Category: SL User Group Meetings

SL projects update week 30/1: server, viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments – Week 30

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

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday July 22nd, the Main channel was updated with the infrastructure project deployed to the Magnum RC in week 29, and which adds support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy, and includes the update to improve L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects previously on LeTigre and BlueSteel- release notes.

Release Candidate Channels

On Thursday July 24th, all three RC  channel should be updated with the infrastructure support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy, and includes the L$ transaction logging update and Temp attachment fix previously deployed to LeTigre and BlueSteel.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday July 22nd, the de facto release viewer was updated to version 3.7.12.291824, previously the Maintenance RC release candidate. This viewer includes over 40 MAINT fixes, including:

  • MAINT-3135 Cocoa Viewer: Mac: Maximizing the viewer leaves garbage on the screen
  • MAINT-3171 Alt-clicking while moving mouse can move the camera significantly
  • MAINT-2980 Reevaluate the 512 meg texture cap
  • MAINT-4216 Double clicking on anything in COF removes it from your avatar – including skin, shape, hairbase and eyes – results in bakefailed avatar
  • MAINT-4001 Received Folder is movable within Recent Tab – see my notes here on this issue
  • MAINT-3610 SL viewer partly ‘eats’ chat-message.

Tuesday July 22nd also saw two other viwer updates:

  • Tthe Group Ban RC viewer updated to version 3.7.13.292225. This allows group owners and those assigned to a specific role to ban (and eject) others from joining the group. Useful for dealing with spammers and other trouble-makers in open enrollment groups. For an overview of the group ban viewer, please refer to my preview notes
  • The Oculus Rift project viewer also updated to version 3.7.12.292141, to bring it up to parity with the release viewer 3.7.12 code base. Note at the time of writing, there were no supporting release notes for this update – please refer to the Alternate Viewers wiki page for the downloads.

Group Chat

Simon Linden is planning on a further group chat test at the Server Beta User Group meeting on Thursday July 24th. Commenting on this at the Simulator UG meeting on Tuesday July 22nd, he said, “those have been really helpful with our development.   The more people who can come, the better. The test is usually at the end, a little before 4:00 if we don’t run out of other topics.”

SL projects update 29/2: server, viewer, TPV meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

My apologies for this appearing a little on the late side; things have been a bit manic in the physical world of late (not helped by the Tour de France and the German GP this weekend!), and I’ve been slipping behind on blog posts (I’ve also got to talk to my minions about vacation scheduling….).

Note that the following notes are taken from both the Server Beta User Group meeting of Thursday July 17th and the TPV developer meeting on Friday July 18th, the video of which is supplied below (my thanks to North, as always). Items taken from the later are time stamped within the text, so you can locate and listen to the discussion in full via the video.

Server Deployments Week 29 – Recap

  • On Tuesday July 15th, the Main channel was updated with the Experience Keys project, which had previously been running on Magnum. This roll-out coincides with the release of the Experience Keys project viewer (see below) and the release of the Lab’s first Experience Keys demonstrator game, The Cornfield.  Please refer to the release notes for further information
  • On Wednesday July 16th, the Magnum RC was updated a new infrastructure project that adds support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy. Release notes
  • On Thursday July 17th, BlueSteel and LeTigre were both be updated with the Experience Keys project, but otherwise remained on the same  server maintenance project as week 28, which addresses a JSON-related bug, an interest list related race condition, and to improve L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects. See the release notes (BlueSteel) for details.

SL Viewer

Group Ban Viewer

The Group Ban viewer reached release candidate status on Wednesday July 16th, with the release of version 3.7.12.292031. This viewer allows certain group members to ban avatar from a group or from joining a group  When an existing group member is banned, they are also automatically ejected from the group. Please refer to my Group Bans overview for further information, if required.

Maintenance Release RC

[04:20] This viewer, version 3.7.12.291824, has been tracking with the same crash rate as the current release viewer (3.7.11.291465), and as such is expected to be promoted to the de facto release during week 30 (week commencing Monday July 21st). However, it has been reported that the Mac Alt-Cam bug (BUG-6760) fix doesn’t work and has been referred back to the Lab for further investigation.

Oculus Rift Project Viewer

[04:56] It is anticipated that an updated version of the Oculus Rift project viewer will be appearing soon, potentially in week 30. The update will bring the viewer up to par with the current 3.7.12 release code base.

Log-in Test Viewer

[04:44] There is a special log-in test viewer currently on closed use (there is no publicly available version), which is being used for some kind of A/B testing related to logging-in to Second Life. Precisely what this testing is geared towards is unclear.

Viewer Autobuild Process

[05:50] Oz Linden has been working on improving the viewer autobuild process, and there is a new version of autobuild, together with a wiki page on the changes and improvements. The new version brings with it a number of improvements, such as stricter library version checking, full transitive dependency checks, additional error checks, etc. This is considered to be one of the steps required in order for the viewer to be compiled using Visual Studio 2013. Full details in the video for those into self-compiling viewers.

 Third-party Viewer Directory Updates

[00:20] The Third-party Viewer Directory, which lists all Second Life viewers and clients which have gone through the self-certification process, has been revised.

Until recently, the directory was listed by viewer crash rate – with the most stable at the top. However, this was something of a hit-and-miss approach due to a number of factors, including significant changes made to the code within the viewer which is used to detect and report crashes. So instead, viewer and clients are now split into three categories:

  • Those which are actively maintained “full” viewers which are updated regularly to track new developments in the Linden Lab viewer, and implement a full graphical environment
  • “Lightweight”, text and mobile clients, such as Lumiya, Group Tools, Radegast and so on
  • Those viewers which have not been updated recently enough to be considered fully compatible with current Second Life services (e.g. they lack things like server-side appearance, etc.).

Group Chat

[11:56] Work is continuing on group chat. At the TPV Developer meeting, Oz Linden summarised this work as:

We are working on group chat; I don’t really have much to report on that this week. We’re doing a set of experiments and collecting a lot of data, and then we’re going to come up with the next round of changes to make. One of the things we’ll try to do, once we think we’re done with this project – and I have no predictions for when that will be – is tell people how it went and what we’ve done.

It may well be that before we’re done, we’ll come back to this group and say we’re making changes to interfaces to viewers for group chat in order to improve the situation. I don’t know of any of those yet, but I’m not ruling them out. We’re going to try to make group chat a lot better, and if that means not being 100% backwards compatible, then that’s what it means. At this point we’re not looking at changing the protocol with anything else. Not ruling it out, but that’s not the correct direction.

Experience Keys

The Cornfield, the Experience Keys demonstrator game
The Cornfield, the Experience Keys demonstrator game

The current creator beta programme for Experience Keys has now been filled. Commenting on it at the Server Beta meeting, Coyot Linden referred to it as proving “wildly popular” and that the Lab have “heard some really cool ideas for new experiences”. He also referred to this being “round on” of the beta programme – so there may be more opportunities for creators to be involved in the future.

During the Server Beta meeting, a request was made for the Linden to consider allowing the popularity of an Experience (e.g. the number of people engaged on it) to be made available, with the suggestion it could be done in a number of ways:

  • As information made available only to the Experience owner (so they can see how popular a given experience they’ve created is proving to be
  • As information which can be (perhaps optionally) published by the Experience owner (e.g. via the Experience Profile)
  • As information which can be displayed in the Search tab of the Experience floater, allowing users to search for the most popular experiences at any given time.

Commenting on this, Simon Linden said, “The numbers will definitely be interesting, but we’ll have to think carefully about what and how to expose it.   As an owner, it makes sense for you to have an idea what’s going on with your experience.  I’m not so sure about others.”

Part of the concern here is about the popularity figure potentially being used by griefers as a means of targeting popular regions / activities and causing disruption. Following Simon’s observation, Dolphin Linden added, “yeah, technically the number can be made available. But how and to whom needs to be thought about, but numbers about your own xp can be tracked if you want with a little bit of work. We might also be able to just get an ordered list of the top 10 experiences or something, without disclosing actual numbers.”

Continue reading “SL projects update 29/2: server, viewer, TPV meeting” →

SL projects update week 29/1: server, viewer, Experience Keys

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments – Week 29

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest status / updates / issues.

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday July 15th, the Main channel was updated with the Experience Keys project, which had previously been running on Magnum. This roll-out coincides with the release of the Experience Keys project viewer (see below) and the release of the Lab’s first Experience Keys demonstrator game, The Cornfield.  Please refer to the release notes for further information.

Release Candidate Channels

On Wednesday July 16th, the Magnum RC should be updated a new infrastructure project that adds support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy. This would appear to be the changes required to support the new Skill Gaming region type. Release notes.

On Thursday July 17th, BlueSteel and LeTigre will both be updated with the Experience Keys project, but will otherwise remain on the same  server maintenance project as week 28, which addresses a JSON-related bug, an interest list related race condition, and to improve L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects. See the release notes (BlueSteel) for details, and part 2 of my projects update for week 28.

SL Viewer

As noted above, the Experience Keys project viewer, version 3.7.12.291846, was released on Monday July 14th. This provides viewer-side support for accessing and managing SL experiences using the new Experience Keys permissions capabilities.

The Search tab on the new Experience floater - part of the Experience Keys project viewer
The Search tab on the new Experience floater, accessed from the Experiences option in the Me menu in the Experience Keys project viewer

This viewer can be used in conjunction with the Lab’s Experience Keys demonstrator game, The Cornfield, and with other experiences as they are opened to public use. Please keep in mind that the viewer may not behave correctly until after the server-side deployment of Experience Keys support has completed on Thursday July 17th.

For further details on Experience Keys, please refer to the following:

There are also some further notes from Dolphin Linden on the subject, below.

Yet More on Experience Keys

Dolphin Linden at the Simulator UG meeting
Dolphin Linden at the Simulator UG meeting

Dolphin Linden again attended the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday July 15th, where he answered more question on the Experience Keys project.

Lucia Nightfire offered up a couple of points of feedback which appear especially relevant to the new capabilities:

  • An estate / parcel setting to disable all non-experience scripts. This would be useful in game experiences, as it could prevent participants cheating by using non-game scripted objects
  • An estate / parcel setting to block all grid-wide experiences from running on an estate / parcel. Currently, any grid-wide experiences which come on-line have to be explicitly blocked by name, which means if an estate / parcel owner didn’t want any grid-wide experiences running on their land, they’d have to keep adding them to their block list as and when they become aware of them. A single check-box option would eliminate this.

Feature requests are to be filed on both of these points, which the Lab have agreed to look into.

Other Bits

Sim Crossing Hiccups

There have been renewed reports of region crossing issues which seem to be occurring regularly, but only between certain regions when tested. The issues mainly appear to affect vehicles and take the form of the avatar taking an exceptionally long period of time to cross between regions – with the vehicle the avatar is say upon taking up to 30 seconds longer. When this happens, the avatar appears to be visually unlinked from the vehicle, but the vehicle itself fails to get auto-returned, as the simulators appear to consider the avatar and vehicle as still being linked.

Motor Loon provided some specific details on the issue, and has indicated he will raise a bug report using the information he has, as the Lab are unaware of any specific problems which may cause this. However, while it has yet to be confirmed, it was also reported at the meeting at a similar issue on a region crossing between two regions was resolved by restarting them in a specific sequence.

SL projects update 28/3: more server and viewer news

Posted on by Inara Pey

Banana Island - The Pilgrim's Dawn; Inara Pey, March 2014, on FlickrBanana Island, The Pilgrim’s Dawn, March 2014 (Flickr)

Server Deployments Week 28 – Recap

  • On Tuesday July 8th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the server maintenance project that was previously on BlueSteel and LeTigre.  This project adds the ability for LSL functions to view and modify the render materials (normal map, specular map, and diffuse texture alpha mode) properties on prims, via new prim parameters – release notes
  • On Wednesday July 9th, the RC channels were updated as follows:
    • BlueSteel and LeTigre received the same new server maintenance update to address a JSON-related bug, an interest list related race condition, and to improve L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects
    • Magnum remained on the Experience Tools project, and receives the same updates as the Main channel, so LSL support for materials is now grid-wide.

 BlueSteel / LeTigre Updates

Commenting on the server maintenance update deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre at the Server Beta UG meeting on Thursday July 10th, Maestro Linden explained one of the bug fixes (BUG-6466) and the L$ transaction update thus:

The LSL JSON bug fix, BUG-6466, just makes it so that numbers in the format “1.0e+2” get parsed as JSON numbers.  Previously, they’d be treated as strings (though “1.0e2”  would be treated as a number). The spec says that “+” is optional, so we added that support.  I’d be surprised if more than 2 people end up noticing that change 🙂 .

The one non-bug fix change in BS and LT is more verbose logging of certain L$ transaction types … Historically, a L$ transaction from scripted payment (llTransferLindenDollars or llGiveMoney ) would not include the name of the object that did the payment, when you viewed it in the “L$ Transactions” section of the website. However you would see that information if somebody had paid L$ into an object.

Previously, the entry would just look like this: Destination: Maestro Linden; Object Pays; Region: Morris.

But now, with the update to BS and LT, transactions in those regions will additionally include this line: Description: <Name of object which paid>. The page where you see the difference is https://accounts.secondlife.com/transaction_history/. Anyway, it could be useful for understanding which of your objects are paying out L$. Assuming they’re not all named “Object” :).

The remaining fix, “Temp Attachments are sometimes not removed on the viewer when detached from a region change event”, was related to a race condition, and explained by Simon Linden:

Updates were out-of-order there. Basically if your script took things off on the region change, anyone might get the updates out-of-order. It was worst on slow connections. For those who are curious, it went like this:  if the first update from the new region was slow, the “kill” message removing the object would happen first, and get ignored.

So in other words, items which should have been removed appear to remain in place, with Simon adding:

In this case you can’t detach it … because for the sim, it’s already gone. The viewers are the ones out-of-sync with the server. So you right-click and detach again and nothing happens.

The fix on BlueSteel and LeTigre should hopefully prevent this from occurring during a region change to regions on these channels.

SL Viewer

Maintenance RC Viewer

A new Maintenance RC viewer appeared late on Thursday July 10th. Version 3.7.12.291824 contains almost 40 MAINT fixes intended “to make your Second Life smoother”. The list of fixes include:

  • MAINT-3135 Cocoa Viewer: Mac: Maximizing the viewer leaves garbage on the screen
  • MAINT-3154 Alt zoom zooms way out when attempt to zoom in on Mac build running with external monitor
  • MAINT-3171 Alt-clicking while moving mouse can move the camera significantly
  • MAINT-2980 Reevaluate the 512 meg texture cap
  • MAINT-4216 Double clicking on anything in COF removes it from your avatar – including skin, shape, hairbase and eyes – results in bakefailed avatar
  • MAINT-4001 Received Folder is movable within Recent Tab – see my notes here on this issue
  • MAINT-3610 SL viewer partly ‘eats’ chat-message.

 

Please refer to the release notes link above, for the full list of MAINT fixes.

Library Refresh Project Viewer

The Lab issued a new project viewer on Wednesday July 9th, version 3.7.12.291799, which contains a number of updates related to the third-libraries used by viewer. This viewer has grown out of Monty Linden’s ongoing HTTP work, which required the update of several essential libraries used by the viewer, and Monty took the opportunity to undertake a more extensive update of the libraries.

These library updates should provide better security, stability and consistency improvements to the viewer. However, an advisory to Mac users warns that the updated libraries in the viewer have been built with a minimum OS level of 10.6. Therefore, this viewer, and future viewers based upon it, will not run on OS X 10.5.

While the viewer is primarily intended for testing purposes, and doesn’t contain updates which are liable to be noticed by most LS users, it is thought that it might help those encountering very specific SSA-related issues, the release notes stating:

A few users have experienced problems with avatar appearance due to their very specific network configuration. Gray avatars are accompanied by ‘Transferred a partial file’ errors in the SecondLife.log file. Linden has not been able to reproduce this internally but a possible workaround is found in this release.

A list of related JIRA reports is also given, but none of these appear to have been switched back to public access at the time of writing. They are: BUG-3323, BUG-3770, BUG-3877, BUG-3879, BUG-3882 and SH-4375.

Other Items

SL AIS Viewer login / Attachments Issue

Users on the SL viewer using the AIS v3 viewer code are reporting issues with attachments when logging-in to Second Life.

Some of the issues are described as a user logging-in to find their hair or (mesh) foot / hand or other attachment incorrectly positioned, and the only way to rectify the situation is to re-log. Some have suggested that swapping between a non-AIS v3 viewer and the AIS v3-enabled viewer may trigger the situation.

Some bug reports (BUG-890 and BUG-2772, both unfortunately non-public at the time of writing) have been pointed-to as examples of the problem, and further reports have been requested should it be encountered, with Coyot Linden noting for those wishing to file a JIRA on the matter:

One way to get a grapple on that sort of thing is to start a test run and keep track of the login times and regions.  When you hit a fail, logout and do one more and see if it succeeds.  If you provide that and the viewer logs, it would be easier for someone to do some log diving to figure out what the problem is.

Coyot Linden Takes the Driving Seat

Maestro Linden is  taking a three-week vacation from the Lab and Second Life. In his absence, Coyot Linden will be occupying the driving seat for the Thursday Server Beta meeting.

SL projects update 28/2: more on Experience Keys (Tools)

Posted on by Inara Pey

On Tuesday July 8th, Dolphin Linden, a member of the team responsible for the Experience Keys (Tools) project,  attended the Simulator User Group meeting, where he took time to provide further information on the project via what amounted to a Q&A session.

Dolphin Linden at the Simulator UG meeting
Dolphin Linden at the Simulator UG meeting

The following notes have been taken from Dolphin’s comments, and should be read alongside my original overview for Experience Keys, and the Lab’s invitation for experience creators to participate in the Experience Keys beta programme.

Note that because some aspects of Dolphins comments on Experience Keys have been covered in my original article (e.g. the concept of trusted Experiences running on regions with access control enabled, permissions covered by Experience Keys, etc.), they can not reproduced here.

  • Documentation for the projects will be finalised “shortly” – it is currently undergoing final review and update
  • Precisely how Experience Keys will be made available to people is still to be decided; as Dolphin reiterated at the meeting: “We are working out the details, but we want them to be reasonably available, but not so easy acquire that people will make throw away ones to try to grief people; we are still working on the rules about who can have them.”
  • Those applying to be part of the Experience Keys beta do not necessarily need to convert an existing experience they may have, but
    • They should be able to demonstrate that they have the experience with building/scripting to make use of the tools, and
    • They should provide as much information on possible about the kind of experience they’d like to present through the beta
  • Experiences and region maturity ratings:
    • Experiences must respect the maturity of the region(s) on which they run – so an adult rated experience cannot run on a general region, for example
    • Experience ratings are set by the experience owner, and this rating is used to determine the region maturity rating required in order for the experience to run
    • A sample Experience profile
      A sample Experience profile

      The rating is part of the Experience’s public profile, all of which must be G rated

    • The list of experiences running on a region is public information
  • Experiences and scripts:
    • A script can only be associated with a single experience
    • However, a single object can include multiple scripts belonging to different experiences, if required – although this might prove difficult to manage, depending on what the scripts are doing / how the object is used
    • Assigning an Experience to a script must be done by the Experience owner or by a member of the Experience’s group with the appropriate group power (“Contributor”)
    • Existing scripts can be converted to work within an experience, the permissions request to an Experience permissions request and then the event handler would need to be modified to handle tw new events – EXPERIENCE_PERMISSIONS and EXPERIENCE_PERMISSIONS_DENIED
    • An Experience is set on a script through a combo box in the script editor. This lists all Experiences the script creator either owns or has Contributor rights to
    • The selected Experience is set at compile time (similar to the compile type), and is part of the compiled script. The script must be re-saved if it the association is changed to another Experience
    • If a modifiable script associated with an Experience is passed to someone who does not have Contributor permissions for the Experience, they will not be able to save the script unless they remove the Experience or change it to one for which they do have permission
  • The Experience database:
    • Every Experience has its own database, which can be accessed wherever the Experience is running
    • The database is fairly simple, but should make storing the current state-of play for avatars engaged in an Experience (e.g. what they have been doing, what they have attached, etc.)
    • It is basically string-to-string mapping
    • The database supports create, read, update, delete, count, and iterate, and the update can be made atomic, so it can be safely updated from multiple scripts
    • The overall size of the database will be limited, although the Lab is still determining an appropriate limit
    • The database size is also configurable (per Experience), so the Lab will likely offer Experience creators the opportunity to increase their database size for a L$ fee, if needed, although this policy has yet to be finalised
  • As indicated in my original notes, an Experience can be refused or blocked by a user, and can be revoked by the Lab. Additionally, an Experience can be suspended by the Experience owner (so as to allow a bug to be fixed, for example). All of these will result in an EXPERIENCE_PERMISSIONS_DENIED event being sent to all scripts associated with the experience
  • Also as indicated in my original notes, private estates / regions with access restrictions will have an additional level of access which will allow anyone participating in a grid-wide experience running on that estate / region to access it. However, should they revoke the experience permissions while on such an estate / region, they will be teleported away in accordance with the estate’s / region’s access controls
  • All temporary attachments made to an avatar will die should the person go to a place where the Experience is blocked or if they block the Experience.

Again, please do be sure to read the above notes alongisde my original overview of Experience Keys.

Dolphin Linden will be available at the next Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday 15th July to answer further questions.

SL projects update week 28/1: server and viewer updates

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments

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

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday July 8th, the Main channel was updated with the server maintenance project that was previously on BlueSteel and LeTigre.  This project adds the ability for LSL functions to view and modify the render materials (normal map, specular map, and diffuse texture alpha mode) properties on prims, via new prim parameters – release notes.

Release Candidate (RC) Channels

On Wednesday July 9th, the three release candidate channels should be updated as follows:

  • BlueSteel and LeTigre should receive the same new server maintenance update. This project addresses some miscellaneous bugs, and improves L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects.
  • Magnum remains on the Experience Tools project, and receives the same updates as the Main channel, so LSL support for materials will be grid-wide following the deployment.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday July 8th, the Snowstorm RC viewer, version 3.7.11.291465 was promoted to the de facto release viewer. The viewer includes multiple contributed updates from the SL open source community, including (but not limited to):

  • STORM-68 Allow setting of default permissions on creation of objects, clothing, scripts, notecards, etc.
  • STORM-1831 Obtain LSL syntax table from simulator so that it is always up to date
  • STORM-1972 Restore particle debug display
  • STORM-2011 Improve loading of Group member list
  • STORM-2015 Region restart sound alerts play only locally.
  • STORM-2020 Restore RenderSpecularExponent.
With the new release viewer, users can now set their own default permissions for newly-crated prims, textures, etc.
With the new release viewer, users can now set their own default permissions for newly created prims, textures, etc.

Windows XP users please note: with this release, you must have either Service Pack 3 (Windows XP 32-bit) or Service Pack 2 (Windows XP 64-bit) installed on your system in order to install this and future versions of the SL viewer – see the release notes. Please also note that no Windows XP operating systems are supported by Linden Lab.

Other SL viewers remain as per the Alternate Viewers wiki page and my Current Viewer Releases page.

 Experience Keys (Tools)

There was a Q&A session at the simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday July 8th with Dolphin Linden, to discuss the Experience Keys (Tools) project. For ease of reference, I’ve included notes from that session in a separate report.