Category: SL User Group Meetings

2024 week #5: SL CCUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hillvale Beach, December 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creators User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, February 1st, 2024.

  • 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 viewer development work.
  • As a rule, these meetings are:
    • Held in-world at the Hippotropolis Campsite, where it is chaired by Vir Linden, in accordance with the dates and times given in the SL Public Calendar.
    • Conducted in a mix of voice and text.
    • 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.

Official Viewers Status

  • The Maintenance W RC viewer – bug and crash fixes – updated to version 7.1.3.7701974306 on January 31st, January 31, 2024.

The remaining official viewers stood unchanged from the start of the week at the time of the meeting:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.2.7215179142, formerly the glTF PBR Materials Maintenance RC, issued December 15, promoted January 8, 2024 – numerous bug fixes and improvements.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7453691714, January 22, 2024.
    • glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7467259489, issued January 12, 2024.
    • Maintenance X RC, version 7.1.1.7088410646, December 7 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y RC, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
  • Project viewers:

General Viewer Notes

  • The Emoji viewer is still on the path towards an RC update, and it is still hoped it will get promoted to de facto release status Soon™.

Graphics / glTF

  • The “glTF featurettes” work is progressing, with the viewer following the current glTF Maintenance-2 RC viewer set to include:
    • Geenz Linden’s work on Hero reflection probes and reflections / mirrors and Cosmic Linden’s work on applying glTF materials to terrain.
    • Updates which will allow the glTF / PBR swatch boxes in the Build / Edit floater display previews of the materials being selected, rather than grey boxes.
    • Possibly, the first series of additional glTF extensions – Index of Refraction.
    • These capabilities (together with 2K textures support – see below) will be sitting behind debug settings, and so a) will need to be enabled by those wishing to test them; b) should be understood to be incomplete features subject to update and change / possible breakage.
  • 2K Textures:
    • The Lab is starting to assess the potential to allow 2K textures within SL. Such support will require “careful assessment” in terms of VRAM footprint, the risk of out of memory crashes on older systems and the like.
    • Runitai Linden believes that if there are issues with the viewer attempting to load a full 2K texture even when it is very small (or very distant), then it is a case of making the viewer “smarter” it terms of how it handles and samples / loads textures.
    • Support for 2K textures is available for general testing on Aditi (the Beta grid) within the RumpusRoom 2048 region.
    • One identified win is seen as terrain texturing, as 2K terrain textures at the region level should not overly tax systems and eliminate the current issues of blurriness / low texel density.

Mirrors

  • Work has been continuing of late, with what is described as a “significant” increase in reflection quality, and is starting to look “correct” as well as working with PBR.
  • Further performance tuning is required, and the clipping is “off in a lot of circumstances”.
  • The focus is on presenting planar reflections (utilising a cub map generated by a “Hero” reflection probe which is selection on the basis of the avatar’s proximity to it), with Geenz Linden noting it has the potential to allow more “fancy things” down the road.
  • It was noted that the approach taken has to offer a balance between intended use (to create actual mirror surfaces) against unintended uses (such as using the mirror capability within a highly polished floor), rather than trying to enforce some nebulous rule of “this functionality is ONLY for mirrors”), as well as taking into the consideration that it needs to be relatively easy to use.

Terrain

  • Cosmic Linden has indicated that once the PBR shader, etc., is working for terrain as per her current project, consideration is being given to allowing the same terrain shader to in-world objects.
  • So, for example, a mesh tunnel might be created and placed in-world, and then the outer face of the model set to display whatever the surrounding terrain might be.

“Combat Committee”

A reminder that:

  • The first meeting of the “Combat Committee” User Group will be held on Thursday, February 8th, at 13:00 SLT, and so will be alternating with the Content Creation User Group.
  • The venue for the meetings will be:  Longfellow/142/255/30.
  • The initial format for the meetings will be text-only, but this may become a mix of voice / text according to attendees’ preferences.
  • Further details are available on the SL wiki, and the meeting is now on the SL Public Calendar.

Rider Linden acknowledged the fact that I (aka “someone”) had pointed out having two user group meetings with the same abbreviation (CCUG) alternating between the same time slot on the same weekday might be confusing for some (even if the meetings are in different locations), so the name for this meeting might be changing.

In Brief

  • The transition from Jira to Github Issues  / Canny is still in progress at LL and is taking up resources and time, hence the slow-down in some areas of work (such as RC viewer updates. As per previous reporting, the work is due to be completed by the end of February, when Jira will cease to be used.
    • The use of Canny remains a source of unhappiness among those who tend to raise bug reports, largely as a result of its limited functionality in some areas (such as no support for any other attachment type other than static images).
    • The Lab is continuing to work with the Canny development team to try to improve things.
  • As was noted in the previous CCUG meeting, the placing of incomplete features (such as the glTF terrain and mirrors functions mentioned above) behind debug settings is a part of a more general move to add features and capabilities to the viewer more iteratively, allowing individual capabilities to be added (and potentially tested on a limited basis by those interested), but only fully exposed to all users once they have been validated / have any required supporting functionality / capabilities available to them.
  • There was a general discussion on the viewer UI and how it tries to meet the needs of very different groups of users  – content creators and “general” users, and how it might be made more responsive to specific modes of use – if you are using the viewer to explore, take photos, play a game in-world, and carry out basic building / editing, etc., then the viewer can be run in a “generic” mode to do all of these things, but if precision tools are required for design and creation, then the viewer can be switched to a mode which provides more specialised options through floaters and menus.
  • The question was asked that if SL is to support the “entire” glTF specification, including animations, does this mean future support for custom skeletons, and if so what does that mean for the current animation marketplace (e.g. preventing confusion as to what will / will not run against different skeleton types).
    • Runitai Linden’s viewer was that if custom skeletons are to be supported, then it would require suitable tools which allow for animation / joint retargeting (e.g. animations made for the current Bento skeleton could be retargeted of any other given skeleton, and vice versa). However, whilst there are tools to achieve this, they would require investigation and assessment.
    • There are limitations on how far retargeting will go, however (and it will not be entirely devoid of creator intervention), so if custom skeletons were to be allowed in SL, it was noted that expectations could be in part managed by specifying with which actual skeleton(s) the offered animation / avatar, etc. has been designed to work.
  • Concern was raised as to the constraints which might be applied if SL has an open gateway to importing glTF meshes from external sources such as SketchFab, where the content may well look pretty but is hardly appropriate for real time game rendering, the view being the Land Impact alone is not going to be sufficient.
    • The view from the Lab is that there will be some form of weighting system at import, at least analogous to Land Impact, but better suited for the acceptance / rejection of content, and this will vary for different content types (e.g. glTF scenes might be assessed of number of nodes, how many bytes in the asset, how many instances of the asset, etc.).

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 #5 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
WQNC Shrine, December 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 30th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this summary, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording the meeting and 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):
  • They 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

Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week, leaving the list of official viewers as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.2.7215179142, formerly the glTF PBR Materials Maintenance RC, issued December 15, promoted January 8, 2024 – numerous bug fixes and improvements – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7453691714, January 22, 2024.
    • glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7467259489, issued January 12, 2024.
    • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7453541295, January 9, 2024 – bug and crash fixes.
    • Maintenance X RC, version 7.1.1.7088410646, December 7 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y RC, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
  • Project viewers:

Jira End-of-Road – Reminder

Combat Committee User Group

  • The first meeting of the Combat Committee User Group will be held on Thursday, February 8th, at 13:00 SLT, and so will be alternating with the Content Creation User Group.
  • The venue for the meetings will be:  Longfellow/142/255/30.
  • The initial format for the meetings will be text-only, but this may become a mix of voice / text according to attendees’ preferences.
  • Further details are available on the SL wiki, and the meeting is now on the SL Public Calendar.
  • I have pointed out to Rider Linden that having two meetings abbreviated to “CCUG” (Combat Committee and Content Creation user groups), which are held at the same time on alternating Thursdays could lead to some confusion among attendees of either, even allowing for some cross-over between the two, so the Combat Committee may yet see a change in name.

In Brief

  • A general discussion on the upcoming llGetNotecardLineSync(), including caching (both when and length of time).
  • Further (often negative) feedback on CANNY as the bug / feature release front-end, including news from Signal Linden that the Canny devs are working to take onboard issues raised with them by LL to help improved the system, some of which (such as providing a wider text input field on tickets) will be deployed in the very near future.
  •  A general discussion on a “HUDs/dialogue box 2.0 feature” to replace / improve upon the current dialogue box system and scripted HUDs. Suggestions included enabling / allowing dialogue boxes to be generated with radio buttons, dropdown boxes, and checkboxes; offering a client-side scripting capability to provide HUDs (and idea also being tossed around at recent Content Creation User Group meetings), although this got largely derailed by the hoary old (and highly subjective) “Pie Menu is better than Context Menus” debate.
  • Details of all above in the video, below.

† 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 #4 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Aurelias, December 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this summary, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording the meeting and 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):
  • They 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 SLS Main channel deployment on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024; the simhosts were all just restarted.
  • Wednesday, January 24th should see a further attempt to deploy the Falls Colours simulator update (which includes a fix for collision sounds reverberating; llRezObjectWithParams, llListFindListNext and llGetNotecardLineSync.
    • The week #3 attempt to deploy the Fall Colours RC simulator had to be rolled back after it was discovered Debian had accidentally included a bug with the version of the OS used to package the simulator release. It is hoped this will be corrected in order for the simulator update to be deployed on January 24th.
  • Assuming Fall Colours is successfully deployed, week #5 (commencing Monday, January 29th, 2024) should see it promoted to the Main SLS channel and the Gingerbread RC release reach at least some of the RC channels.

Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week, leaving the list of official viewers as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.2.7215179142, formerly the glTF PBR Materials Maintenance RC, issued December 15, promoted January 8, 2024 – numerous bug fixes and improvements – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7453691714, January 22, 2024.
    • glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7467259489, issued January 12, 2024.
    • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7453541295, January 9, 2024 – bug and crash fixes.
    • Maintenance X RC, version 7.1.1.7088410646, December 7 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y RC, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
  • Project viewers:

Jira End-of-Road – Reminder

Combat Committee User Group

  • Rider Linden has received the green light to establish this meeting to discuss combat simulation in Second Life, and ways / means to improve what is currently available.
  • The venue / time / frequency of meetings will be announced at the next SUG meeting.

Game Control Update

  • A reminder that the game_control event for using game controllers has been removed from the Gingerbread maintenance RC to become its own branch / channel (currently on Aditi (the Beta grid), where it can be found on the regions LeviathanLove and LeviathanLost.

In Brief

  • In is hoped that work on improving vehicle interactions with parcel ban lines (e.g. stopping them hitting ban lines and getting stuck by having them bounce back) will hopefully be implemented later in 2024. Several Lindens are interested in poking at this.
  • The above led to an extended conversation on security systems in general – notably those which are intentionally aggressive / used to override ban line limitations (e.g. by preventing overflight of parcels on the Mainland well above the upper limit of ban lines). This conversation touched on:
    • The tension between people’s right to privacy vs. the natural expectations that when flying over a contiguous world, a freedom of passage should be allowed.
    • Requests that some form of minimum delay (e.g. 15 secs) be enforced on security systems to prevent unnecessary 0 sec ejection / teleporting those who are innocently passing by a protected parcel.
    • Providing some means for information on orbs / ban lines / private(/restricted) parcel being passed to the viewer (e.g. to be display on the Mini-Map for the former, and / or UI icon to be displayed when passing over restricted  / private parcels with an active security.
    • Please refer to the video below for more on this.

† 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 #3: SL CCUG and TPVD meetings summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Blue NANA Land, December 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creators User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 18th, 2024, and the chat log transcript and video of the Third-Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, January 19th, 2024. My thanks as always to Pantera for recording the TPVD meeting and providing the video, which is embedded at the end of this article.

  • 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 viewer development work.
  • 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  the third or fourth Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
  • In regards to both 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 either content creation or viewer development.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of either meeting.

Please note: my audio recording of the CCUG suffered a glitch in writing to disk. Whilst over an hour of audio was apparently recorded according to Audacity, only 22 minutes was actually saved to disk. As the meeting utilised voice, the loss of around half the audio means that response to questions and generally commentary from the Lab was lost. Therefore, these notes only reflect the section of the meeting which did save for playback.

Official Viewers Status

No updates through the week, leaving the current crop of official viewers as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.2.7215179142, formerly the glTF PBR Materials Maintenance RC, issued December 15, promoted January 8, 2024 – numerous bug fixes and improvements – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7467259489, issued January 12, 2024.
    • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7453541295, January 9, 2024 – bug and crash fixes.
    • Maintenance X RC, version 7.1.1.7088410646, December 7 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y RC, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
  • Project viewers:

General Viewer Notes

  • The glTF Maintenance 2 viewer includes, among other things, less blue tint to improve the general environment appearance.
  • The Emojis viewer is finally on the path towards an RC update, and it is hoped that this will be the finally update for the viewer before it gets promoted to de facto release status.
  • There is concern that the viewer crash rate has been higher than usual over the last several releases, so it appears viewer-side engineering effort is to be put towards determining underlying causes and rectifying them in order to bring the rate back down.
  • Longer-term there will be further Inventory work, with additional flags being added to the viewer which will enable future additional Inventory-related functionality – but it is too early in the process to go into specifics.

Mac OS Requirements

  • The Mac OS requirements for the viewer are changing as a result of Apple ending security updates for OSX 11 and earlier.
  • Whilst Mac OS 11 will now be the minimum requirement (up from 10.3), the recommendation to Mac users running Mac OS 11 or earlier is to “explore macOS upgrade options as soon as possible” due to the resultant security concerns (via Soft Linden).

Graphics / glTF and Future Viewer Development Overall

  • Following the glTF Maintenance 2 RC, it is likely there will be a further graphics RC viewer which will combine:
    • Geenz Linden’s work on Hero reflection probes and reflections / mirrors.
    • Cosmic Linden’s work on applying glTF materials to terrain.
    • Updates which will allow the glTF / PBR swatch boxes in the Build / Edit floater display previews of the materials being selected, rather than grey boxes.
    • Possibly, the first series of additional glTF extensions – Index of Refraction, and also potentially testing support for 2K textures.
  • The idea is to try to move development within the viewer away from huge projects (like PBR Materials), which tend to take a lot of time to develop (1 to 2 years) and suffer a lot of visible feature creep. Instead, the idea is to tackle smaller components and build them out within successive RCs which come together to enable the kind of functionality sought be large scale projects.
  • It is hoped that by focusing on “featurettes”, smaller tranches of work can be more easily validated, that workflow with development and bug fixing can become a lot more linear, and individual elements of the work can be enabled as they are ready, or hidden behind debug flags until such time as functionality they are dependent upon is also ready.
  • Should this approach work with the next iteration of glTF capabilities as listed above, the approach will likely be applied to other viewer projects.
  • BUG-234728 “[PBR] Masked alpha gradient textures change with viewing angle” has been accepted as a known PBR issue, but there is no time frame on a potential fix.

RLV / RLVa Adoption

[TPVD Video 10:16-15:40 and 25:28-28:23]

  • Per a previous TPVD meeting summary, LL is interested in the potential to adopt RLV/a functionality into the official viewer.
  • Adoption has been a popular request from many users, as RLV is seen to have a lot of beneficial uses well beyond its original scope (as is the case the RLV-driven “Wardrobe” systems which allow outfits to be visually previewed and worn in just a couple of clicks), many of which either cannot be easily achieved in viewers without RLV support, or would require Experience-based scripting, which is not seen as ideal.
  • One problem is that RLV/RLVa is for many scripters, an “all or nothing” API, as it can touch on so many areas of the viewer, so that to be of value, the entire protocol would need to be implemented – which would be a major overhaul of the viewer.
  • As such, it was noted that RLV/RLVa implementation within the official viewer could be an ideal candidate for the “featurette” approach to viewer development noted above: discrete elements of the code implemented to a point where they can be validated, but placed behind flags so that they are disabled until such time as the overall implementation has reached a point where they can be jointly enabled.
  • The option to turn it off completely – as is currently the case in the majority of viewers running the RLV/a protocol – would be retained for those not wishing to use it.

In Brief

CCUG Meeting

  • Canny Feedback glTF Materials w/Bake Layers-as-Base Colour Turn White When Editing BOM Layer caused some surprise within the Lab, as applying glTF materials in the manner hadn’t been seen as expected behaviour, as is the fact that the layers display as expected outside of the appearance editor.
    • It was noted that most PBR-related Bakes on Mesh requests have been to allow the Bake Service to composite multiple PBR materials applied to different layers (e.g. being able to apply one materials set to skin, another to (say) shirt layer and another to (say) pants layer).
    • This is something LL would like to tackle, but it is seen as a significant overhaul of the Bake Service, and so is not currently on the roadmap for implementation.
  • There is a known issue with screen space reflections (SSR) on Linden Water which can make the latter appear to “glitch”. Brad Linden is still investigating this, but the solution might be tweaking to / replacement of the SSR algorithm so it “plays nicely” with Linden Water.
  • Object unpacking: a discussion on the potential to be able to unpack the contents of objects directly from Inventory, rather than having to rez them in-world first or for creators to supply them in a scripted HUD for unpacking.
    • A feature request for the reverse – Right-Click to Box In Inventory – has been accepted (which does not indicate it will be implemented in the immediate future).
    • In terms of unpacking / previewing contents of on item directly from Inventory, this is seen as a harder issue as once items are contained within another, they are effectively in the “inventory” of the containing item, rather than the account inventory, and the container’s inventory is only loaded by the simulator when it (or a copy thereof) is rezzed (or attached as a HUD) in-world.
    • Given the above, a new Inventory behaviour would be required which would simulate the object being rezzed in-world / attached as a HUD in order to trigger the simulator to load its contents. This was noted as something worth consideration even if only as a mental exercise at the moment, in order to determine how it might be handled.
    • This is the point at which my audio recording of the meeting truncated during saving, and so ends the summary notes for the CCUG meeting.

TPVD Meeting

  • [Video: 16:02-17:40] Avatar de-clouding: There have been multiple anecdotal reports of avatars taking longer to de-cloud when logging-in. The anecdotal responses at the meeting varied between no real difference and comments that AWS may have had issues over the holiday period resulting in packet loss (and thus longer load times), but this appears to have since been resolved.
  • [Video 19:20-25:09] a discussion on TPV development, licensing, open-sourcing code, what is and is not permissible, new viewers, etc. Please refer to the video for more.
  • General notes:
    • Planar alignment being broken in the Build / Edit floater is a known issue and due to be addressed.
    • There are no plans for LL to offer various “fallbacks” for PBR to “classic” (Blinn-Phong) materials to account for users currently not running PBR enabled versions of viewers, as PBR will be a part of all viewers as they update and move forward.
    • There are no plans to make SL available through platforms such as Steam (as once was the case), due to issues around content restrictions, monetisation methods, etc.
    • A discussion on Twitch not allowing SL streaming and whether LL should try to engage with them to support it. Given that there are other avenues for streaming, and Twitch is free to stand whatever barrier to use of its platform it likes, this would seem unlikely.

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 #3 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Sakura Cranes, December 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 16th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this summary, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording the meeting and 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):
  • They 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 SLS Main channel deployment on Tuesday, January 16th, 2024; the simhosts were all just restarted.
  • Wednesday, January 17th should see the Falls Colours simulator update once more deployed to all of the RC channels. This includes:
  • If all goes well, week #4 should see Fall Colours deployed to the SLS Main channel and the Gingerbread simulator update deployed to at least some of the RC channels.

Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week, leaving the list of official viewers as:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.2.7215179142, formerly the glTF PBR Materials Maintenance RC, issued December 15, promoted January 8, 2024 – numerous bug fixes and improvements.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7467259489, issued January 12, 2024.
    • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7453541295, January 9, 2024 – bug and crash fixesz.
    • Maintenance X RC, version 7.1.1.7088410646, December 7 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y RC, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
  • Project viewers:

Jira End-of-Road – Reminder

  • Linden Lab is ending its use of Atlassian Jira for the filing of bug reports and feature request, and is instead moving to Github / Canny. For specifics, please refer to the following:
  • Note that this is a work-in-progress (so things like additional ticket categories are being introduced, such as the recent Server Bug category), and both the new system and Jira remain open at this time (although the latter will shutdown in February 2024).

Game Control Update

  • The game_control event for using game controllers has been removed from the Gingerbread maintenance RC to become its own branch / channel (currently on Aditi (the Beta grid), where it can be found on the regions LeviathanLove and LeviathanLost.
  • As per the previous SUG meeting summary, the game_control event signature has changed in that the button_edges parameter is no longer provided to the event and must be computed by the scripter if still needed.

In Brief

  • Further discissions on Leviathan Linden’s LSL updates for camera control, due to be deployed in the Gingerbread update (see my previous SUG summary for details)
  • A general discussion on attachment points – such as reserving some for specific uses, or providing a separate pool of attachment points for HUDs / on-screen attachments (so that they are counted separately, rather than being part of the total limit of 38 attachments).
  • Concerns were raised over the fact the PBR now makes it harder to show / hide prims/object faces (e.g. alpha cuts in mesh bodies) using LSL to set the alpha visibility, with loops now being required to achieve what could previously be done via a single function call.
    • The problem is seen as exacerbated by the fact there appears to be no way for a script to determine if PBR materials is applied, making it necessary for creators to add to their script overheads.
    • It had been thought that a bug report had been raised on this issue, as it has been discussed at the Lab and is seen as a issue which needs to be fixed – although it might not be possible to change the semantics of the current Blinn-Phong alpha setters in LSL without breaking content.
    • llSetAlpha was not expanded to handle this out of concern over mixing semantics of setting legacy and PBR alpha values correctly.
    • This led to a general discussion on possible options to manage this issue, which continued through most of the rest of the meeting.
  • Please refer to the video for these items. and on TTAORAIMWEATCP (the throwing about of random acronyms in meetings without explanation and thus confusing people).

† 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 #2 summary: Jira end-of-road

Posted on by Inara Pey
Borkum, November 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 9th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this summary, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording the meeting and 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):
  • They 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 scheduled deployments, just region restarts.
  • It is hoped the issues with the Fall Colours simulator update (e.g. collision sounds reverberating) have now been addressed, and that these fixes will be deployed across all simulator RCs during week #3.
  • A further simulator update – Gingerbread – will be following thereafter.

Viewer Updates

  • The glTF PBR Materials Maintenance RC, version 7.1.2.7215179142 issued December 15th, 2023 and featuring numerous bug fixes and improvements (including haze / fog affecting point lights), was promoted to de facto release status on Monday, January 8th, 2024.
  • The Maintenance-W RC viewer comprising bug and crash fixes was updated to version 7.1.3.7453541295 on January 9th, 2024.

The rest of the official viewers currently in the pipeline remain as follows

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance X RC, version 7.1.1.7088410646, December 7 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
  • Project viewers:

Jira End-of-Road

  • While yet to be formally announced, as a result of Atlassian changing their licensing model and making it prohibitively expensive for Linden Lab to continue using Jira as  reporting tool open to all users, the decision has been taken to replace Jira as a the bug reporting / featuring request filing toll for Second Life.
  • In the very near future, Jira will be replaced by a two-pronged approach:
    • Bug reports will be taken directly though Github.
    • General feedback and feature requests will be made via Canny, from where they will be imported by the Lab as GitHub issues for the purposes of internal tracking.
  • Work is already underway internally to move existing open and incoming Jira tickets to Github, and it is anticipated that the switch-over to using Canny as well as Github will be made very soon. An official blog post on the switch-over is expected to be made either later this week or early in week #3.
  • The use of Canny has already drawn some strong negative feedback from technical users due to several limitation within the service as it has been developed. These concerns have been noted by LL, who are also providing feedback to the Canny developers.
  • However, it was noted that an advantage with Canny is that the Second Life environment there allows users to log-in to it using their SL credentials (just as is currently the case with Jira). However, Github doe not allow this, but requires uses to have dedicated accounts – with the concern this would like be seen as a objectionable requirement by many SL users.

Scripted Camera Control Updates

  • Leviathan Linden has been working on some LSL updates for camera control, which are expected to be deployed with the Gingerbread update in the next few weeks. These are:
    • float llGetCameraAspect(): returns aspect ratio as known to the camera on the server. Basically width/height of SL window.
    • float llGetCameraFOV(): returns “field of view” of the camera as known to the server, in radians. Is a measure of angle of view of the vertical span of the window.
    • vector llWorldPosToHUD(vector world_pos): returns HUD position that maps to the world-pos as seen by current camera as known by server. HUD attachment point doesn’t matter: the server figures it out.
    • string llComputeHash(string message, string algorithm): returns hash digest of message using the algorithm, without any “nonce salt” as in llMD5String(). Supported algorithms are: md5, md5_sha1, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, and sha512.
  • Concerns were raised over the float llGetCameraAspect() being used to “fingerprint” users (e.g. whether two accounts are being used by the same user) through returned information on window size & resolution. In response, it was pointed out the return is only the window aspect ration, which is regarded as more secure against such fingerprinting.

Game Control Update

  • Leviathan also encountered a bug in the game controller code he is developing which meant that sometimes bits could be lost in the button_edges argument supplied to the game_control event.
  • The fix for this has been a change to the game_control event signatures from game_control(key id, integer button_levels, integer button_edges, list axes) to game_control(key id, integer button_levels, list axes).
  • Thus, it will be the responsibility of scripters to compute button_levels as necessary. Scripters who want the edges will have to track a global variable previous_button_levels.

In Brief

  • Questions were asked about LL developing a “scripted UI”. These likely arose out people hearing second-hand some comments made at the first Content Creation User Group meeting. For fuller context, please see my notes from that meeting.
  • For all other topics, please refer to the video below.

† 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.