Category: SL User Group Meetings

2024 SL SUG meetings week #36 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
NeverendingSL: Souru Sosaeti, August 2024 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end – my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

  • On Tuesday, September 3rd, the SLS Main channel was restarted without any deployment.
  • On Wednesday, September 4th:
    • The BlueSteel and Ferrari simulator RC channels will receive the Picnic simulator update (which includes: llFindNotecardTextSync, llDerezObject, for the viewer side, group member lists can now be retrieved in a paginated manner).
      • The existing WebRTC regions of WebRTC Voice 1, WebRTC Voice 2, WebRTC Voice 3 and WebRTC Voice 4 might also be updated with Picnic.
      • Picnic also include the first of the region crossing improvements Monty Linden has been working on. These should see a) avatars already in a destination region getting better frame rates as others arrive in the region; b) crossing avatars with too many scripts will experience slower but smoother crossings.
    • The remaining simulator RC channels will be restarted without any new deployment / update.

SL Viewer Updates

No updates at the start of the week, leaving the currently available public versions of official viewers as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.9.10515727195, formerly the Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling) promoted August 26.
  • Release channel cohort: DeltaFPS RC, version 7.1.10.10622905308, issued August 30.
    • Performance boosts. Memory management has been optimized and users will experience a higher FPS across various systems. A comprehensive range of bug fixes are also provided. This includes better PBR material handling and resolving frequent crashes. See the release notes for more.
    • UI for scheduling region restarts now available via a new button located in the Region/Estate floater. (Note: there is currently an issue with scheduled region restarts working correctly and a fix is due to come in the next server release).

In Brief

  • The recent updates to the SL Map system appears to have been generally well received, with those providing feeding at the meeting noting the Map does appear to load a lot quicker and that changes to regions are more timely in being reflected on the Map.
    • The ability to see ground-level details of regions using regions surrounds where the scale is > 256*1.33 on either the x or y axis (rather than them appearing a flat grey) has been particularly appreciated.
    • The next element of this work will include improvements to pruning “ghost” regions from the Map (i.e. regions that appear on the Map but are no longer a part of the grid).
    • This sparked a general discussion on the Map and its capabilities and possible updates.
  • Github issue: [PBR] PBR Material resets to legacy material after teleport. #853 – while there is no fix for this at present, it sparked a discussion on issues related to broken meshes, which appear to result from the simulator and viewer not agreeing on how many faces a mesh has. Some of this may have been fixed in the Altasaurus release viewer, and Brad Linden noted, there are more coming in the 7.1.10 (DetlaFPS) RC and the viewer to follow it.
  • A reminder that if people have issues where log files might help LL with investigations, this article provides information on where to locate said logs for attaching to a bug report.
  • Need a function for easy PBR alpha switching: Brad Linden indicated he had started working on this, but he’s had to shift over to doing some viewer-related work, so things are currently on hold.
  • A discussion on a means for scripted Group join invites, rather than requiring a bot – please refer to the last third of the video.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2024 week #35: SL TPVD meeting summary; performance issues

Posted on by Inara Pey
Petite Provence d’Annisss, July 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, August 30th, 2024. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meetings Purpose

  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
  • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they re conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers Status

[Video: 1:25-4:45]

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.9.10515727195, formerly the Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling) promoted August 26.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • DeltaFPS RC, version 7.1.10.10622905308, issued August 30th.
      • Performance boosts. Memory management has been optimized and users will experience a higher FPS across various systems. A comprehensive range of bug fixes are also provided. This includes better PBR material handling and resolving frequent crashes. See the release notes for more.
      • UI for scheduling region restarts now available via a new button located in the Region/Estate floater. (Note: there is currently an issue with scheduled region restarts working correctly and a fix is due to come in the next server release).
  • The next viewer to surface after DeltaFPS will have further bug fixes and improvements.

Graphics / PBR

Performance Issues Update

On Thursday, August 29th, Linden Lab issued the following via the Grid Status report mechanism:

We have seen an increase in crashes for some Residents on Windows with older Intel HD-based graphics (GPUs) after the latest release of Second Life Viewer 7.1.9.

If you are experiencing such issues, be sure to download and try the DeltaFPS RC given above. This has a lot of changes and fixes to things like bugs, and to texture loading, memory management (including running the viewer in the background), etc, and those testing it who encounter issues are asked to file reports.

Work Status

[Video: 4:58-7:00]

From Runitai Linden:

We’ve been going over statistics trying to figure out what went wrong and in our stats, 7.1.6 [quoted as 7.1.7] was running quite well, and 7.1.8 [the Graphics Features viewer release] was running quite badly. Atlasaurus [the current release at the time of writing – 7.1.9.10515727195] gets us back up close to where were with 7.1.6, but not quite to where we want to be, so we’ll see where DeltaFPS lands and will get some statistics on that over the weekend. 
We do know some low-end systems are having problems with the PBR update, so we’re still looking at that. for example, we’ve noticed that on Nvidia GT1030s [[GPU released in 2017] we’re had a large drop-off of users from users on those cards. Now we have some of those in-house, and we’ll be making sure … they run well on those. 
Most of the issues for low-ends seem to be coming from running out or memory, and there was a bug that went out  with Featurettes that caused the viewer to think that you had system memory available, and it would continue to allocate textures and then run out of memory and your performance would go to crap and you’d crash. So that’s been fixed in Delta FPS, it was not fixed in Atlasaurus, so were hoping to see the trend continue to improve with the release of DeltaFPS. 

– Runitai Linden, video: 4:58-6:47

  • Runitai further indicated that DeltaFPS is running SL a lot better than has been the case for some time, and that the graphics team are continuing to work on things.
  • [Video 35:49-38:17] Whilst PBR  / mirrors have been blamed for the performance impacts people are experiencing, outside of issues with the likes of GT1030 GPUs mentioned above, LL’s investigations have show that the performance issues evident in the Graphics Featurettes viewer are not related directly to PBR or mirror rendering (although the latter will naturally impact FPS – just not to the degree people have witnessed).
    • Rather, the issues are related to bugs with elements such and bounding box management and memory management which had been previously missed, but particularly came to the fore with Firestorm’s PBR release.
    • Retrospectively, Runitai acknowledges that LL should have picked up on the issues before the Graphics Featurettes code was released, as they had all the data to hand. As a result, the release process has been adjusted to try to account for these circumstances to try to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.
  • [Video: 16:59 in text] Everything Looks Black and White should be fixed in either the current Altasaurus release viewer or in the DeltaFPS RC.

Improved Controls for Visual Aesthetics

[Video: 7:39-13:30]

This is currently work in progress and includes:

  • Linear alpha blending: in order for PBR lighting to render anywhere close to correctly, alpha blending has to be switched from SRGB to linear colour space. This can cause some older content using Blinn-Phong, causing it to look either more opaque or more transparent than in did pre-PBR.
    • The fix for this will likely be to add the ability for people to set and alpha/gamma ramp on an item, which can be modified per texture entry, adjusting how transparent the item is on a curve.
      • This should help with a range of issues – particularly those associated with pre-PBR hair, as has been noted by an number of users.
      • To help with this, the new alpha/gamma ramp value will still be adjustable even if the content is No Mod, so as to allow users to adjust legacy content affected by the issue, rather than having to wait for  fixes from content creators.
    • This fix will hopefully follow in the viewer after DeltaFPS.
  • Tone mapping is another aesthetic being looked at.
    • Rye Cogtail from the Alchemy team has contributed a neutral tone mapper which is not as dark as the current default in the viewer, and LL are looking to make these the default for tone mapping (subject to the outcome of testing).
    • In addition, LL are looking to re-add tone mapping controls to the Advanced Graphics floater.
    • These were available as debugs early in the PBR beta, but creators found it confusing as to which tone mapper they should target.  However, it is hoped that creators now understand that tone mapping is something that should be done by the renderer and not something dome to the diffuse map in PhotoShop (or equivalents).
  • Auto-exposure: LL is looking to add controls for dynamic exposure (speed of transition, range, ability to turn off / on). These options will be made available via the Advanced Graphics floater, and maybe / someday via the the sky settings floaters.
  • The overall hope is that by adding additional functionality and options like this, LL will be in a better position to identify defaults that don’t cause users angst by making things look too different all at once, and will provide users with all the tools they need to adjust their visuals to their liking when changes are made.

WebRTC

[Video 15:00-15:36]

Summary

  • A new project intended to move Second Life away from reliance on the Vivox voice service and plug-in, and to using the WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”). Roxie Linden is leading this work.
  • Key benefits:
    • WebRTC supports a wide range of real-time communications tools in common use (e.g. Google Meet), supporting audio, video and data communications, and is thus something of a “standard” approach.
    • Offers a good range of features: automatic echo cancellation, better noise cancellation and automatic gain control, much improved audio sampling rates for improved audio quality.
    • Opens the door to features and capabilities to voice services which could not be implemented whilst using Vivox.

Status

  • Once the viewer-side updates for WebRTC is widely adopted, the switch for the back-end switch over from Vivox to WebRTC will be thrown.
    • The hope is that this could happen in September, depending on how fast TPVs adopt and release the viewer code.
    • [Video 17:39-18:12] In order to minimise the impact of running both Vivox and WebRTC side-by side, it is hoped that switching to WebRTC can be completed in two step: throwing the switch for all simulators on the RC channels one week,  and a week later switching all simulators on the SLS Main channel.
  • In the meantime, peer-to-peer and ad-hoc WebRTC can be tested on the WebRTC regions of WebRTC Voice 1, WebRTC Voice 2, WebRTC Voice 3 and WebRTC Voice 4. However, there is no bridging between WebRTC peer-to-peer  / ad-hoc and Vivox.

In Brief

Please refer to the video, below.

  • [Video: 19:16-21:52] Will PBR will replace the “old clothing system” one day?
    • Short answer: on a technical level, probably not, given the longevity of content of all kinds in SL. However, whether creators continue use older system / methodologies are newer ones emerge is  down to choice / what drives their market.
    • That said, PBR will impact system layer clothing in as much as LL are actively working on 2K Bakes on Mesh, after which they will be looking at adding PBR to system layers.
    • In respect of legacy content / capabilities, this is why things like Blinn-Phong materials continue to be supported, etc.
  • [Video: 22:32-26:10] Exclusion volumes / invisiprim replacements:
    • There have been a number of requests for exclusion volumes to keep water out of boat hulls and particle weather like rain and dusty wind outside of buildings. etc. These are seen as being something for the longer-term roadmap.
    • In terms of providing an invisiprim style capability outside of this type of use, specific Canny feature requests on why and how such a capability (or options) are required / would be used were requested.
  • [Video: 28:06-32:08] SSR causes moiré-like patterns on the water (formerly BUG-233647): this has been a particular issue for those who enjoy pursuits like sailing and boating, or who simply like to look out over Linden Water.
    • The issue is rooted in the implementation of reflection probes, which required a simplification of the water shader so it did not dominate frame rendering.
    • Screen Space Reflections (SSR) was an attempt to redress this and get SL back to high-quality water rendering, but has not worked as hoped.
    • Geenz Linden is now looking to use some of the work on planar mirrors to possibly allow high-quality water reflections once more. However, this will impact viewer FPS when enabled, and if implemented.
    • It was also noted that there were performance issues with the release of mirrors and hero probes in the Graphics Featurettes viewer, but some of these have been fixed & mirrors are now defaulted to “off”, no matter what the graphics quality default is.
  • [Video 31:41-35:48] The above led to a broader discussion as to the perception of what PBR is for, how the changes were communicated, the need for creators to fully understand the differences in how they might have used PBR (e.g. baking reflections into the diffuse map) when producing textures and materials prior to the introduction of PBR support, and how they should be doing things now when using PBR, etc.
  • [Video: 42:00-46:16] a discussion on a  texture loading issue, potentially fixed using the the multithreaded texture debug option, on Mac systems running Apple Silicon. This appears to be a test on a bug fix that had been implemented to try to eliminate issues of texture loading on Silcon, and might offer an alternative solution, but needs investigation.
  • Firestorm Notes:
    • [Video: 46:26-51:50] 2K textures in Group Profiles: it has been noted that the use of 2K textures for Group Profile images will crash Firestorm 6.6.17 (pre-PBR release) for any user using that viewer who opens the Group Profile or tries to join the Group. So the request is (for now) for people not to use 2K textures as Profile images.
    • It was noted that Firestorm’s 3-version viewer policy stems from an old LL policy (introduced under Oz Linden’s tenure as VP of Engineering) which LL no longer adhere to (and by extension, TPVs are not obliged to adhere to if they do not wish to).

Next Meeting

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2024 SL SUG meetings week #35 summary: Combat 2.0; Kindriod AI

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ai-mura, July 2024 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 27th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end – my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

  • On Tuesday, August 27th, the SLS Main channel was restarted without any deployment.
  • On Wednesday, August 28th:
    • Simulators on the BlueSteel RC channel should receive the Picnic simulator update (which includes: llFindNotecardTextSync, llDerezObject, for the viewer side, group member lists can now be retrieved in a paginated manner).
      • Picnic also include the first of the region crossing improvements Monty Linden has been working on. These should see a) avatars already in a destination region getting better frame rates as others arrive in the region; b) crossing avatars with too many scripts will experience slower but smoother crossings.
      • Monty reminded people that region crossings involving vehicles are a more complicated issue and not part of this work.
    • The remaining simulator RC channels will be restarted without any new deployment / update.

SL Viewer Updates

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.9.10515727195, formerly the Atlasaurus-WebRTC RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling, WebRTC) promoted August 26.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • None.

Combat 2 Updates

Rider Linden is proposing the following for respawn:

When death occurs, if a respawn location has been set the agent will be teleported to the specified location. If no respawn location is set, the region’s default death behaviour applies (for instance teleport home, or teleport to telehub). The agent’s respawn point survives region crossing and death teleports, but is cleared when the agent makes an inter-region teleport or logs out of Second Life. The following new functions have been added to LSL: llSetRespawnLocation(vector position, rotation facing); llSetRespawnLandmark(string inventory_name); llClearRespawn() and llHasRespawnSet(key agent_id)

He further indicated that he had looked at the above as not necessarily having to be tied to an Experience, they could be granted via a HUD, a regular permission request or an Experience, however questions were raised about managing unwanted scripted respawn being created by users and other potential complexities that may move these functions back towards being Experience based.

This led to a discussion on options and Combat, which ran through the majority of the meeting – please refer to the video below.

Kindroid AI NPCs & Companions

On Monday, August 26th, Linden Lab announced “the integration” of AI companions and NPCs using Kindroid (with the announcement causing some confusing in using both “experience” in generic terms and in reference to SL Experiences).

With Kindroid, you can create engaging and lively characters with lifelike memory, intelligence, and personalities that interact and engage in emotionally-deep and meaningful ways – and then bring them to life within our virtual world. Imagine crafting characters that add fun and engaging new narratives into your roleplaying adventures – or maybe you’ll create a companion that can serve as a language tutor or mentor – the possibilities are endless!
With its API, you can integrate Kindroid characters into your Second Life experience using LSL and scripting, just like other objects. Whether you’re looking to enhance social interactions or explore new storytelling possibilities, Kindroid offers an exciting new dimension for any Second Life adventure.

– From the LL announcement

The announcement provides detailed instructions on using LSL to link an Kindroid AI “chatbot” with objects in-world, with LL recommending the use of Animesh, and, for security purposes, the use of the Experience Key Value Pairs (KVP) database to ensure security of API keys.

I’m honestly not au fait enough with Kindroid or AI chat system (generative or otherwise) to pass considered opinion. However, given it is reported at after the initial free avatar, Kindroid requires a subscription (from USD $13.99) after the 3-day free trial and offers limited assurances on user data protection, then its hard not to raise an eyebrow. Anyway, the topic itself came up for discussion towards the end of the meeting. Please refer to the link to the announcement above and the the video below for more.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2024 SL SUG meetings week #34 summary and WebRTC Update

Posted on by Inara Pey
Luane’s World, July 2024 – blog post

Updated with Video: apologies to Pantera, did not see her at the meeting!

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 20th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end – my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

  • On Tuesday, August 20th, the Summer Fun simulator release (which includes the Combat 2.0 updates and the new back-end Game Controller support, although the viewer-side elements of the latter have yet to make it into a formal project or RC viewer) was deployed to the SLS Main channel, making it grid-wide.
  • On Wednesday, August 21st, the simulator RC channels will be restarted without any new deployment / update.

SL Viewer Updates

It appears that all RC viewer except Atlasaurus (which now included the viewer-side WebRTC work) have been pulled to allow LL to focus on PBR / glTF issues per my CCUG meting summary of August 15th.

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Atlasaurus RC (Web RTC; PBR fixes; object take options; improved MOAP URL handling), version 7.1.9.10326512121, August 14.

WebRTC Update

On Tuesday, August 20th, Linden Lab issued an update on the WebRTC work.

Project Summary

  • Replacing Vivox for Voice in SL with WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”).
  • Benefits:
    • Move to a “defacto standard” for voice services, with features such as automatic echo cancellation, better noise cancellation and automatic gain control, etc., and offers much improved audio sampling rates for improved audio quality
    • WebRTC can be supplied within the viewer using a library and wrapper, ending the need for any additional third-party plug-in for Voice like SLvoice.exe, as supplied by Vivox.
    • Opens the door to adding new features and capabilities to SL Voice, some of which have been long-requested.
  • Care is being taking to address potential security issues (e.g. preventing eavesdropping, exposing users’ IP address (by using an internal proxy server), etc.).
  • Feature requests for WebRTC made via the WebRTC board on the SL Feedback Portal are being evaluated and some are being actioned, together with issues being investigated.
  • LL will be looking to Linux devs to help give feedback on how well WebRTC is working on their Linux viewers.

Key Points from LL’s Update

  • As per my viewer notes above, the viewer-side WebRTC work has been combined with the Atlasaurus RC viewer.
  • There are (at the time of writing) four regions on the WebRTC “Pop Rocks” simulator channel: WebRTC Voice 1 – WebRTC Voice 2 – WebRTC Voice 3 and WebRTC Voice 4.
  • Some of the known issues include:
    • Conference/Group/P2P in WebRTC is not yet available on the WebRTC Voice regions.
    • An occasional popup regarding voice server incompatibility can appear. Restart voice if you see this.  To restart voice in the viewer:
      • Hover over the speaker icon in the upper right corner of the viewer.
      • Wait for the dialogue to appear.
      • Uncheck the voice checkbox and wait a few seconds.
      • Recheck the voice checkbox.
    • Selecting another voice device while in a group, conference, or peer-to-peer call may drop the call.
    • Voice morphing is not available in WebRTC-Voice enabled regions.  If voice morphing had been enabled via an older viewer, you will see a dialogue to let you know the implications of using voice:
Voice morphing notification. Via; Linden Lab
  • As voice morphing is currently tied to Vivox, those currently using it are advised to look at the “many excellent alternatives for voice morphing that have become available to the general public as technology has developed”. In addition an FAQ has been produced to help with questions about WebRTC and Voice Morphing.

In Brief

Map System Update

  • Pepper Linden provided an update on the work to improve the world map and map tile updates (see my week #29 summary for more on this):
We had several deploys related to maps, included among them were changes to fix region surrounds in map tiles, as well as a fix to our maps CDN — hopefully they’ve been acting better for you all. Stale tile pruning is still on hold, as there’s a few regions on the grid that weren’t generating their tile — we have a fix that we’re hoping to get out soon, and once that is out, we’ll finally be able to turn on stale tile pruning. 
Bumping the tile resolution is on the roadmap. The current maps is very limited in what it can render — we’ve discussed moving to a viewer-based bot that would be capable of rendering mesh, etc.
  • Pepper also noted that Maps should load a lot faster.

General

We have some decent tests, found ways to hit weird edge cases, and general improvements are to be had. Vehicles with riders are still hilariously bad. We’ll have to tackle that in subsequent projects. It’s just hard to fathom.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2024 week #33: SL CCUG summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Grauland / Corsair Island, July 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, August 15th, 2024.

Meeting Purpose

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work. This meeting is held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
  • Meeting dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they re conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers Status

The Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling) updated to version 7.1.9.10326512121,  on August 14th.

The other viewers in the pipeline remain as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
  • Release channel cohorts:

Upcoming Releases – Change In Priority

As a result of PBR-related issues (see the section Performance Issues, below), the priority of upcoming viewer releases has changed.

  • The next planned viewer promotion was to have been the dedicated WebRTC Voice viewer.
  • The plan now is to prioritise a “more ambitious” viewer which will include the WebRTC updates and a number of high-level bug fixes related to performance (e.g.  a major vertex buffer fix, which although specifically targeted at Mac users, could help others on systems with integrated graphics).

Graphics / glTF

PBR Terrain Painting – Cosmic Linden

Summary
  • An in-development project. Current intent:
    • Provide a means to support the four PBR materials currently used in SL for “terrain painting”.
    • Will allow materials to be defined in their X,Y co-ordinates within a region by using a paint map, rather than having them defined by elevation defined in a height map. This will allow where grass or rock or stones or dirt, etc., appear within the region. providing much more flexibility in how terrain appears / changes.
    • Terrain painting will use the same permissions as terrain texturing (so if you have terraforming permissions, then tertian paining is possible; if you have the appropriate region permissions, you can define the PBR materials for the region.
    • Region owners / estate managers will have the ability to select whether the texture / heightmap is available in a region or whether the region uses terrain painting via a toggle switch in the Region floater. If Terrain painting is enabled at the region level, parcel holders (if I am understanding correctly) will be able to opt out / in.
  • Other points of note:
    • LL prefer to limit terrain painting to the four available slots at region revel, rather than allowing fully customisable swatches / slots at parcel level, as the latter presents “non-trivial issues” for terrain texture handling /loading.
    • Terrain painting will require a new entity to be introduced. Exactly what form this will take is still being discussed internally; it is unlikely to be a new asset type.
  • Much longer term options being considered for this capability might be to:
    • Allow prims to act as part of the terrain, inheriting the materials of the terrain, whilst still allowing the prim to be sized and shaped.
    • Perhaps allow the terrain within a region to be replaced by “something” else created externally to SL and then imported.
    • Neither of these ideas are currently being pursued beyond possible ideas / options.
Status
  • Cosmic believe she is getting close – perhaps another couple of weeks – to having an initial viewer build with the capability.
  • This initial build will allow terrain painting purely on the viewer-side; there will be no support for saving changes on the simulator; this will come as the work continues to be developed.

Transmission / IOR – Geenz Linden

  • Transmission and Index of Reflection (IOR)  will provide:
    • Both refraction and “blurry” refraction suitable for things like frosted glass surfaces.
    • Dispersion, allowing chromatic aberration, allowing the RGB channels to “separate out” based on a certain factor.
    • Volume, allowing an object surface to be tinted at different surface thicknesses .
    • Geenz is currently wrapping this work to get it into the Develop branch of the viewer following an internal demonstration at the Lab.

General Discussion

Performance Issues

  • It’s been confirmed that the potential for performance drops was missed within the code Firestorm took to integrate into their PBR viewer offering, and given they have the largest share of users (particularly those on low-to-mid range systems – e.g. those with 16Gb of RAM or less, and mid-to-low spec GPUs or with integrated graphics), their users have been the hardest hit with performance issues.
    • As a result, Linden Lab is now working with Firestorm to resolve the current issues.
    • As noted above, Linden Lab is now working to prioritise the release of a viewer with a number of fixes and updates aimed at improving / restoring viewer performance.
    • In the interim, the recommendation is for anyone experiencing severe performance issues to roll back to a pre-PBR viewer release.
    • Further, given that fixes beyond those currently being prioritised by LL will take time to surface, and the fact that there will continue to be systems that struggle with PBR, Firestorm has stated that version 6.6.17 of their viewer (the last pre-PBR release) will not be blocked per standard policy, but will remain available on as “as is” basis (e.g. not subject to bug maintenance or update with new features).
  • Fixes LL are looking to get out after the “prioritised” viewer has been released include:
    • Addressing  issues with the texture pipeline.
    • Fixing an issue whereby viewers on systems without dedicated video memory continually allocating available system memory to textures until all available system memory is consumed and the system suffers “performance death” until restarted.
    • A fix from the Alchemy team for an issue wherein if Mirrors are disabled in a viewer session, they continue using system resources until the viewer is restarted.
  • There will be “some form of communications coming out soon” to help inform people who are having a negative experience with PBR about what is going on to help alleviate issues.

In Brief

  • As far as enhancing rendering / shaders is concerned, the focus currently is on getting a working glTF scene implementation first, then working out what to backport to materials in inventory for applying to prims / non-glTF meshes. The will provide a good frame of reference when backporting materials to legacy objects and help maintain a consistency of appearance.
  • The meeting was overtaking by an extended discussion / diagnosis of a issue with hair which is becoming increasingly notices (hair appearing to “clump” or get blurred which does not appear to be directly related to colour alpha blending).
    • The problem is in part exacerbated by the fact the most SL hair is No Mod; so issues cannot be easily user-addressed.
    • No clear solution to this was presented, and the conversation is liable to continue, so will update if / when a way forward becomes clearer.
    • One idea floated, but will require a lot more internal investigation before LL move one way or the other, is to potentially add flags that will allow certain parameters within No Mod objects to be modified where it makes sense for them to be modifiable.
    • Expect further discussion on this.

Next Meetings

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2024 SL SUG meetings week #33 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Cloud Edge II, July 2024 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 13th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log. Pantera videoed the meeting, and the recording is embedded at the end of this piece – my thanks, as always, for her work.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

  • There will be no planned deployments for the week, but the channels will be restarted. LL have decided to hold-off deploying the Summer Fun / Combat 2 update to further channels for another week. Rider Linden described the reason thus:
As we rolled out further we encountered a product that had a scripting bug that caused it to misbehave on the new servers. We reached out to the creator and he’s fixed the issue and is issuing updates. We wanted to give him a chance to get those out all across the grid.

SL Viewer Updates

On Tuesday, August 13th, the WebRTC RC viewer updated to version 7.1.9.10325451220.

The rest of the current crop of viewers remains as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling), version 7.1.9.10220184061, August 7.
    • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.9.9555137545, June 21.
    • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.9.9469671545, June 14.

In Brief

Combat Partnership Reminder

  • With Combat 2.0 becoming available, Linden Lab has announced the Combat 2.0 Promotion Partnership Programme has been launched.
    • The intention behind the Promotion Partnership Programme this is to give those actively involved in combat activities in Second Life the “opportunity to help us spread the word across the grid about Combat 2.0 in Second Life”.
    • In particular, this will see some of the LL combat regions (e.g. Concord and Lexington) a facelift and use them to showcase Combat 2.0, with participants in the Programme asked to donate free-to-use combat items for use in the regions.
    • In addition, participants will have their regions / communities included in a Combat section of the Destination Guide. There may be other benefits for participants as well.
    • Those interested can sign-up via this Google form.

General

  • Recent bugs / requests under review / potentially to be pulled into upcoming simulator updates (e.g. BBG, which will follow Picnic):
  • Weird region crossing behaviour:
    • Various reports of a rare and intermittent vehicle region crossing oddity, in which the crossing goes wrong, unseating the rider- but rezzing a grey prim in the rider’s place as a par to of the vehicle’s linkset “created” by the rider. When unlinked, the prim slides around on the ground but has a rotation lock property on it that keeps it upright.
    • Some think this might be a very old bug that can replace the vehicle rider with an agent-sized cube, per [#BUG-3547] Sim Crossing Rezzes Objects Surrounding Individuals.
    •  It is unclear if any report has been filed recently against the problem, so if anyone encounters it, they are asked to raise a bug report with as much details as possible.
    • Leviathan Linden noted:
Avatars ARE prims, but with some meta data and a session that makes them special. The prim should have been deleted when the session was cleaned up or failed…. which suggests the session itself failed to be created on the far side of the region crossing.
  • There was a discussion on regex functions, based off of llRegex* functions, of which Rider Liden said:
I’ve just not had time to get to it yet. I think I have the code organized to a point right now where they wouldn’t be too much work to implement.
  • Please refer to the video below for further details of the meeting.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.