As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest news and updates.
There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, February 24th
On Wednesday, February 25th, all three RC channels will receive the same server maintenance package, which comprises:
A server-side fix for BUG-8297, “Unable to teleport anywhere using SLGO”
Improvement to server logging.
The SL Go teleport issue only affected users running the SL Viewer (SLV) supplied by OnLive, who run the SL Go service (it did not affect those using Firestorm on SL Go), and was the result of a recent server-side code clean-up which meant that OnLive’s SLV was essentially using an invalid channel name when instigating teleports, causing them to fail.
OnLive implemented a workaround for the issue on their side of things on February 3rd, however, the update included in the RC package noted above provides a fix on LL’s side of the connection as well.
SL Viewer
On Tuesday, February 24th, the Maintenance RC viewer, version 3.7.25.299021, was promoted to the de facto release viewer. This release includes a large number of improvements and fixes to the viewer, as listed in the release notes.
This currently leaves just the new log-in viewer RC (version 3.7.25.298971 released on February 17th) and the Experience Tools RC (version 3.8.0.298001 last updated on January 15th) in the release channel for the time being.
Experience Keys / Tools
The initial release of Experience Keys / Tools is still awaiting various back-end updates to clear the Lab’s QA department, with the viewer remaining at RC status until that happens (see above). As previously noted in my Experience Keys reports, the initial release of the functionality will not support grid-wide experiences, although are likely to be on the roadmap for future enhancements.
Once released, the current iteration of the functionality is liable to be allowed to run for a number of months before the Lab starts making (or releasing) updates, with Oz Linden commenting at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, February 24th, “there will be another round of improvements to Experiences at some point, but we’re going to give the first round some time to be adopted before we go too far with those.”
Group Chat
Group chat work is continuing, with the recent changes to handling server lock-ups reducing the number of reported freezes.
Simon Linden is also continuing to look at the code side of things, and specifically issues with group chat visibly “stalling” which switching between chat tabs and / or as a result of moving between regions. This work has been the subject of a series of “mini-tests” during the Server Beta User Group meetings held on Thursdays, and resulted in some recent code updates. Commenting on this at the SUG meeting, Simon said, “The new code also showed me details about one way the system fails, so I hope to make that better at recovering,” so further updates can likely be expected, although this may not be as broadly visible to many users as the initial group chat improvements.
As will already be known, there were no server deployments this week.
SL Viewer
A new release candidate viewer appeared in the release channel on February 17th in the form of a new login viewer. Version 3.7.25.298971 sees the three log-in options buttons on the original log-in screen update replaced with a single button.
LL viewer log-in updates: as they first appeared after an initial log-in following the 2014 revisions to the log-in / splash screen (top); and as they are now displayed in the new RC viewer, version 3.7.25.298971 (bottom) – click for full size, if required
February 17th also saw updates made to the Maintenance RC viewer, which was updated to version 3.7.25.298971, while the Tools update project viewer was updated to version 3.7.25.298862, having been held over for release from week #7, due to the Valentine’s weekend / President’s day no change window.
Group Chat
The was a further back-end update to the group chat servers during the week, further implementing the stability improvements the Lab has been working on to solve issues of chat appearing to freeze when switching between tab / issues with the chat servers themselves locking-up.
Other Items
Attachment Issues
As per my last report, there is still considerable debate about the nature of attachment issues, particularly those reported via BUG-6925. A concern is that while (as noted last time), the Lab considers there to be multiple issues occurring, BUG-6925 has already had some initial investigations carried out by the Lab, and these might be getting missed as the Lab considers the wider problems and attempts to categorise things. There is also a concern that the BUG-6925 issue in particular is AIS-v3 related, which could result in a significant increase in reported issues should that code be released by Firestorm as a part of their planned update.
Suggestions have been made on additional logging that might be added to the viewer to further pin-down precisely what is happening in the various circumstances where attachments are detached / re-attached or appear to be detached but aren’t, etc., and the issues are continuing to be examined by the Lab.
The following notes are primarily taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, February 13th. A video of the TPV Developer meeting is included at the end of the article (my thanks as always to North for recording it and providing it for embedding), and any time stamps contained within the following text refer to both it and the TPV Developer meeting.
SL Viewer
Avatar Hover Height (AHH)
[09:17] It had been expected that the Avatar Hover Height project viewer (version 3.7.25.298129) might have been replaced by a release candidate during the course of the past week. However, some of the reported issues are still being worked on, most of which are related to the code which tries to keep an avatar’s feet in contact with the ground, and problems which can occur in certain extreme cases. It is now anticipated that the viewer will be updated to a release candidate viewer once these issues have been fixed.
Viewer Build Tools
[14:37] It had been hoped that this viewer would be updated with a release candidate version prior to the long weekend no change window (see below), however it didn’t clear QA in time. Unless something significant happens on the QA side, this viewer should therefore reach release candidate status some time during week 8 (Week commencing Monday, February 16th).
However, it is anticipated it will undergo further updates while at RC status, and so therefore is unlikely to progress directly from RC to the de facto release viewer in a short space of time. One such update might be to include various patches to further simplify the build process, notably for windows, for example.
Graphics Settings and Avatar Rendering
[19:49] This work is a combination of STORM-2082, which allows users to create and save multiple graphics settings defaults, and internal work carried out by the lab to help users improve their viewer performance by defining limited above which avatars with heavy rendering costs are replaced by a solid colour. A viewer with these updates has been under limited testing for a while, and is liable to be appearing very soon, particularly given the Lab’s recent announcement on forthcoming improvements.
Mesh Importer
[23:43] There are a fair number of bugs and issues which have been identified with the current mesh importer project viewer (see the JIRA filter list for details), it is therefore unlikely that it will be progressing in the short term.
Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM)
[00:05] A new version of the Viewer-Managed Marketplace project viewer was released on Friday, February 13th, version 3.7.25.298865. This viewer includes updates as a result of feedback from initial testing on Aditi, and is available for further testing, but again must be used on Aditi in regions ACME D, E, or F.
A number of issues remain open with This update:
VMM-20 Include product listing ID in audit listings window results
VMM-17 Support listing folders at any level of Marketplace Listings folder.
A list of key changes can be found on the forum update announcing the release of the new version of the viewer, and further details on VMM can be found in the SL wiki FAQ.
This viewer doesn’t address all of the concerns raised during testing, as some are still being discussed internally by the Lab, and a decision has yet to be taken on whether to address the additional concerns (which are presumably non-viewer specific) prior to holding a feedback meeting, or whether to push ahead with a further feedback meeting which might encompass the use of the new project viewer. This largely depends on the likely time frame for addressing the remaining issues: it might be as little as a week or so, or it might potentially be a month or so.
Experience Keys / Tools
[06:34] The Lab is continuing to work on back-end issues which need to be sorted prior to the project progressing. It is still believed that none of these issues directly affect the viewer or will require updates to the viewer, however, it is unlikely the viewer will be updated (other than to maintain parity with any other viewer that might be promoted ahead of it), until such time as the Lab is confident they are ready to start pushing things forward again.
Group Chat
The Lab is also continuing to work on group chat, and a further mini-test took place during the Server Beta User Group meeting on Thursday, February 12th. This focuses on testing viewer-side freezes when opening and closing or swapping between group chat tabs, and chat update times when moving across region boundaries either physically for via teleports. The overall results of these tests were that users experienced almost no viewer-side freezes in comparison to the last tests, where some severe viewer lock-ups were experienced.
[10:27] Most of the effort on group chat is now being directed into these issues of stability and eliminating the need for servers to be restarted as a result of server-side freezes, given that one the whole, performance for the majority (all but some of the very largest groups) has been noticeably improved. In terms of the server freezes, progress is being made, with Oz reporting that there might only be once such instance a day now as a result of fixes already implemented, which is currently being iterated upon as a result of the additional monitoring / logging capabilities the Lab have also introduced.
Attachment Issues
[24:52] There have been increasing reports on variations of a problem with attachment rendering following teleports / region crossings (e.g. attachments seem to detach and then re-attach, people see their attachments as missing while other see them as still attached – and vice-versa, and so on). Some of the issues are listed in BUG-6925, and the issues have been noted by the Lab.
The likelihood is that these issues are the result of more than one problem, and possibly the result of various race conditions resulting from the complexities of data packaging and hand-over required in both a region crossing and a teleport (which are both essentially the same things – the packaging and handing of data relating to an avatar and its attachments between simulators, and then passing of updated information to users’ viewers). Some also appear to be directly related to AIS v3 (as per BUG-6925) Currently, the Lab is still prioritising SL issues and problems, and full determination as to what needs to be down to resolve these problems has yet to be made.
In the meantime, if you do encounter the problem, and you’re preferably using the official viewer, you might want to consider filing the following information via BUG-6925:
The specific time, origin region (the place you were crossing / teleporting from) and destination region (the place you were crossing / teleporting to)
Avatar name
The item ID (UUID) for the attachment(s) exhibiting a problem
The viewer log that was recorded at the time the problem occurred.
This will at least provide the Lab with data they can use in further investigations into the issues, once matters have been prioritised.
Other Items
Presidents’ Day
Monday, February 16th marks Presidents’ Day in the United States and Linden Lab will be observing the holiday. This means that there is effectively a no change window in force from February 13th through 16th inclusive. This in turn means:
There will be no Open-source development meeting on Monday, February 16th
Any server-side deployments scheduled for the week commencing Monday, February 16th will most likely take place a day later than usual. So any Main (SLS) channel deployment will probably occur on Wednesday, February 18th and any RC channel deployments on Thursday, February 19th.
News is a little light coming out of the Lab on projects right now, although there was a blog post on things made on Monday, February 9th, which I also blogged about. However, new for the start of the week is still a little on the light side.
Server Deployments
There are no scheduled server deployments for the week.
SL Viewer
It had been anticipated that week #6 would see the Tools update project viewer (version 3.7.25.298587) and the Avatar Hover Height project viewer (version 3.7.25.298129) both superseded by a release candidate. However, neither update occurred.
It is possible these updates will occur during week #7; however, for the time being, all of the LL viewers remain as they were at the end of week #6, and as recorded in my Current Viewer Releases page, namely:
Release version: 3.7.24.297623 (January 13th)
Release candidate versions:
Maintenance RC, version 3.7.25.298030 – this has a number of issues associated with it, which may prevent its promotion to the de facto release viewer (January 27th)
Experience Keys / Tools RC, version 3.8.0.298001 (January 14th) – this has been awaiting final server-side updates to the Experience capabilities
Mesh importer, version 3.7.25.298441 (February 3rd) – a number of bug reports have already been filed for this viewer – see the JIRA filter list for details.
Avatar Hover Height, version 3.7.25.298129 (January 21st)
Viewer-managed Marketplace, version 3.7.21.296858 (November 19th, 2014)
Oculus Rift project viewer, version 3.7.18.295296 (October 13th, 2014).
Grid Status Page Relocated
As some have noticed, on Monday, February 9th, the Lab relocated the SL grid status page to a blog address, with a redirect from the “old” URL of status.secondlifegrid.net/.
However, the result has caused some confusion, notably as a result of breakage across sites and links referring to the “old” URL. Even some of the updates on the secondlife.com dashboard users see having been generating 404 errors as a result of the move.
Commenting on the change during the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, February 10th, Simon Linden – who was out of the office when the change was made – said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen with the status page … but we know the shift caused issues … we heard a lot about it breaking things that relied on it. I’m not sure what the solution will be.”
On Tuesday, February 3rd, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package deployed to the three RC channels in week #5, which includes:
a fix for BUG-8247 “[Experience Tools] Issue with llRequestExperiencePermissions() triggering experience_permissions_denied() and XP_ERROR_NOT_PERMITTED_LAND after prior 5 minute no response period.”
Internal improvements for experience tools key-value functions.
There were no deployments to the RC channels for the week.
Following the Main channel deployment on Tuesday, a number of regions reported issues with objects failing to load and render, textures remaining grey, mesh outfits failing to rez / render teleport issues, etc., all of which appeared to be consistent with region capabilities failing on re-start, and thus requiring the affected regions to be manually restarted. As reported by Whirly Fizzle in the forum thread linked-to above, this has been an intermittent problem which has been occurring for over a year.
SL Viewer – Mesh Importer Update
On Wednesday, February 4th saw the release of the Importer project viewer, version 3.7.25.298441. This viewer brings various improvements to the mesh uploader / importer, which are given in the release notes as:
In this viewer we’ve modified the importer to (optionally) improve debug output, perform name-based LOD association, and handle models with many materials.
Using these new features, models with more than 8 unique faces can be imported. Gone are the days of importing complicated meshes in pieces with “some assembly required”. At import, these models are automatically split into pieces so that each satisfy the current face limits for a volume.
The same limitations on LODs and materials remain in place (e.g. your low LOD mesh materials must be a subset of the full LOD materials).
LODs and Physics reps can now be explicitly associated with a given mesh in the full LOD model using name-based matching.
By properly naming the meshes in your lower LOD meshes and physics reps, you can avoid issues with ordering of the meshes within your DCC tool and other material mismatching errors.
An ImporterDebug option has been added to the settings.xml file which, if enabled, causes more information to be output during import than you can shake a stick at. The extra output can be very helpful for diagnosing authoring errors (e.g. violating the material subset constraints mentioned above) and pinpoint what needs to be fixed in the source model for successful import.
Note that project news is a little light this week due to on-going SL planning meetings taking place at the Lab.
The following notes are taken from the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 28th, 2015, and the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January 30th. A video of the latter is included at the end of the article (my thanks as always to North for recording it and providing it for embedding), and any time stamps contained within the following text refer to both it and the TPV Developer meeting.
Server Deployments Week 5 – Recap
On Tuesday, January 27th, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to Magnum and LeTigre
On Wednesday, January 27th, the RC channels should all receive a new server maintenance package comprising an Experience Keys / Tools related fix, and internal Experience Keys / Tools improvements.
It was stated during the TPV Developer meeting that this update saw the support for the Avatar hover Height (AHH) capability extend to all three RC channels, although no mention of it was made in the release notes.
SL Viewer
Tool Chain Project viewer
The Lab issued a new Tools Update project viewer, version 3.7.25.298587, on Wednesday January 28th. This viewer has been built using the new viewer tool chain for Windows and Mac builds (which includes the upgrade to Visual Studio 2013 for Windows and, Xcode (5 or 6) for Mac, and the use of the autobuild 1.0 process).
Wiki notes for using the new build tools are in the process of being written / enhanced for self-compilers – please note these are a work in progress. Notes on the new autobuild process can also be found on the wiki.
[06:42] It is anticipated that this viewer will progress through to release candidate status, quite probably in week #6 (week commencing Monday, February 2nd).
Maintenance RC Viewer Issues
Users receiving the Maintentance RC, version 3.7.25.298030, released on Tuesday, January 27th, have reported a series of irritating bugs with the viewer:
BUG-8324 (and duplicate BUG-8333) reports the appearance of the term “nolink>” in numerous places within the viewer – such as toasts and notifications – this issue has been imported by the Lab and a fix is apparently in development
BUG-8331 – some links containing the text secondlife or lindenlab incorrectly open a Place Profile in the Places panel when clicked
BUG-8328 – very jagged pictures created by the snapshot floater
BUG-1028 – the fix for MAINT-2056 “Lots of CURL GET FAILED spam in logs when browsing World Map – Beta viewer only” appears not to have fixed the problem, but rather replaced it with an equally spammy message.
Issues with this viewer can be tracked on the JIRA using this filter.
Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM)
[00:12] Brooke Linden was at the TPV Developer meeting to provide an update on the state of play with the Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM) work, which has been undergoing some beta testing with the project viewer on Aditi.
As a result of this testing, the Lab has been re-visiting the project viewer and incorporating feedback and observations for improvements into it, and are “really close” to having an updated version of the viewer available. When the appears depends on whether the Lab opt to release the updated viewer for limited beta testing on Aditi, or to wait until they’re ready to go with beta testing on the main grid, which is also not too far over the horizon.
The current plan is for more widespread beta testing to commence some time after February 14th (so as not to clash with any Valentines Day sales and promotions merchants may be running between now and Feb 14th), then run the beta for around a month, possibly longer, depending on feedback / issues. After this, VMM support will be deployed as a production tool, and things will move to a migration period which will also last around a month.
All this is still TBC, but a schedule will be posted (presumably via the Commerce / Merchant’s forum) once the Lab has worked through dates and requirements.
Experience Keys / Tools
[03:50] The Experience Keys / Tools project is currently awaiting some final server-side updates to be fully deployed (see the server release notes above). It is not anticipated that the Experience Tools viewer which is currently in the viewer release channel (version 3.8.0.298001) will require any further significant updates, so its promotion to the de facto release viewer is pending the server-side updates.
In the meantime, the Lab has already commenced work on a set of enhancement to the Experience Keys / Tools which will further extend capabilities once they are ready to be deployed.
Avatar Hover Height Project
As noted above, server-side support for the Avatar Hover Height project (see my overview for details) is now on all three RC channels, and the plan is to deploy the server code to the Main channel in week #6 (week commencing Monday, February 2nd). Because of this, the current project viewer (currently version 3.7.25.298129) is liable to be superseded by a release candidate viewer following the server-side deployments for that week.
Now in a project viewer (and soon to be a release candidate: Avatar Hover Height provides a means of adjusting your avatar’s graphical height above the ground / floor / objects, as seen by yourself and others
[18:00] A couple of small issues have been noted with AHH, and which only occur is very specific instances. One is that if an adjustment leaves your avatar floating more than around 1/2 a metre above the ground, an attempt to sit down can result in your avatar going up. In the other, standing on a prim and lowering your hover height into the prim can result in your avatar’s legs buckling as you slide into the prim. On terrain, where there can be limited physical penetration, this can be expected behaviour; but when occurring on a prim, it is suspected that the system may not be accurately assessing your avatar’s position.
[19:38] There have been one or two points of concern raised about the similarity in the name of this function – Avatar Hover Height – causing people to confuse it with the existing avatar hover slider (which will not be retired or removed from the viewer once AHH is fully deployed, as the two capabilities provide different use case solutions). The concerns are being fed back internally at the Lab, and if a name change is thought to be required, it may be slipped into the upcoming RC rebuild for the viewer, or the Lab may opt to wait and see if any confusion does arise.
