Category: SL User Group Meetings

2023 week #48: SL TPVD meeting summary + PBR Update

Posted on by Inara Pey
Moochie All Hallows, October 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my chat log transcript and audio recording of the December 1st, 2023 Third Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting, together with the video recording of the meeting made by Pantera – my thanks to her as always for making it and allowing me to embed it in these summaries.

Meeting Overview

  • 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.
  • As a rule, these meetings are:
    • Generally held once a month  the third or fourth Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre. See the SL Public Calendar for specific meeting dates.
    • Open to all with an interest in viewer development.
    • Conducted in a mix of text and voice.
  • The notes herein are drawn from a mix of my own chat log and audio recording of the meeting, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Viewer Updates

  • The glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.1.6894459864, was promoted to de facto release status on November 28.
  • The Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer updated to version 7.1.1.7039128750 on December 1.

The rest of the current crop of official viewers remains as:

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance X RC, version 6.6.17.6935636398, issued November 21 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
    • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 6.6.17.6935629493, November 21.
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
  • Project viewers:

General Viewer Notes:

  • The promotion of the PBR Materials view marks the second promotion of a viewer built using the Github Actions build page.
  • It is uncertain whether or not there will be a further viewer promotion in 2023. If there is, the most likely candidate would by the Emojis viewer, although at the time of writing, this had had to go through the Github build process (which it naturally will when merged with the release viewer code-base).

PBR Materials Update

[Video: 1:23-8:55]

  • PBR Materials was shipped with a number of known bugs and issues, none of the former of which were considered to be significant enough to block the release, whilst some of the latter required further investigation for repros, etc., and the Lab decided to release whilst investigating.
  • This means a maintenance update is already in progress which will continue additional fixes, and this will also be used to catch issues and bugs reported post-release.
    • One of the post-release bugs uncovered is that – for reasons unknown – disabling transparent water impacts animation playback; see: BUG-234759.
    • Another issue revealed by PBR is that the viewer draws Linden Water twice. (not the entire scene, an issue previously remedied, just Linden Water), and this is being corrected.
  • The request is for bug and issues to keep being reported, simply because PBR Materials now has far more eyes on it, and so things that may have been missed due to the limited number of eyes on things in testing / the multiplicity of ways people use SL, means that some edge-cases, etc., may have been missed.
  • A question was asked if LL had considered off the exposure adjustments (adjusted within a set range through the Sky settings) to prevent the viewer from rendering some scenes excessively bright.
    • The response to this was that the exposure is tied to tone-mapping and a controlled HDR range, as such LL would rather users adjust to designing environments in accordance with the new (glTF-defined) tone mapping, then introducing more granular options into the viewer (such as which tone mapper to use).
    • [Video: 14:58-15:55] However, it was also noted that if TPVs wish to provide their own tone mapping options, this would not be seen as violating the so-called “shared user experience”, as they are regarded as post-processing effects (then don’t actually physically manipulate how objects appear in-world) and they are subjective in how they are seen by individual users.
  • [Video 25:25-33:27] A broader mention of additional glTF work – scene import, hierarchies, etc., some of which is mentioned in my simple  introduction to PBR Materials.
    • Part of this future work will be to look at how automatic LODs for mesh objects are produced, and whether to continue to support them through the uploader (which is limited in its abilities) or to direct content creators to other solutions for generating LODs prior to upload (e.g. via Simplygon and Blender).
    • This conversation also encompasses various limitations common to SL which glTF might alter / improve upon as it is further adopted (such as meshes currently being limited to eight faces due to the platform’s data entry model regarding meshes as prims), plus the potential impacts of changes. Please refer to the video for specifics on this discussion.

Performance Issue

[Video: 3:01-6:10]

  • One issue that is proving hard to consistence repro is that of frequent slow-downs with NVIDIA GL drivers which can result in significant FPS loss in the viewer – see: BUG-234706 for more details.
  • At the time of writing, both LL’s QA and others are trying to consistently repro the problem, however, so of the thinking is is related to a mix of CPU core and GL optimisations running on the host system.
  • The concern here is that where it has been repro’d, it has been with systems using 8-core CPUs and NIVIDIA GPUs (although what the correlation between the two might be in terms of a cause for the problem, is unclear), which could impact a fair percentage of SL users if it proves to be a widespread issue (particularly if it is unresolved when Firestorm makes a PBR release).
  • Those who feel they are experiencing a performance loss over time logged-in which reflects the notes presented in the bug report, and who can dig down into their system data for possible causes, are asked to add relevant comments to the Jira.

In Brief

“Disappearing Objects” Issues

[Video:  9:06-11:45]

Some of these may pre-exist PBR or be related to the PBR release:

  • Objects not rendering at log-in due to the inventory frame load locking main processing with the result that messages to the viewer about some in-world objects are simply dropped, and they are never rendered other than via a re-log (or TP out / back?). LL has a fix for this in progress, but as it causes some additional issues, not ETA on when it might be deployed.
  • There is an issue with mesh objects in particular not rendering (see BUG-234700 “[GLTF] Mesh objects randomly not rezzing properly at login”), but it is currently unclear if this is related to the above issue or the result of something else.
  • BUG-234616 “[PBR] Lights outside of camera frustrum are not rendered until within camera frustrum” – has been accepted by LL, but is still an open issue under investigation.

General Notes

  • [Video: 13:18-13:54] The “Fall Colours” simulator update (currently on the BlueSteel and Preflight RC channels) has a bug related to collision sounds (see: BUG-234757 “Repetitive Collision Sound?” and this forum thread) which is under investigation. It was also noted that Fall Colours is liable to be the last simulator update for 2023.
  • [Video 17:24-25:15] The question was asked if LL would accept either the entire RLVa API (Restrained Life Viewer alternative, as maintained by Kitty Barnett and used by several third-party viewer and analogous to RLV) or a subset thereof.
    • RLV/a have been shown to have a wide range of uses outside of their original intent, some of which have, to a degree been matched / had some level of equivalence via things like Experience Keys in the viewer, while others still remain useful for multiple applications – such as the use of either to manage wardrobe / outfit systems, for example).
    • The short response to this via Runitai and Vir Linden was “probably”, as LL are aware that the widespread use of RLV/a features does create something of a schism between TPVs and the official viewer. As such, a pull request of code / the opportunity to discuss has been offered.
    • This led to a wider conversation on how RLV/a works and just what form of open-source platform SL should be in terms of extensibility / code contributions – please refer to the video for more.
  • [Video 33:41-34:20] Linden Lab Office Closure for Holidays: Linden Lab will be closed other than for emergency coverage from end of business on December 22nd through until start of business on January 2nd, 2024.
    • This means that a No Change window for simulator and official viewer releases will be in place from Monday, December 18th, 2023.
  • [Video: 36:16-41:21] HTTP/2 multiplexing:
    • There is a project in development for upping the simulator and viewer to HTTP/2 (although the viewer will require a Curl update in order to handle it).
    • Requests have been made to extend this work to encompass the Asset Store, which internally at the Lab is seen as a nice to have / good to have, but no actual work in that direction in currently in-hand.
  • [Video: 48:00-End] General discussion on better support for the viewer on Linux, segueing into a discussion of possibly adopting voice options other than Vivox, and what needs to be improved within voice in general.

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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #48 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Witherwood Thicket, October 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 28th 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.

Apologies for the lateness of this summary, RL is not playing nice at the moment.

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

  • Tuesday, November 28th: support for PBR Materials was deployed to the SLS Main channel, making it grid-wide.
  • Wednesday, November 29th: the “Fall Colours” maintenance update should be deployed to the BlueSteel RC. This will include llRezObjectWithParams, llIsFriend, but will not include the game controller updates.
  • “Fall Colours” is liable to be the last simulator update for 2023.

Viewer Updates

The glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.1.6894459864, dated November 17th, was promoted to de facto release status on November 28th, in line with the grid-wide deployment of PBR Materials.

Other viewers in the pipe remain as:

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance X RC, version 6855926535, issued November 21 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
    • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 6.6.17.6935636398, November 21.
    • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.17.6898288582, November 20.
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
  • Project viewers:

Game Controllers

  • The code remains under internal review at the Lab, particularly around the UI elements needed to support it in the viewer.
  • Runitai Linden has suggested seeing if it is possible to support a system where the scripter can specify custom input names, which show up in the UI with a select-and-toggle method of mapping game device inputs to those channels, as Leviathan Linden explained at the meeting:
Suppose you were making some custom game with very custom input names (e.g. not “Strafe” and “Jump”), like a Twerking game and you wanted “Wiggle”, “Waggle”, and “Bop” to be the names of your inputs. The scripter would be able to call something like… llGameControlMappings([“Wiggle”, GAME_CONTROL_AXIS_0, “Waggle”, GAME_CONTROL_AXIS_3, “Bop”, GAME_CONTROL_BUTTON_2]); The viewer would then get that info and be able to provide custom UI for setting those input names to the various axes or buttons on whatever device you happen to be using.

– Leviathan Linden describing a proposed custom button names for games controllers

  • This led to an extended discussion on game controller, mapping buttons, options and approaches.
  • Leviathan also noted the current version of the back-end support for games controller will be made available on a simulator channel on Aditi (the Beta grid) later in the week.

In Brief

  • The straw man document Rider Linden has been putting together on combat system improvements is now being circulated within the Lab for comments and feedback. Expect more probably in the new year.
  • The above, together with BUG-233210 “Third Person View With Mouselook Functionality”, led to a discussion on camera positions, remote vehicle control, etc., which in turn led to a broad conversation on camera placement options and camera control.
  • Region Crossings: no major update from Monty, who has been out of the office.
  • A mixed discussion on frame rates (including confusion between server-side frame rates and client FPS performance), region crossings co-habiting regions which are adjoining one another as a defined group on the same simhost server, and much else that was mostly user-side in terms of input. 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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #47 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Spark Project: Olympus, September 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 21st 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.

Apologies for the lateness of this summary, RL is not playing nice at the moment.

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 for the week, due to this being Thanksgiving week in the US, and so a No Change window is in force. Simhosts are being restarted, however.

Upcoming Simulator Deployments

  • The simulator support for glTF PBR Materials is expected to be deployed to the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, November 28th, making it grid-wide. Promotion of the glTF viewer is liable to occur in that week as well.
  • The “Fall Colours” maintenance update will likely go to RC on Wednesday, December 6th, so it can be grid-wide by Christmas. This update will not include Leviathan Linden’s work on game controller support.
  • The game controller work will now likely be included in the simulator update to follow “Fall Colours”, and which has been code-named “Gingerbread”. This will most likely be deployed in the first working week of January 2024, and will likely included the recent Feature Request to increase the available sensor counts (see: BUG-234648).

Viewer Updates

Four viewer updates at the start of the week:

  • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), updated to version 6855926535, November 21.
  • Maintenance Y RC (My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from Landmark history), updated to version 6.6.17.6935642049, November 21.
  • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 6.6.17.6935636398, November 21.
  • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, updated to version 6.6.17.6898288582, November 20.

Other viewers in the pipe remain as:

  • Release viewer: Github Actions (GHA) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.6566955269, issued October 20 (with major CEF update and number version numbering) and promoted on October 25.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

Game Controllers

  • Note the changes to code deployment changes outlined above. The work was pulled from “Fall Colours” to allow for further internal review of the code by the Lab.
  • Because of the need for further review, the code is not currently available on Aditi (the Beta grid). It is hoped the code will be re-deployed to some regions on Aditi in the week after US Thanksgiving.
  • It was noted by Signal Linden that it would be nice to have an official project viewer available when the code starts being deployed to the Main grid.

In Brief

  • Region Crossings:
    • Monty Linden is continuing to work on the updates for physical and TP region crossings, but was not available to respond to questions at this meeting.
    • However, it was suggested that, subject to his input, the update to the simulator code handling income teleports / regions crossings to a region might form a part of the “Gingerbread” simulator update.
  • A discussion on support for expanding regex support with Linkset Data keys to support case insensitive searches (see : BUG-233678) and for case insensitive regex support in general. This is being actively pondered upon within the Lab.
  • A further discussion on sensors and their potential uses, which also touched on the need for an “official” Area Search capability.
  • Please refer to the video for these, and other sundry mentions / discussions.

† 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.

2023 week #46: SL CCUG meeting summary: PBR status & current release plan

Posted on by Inara Pey
Le’eaf Forest Retreat, September 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, November 16th, 2023.

  • 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 and chaired by Vir Linden, in accordance with the dates and times given in the the SL Public Calendar, which also includes the location for the meetings.
    • 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

No updates for the latter part of the week, with the current crop of official viewers being:

  • Github Actions (GHA) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.6566955269, issued October 20 (with major CEF update and number version numbering) and promoted on October 25.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance X RC, version 6855926535, issued November 14 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y, version 6.6.17.6855930358, issued November 14 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.1.6750600769, November 11.
    • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 6.6.17.6709258523, November 9.
    • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.582201, October 16.
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
  • Project viewers:

General Notes

  • The PBR viewer now appears to be the no 1 on the runway for promotion to release status – see the notes below for more.
  • The next viewer LL is hoping to promote after PBR is the Emoji RC viewer.
  • As there are now four Maintenance RC viewer in the pipeline (V, W, X, and Y), it is likely some of them will be merged together to reduce the load on the release schedule.

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

  • To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
  • The overall goal for glTF as a whole is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • Up to four texture maps are supported for PBR Materials: the base colour (which includes the alpha); normal; metallic / roughness; and emissive, each with independent scaling.
  • In the near-term, glTF materials assets are materials scenes that don’t have any nodes / geometry, they only have the materials array, and there is only one material in that array.
  • As a part of this work, PBR Materials will see the introduction of reflection probes which can be used to generate reflections (via cubemaps) on in-world surfaces. These will be a mix of automatically-place and manually place probes (with the ability to move either).
  • The viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page.

Further Resources

Grid-Wide Deployment and Viewer Release

  • Following a meeting this week, the current plan from the Lab is to deploy PBR Materials grid-wide on the simhosts during the first week after US Thanksgiving (so week commencing Monday, November 27th, 2023).
  • Currently, all RC simhost have been updated to the PBR simulator code which leaves only the SLS Main channel to go.
  • The plan is also to promote the PBR RC viewer to de facto release status that same week.
  • Note that these plans are subject to late-breaking issues or other requirements not getting in the way of things.

Recent Work

  • Fixes are progress for what are seen as to remaining notable issues:
    • One to correct the issue with normal maps uploaded via the glTF uploader always coming out square post-upload  and with lossy compression.
    • One to correct the issue of not being able to revert an Alpha mode from blend or mask to opaque without having to save the material back to inventory after making the change in order for it to apply properly.
  • There are some additional bugs within the system, some of which do have fixes in the works, but these aren’t seen as having significant impact, and will be subject to release with the first maintenance update to PBR Materials.
  • That said, there some issues which have been identified, but will not be addressed until the first PBR maintenance viewer is issued. These include:
    • A “slim minority” of users with very, very large inventories and Friends lists may find some objects in a scene do not render when logging-in. Currently, the steps for correcting this are to a) re-log, and if that fails to resolve the problem, b) clear cache.
    • Some users on Macbooks and / or Apple Silicon systems may experience poor performance on the PBR viewer.
  • For those interested – this is the list of currently open issues for PBR.

General PBR Discussion

  • BUG-234235 “[PBR] alpha blend on water is acting a bit like invisiprim” – this is being worked on, and is seen as somewhat related to another change under consideration: environmental haze.
    • Currently, local lights are not affected by environmental haze. Runitai Linden is working on a change that will make local lights responsive to haze (e.g. if you are in a foggy environment, lights at an increasing distance from your camera position will appear fainter and fainter due to the influence of the fog).
    • This work will likely be surfaced in the first PBR viewer maintenance release.
    • The reason this is related to BUG-234235 is that it will also require an adjustment to water haze as well, and this should resolve the issue reported in the bug (haze will essentially get its own render pass, with a single shader being used for both atmospheric and water haze, rather than them requiring separate render passes).
  • Future work on glTF will allow for more greater control of lighting sources, such as lamps, etc., and provide for luminosity to be defined in terms such as lumens. However, this work will depend on glTF scene import, which will be worked on in the next tranche of work, together with HDRI import / export (which is not as yet on the glTF implementation roadmap).
  • A Materials folder is to be added to the system library and available through the Library section of inventory.

In Brief

  • A Feature Request has been filed to allow system-generated sounds to be overridden by Experiences to provide more immersive sounds (e.g. on entering a door and being teleported, the sound heard might be the creaking of the door opening, rather than the ding-sing-whoosh of the default teleport sound – which can only currently be disabled on a per viewer basis by the user). See (and Watch) BUG-234682 “Override UI sounds within the scope of experience keys” for more.

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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #46 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
 Triple Sweet Café, September 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 14th 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.

Apologies for the lateness of this summary, RL is not playing nice at the moment.

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.

Server Deployments

  • No deployments for SLS Main channel, but the simhosts were restarted.
  • Wednesday, November 15th should have seen the deployment of the PBR Material simulator support to all RC channels.
    • Please remember: if you have anything that uses PBR materials and you rez that object (or wear it) on a non-PBR simulator,  the PBR Materials will be stripped from the object and forgotten.
  • There are currently internal discussions on whether or not to deploy the simulator support for PBR before or after US Thanksgiving.

Viewer Updates

Two new Maintenance viewers were issued on Tuesday, November 14th:

  • Maintenance X, version 6855926535, comprising viewer usability improvements.
  • Maintenance Y, version 6.6.17.6855930358, comprising improvements to the My Outfits folder (display thumbnails on hover) and to remove entries from landmark history

The rest of the official remain unchanged at the start of the week:

  • Github Actions (GHA) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.6566955269, issued October 20 (with major CEF update and number version numbering) and promoted on October 25.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

Game Controllers

  • The simulator code for the game controller support is now in the “Fall Colours” simulator RC update, which is currently scheduled as the first simulator RC deployment in December.
  • The viewer code needs further work, including:  keyboard mapping to controller input channels; the ability to set the dead zone of various axes; support for “less common” controllers; additional UI to work alongside existing support options (e.g. SpaceNavigator).
    • In terms of the SpaceNavigator, the project will not include an update to support the latest 3dconnexion drivers, as it is felt this will break expected behaviour for the SpaceNav mouse in SL – the aim is to continue to support SpaceNav as is.
  • This work does not, as yet, include the ability to control avatar motion, although there was additional discussion around this.
  • Expansions to inputs have been filed in Feature Request BUG-234678.
  • There was also significant discussion on game controller / LSL interactions.
  • When available via the Alternate Viewers pages, the viewer will has a MacOS build as well. Meanwhile, documentation on the game controller work can be found on the SL wiki, and this includes Github link for downloading a pre-release version of the Windows viewer.

SL Combat

  • A further general discussion on updating SL’s support for combat gaming, most of which has been covered in recent SUG summaries here (e.g. adjusting the avatar bounding box and hit box when crouching  / seating (so the form allows for crawling under object, for example, and the latter makes for a small target).
  • Camera control options:
    • A new request was for a native means to set the camera to follow remote objects (e.g. RC vehicles) rather than having to relay on “janky” scripts to achieve the capability.
    • There were also requests for offsetting mouselook view (see VWR-28745 for an example of such a request).
    • Rider suggested updates to the camera control mechanism and positioning might be better suited to an update to scripted camera capabilities he is considering (but not anywhere close to being in a position to discuss in terms of what might / can / cannot be done).

In Brief

  • A lot of requests for updates to SL terrain, including updating the textures and improving the resolution (which should hopefully be covered by the PBR terrain support Cosmic Linden is developing, which should also reduce texture stretching as the heightmap is morphed); full terrain painting (not currently on the books); a general smoothing terrain deformations to make movement, etc., smoother.
  • Region Crossing: following the most recent pile-on tests, Monty Linden is working on some updated code, which he is trying to get onto Aditi (the Beta grid) on server channel DRTSIM-565, however there is a bug he needs to hammer on first.
  • Monty is also working on “an EventQueueGet thing”, which he hopes to get on to Aditi on DRTSIM-577.
  • Further requests for a means of masking Linden Water from the interiors of object – see BUG-227965 as a reference for this.
  • There was a request to be able to adjust the centre of mass for a linkset (e.g. a vehicle). While this can be done to some degree via prim cutting, it is not so possible with mesh; how it would be handled is unclear, but Leviathan Linden indicated he would kick some ideas around.
  • somewhat/ sort-of related to the above, a Feature Request has been filed to allow control of where a vehicle rotates from without having to do prim hackery – see BUG-234649, an update to SVC-6619). It was noted this could be useful for objects other than vehicles alone.

† 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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #45 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Tilheyra, September 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 7th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and is not intended to be a full transcript.

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.

Server Deployments

  • No deployments for SLS Main channel, but the simhosts were restarted.
  • The planned Wednesday, November 8th deployment of the PBR Material simulator support to all RC channels has been put on hold pending the resolution of a late-breaking issue.
    • At the time of the meeting, the proposal was to restart simhosts on the Ferrari and Magnum RC channels, whilst BlueSteel and LeTigre (the two currently with the PBR support) to receive updated code before the end of the week.
    • Please remember: if you have anything that uses PBR materials and you rez that object (or wear it) on a non-PBR simulator,  the PBR Materials will be stripped from the object and forgotten.
As it turns out the new message introduced by Materials was generating unacked packets back to the simulator. In groups of one or to agents this isn’t a big deal… but add a user here and a user there and pretty soon you’re talking about real data, and this extra overhead was causing some performance issues on our end that would eat into script time. We have a solution to it and we are just trying to reach a consensus on how best to roll that onto the grid.

– Rider Linden, describing the issue which prevented the simulator-side PBR code deploying to all RC channels

Viewer Updates

No updates to viewers for the start of the week, leaving the official viewer pipelines as:

  • Github Actions (GHA) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.6566955269, issued October 20 (with major CEF update and number version numbering) and promoted on October 25.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

SL Combat

  • Regarding the “Combat Committee” and requests for capabilities for combat in Second Life, Rider Linden stated:
I don’t have news on any sort of when for that. I am actively working on a proposal that I’m going to float around the lab and then bring to the community. That may end up involving creating what I’ve been calling a “Combat Committee”… because I love alliteration. I don’t think I’m going to have anything useful to report on that though until January next year. I would really like to get some tools in that would allow people to create some interesting combat systems.

– Rider Linden

In Brief

  • Requests from users:
    • An update on the recent region crossing tests (see October’s SUG summaries). Monty Linden is working on this, but has been out-of-office, so a further update may be forthcoming at an upcoming meeting once he is back.
    • Custom pivot points – a capability being considered as a further part of the glTF project, as this will enable hierarches that will make arbitrary pivots a lot easier.
    • Animation priority updates: these was going to be looked at as a part of the on-hold Puppetry project. However, any such work is unlikely to include things like changing priorities by script, as these are seen as problematic.
    • A request for new sensor functions which could better enable RP functions (e.g. detacting NPC, casting speeling), together with further requests for Feature Requests such as BUG-4329 “Feature Request: New sensor functions that are not bound to a prim’s position & rotation plus inclusion of an Owner filter” and BUG-233784 “Add sensor type LOW_SCRIPTED as an option”, and also increasing the number of objects a sensor can report on from 16 to 32.
  • Rider Linden is developing ideas for possible scripted camera control updates, and is adding BUG-6325 “More Flag parameters for llSetCameraParams()” to the list.
  • Requests are being made for those with games controller to try the pre-release Game Controller viewer and offer feedback. This is still currently Windows only, but a MacOS version is coming Soon™.

† 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.