Category: SL User Group Meetings

SL projects update week 12 (1): server releases, SSB and more

Posted on by Inara Pey

Sever Deployments for Week 12

Second Life Server (SLS)

On Tuesday March 19th, the Main channel received the server maintenance package which had been re-deployed to Magnum in week 11. As with the Magnum re-deploy, it excludes the fix for VWR-786 while LL go “back to the drawing board” to try to correct issues. However, it does include the following two fixes:

  • BUG-1612: region Owners and estate managers finding they are unable to teleport back to their region after disabling direct teleports to the region
  • SVC-8019: region visibility delays following region restarts.

The release notes for the deployment are available on the SL wiki, as usual.

Release Candidate Channels

On Wednesday March 20th, the Release Candidate channels should receive the following updates:

  • BlueSteel and LeTigre: should receive the same updates as deployed to the SLS channel on Tuesday March 19th, but otherwise retain the same updates received in week 11 – release notes (BlueSteel)
  • Magnum: should receive further updates to Andrew Linden’s interest list work, as per the release notes.  Specific interest list bug fixes included with this update comprise:
    • Updates for objects that are out of view are delayed for a maximum of 5 seconds, at which point they will be sent (mitigates BUG-1779)
    • Fix for “No object updates from vehicles after some region crossings” (BUG-1814)
    • Fix for “Agent appears in incorrect position to other agents after being moved by a sim teleporter” (BUG-1795).

Server-side Baking

As reported in week 11, the second official Server-side Baking pile-on / load test appeared to go well on Thursday March 14th. Speaking at the Content Creator’s User Group meeting, SSB project lead Nyx Linden reported:

Looks like things are going well overall – the back-end services are performing well. There are still some inventory and attachment rezzing issues, but these are believed to not be regressions from current limits.

A few reports of issues, some of which we have fixes for, others we’re investigating, and we’re looking at what it would take to fix up the systems that were falling over … there were a couple of new bug reports we’re investigating.

A further SSB pile-on / load test conducted in Friday 15th March, but exclusively with the Firestorm viewer pre-release with SSB support. Numbers at the Firestorm test were roughly the same as those for the “official” test, and overall, the outcome was the same – much lower reported SSB issues, but similar problems with outfit attachments rezzing from inventory (or rather, failing to), which was common to both parts of the test.

The Firestorm SSB pile-on / load test, March 15th
Peoiple gather for the Firestorm SSB pile-on / load test, March 15th

The inventory issues have themselves become more of a focus of investigation outside of SSB itself (attachments aren’t affected by the SSB code changes, which  relate directly to the likes of skin, shape and clothing layer changes. While the inventory issues were thought to relate solely to Aditi, Nyx indicated that the problem is likely common to Agni as well. commenting:

We were seeing similar failures in inventory, etc on both the old pipeline and the new pipeline, and in areas that we didn’t change. So if we repeated the test on Agni we think we’d see similar failures. We’re looking at the root causes, but attachment rezzing failures won’t necessarily block our first release … We’re looking at the inventory & attachment issues and where their root causes are.

Expect further updates on the latter issue as they become known.

HTTP Testing

All of the test regions for Monty Linden’s upcoming HTTP updates are now up-and-running on Aditi, and available for public access (allowing for the caps on avatars in the primary test regions). The regions are:

As noted in previous project reports, Monty is keep to have TPVs and scripters test the capabilities in order to gather more comprehensive data on his work.

Continue reading “SL projects update week 12 (1): server releases, SSB and more” →

SL project updates: week 11 (2): Server, SSB testing and HTTP news

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update Match 18th: The “mesh only” HTTP test regions, referred to as “coming soon” in the HTTP section of this report are now online on Aditi, and are called MeshTest2 (DRTSIM-203), MeshTest2A (DRTSIM-203A) and MeshTest2H (DRTSIM-203H), respectively. In addition, the sandbox areas (unrestricted access) are also now available as Sandbox HTTP (DRTSIM-203), Sandbox HTTP A (DRTSIM-203A) and Sandbox HTTP H (DRTSIM-203H).

Server Deployments

The planned deployments for the week went ahead as scheduled. Namely:

  • On Tuesday March 12th, the Second Life Server (SLS) Main channel received Baker Linden’s large (as in complex) object rezzing project, designed to improve region performance when rezzing large objects – release notes
  • On Wednesday March 13th, the BlueSteel and LeTigre Release Candidate (RC) channels received a server maintenance package, intended to fix a common crash mode – release notes
  • Also on Wednesday March 13th, the Magnum RC channel received an update to the server maintenance package deployed in week 10, with further improvements / fixes. These included the removal of the fix for VWR-786, which rather than correctly fixing the known issue (IMs to friends not respecting their privacy settings) resulted in all IMs to non friends returning the “User is not online” message, regardless as to whether the recipient was online or not. Release notes for the package are on the SL wiki. The Lab, according to Maestro Linden, is going to have to, “Go back to the drawing board,” to resolve this problem.

As I’ve mentioned in past reports, the aim of this “large object” rezzing project from Baker Linden is to improve how complex objects (those which have a lot of scripts and / or a large file size), with the focus of the work moving the parsing of object files onto a background thread in order to prevent the simulator being choked and performance spiking when such objects are rezzed. As such, the work applies to both in-world objects and attachments, with mesh potentially being a primary beneficiary of the changes. The thought is that the new code may also help frustrate griefers, as the simulator FPS should be better when multiple scripted objects are being rezzed.

SL Viewer

The SL beta and development viewer were both updated on March 14th. The beta viewer moved to release 3.5.0.271843, with updates primarily aimed at CHUI, as anticipated. The development viewer moved to release 3.5.1.271846, and remains broadly in sync with the beta version of the viewer.

Vivox  Updates

Alongside the FMODex (sound system) updates which will be forthcoming after the formal release of CHUI as mentioned in part 1 of this report, Vivox (the SL Voice service) is also due to be updated to version 4.5. Like FMODex, this is unlikely to happen until after CHUI has reached a formal release., but once implemented, this should result in an improvement in Voice quality.

Mesh Deformer

There is still no news on this. Both the issues relating to avatar shapes and weighting are still awaiting internal resources at LL. As such, there is no timeline as to when any movement might be seen on this project.

Interest List – Issues and Further Updates

More interest list updates on Aditi and likely heading for a Release Candidate channel in week 12.
More interest list updates on Aditi and likely heading for a Release Candidate channel in week 12.

The following fixes, related to the interest list code, should be in an RC deployment in week 12 (week commencing Monday March 18th):

  • A fix issue where you ‘lose track’ of a vehicle after a region crossing
  • A fix for BUG-1795 (“Agent appears in incorrect position to other agents after being moved by a sim teleporter”), which should see an end to avatars still appearing in view after they have used a teleport system
  • A fix for the issue where object moving off-camera would suddenly ‘snap’ into place when you turned your camera so they were in your field-of-view. Whereas up until now, the new interest list code has not sent any updates for such objects, the fix to be deployed in week 12 will once again allow updates to be sent to the viewer, but at a much lower rate than before the interest list code was originally deployed.

The code with these updates is currently available for testing on two regions on Aditi: Solariam (rated: Adult) and Tischeriidae (rated: Moderate). This code also includes updates to improve object rendering (particularly with the viewer set to low bandwidths) and to object cacheing as well, as noted in the first part of this report, and those wishing to do so are encouraged to do so, although testing any improvements to vehicle regions crossings might be contingent upon being Adult verified.

Server-side Baking (SSB) Pile-on / Load Test

The second SSB pile-on load test took place on Aditi on Thursday March 14th, immediately following the Server Beta User Group meeting. The test was undertaken using the latest version of the Sunshine project viewer and appeared to be broadly satisfactory, involving both users and a fair few LL personnel – Nyx (x2, as he had his alt there), Simon, Maestro, Monty, Dan, Don, Log, and others. As with the original test, this took place on two regions – one running the current baking system, the other running the new service. Participants were asked to change outfits using the current service, so that the project team could get some baseline / comparison stats, before everyone moved over to the “new” service on the adjoining region.

Continue reading “SL project updates: week 11 (2): Server, SSB testing and HTTP news” →

SL project updates week 11 (1): server deployments, viewer, and interest list updates

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments

Second Life Server (Main channel)

On Tuesday March 12th, the Main channel received Baker Linden’s large object rezzing project which had been deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre in week 10. This project is designed to improve simulator handling of “large” (as a file size / complexity, rather than physical object size) so that the simulator does not stall / choke when handling one or more such objects. makes sim performance smoother while objects are being rezzed. Further details on the project are in my week 10 update, and the server release notes are available in the SL wiki.

Release Candidate Channels

On Wednesday March 13th, the Release Candidate channels should be updated as follows:

  • BlueSteel and LeTigre: both of these channels should be receiving the same server maintenance package, intended to fix a common crash mode – release notes
  • Magnum should receive an update to the server maintenance package it received in week 10, with further improvements / fixes. These include the removal of the fix for VWR-786, which rather than correctly fixing the known issue (IMs to friends do not respect their privacy settings) resulted in all IMs to non friends returning the “User is not online” message, regardless as to whether the recipient was online or not. Release notes for the package are on the SL wiki

SL Viewer

There has been no major viewer movement since the last update in week 10.

CHUI, the Communication Hub User Interface

CHUI looks set to be merged-in to the Snowglobe code, with Oz Linden stating he was hoping to start on this on Monday 11th March. There are concerns as to how LL’s ongoing work with the viewer might impact TPVs going forward. As it is, CHUI is liable to remain in the SL beta viewer for a while (and there is expected to be one more CHUI release into beta, as perviously noted).

Materials Project

Work is continuing on clearing the current issues within the viewer code, with a further push of the non-public viewer expected this week, which may resolve some of the problems.

The Potential LL Roadmap for Viewer Releases

While things are always in a state of flux, the potential order of viewer releases from LL’s perspective is currently veering towards:

  • Materials is now unlikely to “be seen” until after the code has merged with the CHUI code  – this follow-on from the SSB code currently undergoing a merge with CHUI and the move to merge CHUI with the Snowglobe code mentioned above
  • This does not mean that a materials project viewer will not appear prior to CHUI reaching the SL release viewer; rather it means that when a materials project viewer appears, it is likely to have CHUI incorporated into it
  • That said, materials will likely only arrive in the release version of the SL viewer after CHUI has been formally released and (most likely) SSB has been deployed
  • Other updates – FMODex is currently awaiting CHUI as well, but has no clear release date; the same is true of the Mac Cocoa project. Currently, it appears as if these are unlikely to reach mainstream release until after CHUI has been formally released.

Most TPVs are currently focusing on the Server-side Baking (SSB) integration, as this has a significantly greater impact on viewers in terms of the impact on  users than CHUI (although the latter is by far the most complex update as it involves a lot of code refactoring as well as CHUI updates). As such, it is likely to be a while before CHUI starts appearing in the majority of third-party viewers (although Kokua has already merged with it, and now has the CHUI code in the beta branch of its code).

Merchant Outbox Project Viewer

As reported over the weekend, Linden Lab has re-issued the Merchant Outbox project viewer, updated to the 3.4.4 viewer code, but which does not incorporate CHUI. This release is purely to assist merchants who are encountering issues in migrating to Direct Delivery now that the initial retirement of Magic Boxes has been announced.

Those who have / are encountering problems in migrating to Direct Delivery can obtain the viewer from the Alternate Viewers wiki page.

This project viewer will be withdrawn at some point in the future, and will not impact other viewer releases.

Server-side Baking

A further reminder that there will be a further SSB pile-on / load test on Thursday March 14th, following-on, as with the last test, from the Server Beta meeting on Aditi. For wishing to participate:

  • The test is liable to be in much the same format as the first test
  • Those participating should be running the latest version of the official SSB project viewer (3.4.5.271419)
  • Participants should have a number of outfits of system clothing, preferably with multiple layers, which they can swap between during the course of the test. Library outfits are acceptable, but LL are keen for people to use their own outfits to add greater weight to the tests
  • Clearing the viewer cache prior to the test is suggested, but not an absolute requirement.
The first SSB pile-on / load test (image courtesy of Latif Khalifa
The first SSB pile-on / load test (image courtesy of Latif Khalifa

The project also seems to be going through a further informal name change: originally referred to as “Server-side Baked Texture Generation & Storage”, the project has generally been shortened to “Server-side Baking”, but is now tending to be referred to as “Server-side Appearance project”. I’ll be continuing to refer to it as “Server-side Baking” or “SSB” for ease of reference.

Continue reading “SL project updates week 11 (1): server deployments, viewer, and interest list updates” →

SL project updates: week 10 (3): viewer, CHUI, SSB and HTTP work

Posted on by Inara Pey

SL Viewer Beta and Viewer Development  and CHUI

There have been updates to both the beta and development viewers. The beta viewer moved to release 3.5.0.271345, and development to 3.4.5.271386. Both releases were focused on CHUI, and according to Oz Linden, “Right now they are almost identical; different only in the viewer number I believe.” He went on to say, “There is significant uncertainty as to when CHUI will come out of the beta channels, and it’s very likely that will remain true for a while yet – that is, that the two will remain pretty similar.”

With one CHUI update having just gone to the beta viewer, the Lab anticipates there will be at least one more update for the project while in beta before it makes any more to the viewer release channel.

Server-side Baking (SSB)

Server-side Baking saw the release of a further viewer update – 3.4.5.271419 – on March 7th, which was partially in response from information gained from the first public pile-on / load test for SSB, held on Thursday February 21st.

Commenting on the ongoing work to integrate SSB into TPVs at the TPV Developer meeting on Friday March 8th, Oz linden thanked the TPVs for their work to date on trying to integrate the viewer-side SSB code into their offerings in order to keep the project on track. “I’m very pleased to say that right now it does not look like support for it [SSB] in third-party viewers is going to end up being the limiting factor on when it can be deployed,” he said, although he did caution against showing any complacency in getting the code to a deployable condition.

Merge with CHUI

Also at the TPV Developer meeting, Nyx indicated that overall, the project viewer for SSB is becoming more and more stable, and that his team now has and initial merge with the CHUI code, which they are going to be “hammering on”, prior to pushing it to the internal Sunshine branch. As such, the most recent release of the SSB project viewer is possibly the last push prior to CHUI appearing in the viewer.

Given there are concerns over the merger and its possible impact on TPVs, Nyx is going to see if it is possible to maintain a side branch of the SSB viewer code which does not include the CHUI merge, which could continue to receive fixes and make it easier for TPVs to obtain them, however, until this has been looked into in more detail, he is unwilling to commit to how easy it would be to achieve and maintain – or how long for.

Second Pile-on  / Load Test

Serer-side baking - further testing on March 14th
Serer-side baking – further testing on March 14th

Attending the Server Beta meeting in week 10, Nyx Linden announced that the updated viewer will be required  for a further pile-on / load test, which has been scheduled for Thursday March 14th. The test is liable to be in much the same format as the first test, and those wishing to participate are advised to attend the Server Beta meeting on Aditi ahead of time (the meeting commences at 15:00 SLT on Thursdays).

Those wishing to take part in the test should also ensure they are using the latest version of the SSB project viewer linked-to above, as this as this has been specifically set-up to enable correct logging of data, etc., for the test. Nyx hopes that the latest updates to the logging parameters, coupled with the recent inventory fixes applied to Aditi should do much to both lessen the impact of Aditi issues should they occur and make them easier to identify when analysing feedback. However, Nyx suggested that those who have experienced Aditi inventory issues and who wish to join-in the test on March 14th should log-into the Sunshine test regions ahead of time and confirm that they can access their inventory using the project viewer.

Continue reading “SL project updates: week 10 (3): viewer, CHUI, SSB and HTTP work” →

SL project updates: week 10 (2): server, SSB, materials and SSAO

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Update

All of the deployments planned for week 10 went ahead as scheduled. While further issues related to region crossings have been reported, these are not thought to be related to any of the new code deployments for this week (see below for more).

The one issue that has been noted with the deployments is for VWR-786, which formed a part of the Magnum deployment.

This was supposed to ensure that if a friend does not have ‘See my online status’ permission, they will now see “User is not online ..” message following IM or inventory offer. However, the result has also been that if you IM a non-friend, the server always returns the “User is not online” message. The short-term solution for this is to remove the change from week 11’s releases in the interest of getting the other fixes (BUG-1612 and SVC-8019) across the grid.

The Lab is particularly keen to see SVC-8019 deployed to the entire grid, as this should fix issues of regions not handshaking correctly with one another following a rolling restart. The cause of this is believed to be due to regions looking at stale cached copies of a neighbouring regions’ status. With the update, regions grab more up-to-date copies of the status of their neighbours.

Server-side Baking: Further Pile-on / Load Test

Nyx Linden has announced that there will be a further SSB pile-on / load test on Thursday March 14th, following-on, as with the last test, from the Server Beta meeting on Aditi. The test is liable to be in much the same format as the first test, of which Nyx notes, “It gave us a lot of information and we’ve been working on a number of fixes, both to Aditi inventory, as well as viewer and back-end changes. Given this, the reason for the next test, in Nyx’s words, is because, “We’d like to see how much progress we’re making.”

The first SSB pile-on / load test (image courtesy of Latif Khalifa
The first SSB pile-on / load test (image courtesy of Latif Khalifa

Those wishing to participate will be required to be using the latest version of the Sunshine project viewer (3.4.5.271419), and are advised to attend the Server Beta meeting on Aditi ahead of time (the meeting commences at 15:00 SLT on Thursdays). Addressing those who participated in the first test, Nyx added, “If you had trouble at the last pile-on with outfit switching, feel free to test out the new build in advance – you should be able to comment on the JIRA tasks you filed, or email me directly with any issues.”

Materials Processing

Following-on from his replies to my question at the open-source dev meeting on Monday March 4th, Oz Linden talked some more on the status of the materials processing project at the Wednesday meeting on March 6th, “There’s one build floater bug and one crash that need fixing,” he said in kicking-off the discussion on materials, “I might even be willing to let it out without the crash fix (though it’s pretty bad).”

However, before everyone starts shouting, “Yes, yes!” :), even the release of a crashy version of the project viewer requires the “other” problem to be fixed. This appears to be related to a texture list getting corrupted, and which can manifest in a number of ways, including:

  • The normal map picker reverts to displaying the diffuse (texture) map after a normal map has been selected and the picker closed, with the normal map failing to render on the object / face it has been applied to
  • If deferred rendering is turned off, anything using materials appears black
  • If bump mapping is disabled, objects using materials appear to randomly adopt nearby textures (including skin textures) which can change as the camera is rotated / moved.
Normal map application issue: a normal map is selected and apllied to an object face (l); however, on re-opening the build floater, the map appears to have reverted to the diffuse map (r), and the object face does not render as expected
Normal map application issue: a normal map is selected and applied to an object face (l); however, on re-opening the build floater, the map appears to have reverted to the diffuse map (r), and the object face does not render as expected

Continue reading “SL project updates: week 10 (2): server, SSB, materials and SSAO” →

SL projects updates: week 10 (1): server, materials and SSB

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Week 10

A full set of server deployments this week.

On Tuesday March 5th, the Second Life Server (SLS) channel received the server maintenance project that was deployed to all three RC channels in week 9. This update only contains a fix to a single crash mode.

On Wednesday March 6th, the three Release Candidate channel should receive the following code deployments:

  • BlueSteel and LeTigre: a new server maintenance project, which fixes a fairly common crash mode, together with Baker Linden’s large (as in file size) object rezzing project aimed at improving simulator performance (see below)
  • Magnum: a new server maintenance project, which includes a mix of bug fixes and stability improvements. Specific fixes mentioned in the release notes are:
    • BUG-1612: region Owners and estate managers finding they are unable to teleport back to their region after disabling direct teleports to the region
    • SVC-8019: region visibility delays following region restarts. This may help with the problem of diagonally adjacent regions failing to render
    • VWR-786: if a friend does not have ‘See my online status’ permission, they will now see “User is not online ..” message following IM or inventory offer.

Large Object Rezzing Project

Baker Linden has been looking to improve how objects with large file sizes are handled by the simulator software when being rezzed. He describes the work thus, “What I’ve been working on is hopefully significantly decreasing lag spikes when rezzing large, complex objects [such as those with lots of scripts]. Large does not necessarily imply size, but size of the files being read. When an object is rezzing, we have to parse the object / mesh files and create our in-world objects with that data.”

Until now, reading and parsing of any files related to objects which require rezzing has been on the main thread. When several such objects requiring rezzing at the same time, the simulator stalls. Baker has been moving the reading / parsing operation to a background thread in the expectation that this will prevent the simulator being choked.

The key point about this work is that it is specifically aimed at preventing the simulator processes from choking and a region stalling when there are a number of large object files being read / parsed, not at actually “speeding up” the physical rezzing process. As such, it is unlikely that objects will appear any faster in people’s in-world view as a result of this work. However, what it does mean is that the simulator code will be better able to handle rezzing multiple “large file” objects without the attendant region lagging which can occur as a result of the simulator being unable to process messages from viewers and other simulators, etc.

Materials Processing

In my last update on this work, I reported that the Lab believed they had one more issue to resolve with the materials processing project, after which the way should be clear for a project viewer to be made publicly available. At the time, it wasn’t clear exactly what the problem might be. However, on Monday March 4th, I was able to ask Oz about the problem, and it appears that it is with the project viewer itself.

“We’ve got a viewer, but it’s so crashy, and the crashes are mostly in material property editing, that I don’t want to distribute it yet…. I’m concerned that doing so would result in a lot of broken content lying around,” Oz informed me.

Materials processing: viewer issues delaying project viewer release (image courtesy of Geenz Spad)
Materials processing: viewer issues delaying project viewer release (image courtesy of Geenz Spad) – click to enlarge

I asked Oz if the crash problems were related to physically applying maps to objects and / or object faces. He confirmed that this is indeed the case – and that the latest (non-public) version of the project viewer can crash if even the parameters for maps applied to an object / object face are modified. However, he went on to say, “Hopefully we’ll get the worst of the crashes dealt with soon, and then we can start giving it to a wider audience. We’ve already solved a bunch of them, but it’s not quite ready for even open alpha testing.”

So, for those who commented on the lack of any update following my last SL project update from week 9, I’m afraid the situation still appears to be one of, “Hurry up and wait.”

Continue reading “SL projects updates: week 10 (1): server, materials and SSB” →