The RC server maintenance package deployment planned for Wednesday, May 11th was postponed as a result of the 3-day Aditi outage delaying testing. The update, which comprises minor internal improvements which present no visible functional changes to Second Life, will now most likely go ahead until week #20 (week commencing Monday, May 16th.
Viewer Updates
The Quick Graphics RC viewer updated to version 4.0.5.315117 on Wednesday, May 11th, brining it to code parity with the current release viewer. Providing no major issues are uncovered, this might be the last RC update for this viewer prior to its promotion as the de facto release viewer.
Project Bento
As noted above, the Project Bento meeting was severely disrupted by continuing Aditi issues, which left people unable to reach the meeting either via direct log-in or via teleport. As Vir Linden was also unavailable (due to an unrelated matter), Troy Linden steered the meeting, fighting against a slowly deteriorating region condition.
A pile-on test had been planned for immediately after the meeting with the intention of stress testing a region with a large number of animated Bento avatars all with active animations. The test was to have been an internal Lab test, but members of the Bento user group were invited to join-in as well if they wished. Unfortunately, the continuing poor Aditi performance force the test to be postponed.
Agni Test Release Deployment
Allowing for things like stress testing and unforeseen issues, the plan is for a test release of Bento on Agni (the Main grid) to be made during week #21 (week commencing Monday, May 23rd).
The release will be the current server-side support for Bento, plus the project viewer. It has not as yet been decided to make the deployment grid-wide, or restrict it to an RC channel / dedicated channel.
The deployment is to gain a broader audience testing Bento assets and content and using the viewer. This does mean that if you wish to see or try Bento content, you will have to be using either the Bento project viewer, or a TPV which has the Bento updates.
Continuing voice issues rendered recording the meeting impractical, so hopefully normal reporting will resume next week.
There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, May 10th.
At the time of writing, the planned deployment of a new server maintenance package to the RC channels planned for Wednesday, May 11th, was under question as a result of an outage of Aditi, the Beta grid, throwing out the testing schedule for the updates. Should it go ahead, this deployment is described as “Minor internal improvements. No visible functional changes to Second Life.”
SL Viewer
The Quick Graphics viewer is still awaiting update, which should occur once it has been merged with the current release viewer (formerly the Maintenance RC viewer). This leaves the SL viewer list unchanged from the end of last week:
Current Release version: 4.0.4.314579 (dated April 28), promoted May 5th – formerly the Maintenance RC viewer
RC viewers:
Quick Graphics RC viewer, version 4.0.4.314426, dated April 26th
Project Veiwers:
Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions) viewer, version 5.0.0.314884 dated May 5th – this build contains several updates related to joint offsets and meshes and slider changes
The following notes are primarily taken from the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, May 6th, 2016. A video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this report, my thanks as always to North for supplying it, and time stamps in the text relate to this recording.
Week #18 Server Deployments – Recap
On Tuesday, May 3rd, the Main (SLS) channel received the same server maintenance package originally deployed to the three RC channels in week #17, comprising a crash fix and minor internal improvements. There was no RC deployment during the week.
Week #19 Attachment Inventory Limits
There will be a new RC deployment in week #19 (commencing Monday, May 9th). This will include new limits, I believe, on the total number of assets which can be contained on worn attachments. The exact limits aren’t clear to me. However, in-world objects cannot be rezzed if they contain more that 10K inventory individually, or 30K in the case of linksets, so I suspect similar limits will apply to attachments, and any attempt to attach objects that exceed these limits will fail. More on this next week.
SL Viewer Updates
Release Viewer
[03:40] The Maintenance RC viewer, version 4.0.4.314579, released on April 28th, was promoted to the de facto release viewer on Thursday, May 5th.
Quick Graphics Viewer
[03:50] The Quick Graphics RC viewer (currently version 4.0.4.314426, dated April 26th) is now “perilously close” to being promoted to release status, and apparently only needs to be merged with and tested against the new release viewer code.
[04:55] The next update to this viewer will refer to rainbow avatars as “Jelly Dolls”, in keeping with the new popular term for solid-colour avatars, which has been “adopted with enthusiasm” by the Lab.
[05:20] There is also a new control added to the viewer screen for making quick adjustments to the Max Avatar Complexity setting.
Project Bento
The Project Bento viewer updated to version 5.0.0.314884, also on Thursday, May 5th.
This build contains several updates related to joint offsets and meshes:
Joint offsets will be ignored if they define a position identical to the default position for that bone. We use a 0.1 mm tolerance to determine whether a position has changed, so to force the offset to be applied you can make an invisibly small tweak to the bone in your modeling tool.
Along with this, we provide some log message feedback during upload to show which joints will have active offsets.
Meshes can now have multiple skeleton roots – for example, you could have a model rigged to both hands without including any bone that both hands are descendants of.
Joint offsets are now enforced during shape editing.
Slider changes:
We include a fix for a long-standing bug with female torso muscles
The male “package” slider can now be supported in mesh models by weighting to mGroin. (note that the currently available test models do not have this weighting yet).
[04:15] The Lab believes the project is now stable enough to be “close to” moving to the Main grid.
Oculus Rift Viewer
[04:26] The Lab is continuing to work on the Oculus Rift viewer. The next release, which will remain at project status, is expected “real soon now”, but will support the latest Oculus VR SDK, etc.
64-bit Viewer Project
[07:13] The 64-bit viewer project has been temporarily suspended recently while the developers working on it were assigned to other tasks, including the ongoing QuickTime remediation project.
Upcoming Viewers
In September 2015, I wrote about the Lab’s plans for further improvements to inventory management and handling within the viewer. Part of this work involves the removal of older UDP paths / mechanisms for inventory handling are properly deprecated / removed and replaced by newer and more robust mechanisms, and that all older mechanisms which have already been replaced are properly removed.
[05:45] This work had been on hold pending the recent HTTP work. It is now expected that an RC viewer containing these updates will be appearing shortly. Once these updates have reached release status and been fully validate through their active use, the associated UDP support for the deprecated paths and mechanisms will be removed server-side.
Aditi and Agni Inventory Caches
As I’ve previously reported, the new Aditi inventory syncing process created local inventory caching issues (see also BUG-11651). A fix for this was proposed by the Lab, which would allow the viewer to create separate inventory caches for Agni and Aditi, with the correct cache being automatically selected depending on which grid a user logs-in to (see here for more).
This update was incorporated into the Maintenance RC, and so is now a part of the de facto release viewer, and so should also be appearing in TPVs as they adopt the 4.0.4 code base from the Lab.
The current release viewer, version 4.0.4.314579 including the new Aditi / Agni local inventory caching capability to prevent local inventory caches being incorrectly merged when logging between the main and beta grids
Other Items
Double Posts in Chat
There have been reports of users experiencing double posts of their own text chat (local or IM) appearing in their viewer (although other people only see their comment displayed once. The Lab has requested that the problem be tested using the their own viewer, and a JIRA raised stating the precise circumstances when the issues occurred, as soon as possible after it has occurred, together with all relevant data – logs, viewer About information, etc., and further occurrences are similarly logged against that JIRA.
TLS 1.2
As per a blog post from the Lab, which I also reported here, users are being advised to update (if necessary) their web browser and their SL viewer to a version that supports TLS 1.2 by June 15th, 2016. After that date, any web browser or viewer that does not should TLS 1.2 will no longer be able to access Second Life cashier services to send, receive, or exchange L$.
On Tuesday, May 3rd, the Main (SLS) channel received the same server maintenance package originally deployed to the three RC channels in week #17, comprising a crash fix and minor internal improvements.
There will be no deployment to the RC channels on Wednesday, May 4th, and no scheduled restart of simulators on that channel.
SL Viewer Updates
The two release candidate viewers currently in the release channel were updated at the end of week #17:
The current Maintenance release candidate updated to version 4.0.4.314579, dated April 28th
The Quick Graphics release candidate updated to version 4.0.4.314426, dated April 26th.
This means there has been no promotion of an RC to de facto release status, while the project viewers have not been updated, leaving the complete list of remaining official viewers as follows:
Current Release version: 4.0.3.312816, dated March 23rd and promoted on April 1st, formerly the HTTP / Vixox RC viewer
Project viewers:
Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions), version 5.0.0.313876, dated April 15th
Oculus Rift project viewer, version 3.7.18.295296, dated October 13, 2014
Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847 dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.
Avatar Complexity
There are still some issues yet to be resolved with Avatar Complexity which is why this viewer is currently not progressing towards a release status at present. One of these is avatars which should render as solid colours (or “Jelly Dolls” as the popular term for them is now) or imposters are invisible.
This has been a long-standing issue (see BUG-10330), which has proven hard to reliably reproduce, and has had a number of theories attached to it. Recent testing has suggested one of the causes is a possible conflict between the viewer trying to render avatars as Jelly Dolls whilst trying also to account for any alpha mask applied to the avatar with all the layer check boxes ticked. This is possibly because ticking the alpha mask check boxes result in a “special” UUID being applied. Currently, the precise cause of the issue has yet to reach a consensus opinion, and investigations and tests continue.
The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, April 28th at 13:00 SLT on Aditi. For details on each meeting and the location, please refer to the Bento User Group wiki page.
Note that this update is not intended to offer a full transcript of the meeting, nor does it present the discussion points in chronological order. Rather, it represents the core points of discussion to Project Bento, grouped together by subject matter were relevant / possible.
Issue Fixes
Partial Joint Offsets
As noted in my last update, one issue facing Bento is in how best to handle defining partial joint offsets – a mesh that specifies the override positions for some of the joints but leaves other joints alone, which would allow different meshes to be mixed and matched to create an avatar look. Currently, the viewer doesn’t handle multiple root bones in a mesh with partial rigging correctly, and to help correct this, Vir Linden has published a proposal for moving forward. Essentially, this would filter out any joints which have a position unchanged from their expected default, even if the mesh claims to use an offset, with only a very small adjustment (0.1mm or greater) is required to have a joint treated as having its own offset.
Offset and Slider Conflicts
Another issue which has been discussed recently is that joints offsets (notably translation offsets) can conflict with adjustments made using the appearance sliders, resulting in adjustments made using the sliders “snapping back” to their original location on leaving edit shape or following a relog or after removing / rewearing the avatar mesh.
An adjustment has now been made so that where an offset has been set for a joint, adjustments made using the sliders which only affect the offset will be ignored, only changes to the scale of a joint (length, height) made using the sliders will work. It is thought that this fix will also address the likes of BUG-11854.
Work in progress: Aki Shichiroji demonstrates a wearable wyvern utilising Bento bones for animation.
It has also been noted that BUG-10991, “[Bento] Mesh rigged to the new joints either partly disappears, collapses or melts when viewing that avatar as an imposter” has not been fixed with the latest version of the project viewer. It will hopefully be one of the issues addressed with the next update.
Next Viewer Update
The above fixes, coupled with other work which has been carried out are regarded as being sufficient to kick-off another update to the project viewer, although there is a further piece of work Vir hopes to include. If all goes according to plan, this should see a new version of the Bento project viewer appearing in week #18 (week commencing Monday, May 2nd).
Animation File Size Limit
Currently, there is a file size limit of 120 Kb on animation files enforced by the back-end servers. With the increased number of bone available for animation. As it is now possible to animate a far large number of joints, some creators have started to find this limit a problem, and a request has been put in for it to be increased (see BUG-11836).
While there is potential for this to be done, it is currently unclear how much the file size limit should be increased. There are also other considerations to take into account, such as the intention for animation assets to be moved to the CDN for better delivery.
If there are specific examples of animation with large file sizes which could be attached to the JIRA as examples, they would be welcomed by the Lab. It has also been suggested that the Lab establish a best practices guide for animations files on the wiki.
This lead to a brief discussion on interpolation and the differences between .BVH and .ANIM animations, with Vir providing background information on how each are respectively handled.
Sliders for Remaining Bento Bones
While many Bento bones – notably those of the face / head – have been tied-into the existing appearance sliders, there are still those which do not have slider support because they would require the development of dedicated sliders. this has been considered outside the scope of the initial Bento work, and it is far from certain it will be taken up in the near-term future, if at all.
Part of this comes down to the added complexity further sliders would thrust into the viewer UI, and also – as Vir explains – because the use of many of the Bento bones is intended to be arbitrary, therefore providing sliders to adjust them may not suit all of the uses to which they might be put, and cause further confusion / unpredictable results when used.
There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday, April 26th.
One Wednesday, April 27th, all three RC channels should receive the same server maintenance package, comprising a server crash fix and some minor internal improvements
Oculus Rift project viewer, version 3.7.18.295296, dated October 13th, 2015 – Oculus Rift DK2 support (download and release notes)
Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7 (download and release notes).
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 