There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, February 13th, leaving it running on simulator version 18#18.01.17.511913. However, in keeping with the Lab’s policy of running channel restarts every 2 weeks, regardless of whether there was a deployment or not, the channel was restarted.
There will be no deployment to the RC channels on Wednesday, February 14th, and no restarts. All three will also remain on simulator version 18#18.01.17.511913.
SL Viewer
The Project Render project viewer was updated to version 5.1.1.512446 on Friday, February 9th, 2018. Otherwise, there have thus far been no changes to the SL viewer pipelines, leaving the current list as follows:
Current Release version 5.1.1.512121, dated January 26, promoted February 7 – formerly the Voice Maintenance RC – NEW.
Release channel cohorts:
Nalewka Maintenance viewer version 5.1.1.512226, January 31, 2018.
Media Update RC viewer version 5.1.1.512264,released January 30, 2018.
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.
Other Items
Region Restarts Causing Disconnects?
When a region is being shut-down / restarted, a 5-minute warning is given to encourage people to leave (or they’d be disconnected on shut-down). If everyone leaves ahead of the actual shut-down time, the region will wait for about 15 seconds and then go ahead and restart. However, there has been an issue some have experienced whereby if they are the last to leave a region that is shutting-down, they can teleport away, arrive at another location – but as soon as the original region is shut-down for restart, they are logged off (see BUG-5034). Linden Lab had thought this issue to have been resolved, so a new JIRA has been requested to allow for further investigations.
Region Crossings
Joe Magarac (animats) has been doing his best to investigate some region crossing issues, documenting his work via a forum thread. He’s now produced a basic document on his findings. Most of his work is around “patching” things – using a viewer-based RLV (or a permissioned base) approach to forcing an avatar resit on a vehicle post-crossing, if unseated, for example. The Lab’s view is that they would rather work more comprehensively as improving vehicle-related crossings than trying to patch things. The problem here is that region crossings are something of a 3-corner protocol issue (the viewer, the region an avatar / vehicle is departing, and the region the avatar / vehicle is entering), making improvements more difficult to achieve, as it is likely code on all three will at some point need to be revised.
This week is the week of the Second Life team’s meeting to discuss future plans. So there is very little news to impart.
There are no planned deployments or restarts for week #6.
All scheduled user group meetings are cancelled for the week.
The next Open-Source Developer meeting will be on Wednesday, February 14th, 2018 at
The next Content Creation User Group meeting will be on Thursday, February 15th, 2018, as 13:00 SLT.
The next Server Beta meeting (Aditi) will be on Thursday, February 15th, 2018 at 15:00 SLT.
The next TPV Developer meeting was set for Friday, February 16th, 2018 at 12:00 noon (same date as the next Web User Group meeting, so one or the other may move).
Further, there have thus far been not SL viewer updates, leaving the current official viewer pipelines as:
Release viewer version 5.1.0.511732, dated January 9th, formerly the Alex Ivy Maintenance RC – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Nalewka Maintenance viewer version 5.1.1.512226, January 31, 2018.
Media Update RC viewer version 5.1.1.512264, released January 30, 2018.
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. This viewer will remain available for as long as reasonable, but will not be updated with new features or bug fixes.
On Tuesday, January 30th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with server maintenance package #18.01.17.511913, which comprises internal fixes.
There are no scheduled deployments for either the Magnum or LeTigre RC channels planned for Wednesday, January 31st, 2018. A deployment to the BlueSteel RC has been indicated, but no deals were available at the time of writing.
SL Viewer
A new Media Update RC viewer was released on Tuesday, January 30th, 2018. Viewer 5.1.1.512264 includes updates to the built-in media support that were not quite ready to be integrated when the 64 bit Viewer (Alex Ivy) was released. These include various fixes, updates, security patches and improvements for CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) that is the basis for the built-in web browser and VLC that provides support for video media playback. Fixes are included to Dullahan (the third-party library that uses CEF) as well as all the media plug-in code itself. As per the Alex Ivy 64 bit viewer, there is no Linux version.
Otherwise, the SL viewer pipeline remains as:
Current release viewer: version 5.1.0.511732, dated January 9th, promoted January 16th. Formerly the Alex Ivy Maintenance RC – no change.
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. This viewer will remain available for as long as reasonable, but will not be updated with new features or bug fixes.
Other Items
Joe Magarac (animats) continues to look into region crossings with vehicles. As noted in my previous update, he’s learning-by-doing, and testing ideas with a self-compiled version of Firestorm (see this forum thread for more). He currently believes he has workarounds for vehicle animations topping on a crossing and bad camera positions after a crossing. His workarounds are a scripted camera re-set of the camera and animation re-start. Not ideal, and as he noted at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, 30th January, 2018 – the preferable solution would be a server-side fix.
Part of the problem is that vehicle region crossings are extremely complex, as Simon Linden notes:
The avatar and object are disconnected, passed to the new region, then re-assembled. It’s supposed to be transparent, of course, but things get weird when any part gets slow or fails
One of the things that can go wrong is what is being referred to as a “half unsit” situation, where the vehicle crosses to the next region but the avatar is stuck in the old one and unable unsit, move or teleport, leaving only a relog as a means to recover. The problem is recognising where things break: is it a server-side problem, something in the viewer or the result of a race condition? In theory the hand-off of a vehicle and its passengers should commence until the root prim of the vehicle actually crosses the boundary. This is to prevent avatars sitting on the vehicle in advance of the root prim being handed-off and the vehicle then turning back, possibly leaving the avatars stranded in the neighbouring region.
Simon’s thinking is that the receiving region is doing a more than it should while it waits for everything to come together, potentially attempting to move an avatar and / or run scripts before everything is available to put back together correctly. He also acknowledges that specific issues can be difficult to reproduce and so solve.
The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January 26th 2018. The video of that meeting is embedded at the end of this update, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. Time stamps in the text below will open the video in a new tab at the relevant point of discussion.
Viewer Pipeline
[0:00-1:25] The Voice RC viewer updated to version 5.1.1.512121 on January 26th, bringing it to parity with the Alex Ivy release viewer. The reaming viewers in LL’s pipelines remain as:
Current Release version 5.1.0.511732, dated January 9th, promoted January 17th. Formerly the Alex Ivy Maintenance RC – NEW.
Release channel cohorts:
Nalewka Maintenance viewer version 5.1.1.511871, January 17th.
Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17th, 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 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.
Forthcoming Updates
The Voice RC is the next in line for promotion to release status, and this could happen in week #5 (commencing Monday, January 29th, 2018).
The Animesh and Project Render project viewers both have new updates in QA.
There is a new project viewer for media handling (with updates to the latest version of the Chrome Embedded Framework) also due to be made available.
The ability to define the environment (sky, sun, moon, clouds, water settings) at the parcel level.
New environment asset types (Sky, Water, Days – the latter comprising multiple Sky and Water) that can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others.
Scripted, experience-based environment functions, an extended day cycle and extended environmental parameters. This work involves both a viewer updates (with a project viewer coming soon) and server-side updates.
Current Status
[12:25-15:43] Rider Linden now has a test simulator on Aditi where he is able to successfully apply windlights at the parcel level. The work will now allow windlight settings to be applied by height above ground, but this will likely be fixed ranges defined on the simulator rather than allowing completely arbitrary heights for different windlight settings, as can be done viewer-side with some TPVs at present.
General Discussions
Level of Detail / RenderVolumeLODFactor
[4:17-5:21] The latest Firestorm release, 5.0.11.53634, has altered the behaviour of the debug RenderVolumeLODFactor so that changes with set it to any value higher than 4.00 will not persist across log-ins (see my Firestorm release overview here for more). The Lab is now considering implementing a similar change within the official viewer.
Land Impact / Avatar Complexity Calculations
[5:33-5:52] I’ve referred to this project a number of times, which is intended to gather more representative data on the actual cost of rendering object in-world and the cost of rendering avatars and their attachments, with a view to revisiting the formulas used in calculating them, to see if anything can be done to make the calculations more representative of the “real” rendering costs (allowing for issues such as the potential to break content). It is currently hoped that the Lab will have enough data on this in the next for weeks to start carrying these investigations forward.
[27:13-28:12] One of the reasons often cited for creating one very detailed level of detail (LOD) model and a very low LOD model, rather than a number of LOD models (high, medium, low and lowest), is that the latter can penalise the finished model’s overall Land Impact (LI). This is something the Lab is going to be looking at in order to try to remove / reduce disincentives to making optimised content for SL as a part of this work.
[28:35-30:25] These updates are likely to affect the LI of existing and rezzed content. However, they will not be made in Q1 of 2018. Instead, the Lab plan to carry out simulator-side testing to ensure whatever changes that are decided upon cause as little disruption as possible, and will offer a strategy to help people transition to the new system to try to avoid any unnecessary item returns, show the revised formula run the risk of some content being returned when implemented (this might even comprise an increase in land capacity, if the difference between the “old” and “new” LI calculations aren’t too big). Improved tools for understanding LI are also planned as part of this work.
[31:08-31:47] To help people understand LI, content building, etc., Oz Linden has been trying to get more of the Lab’s own documentation on design and building to where it can be seen in public. This also extends to making more of the Lab’s own scripts being made available for public viewing.
Camera Presets Project
[7:09-8:00] Jonathan Yap is moving ahead with his camera presets project (see here and STORM-2145). This will most likely include Penny Patton’s recommendations for improved camera placement as one of the default sets of camera presets.
AIS Project
[8:51-10:28] The Lab is initiating a further Advanced Inventory System (AIS) project. this project will initially be focused on bug fixes, then will include looking for opportunities to deprecate old UDP-based inventory operations in favour of AIS – this work will likely take several months to complete, once started. Once any patches related to this have been made available to TPVs (with time given for them to be implemented), inventory UDP messaging will be turned off at the simulator end.
Texture Rendering and Caching
[16:05-17:15] Kitty Barnett has been looking at texture fetching/decoding and has noted some issues around discard levels in the viewer. Oz Linden would like to learn more on this.
In the meantime, the Lab’s own attempt to re-work how texturing caching works in the viewer hasn’t produced the results LL had hoped (e.g. improving the amount of textures which can be loaded per second). However, tests will continue in the hope that improvements can be gained. If the work is successful, then the Lab will look towards improving object caching as well.
Inventory Folders and Load Times
[18:52-20:50] Inventory and folders: the recent change (current SL maintenance RC viewer and Firestorm 5.0.11) to include folders in the total inventory count has raised concerns about increasing inventory load times.
The Lab’s rule-of-thumb remains one of balance:
Individual folders with tens of thousands of item in them (object, links, sub-folders) – including trash – can cause the inventory load process to freeze, due to the way folders are individually loaded at log-in. Therefore, these are best avoided.
Conversely, having an individual folder for every single item – or just very small number of items can cause lots of little fetches that don’t achieve very much.
Therefore, somewhere between these two extremes is preferable.
Other Items
A resource has been made available to update the wiki documentation on the new viewer log-in screen widget.
There is liable to be something of a focus on the render pipe (there’s already the rendering project viewer in the pipeline), as a resource with SL rendering expertise has returned to the fold from Sansar.
Next TPVD Meeting
[1:35-2:05] The next Third-Party Developer meeting is set for Friday, February 16th, 2018 (although in theory this should be a date for the Web User Group meeting, which usually alternates with the TPVD meeting).
There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, January 22nd, leaving it on server maintenance package #18.01.08.511751 with internal logging improvements.
On Wednesday, January 23rd, the RC channels should be updated to server maintenance package #18.01.17.511913, with further internal fixes.
SL Viewer
The Voice RC viewer updated on Wednesday, January 23rd to version 5.1.1.511952 on Tuesday, January 23rd. This brings the viewer to parity with the Alex Ivy viewer (the current release viewer), and so is offered in 64-bit for OS X and both 32-bit and 64-bit for Windows. Depending on how this version performs over the next week or so, it may be the next in line for promotion to release status.
The remaining viewers in the current pipeline remain unchanged from the end of week #3:
Current Release version 5.1.0.511732, dated January 9th, formerly the Alex Ivy Maintenance RC – NEW.
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. This viewer will remain available for as long as reasonable, but will not be updated with new features or bug fixes.
Other Items
Joe Magarac (animats) has been working to try to improve some of the viewer-side code which handles regions crossings – specifically in reference to vehicle crossings. He’s learning-by-doing, and testing ideas with a self-compiled version of Firestorm, although his work might be present in a future Firestorm release. He’s been recording his efforts in a forum thread (gaining some helpful and some less-than-helpful feedback), and providing updates at the last couple of Simulator User Group meeting. Anyone wishing to help or who can offer advice / ideas can reach Joe via the forum thread.
Grumpity and Alexa Linden host the Web User Group meetings on alternate Fridays at Alexa’s barn.
The following notes are taken from the Web User Group meeting held on Friday, December 19th, 2017. These meetings are generally held on alternate Fridays, and chaired by Alexa and Grumpity Linden at Alexa’s barn. The focus is the Lab’s web properties, which include the Second Life website (including the blogs, Destination Guide, Maps, Search, the Knowledge base, etc.), Place Pages, Landing Pages (and join flow for sign-ups), the Marketplace, and so on and the Lab’s own website at lindenlab.com.
Not all of these topics will be discussed at every meeting, however, the intention within the group is to gain feedback on the web properties, pain points, etc., and as such is very much led by comments and input from those attending. Along with this are two points of note:
Specific bugs within any web property – be it Marketplace, forums, Place Pages or anything else), or any specific feature request for a web property should be made via the Second Life JIRA.
Alex Linden provides routine updates on the Lab’s SL-facing web properties as and when appropriate, which can be found in the Second Life Web thread.
Note that the SL forums are not covered by the Web User Group, as the management of functionality of the forums falls under the remit of the Support Team.
Lindens in the Web Team
A number of Lindens attend the Web User Group meetings in addition to Grumpity and Alexa (who are part of the Second Life Product team). While they may not be present at every meeting, Lindens staff directly involved in supporting the SL web services include:
Spidey Linden: QA Lead for SL Web and Marketplace.
Shrike Linden: a QA tester on the Second Life web team.
Nazz Linden: a web developer who has thus far primarily worked on secondlife.com and the Place Pages.
Natty Linden: a web developer with a focus on the Marketplace.
Sherbert Linden: a web developer working on various SL web properties.
Support Portal Migration
Some people have reported that their support ticket histories are no longer intact. This may be a result of the ongoing migration of data from the old support system to the new system (see here and here for more). If there are specific tickets raised prior to the start of 2017 people need to view, a new support ticket, including details of the ticket which needs to be viewed, should be raised, and the support team should be able to access the old ticket and provide any information on it.
360-Snapshot Viewer
Currently a project viewer (version 5.1.0.506743 at the time of writing), this is still in the process of being updated to offer higher resolution 360-degree images taken in Second Life, and for the uploading of 360 images to Place Pages (as well as the other viewer snapshot upload options).
Feature Requests
Feature requests are suggestions forwarded to the Lab on ideas and improvements which might be added / made to Second Life. They are raised via the Second Life JIRA:
Once logged-in to your Dashboard, click ob Create Issue (top right of the window).
A pop-up Create Issue form is displayed.
Click on the right of the Issue Type box on the form to display a drop-down, and select New Feature Request.
When filing a feature request, give as much information as clearly and concisely as possible: what the feature request is, what it is for, why it should be considered beneficial, what it might help improve, how it might work, etc., – as these things apply.
If you are requesting a UI change to the viewer, and can include images of proposed changes or new floaters / panels the feature would require, be sure to attach them.
Filing a Feature Request via JIRA – click for full size, if required
In 2017, 383 feature requests were filed via JIRA. Of these, 167 (roughly 43%) were accepted by Linden Lab for transfer into their internal JIRA system. It’s not clear how many of the accepted items were eventually actioned, but the figures nevertheless show that feature requests are triaged and some are taken for current or future consideration and possible implementation at a later date.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 