Category: SL User Group Meetings

SL project updates week 47/1: server, viewer, RenderAutoMute functions

Posted on by Inara Pey

Nordan om Jorden; Inara Pey, November 2014, on FlickrNordan om Jorden (Flickr) – blog post

My apologies for the lateness of this update; have been busy with a variety of things, both SL and non-SL.

Server News – Week 47

There are no server deployments during the week, due to the hardware inspections taking place, which involved restarts taking place from Monday, November 17th through Friday November 21st, as detailed in the Grid Status updates (as a reminder, there is an additional period of maintenance due on Wednesday, November 18th, commencing at 13:00 SLT).

According to Simon Linden, speaking at the Simulator User Group on Tuesday, November 18th, the work on the servers requires each box being taken down, opened-up and physically inspected, and parts (unspecified) possibly being swapped-out.

Exactly what amount of work (if anything) is required on each server may vary, making the process something of a piece of string when it comes to how long it will take per box.

What prompted the work isn’t clear, but there was muted speculation that some servers may need a physical update of some description to avoid the potential of failing due to a defect. Whether this means one of the Lab’s suppliers altered them to a problem or not or something else has come up, isn’t clear.

However, none of this work should, outside of the rolling restarts, affect the performance of any regions.

SL Viewer

HTTP Pipelining Viewer

A new HTTP Pipelining RC viewer appeared on Monday, November 17th. Version 3.7.21.296736, see a “reduced pipelined texture and mesh fetching time-out so that stalled connections fail quickly allowing earlier retry. Time-out value changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds.”

It is hoped that this viewer fixes the following issues:

  • BUG-7686 – “Avatars are not coming on viewer”
  • BUG-7687 – “Nothing is rezzing in SL,, av’s are all gray and textures will not rez”
  • BUG-7688 – “Since the last restarts I cant seen to see things I rez from my inventory or wear mesh in my inventory. I have done numerous clean installs of the latest LL viewer. I have also made sure I am not running the beta version of the AMD CCC”
  • BUG-7690 – “Textures and Meshes abruptly stopped rendering”
  • BUG-7691 – “Won’t rez properly”
  • BUG-7694 – “Textures and meshes loading slow or refusing to load”
  • BUG-7698 – “Textures much slower to load on a CDN region then on a clone of the same region not running CDN”

See the release notes for further details.

Maintenance RC Viewer

There are reports that the Maintenance RC viewer currently in the viewer release pipeline (version 3.7.21.296734) contains a number of regressions for joint position bugs. These issues are apparently known by the Lab, which hopes to have them corrected before the code merges with anything else.

Group Chat

There have been various reports of further group chat issues doing the rounds. On Monday, November 17th, for example, it was noted through Firestorm Support chat that at least two group chat server were down. Asked about this during the Simulator User Group meeting, Simon Linden replied:

Yes some of the chat servers have been having troubles in the last few days.   I’ve been looking into that … the code running there isn’t super new, and the outages might be timed with some of those restarts. In any case, there is an update soon for the chat servers, and already another in the pipeline.

Experience Keys

No major news here, other than those trying the Experience Keys in the current beta are being urged to file any additional issues they may have found as BUG reports as soon as they can. Simon Linden added to the request, “we’re trying to finish off the last few issues and have that Real Soon Now (sometime in the future, no promises).”

As previously indicated in my coverage of Experience Keys, the first release of the capabilities will not allow for grid-wide experiences, although this is something that is on the Lab’s list. Commenting on the plans, Oz Linden said:

The first general release of experiences won’t include being able to get a grid-wide key. It’s not so much that as there are more issues for us to deal with for grid-wide experiences, and we don’t want to make people wait for the ones …. Being able to do grid-wide experiences isn’t going to fall of the to-do list or anything.

As Oz was speaking, Simon Linden added:

We’ve talked about it before, and having a widely available data system like the key-value store would be really great, but there are a ton of issues with that being available, scaling it to cover the full SL population and all that. So we’re going ahead with a more feasible sized feature set.

RenderAutoMute Functions (Avatar Complexity)

One of the heaviest impacts on viewer performance comes not from issues with the SL servers or in rendering the contents of the the region you’re in, but from avatars themselves, particularly in crowded or busy regions. The Avatar Imposters option within the view can help with this, however, the Lab is looking to bring a debug setting to the fore within the viewer’s UI to further help users control their viewer’s performance.

The setting in question is RENDERAUTOMUTERENDERWEIGHTLIMIT, which is somewhat tied to the Avatar Render Weight (once aka Avatar Render Cost), the colour-coded render value assigned to avatars which can be displayed over their heads via the Advanced menu (CTRL-ALT-D to enable if not visible): Advanced > Performance Tools > Show Draw Weight for Avatars.

Essentially, the idea is that by entering a value against this setting, you can define a limit above which the viewer will cease rendering avatars fully, and instead will render them as a sold colour imposter, regardless as to how near / far they are from your point-of-view, reducing the rendering load on the viewer / your computer.

Currently, you can use the RENDERAUUTOMUTERENDERWEIGHTLIMIT option within the viewer to set a limit on rendering high-ARW avatars as solid colours in your viewer. You'll need to have RENDERAUTOMUTEFUNCTIONS set to 7 for it to work smoothly, and should note
Currently, you can use the RENDERAUUTOMUTERENDERWEIGHTLIMIT option within the viewer to set a limit on rendering high-ARW avatars as solid colours in your viewer. Note how the debug setting doesn’t correlate with the ARW for the avatar – something that will be fixed when the setting becomes a UI option (which will also see the dependency on setting RENDERAUTOMUTEFUNCTIONS removed – see the notes below)

I used the term “somewhat tied” above, because there is currently no obvious correlation between a number set within the debug setting and Avatar Render Weight, which is a figure that is in turn impacted. A further problem with the setting as it currently stands is that it is actually calculated by multiplying the number you enter against RENDERAUTOMUTERENDERWEIGHTLIMIT by a certain LOD (level of detail) factor (so if you set RENDERAUTOMUTERENDERWEIGHTLIMIT to 60,000, the actual figure being used might be 92,000 – 60K x the LOD factor).

Both of these points of confusion will be addressed by the Lab in making the option directly available through the viewer UI, so that there is a much clearer and obvious correlation between the setting and ARW.  Oz Linden is also working on colour-coding the resultant solid avatars so that it is possible to determine those avatars which are just over any limit set in the viewer and those which are well over the limit, allowing users to further fine-tune their settings according to needs / circumstance.

The two debug settings: you'll need to set RENDERAUTOMUTEFUNCTIONS to 7, and then experiment with RENDERAUTOMUTERENDERWEIGHTLIMIT
The two debug settings: you’ll need to set RENDERAUTOMUTEFUNCTIONS to 7 in order to experiment with RENDERAUTOMUTERENDERWEIGHTLIMIT

The option can actually be experimented with at the moment, although it currently has a dependency on another debug setting – RENDERAUTOMUTEFUNCTIONS - which must be set to 7 in order for any of the RenderAutoMute functions (5 in all) to work. Again, the Lab indicate that this dependency will be removed when RENDERAUTOMUTERENDERWEIGHTLIMIT becomes a UI option.

Again, the emphasis is on “experiment”, simply because of the lack of a direct correlation between values entered into the debug setting and the ARW values of surrounding avatars.  However, if you do want to have a play with the setting as it is at the moment, Oz Linden suggests starting with a value of around 60,000 and working up or down from there, depending on your needs / circumstances.

There’s no time frame as to when this work may find its way into a viewer, but Oz is actively working on it, following a prompt from third-party contributor, Jonathan Yap.

SL project updates 46/2: viewer updates, miscellaneous news

Posted on by Inara Pey

Collins Land; Inara Pey, September 2013, on Flickr, on FlickrCollins Land, September 2013 (Flickr) – blog post

The following notes are drawn from the Server Beta user group meeting held on Thursday, November 13th, the transcript for which can be found here.

Server Deployments Week 46 – Recap

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread in the forums for the latest information and updates.

  • There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, November 11th.
  • On Wednesday, November 12th, all three RC channels received the same server maintenance package, which comprises “minor improvements” to help configure the texture and mesh CDN, by allowing the Lab to reconfigure the CDN URL if they need to, with the intention of the of making it a more dynamic host name in the future.

SL Viewer

Snowstorm RC Viewer

A new Snowstorm contributions RC viewer arrived on Thursday, November 13th. Version 3.7.21.296724 promotes the viewer from project status, and brings with it the following contributed updates:

  • OPEN-215 kCGLRPTextureMemory is a deprecated function as of Mac OS X 10.7, replace with kCGLRPTextureMemoryMegabytes
  • OPEN-268 FFLOAD_XML missing on linux and darwin, FFSAVE_XML missing on darwin
  • STORM-2053 applicationShouldTerminate function returns NSApplicationDeligateReply when it should return NSApplicationTerminateReply
  • STORM-2056 Projector reflections do not respect the environment intensity parameter
  • STORM-2067 Glossy Projectors
  • STORM-2069 Delete key doesn’t delete first character of marked text on OSX
  • STORM-2070 Sticky modifier keys after OS window comes up on OSX
  • STORM-2071 Unwanted InputWindow comes up when typing Japanese on OSX
  • STORM-2072 Bad behavior of Input Window
  • STORM-2078 Editing an objects rotation with the rotation rings often causes the object to jump to position <0,0,0> on the region and rotation changes to <0,0,0>
  • STORM-2080 Dresses purporting to be Fitted Mesh stretch to 0,0,0
  • STORM-2081 Second Life 3.7.18 (295539) Oct 16 2014 08:19:54 (Second Life Release) crashes every time upon viewer Quit under OS X Yosemite 10.10

Attachment Fix and Maintenance RC Updates

The current RC viewers – the Attachment fix RC viewer and the Maintenance RC viewer both updated on Wednesday, November 12th as a result of the Benchmark viewer promotion to release status. The updates were as follows:

  • Attachment Fix RC viewer updated to version 3.7.21.296729. This viewer adds some fixes to previously released changes in the way joint offsets in rigged meshes are handled & fixes some issues found with adding and removing attachments after the recent AISv3 deploy, and improves the status information shown in inventory for attached objects
  • Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 3.7.21.296734. This viewer offers a broad range of fixes for voice, privacy, rendering, texture animation, avatar distortion, inventory management, sounds, Mouselook in Mac, multiple UI fixes in script editor, Pay flow, chat, stats floater, edit menu, etc.

Release Viewer VFS Failure Issue

It’s still not clear how widespread the VFS failure issue on the current release viewer extends (see part 1 of this week’s update, and BUG-7776).  As noted in the first part of this report, I’ve managed to resolve such problems by manually deleted the viewer cache, and this worked for me in this case. Whirly Fizzle posted the same advice to the bug report, but at least one person has indicated it didn’t resolve the issue for them.

“Fast Pipe” Viewer

Monty Linden is working on further viewer-side updates to address reported problems being experienced in region rezzing times (such as reported in BUG-7698). There’s an initial release of the viewer available to those who can self-compile, and Whirly Fizzle reports that the fixes appear to work, commenting that, “Fast-pipe with pipelining enabled def works better for me on CDN regions. The long texture loading stalls have pretty much stopped.” There’s no date as to when this viewer will publicly appear as an RC or project viewer.

Other Items

Viewer Stats Ping Sim Data

There have been a few question in both meetings and in the forums about what the Ping Sim data in the viewer’s statistics bar actually represents. According to the wiki page:

Ping Sim: How long it takes data to go from your computer to the region you’re currently in. This is largely dependent on your connection to the Internet. If Ping Sim is high but Ping User is not, the server might be having problems.

However, this doesn’t paint a complete picture, as there can be a noticeable difference in the ping sim value given in the statistics bar of the viewer compared to pinging a simulator host directly. Responding to a question during the Server Beta meeting, Maestro Linden said:

As I recall, the ping number is your actual network round trip, measured by the UDP connection to the sim, *plus* some other time, like the time required to render the frame… So if you’re only getting 10FPS, that’s an automatic +100ms on top of the actual network round trip time… That ping time may also include the sim’s frame time (22.2ms if running at 45fps).

Answering a similar question through the forums in October, Oz Linden offered further clarification:

Looking at the code (I had not had occasion to look at this before), the Ping Sim measure appears to be based on a separate Ping message (our own message type transmitted over UDP, not ICMP). Those messages are mixed in periodically with the other UDP messages that are more or less constantly flowing between the viewer and the simulator. Because it’s the application that is turning that message around rather than a low-level part of the network stack, the fact that it is consistently higher than ICMP ping to the same host isn’t surprising. 

[ICMP, or Internet Control Message Protocol is the protocol generally used by ping operations.]

A couple of upshots of this is that if there is packet loss as a result of packet loss with increase ping rates as seen in the viewer, while no actual increase is occurring in the network connection itself, while increasing traffic within in region will cause higher ping rates within the viewer, simply because of the resultant UDP packet queuing in the server (hence a possible reason for BUG-7797, where the ping increase is seen as causing an increase in “lag”, rather than being indicative of an increase traffic load occurring). As such, Maestro commented that the viewer’s ping data is, “probably a more useful measure of latency than network ping.”

SL project updates 46/1: server, viewer + issues, misc items

Posted on by Inara Pey

Small Town Green; Inara Pey, February 2014, on FlickrrSmall Town Green, February 2014 (Flickr) – blog post

Server Deployments Week 46

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread in the forums for the latest information and updates.

  • There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, November 11th.
  • On Wednesday, November 12th, all three RC channels should receive the same server maintenance package, which comprises “minor improvements” to help configure the texture and mesh CDN

We’re currently approaching the run-up to holidays, which means things are liable to be a little quiet on the server release front. There is usually a code freeze in effect during the US Thanksgiving week, and again over the Christmas / New Year period (which also affects viewer releases). With this in mind, and commenting on the next couple of weeks, Simon Linden commented that there is some hardware maintenance scheduled between now and Thanksgiving, and not a lot else.

SL Viewer

Release Viewer and Start-up Issues

On Monday, November 10th, the Lab promoted the Benchmark viewer, version 3.7.20.296094, to the de facto release viewer. This viewer removes reliance on the GPU table for determining the viewer’s initial graphics settings, and can be obtained from tha main viewer download page.

Some people have been reporting problems trying to run this viewer, specifically that it fails on reaching VFS initialisation. I encountered this problem myself in allowing the viewer to update from the HTTP pipelining release (3.7.19.295700) to the current release, and found that deleting my SL viewer cache ( C:\Users\[user name]AppData\Local\SecondLife) – a trick I’ve used with similar problems following a “dirty” install with Firestorm – cleared the issue for me; on restarting the viewer, it loaded OK and I was able to log-in.

However, for those who find this doesn’t work, or who have found a completely clean install (removing the viewer, the cache and local settings found in C:\Users\[user name]AppData\Roaming\SecondLife) hasn’t worked, a JIRA is open – see BUG-7776 – and specific problems should be reported there.

Group Chat

The recent round of changes to group chat, related to how the system looks-up avatars engaged in a group chat session as they move around the grid – see here – are expected to start rolling-out this week on the back-end. However, they are not expected to yield dramatically visible improvements in group chat.

Experience Keys / Tools

There’s not a lot to report On the Experience Keys project (see my overview and update), other than the Lab is “trying hard to wrap up the last few issues with Experiences so that we can make them generally available,” as Oz Linden said during the Simulator User Group meeting. As well as having the capability of allowing users to build more immersive experiences for people to enjoy, a particular interest in the Experience Tools is the key/value store, which is being seen as a potentially powerful additional capability to help with saving and retrieving data.

Other Items

Saving Graphics Profiles (/Preferences)

A suggestion was recently put forward during a Simulator User Group meeting for the Lab to allow the saving of graphics profiles (see my week 44/1 report under “Graphics Profile in the Viewer”. This would mean, for example that you could have a graphics profile where various options – the quality slider, shadows, occlusion, draw distance, etc., could be pushed towards their upper limits; and another where the setting are more conservative and less taxing on your GPU / system.

A feature request was subsequently submitted, after Oz suggested this might be a good open-source contribution, and Jonathan Yap is now working on the feature (STORM-2082), although it may be a “somewhat altered version” of the original suggestion. Currently, the work is focused on  Quick Preferences style of panel (as found in a number of TPVs),  as shown in the image below, accessed via the Setup tab in Preferences.

Jonathan Yap is working on a new "Quick Preferences" floater for the SL viewer
Jonathan Yap is working on a new “Quick Preferences” floater for the SL viewer (seen on the left in this image), access from the Setup tab in Preferences – this Quick Preferences tab will likely have options to save graphics settings once set through the sliders

Keep in mind this is very preliminary work, and things are liable to change as the work progresses.

Prim Selection Problems due to Interest Changes

An annoying issue which has been introduced with the interest list changes is the ability for them to interfere with object selection. Essentially, if an object or group of objects is selected, and camming then moves them off-screen, they are deselected, as updates from them to the viewer are culled – see BUG-7115. A fix for this should be available in the next round fo general bug fixes for the viewer released by the Lab.

It has been thought the interest list code had been altered since that there was a minimum distance before culling would be applied (e.g. so that there would be no culling on objects within, say, 30 metres of your camera position, regardless as to whether their were in your field of view or not). Simon Linden is going to take a further look at the code to see if this is in fact the case.

Script Sizes

The Simulator User Group meeting saw further discussion on script sizes (still 16Kb for LSL and 64Kb for Mono) and the viability of increasing them. Commenting on the discussion, Oz Linden observed, “Increasing script size is one of those things that must be considered very, very carefully. It would affect many, many things.” As such, it’s unlikely that any changes will be on the horizon.

SL project updates week 45/3: TPV Developer meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

The following notes are drawn from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, November 7th, and shown in the video above. Time stamps, where relevant, have been included for ease of reference to the video. Note that items are listed according to subject matter and not necessarily chronologically, so some time stamps may appear out-of-sequence in places. My thanks as always to North for the recording.

SL Viewer

Maintenance RC Viewer

[00:06] The Lab released a further maintenance viewer on Thursday, November 6th (although it didn’t reach the release candidates section on the alternative Viewers wiki page until Friday, November 7th). Version 3.7.20.296368 is a further maintenance release RC, offering a broad range of fixes for voice, privacy, rendering, texture animation, avatar distortion, inventory management, sounds, Mouselook in Mac, multiple UI fixes in script editor, Pay flow, chat, stats floater, edit menu, and so on. Follow the link above to the release notes. This viewer also includes a couple of the AIS v3 fixes as well.

Benchmark Viewer

The Benchmark RC viewer, which eliminates the need for a manually maintained GPU table in order for the viewer to initially set graphic options, looks set to be the next viewer that will be promoted to release status.

Viewer Build Tools

[01:36] As the Lab is primarily focused on completing the updates to the viewer build chain and tools. As has been previously reported, the Mac viewer can now be built using the new build process, but it isn’t performing as well as expected, so it is being looked into. The Lab still has yet to get the new windows build process up and running.

[33:08] This work also means that the Lab currently isn’t attempting to progressing getting 64-bit versions of the Havok libraries at the present time.

Group Chat

[02:15] As noted in part 2 of this week’s update, the Lab is continuing to poke at group chat.  Oz confirmed there are still “one or two” more rounds of changes to be made, and the overall, the Lab is “pretty happy” with what has been achieved thus far. The Firestorm team, who perhaps have one of the most active of groups with a large number of users in their English Support group, have noted a substantial increase in group chat performance.

Z-offset Height Adjustment

[03:20] Vir Linden has resumed work on the z-offset height adjustment (aka, on-the-fly avatar height adjustment feature), after having been diverted to take look at the AIS v3-related attachment issues (the fixes for which are now out in an Attachments RC viewer, as noted in part 2 of this report). While there currently isn’t any significant news on progress as yet, it is hoped that there will be an update at the next TPV Developer meeting.

CDN

[03:50] The Lab issued a further update on the CDN on Friday, November 7th (my report is here). commenting on this during the TPV Developer meeting, Oz added:

Mostly, it’s going really, really well, and that contributes to figuring out what is going wrong when it isn’t going well. But we have a lot of things to work on, and we think we are making progress even on those. 

As the Lab’s blog post indicates, there have been a lot of people assisting the Lab with remote testing, which Oz described as “invaluable”, given that tying-down issues has a lot to do with where you are on the Internet, which CDN nodes / PoPs you hit, and so on.

Viewer Managed Marketplace

[06:10] Testing on Aditi for the new viewer-managed marketplace updates is due to commence “pretty soon”, although it appears to be running a little behind the schedule outlined for it when first announced. Testing will hopefully commence prior to US Thanksgiving towards the end of the month, but the overall plan remains that this will be a slow but steady implementation; there will be no quick-firing testing on Aditi with a sudden main grid deployment, particularly given the Christmas shopping season is now on the horizon (not to mention the Lab’s own code freezes over the holiday periods).

Continue reading “SL project updates week 45/3: TPV Developer meeting” →

SL project updates week 45/2: viewer, group chat

Posted on by Inara Pey

The Trace, The Trace; Inara Pey, November 2014, on FlickrThe Trace, The Trace (Flickr) – blog post

This update is taken from notes gathered at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday November 6th, and is somewhat late due to the motherboard on my primary PC failing, and my having to pull out an old PC and get it running (Vista – bleah!).

Server Deployments Week 45 – Recap

  • On Tuesday, November 4th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the server maintenance package deployed to all three RC channel in week 44. comprising some minor improvements described by Maestro Linden at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday, October 30th, as, “just some code cleanup and some extra optional debug logging.”
  • There were no RC channel deployments for week 45.

SL Viewer

On Wednesday, November 5th, the Lab issues a new Attachments RC viewer. Version 3.7.20.296355 carries the following description from the Lab:

This release adds some fixes to previously released changes in the way we handle joint offsets in rigged meshes. Originally, if you attached multiple meshes with joint offsets, the results were unpredictable, depending on the order in which the attachments were processed. This means that you could see yourself with different joint positions at different times, and the way you saw yourself might not match up to what others saw. With these changes, the behavior is deterministic, so wearing the same set of meshes should always produce the same joint positions, and the way you see yourself should consistently match the way others will see you.The process for removing attached meshes is also more robust, so you should be able to reliably get your old joint positions back after meshes are removed. People running un-updated viewers will continue to see the original behavior with the original bugs, but will not experience any new regressions due to these changes.

This release also fixes some issues found with adding and removing attachments after the recent AISv3 deploy, and improves the status information shown in inventory for attached objects.

Specific fixes include:

  • BUG-6197 (MAINT-4158) Avatar distorted when changing outfits’
  • BUG-6487 (MAINT-4196) “Wear” Behaves Erratically For Attachments on Same Point’
  • BUG-6908 (MAINT-4350)  Attachments scripted to llDetachFromAvatar on region change show as “Worn on invalid attachment point” in inventory after region change’
  • BUG-6439 (MAINT-4189) Shape distortion when wearing / taking off rigged mesh with joint offset’
  • MAINT-4572 Body crusher animations for quadruped avatars do not appear to load
  • MAINT-4605 [LION] Avatar eyes sometimes disappear after adding or removing rigged mesh
  • MAINT-4606 [LION] Avatar shape is deformed after removing some rigged meshes. Deformation is only seen by users on the Lion viewer, not default release.

Note: MAINT JIRA are internal to LL, and not available for general viewing.

Group Chat

Simon Linden is continuing to tweak the group chat code, and has most recently been looking at  the code that routes the messages – where it goes to find where group members are on the grid in order to be able to deliver messages to them, with the aim of trying to improve things there.

A further brief test was carried out during the Server Beta meeting on Thursday, November 6th to see how the changes are working out. During the test, Simon noted that any differences resulting from this round of updates are liable to be less noticeable than other recent changes. However, they should help smooth the process of how the system locates people as they move around SL.

The problem with group chat routing is that everything is run via the region you’re in; so if you move to another region, messages go to the last region you were in, which replies with a message that you’re no longer there, which triggers the chat service to perform a look-up as to where you now are. “So the system has logic (in many places, not just group chat) which is kinda like, ‘try sending to where I think they are, and if that fails, go ask and try again,'” Simon said in explaining the methodology used. It can sometimes result in messages being dropped as a result, particularly if people are moving about a lot as a result of rolling restarts, etc.

Suggestions have been made about using a central service – such as a virtual server – to handle group chat. However, such a solution isn’t favoured by the Lab. “There can be roughly 50k people online at once, all in 42 groups … it doesn’t scale well,” Simon explained.

A further problem noted (by users) with group chat is that it will often open with the original poster’s message absent – the first thing seen is a reply to what was originally said to initiate the session. This doesn’t happen all the time, but has happened enough to be noticed.

In the meantime, and depending on the results of the most recent tests, these updates may well be in an upcoming RC release.

Other Items

Aditi log-in Issues

Some people recently experienced issues when logging into Aditi which resulted in them being logged into a random region rather than their last location. The issue appears to have been linked to a specific inventory host on Aditi, and is now believed to have been fixed (see BUG-7707), so if you’ve experienced the issue yourself on the beta grid, it now should be cleared-up.

 Disconnected When Last to TP on a Region Restart

There have been a number of reports of people finding that if they are the last the leave a region prior to it restarting (either a manual restart or during a rolling restart), they are being disconnected from SL, even though they have apparently successfully arrived in their destination region (i.e. it has rezzed around them and the viewer log records their arrival). BUG-5034 outlines the issue, although it has been reported that the problem isn’t just restricted to estate managers.

Open Scripts Issue

There’s been a long-standing issue where if you have two copies of a scripted object, the script editor won’t open for scripts in one of the objects if the script in the other copy has already been opened – the script editor keeps the first script active (see VWR-27512). This issue apparently now has a fix, which should be appearing in the near future.

SL project updates week 45/1: server, viewer, texture rendering

Posted on by Inara Pey

France Portnawak, Dreamland volcano; Inara Pey, October 2014, on FlickrFrance Portnawak, Dreamland Volcano (Flickr) – blog post

Server Deployments, Week 45

  • On Tuesday, November 4th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the server maintenance package deployed to all three RC channel in week 44. comprising some minor improvements described by Maestro Linden at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday, October 30th, as, “just some code cleanup and some extra optional debug logging.”
  • There are no planned RC channel deployments for week 45.

SL Viewer

On Friday, October 31st, the Lab issued a new Snowstorm contributions project viewer. Version 3.7.20.296071 includes a number of contribution, including Geenz Spad’s work on projectors STORM-2056, STORM-2067, a number of Mac OS X issues, a fix for editing an objects rotation with the rotation rings causing the object to jump to position <0,0,0> on the region and rotation changes to <0,0,0> (STORM-2078), and more. See the release notes in the link above or the full list of updates and known issues.

The snowstorm project viewer includes Geenz Spad's improvements to projector reflections (STORM-2067) and
The Snowstorm project viewer includes Geenz Spad’s improvements to projector reflections (STORM-2067) and issues with projected reflections failing to respect the environment intensity (STORM-2056)

 Texture Rendering Issues

There have been mixed reports of texture rendering issues since the arrival of the HTTP Pipelining viewer and the CDN. The reports can be variable in nature, but are apparently quite noticeable. The common symptom is for certain textures to remain fuzzy, as if stuck at a low resolution value (e.g. 64×64), with the higher resolution values failing to load until the mouse is placed over the object displayed the blurred texture or the object is physically clicked upon.

The issue appears to be particularly noticeable when using the HTTP pipelining viewer (I’ve encountered this myself running both the current SL release viewer version 3.7.19.295700, and the latest Alchemy viewer version 3.7.19.34077. It is also not the same issue as texture thrashing (which sees texture change from blurred to clear to blurred, etc., as a result of low video memory) nor is it the same as the interest list issue where panning the camera so that an object is off-screen and then back to it again causes the textures for the object to be re-loaded / rendered.

Gibson Firehawk has raised an JIRA on this issue, BUG-7700, which the Lab sees as a duplicate of BUG-7698, raised by Whirly Fizzle, which is being investigated. If this is a problem you are encountering on a persistent basis within one or more locations in SL, please consider raising a bug report and providing as much information as possible, including steps to reproduce. The more information the Lab has, the better position they’ll be in to poke at things.