Category: SL User Group Meetings

July 2024 SL Web User Group summary: MP on Mobile & MFA for MP

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday July 3rd, 2024. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

Note: This meeting was entirely text-based.

Meeting Overview

  • The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), the forums.
  • As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
    • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
    • In both Voice and / or text.
    • At this location.
  • 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.

Improvements and Updates from the Web Team Planned for the Coming Year

Marketplace on Mobile and MFA on the Marketplace

  • The Marketplace will have a first release of being mobile responsive in the coming weeks (“not months”).
    • This will be rolled out slowly so some users may see it before others.
  • This release will focus on making the the product listing pages and checkout page more responsive and display better at specific break points (including on mobile devices).
  • Once the initial work on making the above pages more responsive has been deployed, LL will be adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) to the Marketplace
    • This will be an extension to the current MFA implementation covering secondlife.com dashboards and the viewer.
    • As with the current MFA, it will be opt-in on the Marketplace, and required on logging-in (presumably, whenever a token has expired).
    • Information on enabling MFA on the Marketplace will be made available nearer the time it will be made available.
  • Alongside the MFA implementation, there will be likely be further changes to Marketplace search algorithm.
    • Once this work is deployed, LL will be looking at how it changes transactions, and receiving merchant feedback on the Feedback Portal.
  • After the MFA work and search updates, work will resume on making the Marketplace more responsive / mobile device friendly.
    • This work will focus on MP search and the shopping cart.
    • However, a fully responsive Marketplace is not anticipated before the end of the year.
  • In addition to the above, there will be some general quality of life updates on the MP, including things like a button to confirm clearing the shopping cart.

Additional MFA Discussion

The announcement of MFA coming to the Marketplace led to a further general discussion and exchange of ideas on the MFA implementation in general, including:

  • The need for better safeguards to prevent large-scale Linden dollar movements in the event of an account being compromised.
    • Even with MFA, an account is vulnerable to being compromised and its L$ balance being access through the viewer.
    • The suggestion was made that MFA should therefore be additionally requested when attempting to move large values of L$ from an account. This was combined with the idea of the same in the event of multiple transaction above a certain level in a short amount of time.
    • Obviously, what constitutes a “large transaction” and a “short amount of time” would require consideration and be balanced against users becoming frustrated the MFA process and then opting-out (thus defeating the purpose in having it).
  • This broadened into a discussion of MFA being triggered more in common with other web services: e.g. an alert being sent via e-mail if a log-in is detected from an unexpected / new device, an unrecognised location, etc., allowing the account holder to take action, if required.
  • There was a further request for e-mail based authentication or SMS code-based authentication.
    • E-mail has been promised in the past, but is potentially prone to easy compromise.
    • SMS + code is not seen as insecure, and not likely to be implement, particularly given the general move away from it that is taking place.
  • Kali Linden reiterated, the current plan is to enhance and expand the current MFA, not re-invent the wheel.

In Brief

  • Maps.sl:
    • Garfield Linden is overhauling maps.sl as an after-hours project. His focus is on:
    • Bringing it to feature parity with Maps-in-the-viewer.
    • Making it mobile-friendly (e.g. with a search bar that floats over the map tiles, like maps.google.com).
    • If anyone has simple ideas for how it might additionally be improved etc., input to him or via the Feedback Portal.
  • Changing to WUG meeting frequency (date / time):
    • The web team is looking to add ” a second web user group meet with a different time that is more accommodating for residents then our SLT time zone meeting”.
    • Noon SLT was considered (by the small number of attendees) as a preferable time.
    • Sntax Linden arbitrarily selected Tuesday, July 30th as the date for the first of these additional meetings- HOWEVER, 12:00 noon on the 30th July brings any WUG meeting directly into conflict with the Simulator User Group meeting (and there is audience cross-over between the two). As such, the date / time of any additional WUG meeting has yet to be confirmed.
    • Ironically, since the request was made for an additional meetings (initially on the basis of getting more frequent updates / input, rather than issues over the time), attendance at the WUG meetings has been in decline.

Next Meeting(s)

  • Wednesday, August 7th, 2024, any alternate TBC – check the SL public calendar.

2024 SL SUG meetings week #27 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kingsand, June 2024 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  July 2nd, 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 and the video by Pantera – my thanks to her as always 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

  • No deployments for the week, but all channels will be restart per usual schedule.

Coming up as the next simulator update is Summer Fun, which is currently with the Lab’s QA team. Following that will be Picnic, which among other things will include the following LSL functions:

  • llFindNotecardText
  • llFindNotecardTextSync)

SL Viewer Updates

The webRTC RC viewer updated to version 7.1.9.9688089989 on July 1st, 2024.

The rest of the current official viewers 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:
    • Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling), version 7.1.9.9620320242, June 27.
    • 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.

Luau Projects

These note are related to the Product and Engineering Town Hall at SL21B,when it was announced Luau VM is to be implemented on the server-side, eventually replacing Mono VM.

  • Signal Linden is putting together a technical FAQ about lua with has more detailed answers about “why lua and not [insert option]” and “how is lua faster than mono” etc.
  • Pepper and Rider Linden confirmed part of the work planned will allow for shadow execution of scripts under the Luau and Mono VMs during testing, which will ensure that all output of functions are the same.
    • This shadowing will likely be only be visible to the Lab.
    • Once LL is convinced both behave the same, the switch to using the Luau VM. At that point, the anticipated memory and execution time improvements should become visible.
    • Finally LL will allow a switch to compile either LSL2 or Luau.
  • Signal further indicated:
    • That with the switch to lauau on the back-end, code can be written in either LSL2 or Luau.
    • That both the current Lua client-side project and the announced luau back-end work, whilst separate projects will both leverage Luau, not Lau.
  • Pepper Linden confirmed LSL functions will continue to be maintained, but using Lua will allow for the creation of versioned functions for Lua scripts, providing a more flexible means to update functions without the worry of breaking content.
  • This discussion took up most of the meeting – please refer to the video for more.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for the following and other topics discussed:

  • Leviathan Linden is hoping to provide an updated GameControl viewer download. It will contain no additional capabilities, but will be updated to the current viewer development branch. However, GameControl will now be behind a single UI setting which will need to be set in order to see its UI.
  • Monty Linden confirmed that the first batch of teleports / region crossings  work will now likely surface in the Picnics simulator update.

† 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 #26 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Simurg, June 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  June 25th, 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 and the video by Pantera – my thanks to her as always 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

  • No deployments for the week, but all channels will be restart per usual schedule.

Coming up as the next simulator update is Summer Fun, which is currently with the Lab’s QA team. Following that will be Picnic, which is still in the process of being put together.

SL Viewer Updates

No updates to the current official viewers, leaving the list as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Project viewers:
    • None.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for the following and other topics discussed:

  • Leviathan Linden is putting the GameControl feature behind a debug settings option, and then rebasing that onto the viewer _develop_ branch. This will help ensure the functionality is available in future viewer updates, ready to be enabled when the corresponding simulator support has been deployed.
  • A reported issue with llDetectedTouchPos is is the queue of issues the viewer team will be / are looking at.
  • The functionality gap with llSetLinkAlpha() and PBR Materials, and which has workarounds on the wiki using llSetLinkPrimitiveParams() and PRIM_GLTF_BASE_COLOR, is due to be more properly resolved for when controlling larger linksets.
  • Monty Linde noted that the first batch of teleports / region crossings  work is in line for the release after the Summer Fun simulator update – however, vehicles are not specifically part of this work.
    • This led to a general discussion on vehicular region crossings.
  • A further discussion on the Combat project – this will be covered in the Combat Group update following the meeting on June 27th.
  • A general discussion on getting world map tile information, focuses around the request for llGetRegionWorldMapTile.

† 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 #25: SL CCUG summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Joyful Gardens, June 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, June 20th, 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.
  • In regards to meetings:
    • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.
    • Commence at 13:00 SLT on their respective dates.
    • Are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
    • Are open to all with an interest in content creation.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers Status

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.9.9469671545, June 14.
    • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.8.9130881608, June 10.
  • Project viewers:

WebRTC Voice Update

Not strictly a Content Creation tool / subject, but of import to SL as a whole.

Summary

  • A project intended to replace the Vivox Voice system with the WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”).
  • Will see the removal of the SLplugin.EXE from the viewer, to be replaced with a library wrapper within the viewer.
  • Offers much better and more flexible voice support across platforms, with improved capabilities (e.g. automatic echo cancellation, automatic gain control, better noise cancellation) with better audio sampling / quality.
  • Also 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.).
  • During the transitional period as WebRTC is deployed on the back-end and gradually made available by viewers, support will be provided for both Vivox and WebRTC (i.e. if you are using a viewer using the Vivox plug-in, you will connect to voice via Vivox, and if using a viewer with WebRTC, then that protocol will be used.
  • Both Vivox and WebRTC work together, but their may be some initial limitations / issues until the project is fully deployed and the switch made.
  • 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.

Status

  • There is a Project viewer available on the Alternate Viewers page. Thus is expected to to to Release Candidate status very soon.
  • The server support is currently available on the region WebRTC on the main grid.
  • The focus is currently on getting the viewer code up to release status so it can be adopted by TPVs, with a gradual deployment of the server code, however, it is unlikely the latter will be widely deployed until after the viewer code has been more fully adopted.
  • That said, this is something of a priority project, likely to be fast-tracked as much as possible.

Graphics / glTF

Terrain

  • Cosmic Linden is working on PBR terrain custom repat controls allowing for improved Texel densities to help reduce the “stretching” of textures of elevation changes)  and better support 2K textures.
  • Most of the viewer work for this is now almost complete, but is awaiting simulator-side support on Aditi in order to be offered in a test viewer.
  • There is a more general bug where PBR terrain does not render in planar mirrors, and Cosmic is also working on trying to resolve this issue.
  • PBR Terrain painting: depending on how the above progress, Cosmic hopes to be able to start looking into the potential for PBR terrain painting in the near future. Currently the tentative plan is:
    • To allow land owners to control the mix of the four PBR materials on terrain, rather than the current situation where it’s determined by some elevation weights plus some noise added on top.
    • This capability will potentially be allowed for whoever can edit the terrain heights in a given parcel.

glTF Scene Import

  • Runitai Linden is continuing to work on glTF scene import. The focus remains on the viewer-side code.
    • As previously noted, this allows glTF scenes to be uploaded, tied to an in-world object and previewed in the viewer.
    • The support for this is available on the Rumpus Room regions on Aditi (the Beta Grid).
  • Actual simulator / back-end support for glTF scene will not start to be implemented until after the viewer side of the code is in better shape.
  • The overall goal is to get scene import working with Blender (and in accordance with the glTF specification), and mee the requirements /  guidelines outline in the Blender glTF Imort / Export documentation. The plan is to:
    • Support all of the animation data defined in the document.
    • Support “most” of the materials data in additional to the already supported  metallic roughness & emissive unlit.
  • As this work is still in the prototype phase no decisions have been made regarding the potential Land Impact for scenes or how LI will be calculated. This will come later in the project, once LL have more of a handle on things (upload, streaming, download, runtime cost, etc.).
  • There are also a lot of additional decisions yet to be made regarding this work – the LSL API, avatar limits (which can be attached to an avatar within a scene), all of which mean it will sill be a while before glTF scene imports are ready for any form of testing on the main grid (Agni).

General Notes

  • Runitai Linden is looking at the render pipe and possible optimisations and the potential to improve things like rendering objects, etc. Some of this work is likely to find its way back into production viewers in time.
    • This work also includes refinements to mirrors (e.g. so they get occluded, improvements to the update rate, etc).
  • Geenz Linden continues to work on Transmission and Index of Reflection (IOR), however, as they were out of the office for this meeting, no update was available.
  • Proper support for HDRI skies is being increasingly requested as a result of the Graphics Featurette viewer, and this work may  be accelerated. However, they will require a new asset type.

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 #25 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hylia’s Lake, May 2024 – blog post †

Update: following the publication of this summary, Linden Lab announced changes to texture upload costs (mentioned at the end of this article). In short: the Lab will be reducing the cost of 2K texture uploads for Premium Plus and Lifetime Premium Plus accounts to L$0. See here for more.  

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  June 18th, 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 and the video by Pantera – my thanks to her as always 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, June 18th, the Main SLS channel was updated with the Spring Break simulator update (which has a fix for the hovering-at-login issue) .
  • On Wednesday, June 19th, the RC channels were restarted without any update.

Coming up as the next simulator update is Summer Fun, which is currently with the Lab’s QA team. Following that will be Picnic, which is still in the process of being put together.

SL Viewer Updates

No updates to the current official viewers, leaving the list as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.8.9130881608, June 10.
    • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.7.8820704257, May 6.
  • Project viewers:

In Brief

Please refer to the video for the following and other topics discussed:

  • This week was a Summer Solstice party, so discussion was semi-limited.
  • As per my recent Combat User Group summary, Rider is looking at avatar rotation / aiming and improving llRotateAvatar, but as the former are controller viewer-side and the later in simulator-side, is making this is proving to be an issue.
  • Simon Linden is “working on chat”, but would not be drawn on specifics, other than “it should be more useful”.
  • The updates required to the Bake Service (and all associated services) to support 2K textures is still on the “to be done” list.
  • It was pointed out that the Lab’s Premium Memberships page still states Premium Plus levies no charges for any uploads (click Even More Benefits to view) – despite this not being the case for 2K textures
  • General discussions on camera offset and llGetCameraPos().

† 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.

Second Life Combat User Group: June 13th, 2024 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Credit: Rider Linden

The following notes were taken from the Thursday, June 13th, 2024 Combat User Group meeting. They form a summary of the core items discussed and responded to by Lindens, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Meeting Overview

  • The Combat User Group exists as a forum to discuss improvements to the Linden Lab Combat System or LLCS to better support combat in Second Life.
    • The core idea is to provide additional events and capabilities which sit on top of LLCS to provide combat creators with better tools with which to create better combat systems for their specific scenarios.
    • It is not intended to be a complete combat system in and of itself.
  • The meetings are the result of a proposal document on improving the native damage system in SL, written by Rider Linden, and which is the focus for both the meeting and any work arising from them.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
    • By Rider Linden, with the support of Kyle Linden.
    • On alternating Thursdays (rotating with the Content Creation User Group) at 13:00 SLT. Meeting dates are recorded in the Second Life Public Calendar and at this location.
    • In local chat.
  • Discussion topics, requests, etc., can be found on the SL Feedback Portal Combat Board.
  • Additional details are available via the SL wiki Combat2 page.

Work In Progress

  • The current iteration of Combat 2.0 support on the server-side is due to be included in the Summer Fun simulator update, which is looking to be deployed some time after SL21B.
    • Those wishing to test the system can do so on Aditi on regions Gallipoli and Thermopylae.
    • Issues / feedback should be reported via the Support Portal Combat Board.
    • As noted in my previous update, this will very much be a release to find out exactly what works and what doesn’t for the Combat community/ies in Second Life and will be iterated upon going forward.
  • Rider is looking at avatar rotation / aiming and improving llRotateAvatar, but as the former are controller viewer-side and the later in simulator-side, is making this is proving to be an issue.
  • Rider has also been looking at improving hit boxes / hit box adjustments. However, this work is liable to be in follow-on updates to the initial release.

Comments and Requests

  • There was further request for Linden Lab to adopt the first-person shooter improvements found in the Black Dragon viewer. However:
    • As noted in my previous summary, this can only be done if Black Dragon’s develop provides the code to Linden Lab as a code contribution / code pull request, indication LL can consider / adopt the code.
    • The developer has indicated he can do this, but he might require time to do so for various reasons, including the fact it will probably need a lot more fine tuning and bug fixes.
  • The the above led to a discussion of using some form of IK update or scripted attachment added to hand-held weapons which could act as an animation targets for moving avatar hands to grips, magazines, etc. Some sample weapons have been put out on the combat regions on Aditi, and some sample scripts will be added to the SL wiki Combat Page to allow people to play with this idea.
  • As noted in my last summary, there has been a request made to add a “fast” parameter to llRezObjectWithParams to allow objects to rez at a reduced delay to allow things like higher rates of fire for some weapons without the need for additional rez nodes.
    • There is a potential griefing vector with this idea, so it was suggested that the parameter could be managed at region owner / estate level (e.g. so only enabled where specifically required).
    • At this meeting, Rider noted that implementing it would be a non-trivial task, because script delays are built into the function definition in the virtual machine, and so would require considerable update.
    • He also noted that even with an estate level control to counter issues of griefing on region that do not need it, such a parameter could result in the simulator’s rez queue being swamped by requests. However, it was suggested that this would be avoided because rezzers with too high a request rate would hit the grey goo fence.
  • There was a general discussion on llSensor and searching damageable types, with Rider noting the DAMAGE parameter searches for objects that either process on_damage, final_damage or have a health value, and when used, should combine both ACTIVE and PASSIVE, as it filters results.
  • In terms of damage, Rider noted that negative damage should be unthrottled and not trigger the region damage cap or contribute to the individual call throttle.
  • It was suggested that as a well as damage controls, there should be healing controls as well (e.g. a healing toggle and healing throttle) so as to prevent people making themselves “immortal”. However, it was noted:
    • It would be easier just to reduce all damage to 0, not matter what hits the avatar.
    • Either way, people abusing the system like this would show up clearly in the combat log, with combat region owners to potentially write a monitoring relay that will teleport anyone cheating in such a manner to be teleported home with a warning.
  • During the previous meeting it was asked if the former combat-enabled regions on the old Teen Grid – Lexington, Concord and No Man’s Land – could be brought back.
    • During that meeting, Madori Linden was able to bring back Lexington and Concord, but scripts on both were turned off – as of this meeting, scripts on both regions should be enabled.
    • It is proving difficult to recover No Mans Land, due to the lack of a good archived simstate.
    • A further request has been made to relocate Concord and Lexington to the Combat Sandbox red team and blue team regions, and make both combat sandboxes.