Category: SL User Group Meetings

SL projects update week 34 (2): Server, viewer, group ban list, HTTP

Posted on by Inara Pey

Note: with the exception of the server deployment review, the majority of this update has been taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday 21st August. A video of the meeting, recorded by panterapolnocy, is available at the end of this article

Server Deployments Week 34

As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for news, updates and feedback.

  • On Tuesday August 20th the Main channel had Server-side Appearance (SSA) enabled, as per this blog post from the Lab.
  • On Wednesday 21st August, the Magnum RC received a new maintenance package with “under the hood” changes which should be invisible to residents, while BlueSteel and LeTigre received an update to the package deployed to BlueSteel in week 33. This includes a fix for the “grey box” attachment issue which affected multiple avatars riding an object over BlueSteel region crossings. Additionally, these channels also saw SSA enabled, meaning the entire main grid is now running SSA.

SSA Update

For information on the Server-side Appearance deployment, please see my separate report.

SL Viewer Updates

A new release candidate debuted on August 20th with the name “CHUIStorm” (3.6.4.280048). This is a merging of the CHUI and Snowstorm RC viewers with the latest de facto release code base. The reason for merging the two RCs is because the Lab felt there were “too many RCs in flight”, making it difficult to determine which one should be promoted to the release viewer if several appeared ready simultaneously. In future, the Lab hopes to keep the total number of RCs in the channel to around two or three.

Interestingly, the Google Breakpad RC has vanished from the list of RC viewers in the Release channel.

The Materials project viewer was promoted to the Release channel on August 21st (RC 3.6.4.280083), leaving the current total number of RC viewers in the channel at three (CHUIStorm, Cocoa (Mac) and Materials).

Next in the Pipeline

While the order in which they appear or the overall time frame for their release is not clear, there are a number of project viewers which will be appearing in the near future. These include:

  • A further Snowstorm project viewer (third-party developer contributions) – currently with LL’s QA team
  • A new Interest List project viewer (which has had trouble passing QA – see below)
  • A further SSA project viewer – for details see my SSA Update
  • A Group Bans project viewer (see below)
  • An HTTP project viewer (see the HTTP update below)

In addition, Oz Linden hinted that he may have a surprise announcement at the next TPV Developer meeting in two weeks. While he said absolutely nothing further on the subject, the resultant speculation was that he might have been referring to the arrival of an Experience Tools project viewer. Linden Lab accidentally exposed such a viewer a few weeks ago, but quickly moved it back to a private status, so there is an awareness that a viewer is in development. Whether the speculation is right or wrong will be revealed in the fullness of time!

Interest List Update

As noted above, the viewer-side updates to the Interest list project continue to evade a project viewer release, but are expected to appear “soon”. While the code does not contain any mandatory changes TPVs must adopt, there are obviously optimisations within the code which will be beneficial for TPVs to pick-up once the repository is public.

Group Ban List

Baker Linden continues to make good progress with the group ban list project. He is currently working on what he sees as the last major part of the initial work: getting the viewer connected to the server. After that, he reports he has “a lot of security checks, and some minor additions”. There’s still no date for a project viewer, but it would appear that it is not that far from reaching a status of “real soon now”.

HTTP Update

Monty Linden is continuing to work on his HTTP updates, although he has most recently been trying to get the ” bureaucratic details” sorted and getting a QA pass on both the server-side and the viewer side work. He’s also trying to get a DNS fix in as well, which he describes as the “great DNS look-up failures problem” which the Lab has had for a number of years. He thinks he has a fix for the issue, but he’s not 100% certain.

Monty's HTTP work is now focusing on mesh connections
Monty’s HTTP work is now focusing on mesh connections

In terms of the HTTP work, Monty is trying to get a project viewer lined-up, and describes the major feature within it as being the reduction of the number of connections used by mesh so that it will be possible to start using keepalives  with mesh as well.

As I’ve previously reported, Monty has already reduced the number of mesh connections from 32 to 8. Going forward, eight will be the new default (rather than 32), with the aim being to cap the total number of mesh connections used by the viewer, with adaptive throttling and two different re-try schemes. The hope is that this will further improve network utilisation by creating more effective viewer / server connections; it should also help less capable routers.

Continue reading “SL projects update week 34 (2): Server, viewer, group ban list, HTTP” →

SL project updates week 34 (1): server releases, SSA, viewer, Oculus Rift

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Week 34

As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for news, updates and feedback.

Second Life Server (SLS Main) Channel – Tuesday August 20th

The Main channel had Server-side Appearance (SSA) enabled, as per this blog post from the Lab. As I’ve previously noted, users will need to run a maintained viewer which incorporates the SSA code in order for other avatars to render correctly in their view. See the release notes for additional information to the above links.

There were no other updates in this deployment.

Release Candidate Channels – Wednesday August 21st

  • Magnum should receive a new maintenance package which “only includes a few internal bug fixes which shouldn’t show any visible changes to the residents”. In describing this at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday August 13th, Simon Linden said, “There’s one performance fix that you might see in the viewer … you shouldn’t get those situations where you see lots of ‘duplicate caps. messages” – this package was deployed to LeTigre in week 33
  • Bluesteel and LeTigre will both be on an update to the package deployed to BlueSteel in week 33, which includes:
    • A fix for the “grey box attachment  issue” (non-public BUG-3547, details below)
    • A (further?) update to for “llListen in linked objects is listening at root instead of linked object local position *after re-rezzing the linkset*”, which was also listed in the BlueSteel release notes for week 32  (non-public JIRA BUG-3291)
    • The code to block avatars entering a region / objects being rezzed in a region during the last 60-seconds before a restart. In addition, restart warning pop-ups will include the region name. This was again in the release notes for week 32, so would appear to be a further update to that code
    • Fixes for further simulator crash modes.

Further, all three RC channels will have Server-side Appearance enabled at the conclusion of the Wednesday August 21st deployments.

SL Viewer Updates

Release Viewer Updated

Tuesday August 20th saw a new update to the de facto release viewer, when the former Maintenance Viewer RC 3.6.3.279564, dated August 12th, was promoted. The full list of updates for this release can be found in the release notes. However, of most interest to many will be the fact that it includes the particle selection capability.

As previously reported in these updates, this capability (MAINT-2268) allows a user to right-click on a particle emitter and mute it, blocking the particle emissions from their viewer. This is liable to be very welcome to those using regions which are frequently the target of particle griefing, as it means that the emitter itself no longer needs to be located and blocked. In addition, the new code has a FPS limit on particles, and will stop generating new particles when frame rates drop to 4 FPS or lower.

Other SL Viewer Updates

The promotion of the Maintenance Viewer RC to release status leaves four remaining release candidate viewers at this time: CHUI, the MAC-focused Cocoa RC viewer, the Google Breakpad RC for better crash / stats reporting and the Snowstorm RC, which contains updates contributed to LL by third-party developers. As is now the practice, these will each be rebuilt using the “new” de facto release viewer code, and so will have updates appearing over the coming days.

Oculus Rift

Oculus Rift - UI work progressing at the Lab
Oculus Rift – UI work progressing at the Lab

Work is progressing with integrating Oculus Rift with Second Life. While I’m not overly interested in the Rift myself, one are that does interest me is that of the UI and how it is going to be integrated with the headset – as I’ve commented in the past, while others see it as a potential issue, I don’t necessarily agree, although I’ve felt that a balance would have to be struck in order to avoid the UI completely overwhelming  / spoiling the first-person view.

Speaking at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday August 20th, Simon Linden indicated that this is on the Lab’s collective mind as well – and that a potentially clever solution is being tried-out to ensure the UI menus, etc., are usable without interfering with the user’s view of things:

I know recently they were working on how to have the SL UI appear … having menus hanging out in your vision is an interesting design, but you’re not in a “window” anymore … In the Rift it’s projected on a surface around you … so you look up to see the menus and they float there in mid-air … I think they’re experimenting with the shape of that surface too … if it’s flat, the text can look funny as it’s slanting away from you.

This, I have to say, does sound intriguing, and I’d be curious to see it in action; if nothing else, it gets me thinking somewhat of Bruce Branit’s World Builder – although admittedly, the protagonist in that piece is physically “inside” his virtual realm…

If nothing else, that gives me an excuse to post the new HD version of World Builder Bruce posted to his YouTube channel earlier this month (yes, I know it’s not the first time I’ve posted it, but I do love the movie).

Related Links

Server-side Appearance to go live across the grid August 20th/21st

Posted on by Inara Pey

A blog post has appeared from the Lab announcing that Project Sunshine – otherwise known as Server-side Appearance (or Baking as was), and a part of the Project Shining initiative – will go live across the grid this week.

The blog post doesn’t provide any date(s) by which this will occur, however Nyx Linden has confirmed that:

  • The Main channel will have Server-side Appearance (SSA) enabled following the server deployments on Tuesday August 20th
  • BlueSteel and LeTigre will have SSA enabled following the Release Candidate deployments on Wednesday August 21st (as Magnum is currently the only channel with SSA enabled).

So, if you haven’t already updated to an SSA-capable viewer, you have less than 24 hours in which to do so before you start seeing a lot of avatars failing to render correctly.

Currently, all maintained TPV viewers with the exception of Dolphin (V3-style) and Imprudence (V1-style) support SSA rendering of avatars.

Commenting on the upcoming enabling, Nyx Linden said:

We have stats that show that it should speed up avatar loading time for everyone, so hopefully it will go smoothly and be a great improvement across the grid.

As with previous blog-posts on the subject, the Lab have included a viewer of the new service and what it means.

So, as the video says, “Don’t be cloudy and grey, enjoy Sunshine today!”

Related Links

SL projects update week 33 (2): server releases, group ban list, texture issues

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Week 33

As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for news, updates and feedback.

  • As noted in part 1 of this report, there was no deployment to the Main channel in week 33, as a result of the “grey box” attachment issue appearing in the week 32 BlueSteel deployment
  • The Magnum RC channel remained on SSA, with no other updates
  • The LeTigre RC received a new server maintenance package with “under the hood changes” which should not be visible / perceptible to users. This package saw the removal of SSA from LeTigre – Caleb Linden apologised at the Server Beta meeting for the confusion this caused as the forum thread & release notes did not initially make it clear
  • The BlueSteel RC received further updates to the fixes released in week 32 and the fix for the “grey box” attachment issue

Viewer Updates

The CHUI RC viewer updated to release 3.6.3.279849 on August 15th (download & release notes). The Materials project viewer also underwent a further update to release 3.6.3.279904 on August 16 (download & release notes).

Server-side Appearance

As noted above, SSA is currently only enabled on Magnum for the time being. A decision will be made on Monday August 19th on server-side updates and deployments, and until then the Lab is keeping quiet as to what may or may not happen in terms of SSA enabling. However, from comments passed in recent discussions and a hint in the forum deployment thread, it would appear that if the data obtained from Magnum during the week remains solid, SSA might be considered ready for “prime time” in week 34.

The removal of SSA from LeTigre did cause some confusion, with at least one JIRA (SUN-109) being raised as a result. Given the JIRA refers to the slowness of avatar rendering, rather than to any overall failures (which shouldn’t happen anyway, given the viewer code is currently backwards compatible with the “old” avatar baking service), this tends to point to the fact that the rapid nature of SSA baking is being appreciated.

Group Ban list

The obligatory Baker Linden shot :)
The obligatory Baker Linden shot 🙂

“Group bans are coming along pretty well,” Baker Linden informed his ‘Thursday after meeting class’.  He went on:

I chose to take the rest of this week to improve the code rather than continue progressing. I really hated copying an entire source file without trying to refactor it … So now it’s refactoring, cleaning up, and after that the viewer will be finished. Well, I need to add the functionality to some other subsystems and have it actually send an HTTP message but that stuff is all stubbed in anyway.

Some of the cleaning up work apparently involves  removing the, umm, colourful metaphors he used when first commenting on the code to highlight those bits he wanted to poke about at. These have apparently been causing a few giggles among those able to peek into the repository!

Given the work is still ongoing, there is no ETA for a project or beta viewer as yet, and this may be delayed a little more while Baker considers the problem of group chat.

Because of the way in which group chat works, anyone who is removed from a group while they have the group chat window open is actually able to continue chatting / spamming within the group until they close the group chat window, unless the group moderator remembers to block them from chat first. This hadn’t been on Baker’s radar, and he’s going to take a look around and see what can / needs to be done to try to make sure the group ban function won’t suffer this weakness, if possible.

Continue reading “SL projects update week 33 (2): server releases, group ban list, texture issues” →

SL projects news week 33 (1): server, “grey box attachment” issue, SSA, materials

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Week 33

As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for news, updates and feedback.

Second Life Server (SLS Main) Channel – Tuesday August 13th

There was no update to the Main channel. It had been anticipated that the package deployed to BlueSteel in week 32 would reach the Main channel this week, but this is not the case, for the reason given below (see the Grey Box Attachment issue notes, below),

Release Candidate Channels – Wednesday August 14th

    • Magnum remains with SSA enabled, but otherwise received no further updates.
    • LeTigre should receive a new maintenance package which “only includes a few internal bug fixes which shouldn’t show any visible changes to the residents”. In describing this at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday August 13th, Simon Linden said, “There’s one performance fix that you might see in the viewer … you shouldn’t get those situations where you see lots of ‘duplicate caps. messages”
    • Bluesteel should receive a new server maintenance package comprising:
      • A fix for the “grey box attachment  issue” (non-public BUG-3547, details below)
      • A (further?) update to for “llListen in linked objects is listening at root instead of linked object local position *after re-rezzing the linkset*”, which was also listed in the BlueSteel release notes for week 32  (non-public JIRA BUG-3291)
      • The code to block avatars entering a region / objects being rezzed in a region during the last 60-seconds before a restart. In addition, restart warning pop-ups will include the region name. This was again in the release notes for week 32, so would appear to be a further update to that code
      • Fixes for further simulator crash modes.

“Grey Box” Attachment Issue

This is a problem whereby a grey prim appears around any passenger(s) sitting on a boat / vehicle when crossing from a BlueSteel region to any other region (including another BlueSteel region) – the driver / pilot is left unchanged. The affected avatar has no control and requires a relog, while the prim itself appears to be linked to vehicle when edited.

The "grey box attachment issue" (image courtesy of Jen Cuddihy via the SL forums)
The “grey box attachment issue” (image courtesy of Jen Cuddihy via the SL forums)

It is thought the bug was introduced during the week 32 BlueSteel deployment, and Simon Linden indicated it was the reason there was no Main channel deployment for week 33, saying:

We didn’t update the main channel today. There was a bug found involving vehicles and region crossings that needed to be fixed, so that update will go out tomorrow [the BlueSteel RC deployment].  Basically, don’t sit more than 1 person on a vehicle when leaving a BlueSteel region, otherwise it turns you into a box :P.  It happens to the 2nd (and probably more, if you had a crowd) person seated on the object.

Kelly Linden explained what was happening to cause this:

Every agent has a ‘task’ representation on the server that is the same as a prim. The bug is in sending the linked set w/ avatars to the other region: avatars after the first are losing the special avatar treatment and getting passed as a regular linked prim. So that prim is what the server thinks all avatars look like.

Simon added:

The region crossing code basically un-sits avatars from an object, sends both the avatars and object to the next region [as separate sets of data], which puts them back together. In this case, the 2nd avatar doesn’t get detached properly and things go south from there. So the 2nd avatar gets sent over bundled up with the object … which it’s not designed to do.

The additional avatars on the vehicle at the time of the region crossing essentially end-up in limbo, with data caught between the two simulators. “The regions are very confused about that avatar data by that point, I’m sure a relog would be needed,” Simon said.

An interesting side-effect of this is that the bug makes it possible to exceed the 256-prim linkset limit – sort-of. Enterprising individuals have realised that if you rez a 256-prim linkset, sit a number of avatars on it and move it across a region boundary, it will acquire an additional prim for each additional passenger over the first avatar to sit on it. However, the ability is of limited value; make any changes to the enlarged linkset, such as unlinking a child prim or trying to texture one of the greyprims, and the entire thing turns no modify / no copy – and the fix being deployed to BlueSteel should correct the problem anyway.

Server-side Appearance

Just as a reminder. There are no further SSA deployments planned for week 33. This is to allow for some back-end updates to be made to the SSA servers. These updates shouldn’t result in any visible difference to users on SSA-enabled regions, and are intended to fix a couple of scenarios where the viewer would have to re-try requests when it shouldn’t have to. The Lab wants to get these updates deployed to the SSA server prior to making any move to rolling-out SSA to the entire grid.

There have been comments on the forums that SSA “must” be encountering major problems as the deployment has been so protracted. This is not the case. Linden Lab (via Nyx Linden) have always stated that the deployment would proceed very, very cautiously because it is such a fundamental change in how Second Life functions. Even though the Lab has indicated that very, very few problems have been encountered with enabling the service so far, and the load testing on both Magnum and LeTigre (representing a little over 20% of the grid) has been very positive, they are sticking to their softly, softly approach.

Viewer Updates

As the Vivox updates became the de facto release viewer in week 32, the remaining five release candidate viewers in the viewer release channel have been underground rebuilding using the updated release viewer code base. On Monday August 12th, updates for both the Cocoa Viewer for Mac (version 3.6.3.279554 – download and release notes) and the Maintenance Viewer (version 3.6.3.279564 – download and release notes) were released.

Materials Project

The Materials Project viewer was updated to version 3.6.3.279651 on August 8th. This release lists a large number of fixes, perhaps most notably those related to problems with the appearance of alpha textures under both local lights and sunlight, and numerous issues with mesh rendering and lighting within the materials viewer. Please refer to the full list of JIRA items in the release notes linked-to above.

ALM Concerns

Concerns have been raised about performance issues as a result of having the Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) enabled by default (as is now frequently the case for most graphics cards, as is a requirement in order to see materials in use in-world).

The amount by which ALM can affect the user experience is variable, and subject to a lot of influences, not just the graphics cards / computer system the viewer is running on. Some people with systems similar to my own (see the panel on the right for my system spec), have noted “significant” impact when running with ALM enabled on a materials-capable viewer.

Part of the problem is the “ALM” is a very broad term, and other options within the viewer can influence performance, but will not impact the ability to see materials even if they are turned off – such as having shadows set to None, for example, or having water reflections set to Minimal and turning off local lights (via debug or Phototools, for example). So part of the problem is that of communicating what can be done from within the viewer to help offset performance impacts should they occur, but which don’t limit their ability to see materials in use.

Quick ways to improve performance when running in ALM to see materials. Top left: you can uncheck Ambient Occulsion, keep Shadows set to None and drop water reflections to Minimal. Bottom Left: Using Debug Settings from the Advanced Menu, set RenderLocalLights to FALSE. Right: Firestorm / Phototools, ambient occulsion, hadows, local lights and facelights can all be disabled from the Light tab and water reflections lowered from the WL tab
Quick ways to improve performance when running in ALM to see materials. Top left: you can uncheck Ambient Occlusion, keep Shadows set to None and drop water reflections to Minimal. Bottom Left: Using Debug Settings from the Advanced Menu, set RenderLocalLights to FALSE. Right: Firestorm / Phototools, ambient occlusion, shadows, local lights and facelights can all be disabled from the Light tab and water reflections lowered from the WL tab

Related Links

SL projects update week 32 (3): all things viewer, SSA, HTTP and more

Posted on by Inara Pey
A typical TPV dev meeting
A typical TPV dev meeting

The Viewer Release Process and Viewer News

There are currently five viewer release candidates sitting in the viewer release channel. These are:

  • CHUI updates
  • Cocoa updates for the Mac version of the viewer
  • Google Breakpad updates (fixes and updates to improve the level of crash reporting from the viewer)
  • Maintenance viewer updates
  • Snowstorm updates (third-party contributions to the viewer)

As the first release candidate has now become the de facto viewer release (the Vivox updates, see part one of this report), all of the remaining release candidates are undergoing rebuilds using the “new” release viewer code base, and this is expected to be completed in week 33.

The current number of release candidates is considered to be atypical of the process, and reflects the fact that there is a backlog of viewer updates to be cleared. Once this has happened, it is anticipated that the number of release candidates within the viewer release channel will fall. In the meantime, it means we could be seeing new viewer releases (i.e. release candidates being promoted to the de facto release viewer) at the rate of one a week, depending upon how well individual RCs perform in user testing, until such time as the number of RC viewers becomes more manageable.

Installing Multiple Release Candidate Viewers & the Auto-updater

By default, release candidate viewers are intended to install / be installed into the same location as the de facto release viewer. Therefore, if you wish to run multiple RC viewers, you must install them manually into separate folders.

However, there is a problem in installing multiple RC viewer under windows, whereby the last location used to install a viewer is recorded by the installer (presumably as a registry setting), and the auto-updater will automatically use that location to install any update. So, if you manually install “Release Candidate B” into its own folder, and then receive an update for “Release Candidate A” (already installed on your PC) via the auto-updater, it will be installed into the folder containing “Release Candidate B”, overwriting it. This may even happen if the auto-updater is “disabled” within viewer preferences (see here for notes on how to avoid this).

At least one JIRA (non-public BUG-3522) has been raised against this issue. However, while LL are still investigating the problem, if it lies within the installer itself, it may not be addressed as there is an unwillingness at the Lab to get deeply involved in the mechanics of the installer.

Viewer Downgrades

There have been reports of the auto-updater mechanism forcing people to downgrade their installed viewer to an earlier release. While it “shouldn’t happen”, and may have been fixed, anyone who does experience the problem when auto-updating a viewer is asked to raise a bug report with as much information as possible on what happened (i.e. version being run before the update, version running after the update, date of update, etc.).

Making the Viewer Management System Available to TPVs

The Lab is experimenting with making the viewer management system available to TPVs if they wish to make use of it. This will mean that TPVs will have to port the code for use in their own viewer / environments, but it could help them with automating viewer updates if they don’t already have such a mechanism in place. One of the potential benefits of this for those TPVs following the Lab’s lead is that, as a result of changes also being made to the Lab’s reporting mechanisms, they will be able to receive a range of stats reports on their viewers directly from the Lab.

Settings.xml Changes

The current Snowstorm release candidate includes a change to how the settings.xml file works (the file which controls your viewer settings). This change will only affect those who have more than one Linden Lab viewer installed on the same computer (for example, someone who has the release viewer, a beta viewer and several project viewers installed), and will see all of the installed LL viewers using the same settings.xml file, rather than each creating a separate version of the file. This should prevent issues where the settings from one LL viewer are incorrectly applied to another, as can sometimes occur at present.

Interest List News

As noted in earlier parts of this report, Andrew Linden has wrapped-up his current work on interest lists. However, the project viewer for some of the work still has yet to appear, and is apparently still encountering problems getting through LL’s QA process. The code has been “real close” to being ready for release in some form on a number of occasions before getting kicked back for further work. The hope is that it will appear as a project viewer – or possibly a beta or release candidate – “soon”.

Continue reading “SL projects update week 32 (3): all things viewer, SSA, HTTP and more” →