to LL’s attention, and it is being examined. However, whether or not an alternative means to make such localised (/ personal) tweaks to an environment will make the initial EEP release or be held over to “EEP 2.0” has not been decided.

One suggestion put forward at the meeting allowing such minor tweaks might be to allow make changes without exposing the associated underlying values for the settings (thus avoiding people being able to copy  / rip EEP assets that they would otherwise have to buy), and to have the Save options disabled when doing so. Rider Linden indicated this is one of the approaches he was considering looking at.

Reminder: the EEP simulator code is now grid-wide. This means certain render feature – such as the stars – appear to be “broken” on non-EEP viewers (e.g. black “stars” can appear in daytime skies as square blotches, and at night white stars appear decidedly square. This is because the sky (including the stars) is rendered differently with EEP, but an attempt is made to convert things like stars back to a windlight setting for rendering by non-EEP viewers, which doesn’t entirely work.

This issue will obviously be fixed when the EEP viewer code is available in all viewers.

Simulator Update

[6:56-7:20] Simulator releases have been fairly quiet of late, with some weeks seeing no roles on either the SLS (Main) channel or one or more of the RCs. However, there are a number of simulator projects in flight which mean things are liable to be busy with simulator releasing over the coming weeks.

Teleport Issues

Teleport Disconnects

[25:37-34:01]

  • It’s been widely noted that there has been a sharp up-tick in teleport failures & viewer disconnections (with physical region crossings also causing similar issues).
  • This problem appeared to start with a server deployment, but the root cause(s) is / are proving hard to identify.
  • It took the Lab a while to realise there was a problem, as the tool they use to monitor the success / failure rate of teleports was not showing any significant issues, and Lindens in-world assumed that when they encountered the problem, it was an issue with their own connection.
  • Investigations are now in progress, but identifying a root cause is difficult, as it is proving hard to get a consistent set of circumstances by which the disconnects can be reproduced.
    • If anyone can determine a means to repro the issue, or determine the conditions under which the problem is more / less likely to happen, they are asked to put it in a Jira for the Lab.
  • Some changes have been made to the simulator code in the hope that they might either a) help alleviate the problem, or b) at least provide more data when teleport disconnects do occur, and some of these changes are likely to be deployed in week #14.

Attachment Loss on Teleport

[34:09-36:59]

  • This is another issue that has been of increasing notice for a while now (e.g. inventory being actually detached; attachments being ghosted in your local view whilst others still see them attached; experience-controlled temporary attachments becoming ghosted, etc.).
  • The Lab does not have a solution for the problem as yet. However, via testing, they have found a number of issues that contribute to worn inventory being detached as a result of the teleport (/ region crossing).
  • Fixes for these issues are being developed, and more news on these should be available once the Lab has some definitive testing results.
  • The hope is that the Lab will able to resolve most of the issues  – or at least make things behave more correctly – just through changes on the server-side, rather than the fixes being heavily biased towards the viewer.
    • Any viewer-side changes that might be required will be highlighted at future TPVD meetings do that other viewers can take and merge them as required.

Other Items

Adult Rated In-Viewer Web Searches

[40:45-43:15]

Despite certain pundits claiming otherwise, the Adult rating is not all about “extreme sex and violence” (there are numerous residential, art, photographic, and role-play regions for example, that err on the side of caution and opt for an adult rating). However, a problem that does exist is that the web search in the viewer currently opens on the Events tab, and with the Adult search parameter enabled, this can result in sexually explicit adverts being displayed, which some who might otherwise be using Adult to rating simply to find the type of location noted above to be uncomfortable.

  • Unchecking the Adult search option isn’t a solution, as disables Adult searching in other categories thus preventing the art galleries, etc., mentioned above being listed in results.
  • One way to lessen this impact might be to make the Destinations tab the default tab on opening the web search panel. While this still has Adult destinations in the banner ads, these are more mixed with ads for destinations with other ratings, and potentially less noticeable.
  • Another suggestion offered is to possibly sub-categorise Adult search results between sexual / non-sexual (although this could be hard to achieve in avoiding issues of gaming).
  • The suggestion made for this issue to also be raised at the next Web User Group meeting.

 

2019 SL User Groups 13/2: Content Creation summary

Posted on by Inara Pey

On The Other Side; Inara Pey, February 2019, on FlickrOn The Other Side – blog post

The majority of the following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on Thursday, March 28th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Bakes On Mesh

Project Summary

Extending the current avatar baking service to allow wearable textures (skins, tattoos, clothing) to be applied directly to mesh bodies as well as system avatars. This involves viewer and server-side changes, including updating the baking service to support 1024×1024 textures, but does not include normal or specular map support, as these are not part of the existing Bake Service, nor are they recognised as system wearables. Adding materials support may be considered in the future.

Resources

Current Status

  • As noted in my Simulator User Group update, the Bakes on Mesh viewer has reached release candidate status with version 6.1.1.525409.
  • Depending on feedback from QA, this could mean Bakes on Mesh is fairly close to promotion to release status.
  • However, alongside of this work, the Bakes on Mesh reference textures have had to be re-uploaded, and thus have new UUIDs.
    • This means any test content (such as the test Omega system) using these textures will have to be updated in order to work with the RC viewer.
    • The new UUIDs have – at the time of writing – yet to be updated on the Bakes on Mesh wiki pages.
    • There are also LSL constants for the new UUIDs, but LL don’t currently have a simulator update for these yet, so if you try to set LSL to try to set textures to the appropriate channels they won’t currently work as expected.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements allowing the environment (sky, sun, moon, clouds, 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 not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

Current Status

  • Work is continuing to resolve some shader issues that see “certain things shading differently”.
  • It has been noticed that EEP can also impact frame rates, and the Lab is trying to quantify these better.
  • A further RC build of the viewer is in the wings, but has some issues with it (e.g. issues with handling projected lights) which need to be addressed. However, it is hoped this will surface in week #14 (commencing Monday, April 1st, 2019).

Reminder: the EEP simulator code is now grid-wide. This means certain render feature – such as the stars – appear to be “broken” on non-EEP viewers (e.g. black “stars” can appear in daytime skies as square blotches, and at night white stars appear decidedly square. This is because the sky (including the stars) is rendered differently with EEP, but an attempt is made to convert things like stars back to a windlight setting for rendering by non-EEP viewers, which doesn’t entirely work.

This issue will obviously be fixed when the EEP viewer code is available in all viewers.

Animesh Follow-On

Vir has commenced work on LSL support for Animesh objects. Right now this involves providing a means to get the number of animated attachment slots, the number of open slots.

Other Items

Animation Optimisations

It’s been noted that .bvh animations go through an optimisation process, but .anim animations do not (a past subject of discussion in CCUG meetings). It would make sense for the optimisations to be applied to both, if they are of benefit, or ignored by both if they are not proving beneficial. It’s been suggested that the optimisations result in .bvh animations being a little less fluid than .anims.

Thus far the Lab hasn’t acted on this, as the general feeling has been that most animators favour one of the formats over the other. Those noticing specific differences in performance between the two are asked to file a Jira and attach test versions of both formats so the Lab can do side-by-side comparisons.

Custom Pivot Points

This was another point of past discussion. Initial work has been done to allow custom pivot points within the viewer, but the current blocker is that it requires simulator support, specifically with the physics shapes that have to be generated. With everything else going on at the moment, there is no time frame as to if / when this work might be carried out.

Date of Next Meeting

Thursday, April 11th, 2019.

2019 SL User Groups 13/1: Simulator User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey

Originalia; Inara Pey, February 2019, on FlickrOriginalia – blog post

Server Deployments

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for updates and news.

  • There was no deployment to the SLS (Main) channel on Tuesday, March 26th, leaving it on server maintenance package 19#19.03.07.525089. Previously deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre, this update contains:
    • Internal fixes.
    • The Environment Enhancement Project code.
  • On Wednesday, March 27th, the BlueSteel and LeTigre RC channels should be updated with server maintenance package 19#19.03.22.525531, comprising:
    • Internal Fixes
    • Removal of UDP Asset message handling – see below
  • There is no planned deployment to the Magnum RC channel, which should remain on server maintenance package 19#19.03.15.525315, comprising:
  • The new operating system update.
  • The Environment Enhancement Project code and all bug fixes for it.

Removal of UDP Asset Message Handling

The BlueSteel and LeTigre RC deployment sees the removal of server-side support for asset (inventory) messaging via UDP. All maintained viewers should be using HTTP for all asset handling – and this has been the case for a good few years for several asset types, with the last few moving to HTTP in 2017; as such these viewers will not be impacted by this deployment.

However, it does mean that anyone using very old viewers still reliant on UDP messaging for assets will not be able to receive any updates on regions on either BlueSteel or LeTigre – this includes the two legacy viewers provided by Linden Lab, the Linux Spur viewer and the Obsolete platform viewer, neither of which contain all of the HTTP asset fetching code.

If you hear someone on a BlueSteel or LeTigre region complaining they are constantly a cloud on those region, suggest to them they check their viewer, and perhaps move to a more recent version.

SL Viewer

  • Bakes on Mesh reached RC status with the release of version 6.1.1.525409 on Tuesday, March 26th.
    • For those not familiar with this project, Bakes on Mesh is a new feature to allow system avatar baked textures to be shown on mesh attachments. Currently you need this viewer to use it.
  • The Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.1.1.525446 on Tuesday, March 26th.
  • The Estate Access Management RC viewer updated to version 6.2.0.525404 on Monday, March 25th.

The rest of the viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.1.0.524670, formerly the BugSplat RC viewer February 13, promoted February 28 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:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

 

2019 SL User Groups 12/2: Content Creation summary

Posted on by Inara Pey

Elvion; Inara Pey, February 2019, on FlickrElvion – blog post

The majority of the following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on Thursday, March 21st, 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

SL Viewer

  • The long-expected Maintenance RC viewer, code-named Teranino, was released on Wednesday, March 20th. Version 6.1.1.525401, comprising 50+ fixes.
  • The EEP RC viewer updates to version 6.2.0.525395 on Thursday, March 21st. It is felt EEP may have “one or two” further RC updates before it is ready to go to release status.

The rest of the official viewer pipelines remain as:

  • Current Release version 6.1.0.524670, formerly the BugSplat RC viewer February 13th, promoted February 28th 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):
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.1.1.524929, March 6th.
    • Estate Access Management (EAM) RC viewer, version 6.2.0.524909, March 5th.
  • Project viewers:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17th, 2017 and promoted to release status 29th November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Environment Enhancement Project – on the Grid

On Tuesday, March 19th and Wednesday March 20th, EEP back-end support was deployed to the SLS (Main channel) and to the Magnum and Cake RC channels, meaning it is now gird-wide.

As EEP handles environment rendering differently to windlight, that can be that at time, viewers without the may rendered skies oddly (e.g. black dots (stars) appearing in daytime skies, the sun may look bigger than it actually should be, and similar). Should this be the case, toggle the Use Region windlight option in your viewer off / on.

Note that if you are using a personally applied windlight or a custom parcel windlight through a viewer like Firestorm, generally speaking, you should see no issues.

Bakes on Mesh

Again, no update, other than a back-end Bake Service update is due (presumably to fix the “black skirt issue”. Once this is deployed, it should allow a resumption in progress with the viewer, which could likely be promoted to RC status.

ARCTan

The ARCTan project to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs in the viewer is still stalled. One concern is that more needs to be done to encourage a greater number of creators to create low impact worn mesh; high impact worn mesh can do much to impact viewer performance, but is currently seen as having little around it to discourage better design. While there are options like the “jelly doll” capability, these are seen as limited in encouraging better content design as the onus is pushed onto other users to determine what they can or cannot see.

ARCTan itself is a difficult set of measures to calculate, as user hardware plays a role in performance (obviously), such as the split between CPU-based and GPU-based computations. As a result, frame times can vary widely. Ergo, more objective measures are required (e.g. triangle counts + surface area for textures, etc.).

Other Items

  • Mesh attachment loading: this is taking appreciable longer, and is particularly noticeable in busy regions, where avatars with a lot of mesh can take what feels like an age to “pull themselves together” (so to speak), although no cause has yet been identified. Vir Linden has been leading work to look into this.
  • Animesh follow-on: the focus is still on allowing body parts in the inventory of an Animesh to be used to customise the skeleton of the Animesh.
  • Creator requests: Vir asked a general question on things creators may be seeing a blockers to developing new content and what they would like to see to overcome these blockers. The feedback included:
    • More script functions.
    • Replacing appliers with an inventory based solution and a Bakes on Mesh follow-on.
    • Extending the existing constraints in the animation format to be a full Inverse Kinematics system.

2019 SL User Groups 12/1: Simulator User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey

The Missing Whale; Inara Pey, February 2019, on FlickrThe Missing Whale – blog post

Server Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest news.

  • On Tuesday, March 19th, the SLS (Main) channel was updated with server maintenance package 19#19.03.07.525089. Previously deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre, this update contains:
    • Internal fixes.
    • The Environment Enhancement Project code and all bug fixes for it.
  • On Wednesday, March 20th, the server RC channels should be updated as follows:
    • BlueSteel and LeTigre will remain on server maintenance package 19#19.03.07.525089.
    • Magnum will update to server maintenance package 19#19.03.15.525315, containing:
      • The new operating system update.
      • The Environment Enhancement Project code and all bug fixes for it.

These deployments will mean that server-side support for EEP will be grid-wide. However, the viewer is still at RC status and awaiting some final updates (including the Chrome / Chromium / CEF) fix noted below). The version with the fixes is due to go to the Lab’s internal QA later on March 19th.

SL Viewer

There have been no official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the current pipelines as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.1.0.524670, formerly the BugSplat RC viewer February 13, promoted February 28. No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Chrome and Chromium Exploit

As noted in my TPV Developer meeting summary, an exploit within Chrome / Chromium which affects all versions except the very latest, 72.0.3626.121. This is being addressed by Linden Lab, but it will take time for the patch to filter out to all viewers – both the Lab’s own and TPVs (note that neither the Linux Spur viewer and the obsolete OS viewer will not be updated with a patch to fix this issue).

In the meantime, the current internal SL web browser is potentially vulnerable; do not use it to browse non-LL websites on it, and avoid using media on a prim from untrusted sources.

Inventory Maintenance

There will be a period of scheduled inventory maintenance between 05:00 and 07:00 SLT on Wednesday, March 20th, 2019:

During this time, residents may have issues with any inventory related activities including building, logging in, as well as avatar and object rezzing. Please refrain from rezzing in-world, in addition to transacting in-world, on the Marketplace, or on the Lindex during this time.

– SL Grid Maintenance notice