Category: SL User Group Meetings

2023 SL Puppetry project week #19 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Puppetry demonstration via Linden Lab – see below.  Demos video with the LL comment “We have some basic things working with a webcam and Second Life but there’s more to do before it’s as animated as we want.”

Note: this has been updated to include comments made at the TPV Developer meeting on Friday, May 12th.

The following notes have been taken from chat logs and audio recording of the Thursday, May 11th, 2023 Puppetry Project meetings held at the Castelet Puppetry Theatre on Aditi. These meetings are generally held on alternate weeks to the Content Creation User Group (CCUG), on same day / time (Thursdays at 13:00 SLT).

Notes in these summaries are not intended to be a full transcript of every meeting, but to highlight project progress / major topics of discussion.

Project Summary

General Project Description as Originally Conceived

LL’s renewed interest in puppetry was primarily instigated by Philip joining LL as official advisor, and so it really was about streaming mocap. That is what Philip was interested in and why we started looking at it again. However since Puppetry’s announcement what I’ve been hearing from many SL Residents is: what they really want from “puppetry” is more physicality of the avatar in-world: picking up objects, holding hands, higher fidelity collisions. 
As a result, that is what I’ve been contemplating: how to improve the control and physicality of the avatar. Can that be the new improved direction of the Puppetry project? How to do it?

Leviathan Linden

  • Previously referred to as “avatar expressiveness”, Puppetry is intended to provide a means by which avatars can mimic physical world actions by their owners (e.g. head, hand, arm movements) through tools such as a webcam and using technologies like inverse kinematics (IK) and the  LLSD Event API Plug-in (LEAP) system.
    • Note that facial expressions and finger movements are not currently enabled.
    • Most movement is in the 2D plain (e.g., hand movements from side-to-side but not forward / back), due to limitations with things like depth of field tracking through a webcam, which has yet to be addressed.
  • The back-end support for the capability is only available on Aditi (the Beta grid) and within the following regions: Bunraku, Marionette, and Castelet.
  • Puppetry requires the use of a dedicated viewer, the Project Puppetry viewer, available through the official Second Life Alternate Viewers page.
  • No other special needs beyond the project viewer are required to “see” Puppetry animations. However, to use the capability to animate your own avatar and broadcast the results, requires additional work – refer to the links below.
  • There is a Puppetry Discord channel – those wishing to join it should contact members of LL’s puppetry team, e.g. Aura Linden, Simon Linden, Rider Linden, Leviathan Linden (not a full list of names at this time – my apologies to those involved whom I have missed).

Additional Work Not Originally In-Scope

  • Direct avatar / object / avatar-avatar interactions (“picking up” an apple; high-fives. etc.).
  • Animations streaming: allowing one viewer to run animations and have them sent via the simulator to all receiving viewers without any further processing of the animations by those viewers.
  • Enhanced LSL integration for animation control.
  • Adoption of better animation standards – possibly glTF.
  • Given the project is incorporating a lot of additional ideas, it is likely to evolve into a rolling development, with immediate targets for development / implementation decided as they are agreed upon, to be followed by future enhancements. As such, much of what goes into the meetings at present is general discussion and recommendations for consideration, rather than confirmed lines o development.

Bugs, Feature Requests and Code Submissions

  • For those experimenting with Puppetry, Jiras (bug reports / fixes or feature requests) should be filed with “[Puppetry]” at the start of the Jira title.
  • There is also a public facing Kanban board with public issues.
  • Those wishing to submit code (plug-ins or other) or who wish to offer a specific feature that might be used with Puppetry should:

Further Information

Meeting Notes

Viewer Progress

  • An updated version of the viewer – version 6.6.12.579958 – was release on Thursday, May 11th.
    • This update includes access to Rider Linden’s experimental attachment point tracking & forwarding to the server feature.
    • It also includes various incremental improvements to handling puppetry, such as support for parsing binary LEAP data from the LEAP script.
  • Avatar attachment point tracking (per the TPVD meeting discussion on May 12th):
    • This allows the tracking of joints (using attachment points) using a script.
    • Using visible attachment points (i.e. those on the avatar , NOT any of the screen-based HUD attachment points) cuts down on the the amount of data having to be be handled at both ends.
    • The speed at which the attachment point movement is read back is such that it could not be exploited to create a copy of an animation with any real fidelity.
    • This is a deliberate move to ensure that animation creators are not left feeling uncomfortable about LSL animation tracking.
    • There is a combined throttle / sleep time elements to tracking attachment points: the throttle limits the number of attachment points that can be tracked over a certain period of time; he script sleep time is designed to allow an animation to move those attachment points forward sufficiently before a further taking record is made. Thus, it is next to impossible to track and record a coherent animation frame.
  • It was noted that previously, joint constraints had been hard coded in C++, but their configuration has been moved into a human-readable LLSD file which can be modified without rebuilding the viewer.
  • Two areas of focus going forward are:
    • Improving the Inverse Kinematic (IK) system within the viewer – something Leviathan Linden is already working on. This will include overall improvements to IK constraints as well as to positioning, with the existing source-code constraints moved  replaced by a further config file – “constraints” here being in terms of joint rotation / movement.
    • Providing .FBX animation file import and Mixamo skeleton re-targeting.
  • The IK work is still being thrashed out (and subject to much more discussion at meetings, but is seen as a priority over other elements of work, such as the animations streaming idea Leviathan Linden had been working on. The hope is that by improving IK, it will play into streaming and “live” animations a lot more robustly and smoothly. It is also seen as a foundational piece of work for further opening up puppetry and animation work.

General Notes

  • It was noted that for animation import, LL is looking towards using / supporting Assimp (github: https://github.com/assimp/assimp), which supports some 30-40 animation formats, converting them to it ownformat for ease of import to multiple platforms. Notably, it supports .FBX and glTF, so it fits with the Lab’s goal of utilising glTF for materials, mesh imports, etc.
  • [TPVD meeting, May 12th] This will not alter the existing internal format for animation. It is just  to allow the import of other formats.
  • It is acknowledged that alongside o that, the Labe will require a retargeting system for animations; although what form this will take is still TBD.
  • The core of the meeting was a general discussion of things that might / could e done in the future, and what technologies LL might look towards.

Date of Next Meeting

  • Thursday, May 25th, 2023, 13:00 SLT.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #19 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The White Armory-Silvan Moon Designs, March 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 9th 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 entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, May 9th, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 579747, previously deployed to the RC channels.
    • An issue occurred during the deployment which caused it to be somewhat protracted, but this was overcome without any need for a roll-back.
  • On Wednesday, May 3rd, a new simulator release will be made to the BlueSteel RC channel. This contains configuration changes on to help support the new “Social Casino“.

Upcoming Simulator Updates

  • It is hoped that week #19 will see a new simulator release to the RC channel which contains assorted updates and fixes.
  • No news on when the back-end for PBR Materials will be deployed to Preflight (and Snack?).

Server Deployment Forum Announcements

  • A long-standing aspect of the Tuesday / Wednesday simhost re-starts / deployments is that they have been highlighted through (almost) weekly announcement posts to the Technology > Simulator sub-forum.
  • In recent months this practice has grown increasingly sporadic and for the last multiple weeks, ceased altogether – which has apparently been a deliberate move, LL viewing the dedicated web pages for server and viewer releases as potentially more useful.
  • In addition, LL are looking to try to produce “more substantial release notes”.
  • HOWEVER: the problems here are that:
    1. The forums are a popular resource for users, and the summaries of deployments there do a lot to keep people informed as to what is going on, and how their specific regions might be affected by rolling restarts and updates contained in releases.
    2. Most particularly, while the server release pages provide a list available active and past releases, they do not make it particularly easy to discover information on upcoming deployments, unless you happen to have the actual release number – something what has only previously been made obviously public through – wait for it – the forum posts.
    3. Ergo, it really doesn’t matter how much more informative LL make the release notes if they cannot be found and read in time to understand what any upcoming releases might hold.
  • Given the above – and as Rider Linden noted in the meeting, it would probably be a useful idea for LL to continue to provide the forum posts on upcoming deployments.

Viewer Updates

No official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579629, promoted April 25.
  • 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:
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

  • HTTP work:
    • Rider Linden is currently working on a server-side update to allow the PATCH method for both HTTP out and in. during the meeting, he raised the idea of possibly adding HEAD to both as well – both of which met with favourable responses.
    • He will attempt to add BUG-231657 “http_response body is blank if no Content-Type header was returned” to the current simulator maintenance update, if it can be fixed in time.
  • KVP work:
    • A simulator update is in progress to de-couple the Experience KVP database from land (i.e. so it will work on land where there is no associated Experience running). It is not clear when this will be deployed within an RC – although it will not be in the next RC update.
    • A request as been made to give the KVP database the same search options as LSD has with llLinksetDataFindKeys(). This is unlikely to happen, with the reason given being that the storage system for experience key-value data and object LSD is totally different, so feature parity between the two doesn’t always make sense / isn’t possible.
    • However, additional work on KVP is on the simulator roadmap, but not work has started on it as yet. This work will likely include: updating the server/software that make that operate; a probable change to the way accounting is performed (e.g. rather than giving KVP users a pool of bytes, the limitation would be by the number of keys, with the overall byte pool increased).
    • This latter point gave rise to concerns about the potential for application breakage for grid-wide applications, particularly those which may expand in their use over time if they are related to a popular product (e.g. a grid-wide teleport system with multiple nodes throughout the grid).  Expect more on this as the ideas are more fleshed-out; for now refer to the last 15 minutes of the video below.
  • There are some reports that BUG-232037 “Avatar Online Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” have worsened on the course of the last week, despite efforts to tamp down on some of the causes. LL are to take “another swing at it”.
  • BUG-233384 “Scripts failing to receive rapid touch_start events under LL viewer” – whilst possibly more a viewer-side issue, was raised on account of it being marked as “resolved” (perhaps as far back as the release of the MFA viewer), and the report closed, but the issue still occurring for some. This led to a discussion on touch events (double-clicks vs. long clicks, games requiring both, the nature of the issue, etc. Those seeing the issue should 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 week #18: SL CCUG meeting summary – PBR

Posted on by Inara Pey
Elvion, March 2023 – 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, May 4th, 2023 at 13:00 SLT. 

These meetings are for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current work, upcoming work, and requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work. They are usually chaired by Vir Linden, and dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.

Notes:

  • These meetings are conducted in mixed voice and text chat. Participants can use either to make comments / ask or respond to comments, but note that you will need Voice to be enabled to hear responses and comments from the Linden reps and other using it. If you have issues with hearing or following the voice discussions, please inform the Lindens at the meeting.
  • The following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting, and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Official Viewer Status

No updates through until the meeting, leaving the official viewer pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579629, promoted April 25.
  • 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:
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

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.
  • There is a general introduction / overview / guide to authoring PBR Materials available via the Second Life Wiki.
  • Substance Painter is also used as a guiding principal for how PBR materials should look in Second Life.
  • 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.
  • Given the additional texture load, work has been put into improving texture handling within the PBR viewer.
  • 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.
    • It is currently to early to state how this might change when glTF support is expanded to include entire objects.
  • The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
  • The viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page.
  • Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.

Status

  • The viewer is now at Release Candidate status, per the viewer update list above. HOWEVER, the server-side support for glTF / PBR is still awaiting deployment to the Preflight RC channel on the main grid, so for the time being, the viewer still only works on Aditi (the Beta grid), on the following regions: Materials1, Materials Adult, Rumpus Room and Rumpus Room 2 through 4.
  • The viewer will remain in RC for some time to allow for broader feedback to be gained, particularly once the server support has been deployed to simhosts on Preflight (and, most likely Snack as a follow-on), and so is more amenable for testing by a wider group of users / creators.
  • As always, those who do find significant issues in using the viewer in RC are asked to report them via a BUG report ASAP.
  • Runitai Linden (aka Dave P), has been working on avatar performance with PBR, hoping to up the performance a little further, as well as continuing to refine reflection probes.
  • Brad Linden continues to work on bug fixing, improving network traffic overheads, etc.
  • A new addition to the PBR viewer is a reflection probe visualisation debug tool, allowing the volume of space specific probes are influencing to be seen, allowing people to better understand where reflections on surfaces are coming from, etc.
  • Application priorities: if a surface had either only PBR Materials applied, or PBR overlaying the “traditional” SL materials, it will be rendered according to the glTF specification. If an object has faces with different materials types (e.g. PBR Materials on some faces – such as the sides of a prim cube, and “traditional” SL materials on the others), the viewer will render the PDR faces via the the PBR renderer, and those face with the older materials in a manner consistent with how the should appear if rendered on a non-PBR viewer.

PBR Resources for Testing

  • There have been some requests for content to test PBR Materials against. Content has been provided (by LL and some of the creators testing PBR Materials already) on Aditi, and some of this could potentially be ported.
  • One suggestion was to make a sandbox available for PBR testing, allowing creators to build / import their own content and test it under different EEP settings (e.g. their own / those in the Library), using the Apply Only to Myself option.
  • Custom EEP settings are one particular area of testing that EEP creators might want to look at (both in terms of the PBR viewer and also with any PBR Materials test content). This is because there have been some changes made to the environment rendering in the PBR viewer which might impact some custom EEP settings, which may require them to be adjusted / updated and / or BUG reports raised against significant issues.
  • For those wishing to gain familiarity with PBR Materials in general, their is the SL Wiki entry for it, and it has been suggested some general test content could be provided through that page.

Future glTF Work

  • Geenz Linden is actively working on real-time mirror as a future follow-on project from the PBR Materials work, as well as working on Screen Space Reflections

Next Meeting

  • Thursday, May 18th, 2023.

† 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.

May 2023 SL Web User Group (WUG) meeting summary

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, March 3rd, 2023.

WUG meetings:

  • Are held in-world, generally on the first Wednesday of the month – see the SL public calendar.
  • Cover Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
  • They are not intended for the discussion of Governance issues, land fees / issues, content creation & tools, viewer or simulator development / projects. Please refer to the SL calendar for information on available meetings for these topics.

A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.

Marketplace

  • Mentioned towards the end of a blog post made on April 7th relating to (then) recent updates, the change to allow best selling to now index each merchant’s store individually instead of just the top 50k items is now being actively worked on.
    • When complete, it will allow customers to sort the listings within a store by those which have been the top selling over a certain period of time (exact period still TBD at the time of writing).
    • In addition, Sntax Linden is interested in taking feedback from merchants on idea they may have for best selling items indexing / lists.
  • Also raised at the April meeting was the subject of a Marketplace “Spring Clean” (last performed in 2019).
    • This will see the unlisting of products and/or disabling of merchant stores if they meet specific criteria (as defined in the blog posted linked-to above).
    • Note that products / stores can be re-activated by the Merchant logging-in and re-activating and re-listed.
  • The “Spring Cleaning” discussion included a number of suggestions / comments, including providing  listings with an indicator to show if the merchant had logged in to MP in the last X number of days, so that customers might have some idea as to how active the merchant is, should support be required (privacy concerns were raised over this idea).

In Brief

Please refer to the video for these topics.

  • The Spring Cleaning topic led to a broader discussion on preserving content which might be regarded as “historic” (with the creator’s approval) when the creator departs Second Life.
    • This is not necessarily something restricted to saving within the Marketplace.
    • There is already the Second Life Region Preservation Society which can take entire regions into LL’s stewardship when certain criteria can be met).
    • However preserving individual products / product lines raises issues of IP which could be more complicated than with the preservations of a region, and with issues of continued support (or the expectation thereof) should the product(s) also continue to be in use within SL.
  • Questions were asked about shopping practices and how often people use the MP shopping cart to store-up items for later purchase, rather than proceeding to the checkout with a cart when they’ve finished their current round of shopping.
    • Responses to this were many and varied (e.g. “because I don’t want to make any MP purchases until I’m in-world to receive / unpack / sort them”), through to comments about lack of wishlist functionality (e.g. they remain cumbersome to use / load slowly / the link to add items to a wishlist is not obvious, etc.).
  •  In terms of wishlists, the option for multiple / custom wishlists was again raised, and noted that it is on the MP roadmap, but currently under the heading of “someday”, rather than something that is actively being worked on or considered for implementation at this point in time.
  • A general discussion on how merchants promote new products – via Groups, Twitter, Discord, word-of-mouth, etc.
    • One suggestion was to allow customers the ability to “follow” their favourite stores (see feature request
    • BUG-233138 “Social/Creator Focused Marketplace Feed”), allowing them to receive / view information on new releases from those stores when visiting the MP.
    • Whilst reactive rather than proactive, it was also pointed out that the above could be done when a customer goes to their Favourite Stores listing on the MP and then order by Age: Newest First.
Sorting Favourite Stores on the MP to show latest releases from each store. Credit: Alexa Linden
  • The above led to the suggestion that people could have their own personalised MP home page, listing favourite stores, providing updates on the releases etc.
  • Dates for listings – date listed, date last updated, last date the item sold, for example – have been requested in the past and were requested again, together with indications on whether products are using  the latest / more recent SL capabilities, if relevant (e.g. Bento, PBR (once in general use), etc). However, trying to cover everything likely become overly complicated.
  • The idea of “verified” creators was also raised: although exactly what the criteria for this should be might be seen as subjective, or the process itself might be seen as a barrier to entry )were it, for example, involve LL requesting personal information beyond that already requested).
  • Plrease refer to the second half of the video for these and other general discussions.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, July 5th, 2023 (according to the public calendar – check for changes). Venue and time per top of this summary.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #18 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kaleidoscope, February 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  May 2nd 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 entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, May 2nd, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 579248.
  • On Wednesday, May 3rd, the maintenance release made to the Bluesteel RC channel in week #17 will be deployed to the rest of the RC channels.
    • One of the updates in this release is designed to fix issues “in the vicinity of” BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating”. At the time of the week #17 deployment, it was noted that all instances of the issue may not have been fixed, and the time the release has been on BlueSteel proves this to be the case.
    • Similarly, while this update helps fix an issue with avatars colliding with their vehicles on region crossings, it does not fix all region crossing issues; more will be addressed is an upcoming simulator update which should be “heading for RC soon”.

Viewer Updates

No official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579629, promoted April 25.
  • 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:
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

PBR Materials

With the promotion of the PBR Viewer to Release Candidate status, the plan remains to deploy the server-side code to a Release Candidate channel on the main grid “real soon now”. The code will initially go to the Preflight RC channel with a limited number of regions. Should it prove stable there, it will be expanded to the Snack RC prior to gaining promotion to one (or more) of the “major” RC channels.

In Brief

  • A discussion on region crossings and also an apparent uptick in teleport failures. Again, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence here that might be causing incorrect conclusions to be drawn:
    • Those doing a lot of consecutive region crossings in relatively short order (e.g. through flying, boating, driving) believe issues are “increasing”, and thus drawing the conclusion failures are widespread / endemic, and that those who are not seeing the same issues elsewhere is simply down to those other regions being routinely restarted.
    • Those making region crossings / TPs on a more  extended basis (e.g. interspersed with some amounts of time with each region, rather than just passing through / hopping one to the next) are not seeing the same issues, even within regions subject to heavy use (as with Fantasy Faire), and therefore questioning whether there is any real increase in issues.
    • (Which is not to say region crossings are not problematic; just that they can be subject to subjective responses rather than objective measurement.)
  • BUG-233784 “Add sensor type LOW_SCRIPTED as an option” sparked a debate on whether it should be a feature request or BUG report. This has been raised because the existing SCRIPTED sensor flag only locates objects that have used a substantial amount of CPU time recently, rather than ALL objects with any script in them set to “running”, as someone might reasonably expect when using it; so it is essentially a request for a new flag.
  • BUG-233829 “llSetEnvironment() in neighbouring regions can cause issues with the viewer” –  it has been noted that if llSetEnvironment() (EEP) is set within an adjoining region to one where it is currently being set (and the avatar attempting to set it is registered as a child agent within the ormer region), this can impact attempts within the latter region to change its settings through the EEP options. Whether this means the simulator should be updated so as local environment settings are not sent to child agents, or the viewer should be updated so it does not ask for neighbouring region EEP settings has yet to be determined – as has the time frame for either change to be made.
  • There is a further discussion on llMessageLinked, and the idea of an llMessageListLinked function towards the end of the meeting and script sleep cycles used in llRezObject and llCreateLink. Please refer to the video below for specifics.

† 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 #17 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Grand Garden, February 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  April 25th 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 entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, April 25th, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 579248.
  • On Wednesday, April 26th, simhosts on the Bluesteel RC channel will receive a bugfix maintenance release, highlights of which include:
    • “Fixes in the vicinity of” BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” – although all causes of this issue may not be fully resolved with this update.
    • A fix an issue with avatars colliding with their vehicles on region crossings.
    • Removal of a spurious error message that would pop up on llSetKeyframedMotion.
    • Being able to add UUIDs to the ban list that don’t belong to an agent or group and then being unable to remove them.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

  • It is still hoped to get the server-side support for PBR materials to one (Preflight) or two (Preflight and Snack) RC channels. There is no ETA on this, with both viewer and simulator with LL’s QA team.

Viewer Updates

No official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.11.579629, April 20th.
    • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
    • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
  • Project viewers:
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 10 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

  • A discussion on llMessageLinked, and the idea of an llMessageListLinked function, starting some 27 minutes into the meeting. To avoid misunderstnadings, please refer to the video below for the full discussion.
  • The above led into a general discussion on possible LSL updates / functions, including the likes of BUG-232312 and BUG-229174 – again, please refer to the video for details.

† 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.