The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 11th, 2022 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.
On Tuesday, October 11th, the Main SLS channel were restarted with no deployment, leaving them on simulator release 574921.
On Wednesday, October 12th, the simhosts on the RC channels should receive simulator release 575585.
This release should contain two new functions llGetObjectLinkKey (specified under llGetLinkKey) and llSHA256String.
In addition, a slight change to the simulator code may help with the issue of people’s on-line / off-line status not being properly reported. It is not an actual fix for the problem, but LL would like feedback as to whether people are seeing an improvement. See : BUG-232037 for more information on the issue.
Available Official Viewers
Release viewer: version 6.6.4.575022 – hotfix for Crash at ~LLModalDialog() – promoted September 15 – no change.
Maintenance 3 RC viewer, version 6.6.5.575257, September 23.
Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.5.575055 September 19.
Project viewers:
Performance Floater / Auto-FPS project viewer, version 6.6.5.575378, October 4.
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.574545, issued on August 30.
Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
Local KVP / “Linkset Data”
From the server deployment thread:
Coming Soon. We have a new feature build on Aditi for a feature tentatively called Local KVP. This feature works similarly to Experience Key-Value store, but the data lives with the object that sends and receives the data. Only scripts in the same linkset will be able to read the data written with this feature. For more details, see the in-progress wiki pages [COMING SOON]. You can try out the new LSL functions related to this feature at the following Aditi Mainland regions:
We’re looking for feedback on this new feature including bugs and input on anything that might be missing or not work the way you’d expect. Please file a BUG Jira in all of those cases
To the above, Rider Linden added:
The data is stored on the root prim of a linkset and if you link two prims together (each containing LinksetData it will migrate the new non-root’s data up to the the root). The data is accessible to any script running in the linkset [but] it is not visible at all from outside the linkset.
This functionality was the focus of the majority of the meeting, with questions and suggestions coming from those attending. To avoid confusion through summarising questions / suggestions and replies, please refer to the video below, and also see also this forum thread.
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 6th 2022 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.
This is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript.
Official Viewers Status
No changes through the week, leaving the current crop of official viewers as:
Release viewer: version 6.6.4.575022 – hotfix for Crash at ~LLModalDialog() – promoted September 15 – no change.
Release channel cohorts:
Maintenance 3 RC viewer, version 6.6.5.575257, September 23.
Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.5.575055 September 19.
Project viewers:
Performance Floater / Auto-FPS project viewer, version 6.6.5.575378, October 4.
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.574545, issued on August 30.
Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
The Performance Floater / Auto-FPS project viewer includes a merge between the performance improvements from Firestorm integrated with the Lab’s auto-FPS capabilities.
Test viewers continue to be made available to those on the Content Creation Discord channel. Requests to join that channel should be made in person at CCUG meetings. I am no longer able (at LL’s request) to furnish such information.
Viewer notes:
In order to make it clear when someone is working with PBR materials assets, there is an additional option within the viewer’s Build floater which, when selected, will open a dedicated PBR Materials editor, rather than munging the editor controls into the Build floater.
This also allows options like Glow (not a part of the glTF specification) to be retained and potentially used as an overlay on PBR materials.
Render work has seen the removal of the stencil buffer. This means that those build tools relying on the stencil buffer will be changing or completely going away from the viewer (e.g. the show grid cross-section checkbox, which has been broken for some time).
Work is in progress to integrate Linden Water into the new rendering pipe and support reflection probes.
This is also seeing some additional work on underwater refraction and on water reflections (e.g. no longer necessarily real-time reflections) so as to lighten the performance load.
The changes will mean Linden Water will look a little different as to how it looks at the moment.
Additional scripting functionality has been added to the glTF test regions on Aditi to allow the configuring the reflection probes:
Link set variants of these functions should also work. These are the flags you can use in the last parameter:
PRIM_REFLECTION_PROBE_BOX` – Flag that determines if probe is a box or sphere.
PRIM_REFLECTION_PROBE_DYNAMIC` – Flag that determines if probe will cause avatars to be shown in its reflections
Overall, it is felt:
That a plan / process is in place to future-proof the work for the additional of further glTF parameters down the road.
The test viewer is moving rapidly towards a point where a pubic Project viewer will debut.
The aspirational goal for this work is to have the viewer fully released by the end of 2022. However, this is dependent upon feedback and reaction to some of the compromises made, once the viewer gets to project status as a wider audience.
In Brief
Planar mirrors: if developed, these are seen as being similar to mirrors found in VRChat, etc., where they can reflect the local scene in detail, although at a performance impact.
There are potential ways to help reduce the impact – such as by limiting the distance at which a mirror is seen as “active” via the viewer (e.g. if you are within 5 metres, reflections are generated in the mirror; if you are beyond 5 metres from it, no reflections are generated) or by having mirrors touch-activated.
Ideally, such mirrors would have a specific function, and not merely another item of set dressing for a scene, and reflection probes will be used for generating environmental reflections (e.g. those seen on the shine of a car body or piece of silverware), rather than trying to make general object surfaces planar mirrors.
Note that any of this work would be for a future project, and is not part of the current PBR Materials + reflections work.
Custom pivot points: this work is described as currently “stalled out” due to investigations into supporting full hierarchies and similar, which have proven more complicated that first thought – although the benefits of having a full hierarchy is seen as being a major benefit.
LOD Clamping, etc. (please refer to my previous CCUG / TPVD summary for background on this: discussions are still in progress, and nothing definitive has been decided as yet. However, enforcing a hard clamp on setting LOD factors (including via the RenderVolumeLODFactor debug) is seen as a potential first step.
Were this to be done, TPVs would be given a suitable lead time to encourage creators to make suitable adjustments to their content.
This would apply only to in-world objects, although it is recognised avatars are a problem in their own right.
The latter have had some amelioration applied, as the Performance Improvement code ignores rigged attachment scaling, and only paying attention to the avatar bounding sphere, so a) LODs should be selected based on the size of the avatar; b) rigged attachments should change LOD depending you your camera distance from them.
The above does not apply to rigged meshes with no LODs – so it is possible the Lab will start auto-generating LODs for these in the future.
Avatar imposters: SL currently leans heavily on the avatar imposter system to reduce the load of rendering avatars. It has been noted that a preferable route would be to generate mesh proxies for avatars at a distance. However, whilst discussed within the Lab, this is not – yet – a project.
Are usually chaired by Reed Linden, who is the Lab’s Product Manager for the Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
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.
From this is it hoped that improved filtering, etc., can be built-out, and the work on Styles (listing variants) can move closer to deployment.
Land Ownership “Journey”
A complete re-write of every route by which users can obtain and hold land, from Premium (+Plus) Linden Homes, obtaining Mainland (incl. Abandoned Land), and private island regions, and renting from private estates.
The first element of the land work to be user-facing will be the new Land Portal, a central hub from which to get to all aspects of land “ownership”.
The Land Portal is still a development, and in the process of creating it, the team has embarked on building a design system so that the redevelopment of web properties can be undertaken with greater ease in the future.
Once available to the public, the Land Portal will thus provide insight into how the rest of secondlife.com will look at the web properties revamp continues.
[12:11-13:08] While incorporating private estates / rentals within the new “Land Journey”, the intent is not to manage private rentals, the idea is to make it more obvious to users that they can rent from private estates, how they might do so, and (potentially) provide a means for people to highlight their own available rentals.
Why Overhaul the Web Properties?
Effort is being put into the web properties as many relay on core designs and structures built well over a decade ago, and are thus dated in their look compared to modern websites and are difficult to maintain. The re-vamp is therefor intended to both update SL’s appearance on the web (and make it more attractive to the curious) and provide the means for more functionality and easier maintenance.
The introduction of Premium Plus has opened the door to potentially having multiple subscription levels, and possibly an “a-la carte” capability (pick which benefit options you’d like, and pay on the basis of that selection).
As Premium Plus has been so successful in its take-up, the Lab is looking to deploy what might be the first of further Premium levels by the end of 2022.
A formal announcement of what this new level is is be called and what it includes is expected “pretty soon”, possibly late October / early November 2022, depending on how the final naming and marketing, etc., decisions go,
This is not a level to sit “between” Premium and Premium Plus, but is regarded by the Lab as more of a “side” version, so levels are not necessary identified by price point but by options.
Reed’s view on additional Premium levels is that is the Lab develops ideas and takes feedback, so they will be able to offer choices (including a future a-la carte) that more fully reflect the hopes / wants / needs of users.
The New User eXperience (NUX) has been identified by the Lab’s Executive Team as a major area of focus for the at least next 12 months.
Some of the Lab’s work in this are has been previewed in terms of the upcoming “all mesh” New Starter Avatars (see here and here), but LL recognises more work needs to be done within the NUX as a while.
incoming suggestions for improving the NUX / user retention at this meeting were:
Inclusion of a “Getting Started” option in the viewer (or as an additional to the toolbar button?) to provide access to “approved” Second life You Tube tutorials (perhaps linking to the official Second Life University You Tube playlist?).
Introducing an actual “character creator” rather than just sets of starter avatars – this is actually already something the Lab is actually investigating at the moment.
Providing an over-the-shoulder camera view within the viewer, rather than / in addition to the current default camera placement.
Many already do this via the Camera Presets built-in to the viewer, and using “recognised” offsets such as those long provided by Penny Patton, and some TPVs provide an over-the-should view by default.
Doing so has many beneficial aspects to SL (such as the ability to properly scale building interiors) well beyond purely the NUX.
Making sure any gateway access points for incoming users have daytime EEP settings.
This is perhaps questionable where Community Gateways for specific role-play types (vampire / horror / space) are supposed to be dark – and having even a small area set to daytime might come across as counter-intuitive to incoming new players.
Improving the Inventory interface and ease the process of changing outfits, etc.
Some work on Inventory is being considered, which may include updates to things like available object icons, etc.. Alexa Linden has also been seeking broader feedback on inventory pain-points existing users experience.
Re-engineering the viewer so capabilities are only unlocked as new users visit in-world tutorial areas.
A problem here is that people come to SL for different reasons – so how do you ensure that their needs are meet both in terms of allowing them access to any functionality they require that may otherwise be “locked” & ensure they can get to require required tutorial location(s) with ease?
Some also come in as a result of friends, and get hands-on support from said friends – so may not require “formal” tutoring through dedicated locations – which then become regarded as a PITA in forcing people through them.
Providing structured hand-holding at the gateways where questions can be asked and answered – again something LL has re-experimented with, and many community gateways provide.
No definitive take on what it might look like, etc.
Lab still interested in obtaining feedback from store holders and customers on what they’d like to see incorporated in a new MP / approaches they believe should be taken (e.g. Amazon-like; Daz3D-like, etc.), and where specific pain point lie within the current MP & its presentation.
General chat towards the end of the meeting on user retention, content creation, strategies for user acquisition, etc. Please refer to the video for details.
Next Meeting
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022. Venue and time per top of this summary.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 4th, 2022 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
At the time of writing, there was no published deployment plan for the week.
On Tuesday, October 4th, the Main SLS channel were restarted with no deployment, leaving them on simulator release 574921.
On Wednesday, October 5th, the simhosts on the RC channels should receive simulator release 575421, which did not have an release notes available at the time of writing
This is the release from week #39, which was ultimately postponed as a result of an 11th hour bug showing up in QA testing.
These release should contain two new functions llGetObjectLinkKey (specified under llGetLinkKey) and llSHA256String.
Available Official Viewers
The Performance Floater / Auto-FPS project viewer updated to version 6.6.5.575378, on October 4th.
The rest of the current crop of official viewers remains as:
Release viewer: version 6.6.4.575022 – hotfix for Crash at ~LLModalDialog() – promoted September 15 – no change.
Maintenance 3 RC viewer, version 6.6.5.575257, September 23.
Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.5.575055 September 19.
Project viewers:
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.574545, issued on August 30.
Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
Experience KVP Change
Rider Linden offered a heads-up on a forthcoming change to Experience Key Value Pairs (KVP), which can be used to store large amounts of data related to an experience in-world, and make them accessible anywhere, any time, within the experience. Rider described the changes thus:
We are doing some work on the Experience KVP. The new tech that we are using doesn’t let us easily monitor the number of bytes that have been used be any particular experience. SO the proposal that is on the table is that we change the limit to a number of keys [and]:
A field would be tacked on to the end of llCountKeysKeyValue() that would be the allotted number of keys.
llDataSizeKeyValue would be changed to return the number_of_keys*4096 (which is the maximum size of the value that a key can store.
– Rider Linden
This sparked a discussion, and those who use experiences – or use the KVP table in an experience for any form of data storage, should refer to the video [29:21-end] in order to gain the full context of the proposed change and the discussion.
In Brief
BUG-232037 – “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” has been a bone of contention for many for the last few months, Commenting on the issue, Rider linden there are at least a couple of points in back-end communications where the problem might occur, but it will take time to properly diagnose.
Viewer-side: as noted in recent TPV Developer meeting summaries, there is a lot of work going on on the viewer build side of things (move to github for repositories, tool and library updates, etc. Whilst not strictly a part of the SUG meeting, Signal Linden wanted to get a couple of points out for viewer devs to note. One of these points relates to 3rd party code contributions to LL, the other on a library location under the new github structure:
So, some minor early notes wrt to opensource development. We are reviewing our contributor license agreement (CLA) and the process for collecting signatures. Ideally, I’d like for the CLA to be able to be signed in PRs on github. This will take some work with legal, and I don’t have anything definitive yet 🙂
Also, if you are not on the opensource-dev mailing list, the llsd python serialization library has been moved to its own repository; https://github.com/secondlife/python-llsd We are also starting to finally get the PyPI packages updated for autobuild.
My audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, September 29th 2022 at 13:00 SLT.
My notes and the video from the Third-Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, September 30th, 2022 at 13:00 SLT. The video is provided by Pantera – my thanks to her for recording it, and it can be found at the end of this article. Times stamps to the video are included where relevant in the following notes.
Both meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.
This is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript.
Maintenance 3 RC viewer, version 6.6.5.575257, September 23.
Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.5.575055 September 19.
Project viewers:
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.574545, issued on August 30.
Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.571296, May 10.
General Viewer Notes
The next likely promotion to de facto release status will be the Maintenance 3 RC viewer.
The Performance Floater project viewer (which includes UI updates and the Lab’s new Auto-FPS feature) has been undergoing a lot of work to reconcile the Lab’s auto-FPS work with that of Firestorm (by Beq Janus and released in Firestorm 6.5.3, March 2022), and so an updated version should be appearing Soon™, possibly in week #40.
[Video: 28:10-32:35] The move to use Visual Studio 2022 in the Windows builds of the official viewer is moving ahead. Licenses are now in place, and an internal viewer (DRTVWR-568) built using VS2022 is being tested, and a project viewer may appear off the back of this.
In addition to this work, and as part of the migration to github, the third-party libraries used by the build process will be updated. This work will not include Clang.
A new version of Autobuild has been released with some features TPV developers may be interested in:
zstandard, xz, gzip compression of package archives.
blake2b hash support.
Support for downloading packages from restricted sources such as private GitHub Releases and GitLab packages.
CPU count exported as AUTOBUILD_CPU_COUNT for build scripts.
Signal Linden would like to hear from developers using a forked version of Autobuild could let him know what they need to be able to use the upstream version of Autobuild so that is is “simple to use” and has all the features TPV devs need to build their viewers.
This discussion included a conversation on using WSL in place of cygwin and on setting credentials to protect build packages that are not supposed to be redistributed.
Test viewers continued to be made available to those on the Content Creation Discord channel, with work now focused on brining the viewer more into line with the release viewer so that it can move forward to a project viewer status for wider distribution.
Requests to join that channel should be made in person at CCUG meetings. I am no longer able (at LL’s request) to furnish such information.
It currently looks as though the route to be taken in aligning the PBR / Materials viewer to the current viewers code is that users will not be able to disable PBR rendering, but will be able to turn off the new reflections capabilities. This means that:
Objects with PBR materials on their faces will continue to show those materials, they just will not respond to reflection probes when the reflections capability is disabled.
Legacy materials (those we currently have today) should continue to look pretty much as they do at the moment.
A major change between the PBR / Materials viewer and the current viewer is the former performs the majority of alpha blending rendering in linear colour space.
This can cause some different results to be displayed with alpha blending and the haze in some EEP settings. However, the majority of colours should render the same as, or close to, how they appear now.
However, the benefit is it reduces the amount of work the GPU / CPU has to do in converting between different colour spaces (e.g. linear and RGB).
Linden Water still has to be incorporated into the new render pipe (notably the the reflection and refraction paths, which currently require the forward rendering ((i.e. non-ALM) path – a path being disabled in the viewer as a part of this work.
[TPVD video: 1:34-3:15] texture overrides are likely to be handled via specifying a glTF complaint JSON blob per texture entry – although which fields will be supported is still TBA. It’s hoped that this approach will allow for rapid front-end / back-end support of features.
Reflections: the blending between reflection probes is still “not great” so this may cause some issues with presenting reflections across large surfaces (such as the face of a large skyscraper or glass building), with the suggestion being to manually place additional probes.
LSL Support
New PBR / Materials related LSL functions are to be introduced to allow for setting PBR materials on prim / object faces.
The standalone functions are seen as being in line with llSetTexture, and to be less verbose when typing, compared to typing a list as with Set /GetlinkPrimitiveParams.
All of these functions work similarly to the functions for setting textures on the faces of prims (ex: llSetTexture), but instead of referencing an image asset, they reference a material, such as can be created with the Material Editor.
materialNameOrID can be the material UUID string, or the name of a material item in the prim’s inventory.
These functions are currently deployed on the Aditi PBR test regions (Rumpus Room and Materials Sandbox regions) for testing.
The core of both the CCUG and TPVD meetings was the issue of the user experience, in-world mesh LODs, Land Impact, and what might be done to improve things.
Side note: it was acknowledged that many of the issues raised also apply to mesh avatar clothing and avatar accessories, but due to the manner in which avatars are handled in general, this is seen as a separate issue, deserving of its own discussion and potential routes to improve.
The Problem
Around 30% of SL users – and a lot who are entering SL for the first time – are on systems that require a reasonable LOD factor (e.g. no more than 2) in order to have a reasonable frame rate. Unfortunately, this leaves them with a “broken” view of the world, as a result of a lot of in-world mesh items being built so they need to be seen at higher LOD setting at even reasonable camera distances.
This is the result of a combination of issues, including (but not necessarily limited to):
The Land Capacity / Land Impact (LI) system, and the need to manage the impact (LI) in-world builds builds have.
The failure / unwillingness of some creators to properly optimised the Level of Detail (LOD) generation of their models, despite knowing they should, and using the lowest LOD options they can in order to minimise LI (and thus have their models decimate – fall apart – even when see from relatively close distances).
The ability to force the viewer to fully render any LOD model of an in-world object, no matter how poorly optimised, in full detail via the unsupported RenderVolumeLODFactor setting, with creators then telling customer to set their viewer to high LOD factor (sometimes double figures) – something which can severely impact frame rates.
“Unsupported” is here a deliberate choice of words. As Runitai Linden noted at both meetings, debug settings, whether exposed as a UI element by TPVs or not, are not regarded as being a core, supported part of the viewer and thus are subject to change / removal by the Lab.
Issues within the mesh uploader cost calculations which appear to penalise properly modelled LODs by increasing the cost of a model with “decent” LODs to upload.
It is an issue that is seen as needing to be addressed, simply because new users are seen as coming into SL on lower-performing systems and having a bad visual experience. The question is how best to address it.
Possible Routes to Help Alleviate
Enforced clamping of the RenderVolumeLODFactor debug setting to no more than 4.00 for all viewers. This has been the case for some time in the official viewer (with the Graphics Preferences slide clamped to a maximum of 2.00), a practice also employed by some TPVs.
There was a general level of support for such a move, the view being it would force those creators who persist in trying to circumvent LOD modelling in favour of gaining a lower LI on their items to no longer do so, and encourage those coming into SL mesh content creation to properly model LODs.
Overhauling the LOD calculations for how objects are seen and rendered by the viewer, so that instead of only looking at the number of degrees on-screen the bounding sphere of an object takes up, the viewer scales its calculations in accordance with screen resolution.
This is seen by the Lab as a potentially good idea.
Other Points Raised in the Discussions
[TPVD Video 51:41-53:26] – Proper LODs appear to be penalised with higher LI values. This is likely to be down to how LI is calculated across a regions as explained by Runitai, and the math involved is unlikely to be changed.
[TPVD Video: 55:21-56:51] – Issues of render cost vs. download costs (getting all the asset data to the viewer for rendering) and what is seen as an imbalance between the two when rendering multiple copies of the same object. however, for the reasons given in the video, this is also unlikely to change.
[TPVD Video: 57:25-58:38] – RenderDynamicLOD is a debug setting (again, unsupported), that, when set to FALSE, forces the viewer to select a LOD model for an in-world object, based on its size, and always renders that LOD model, irrespective of camera distance.
As such, it cannot be gamed to avoid LODs per se.
It can, in some circumstances, result in an improvement (perhaps only slight) in FPS. As such, it is possible this setting might be presented as an option in the Advanced Graphics Preferences at some point (thus making it a supported feature).
[TPVD Video: 58:59-59:46] – In response to a suggestion made in chat that LL provide some form of “mesh inspection” service to ensure mesh items are decently optimised / modelled.
This was seen as antithetical to SL being a platform for content creation, as it would bottleneck the creative process and potentially deter creators.
It would also raise the question of how to review and “accept / refuse” all existing content within SL.
Instead, the preferable route is seen as trying to provide a means for creators to use them platform whilst ensuring that are encouraged to produce good looking, performant, content.
[TVPD Video 59:49-60:43] – However, it was observed that at the end of the day, if content creators are unable / unwilling to adhere to some building principles which allow the world to scale well be providing properly optimised LODs, there is always the option of replacing all creator-generated LODs with auto-generated LODs.
This is something which may (please note the emphasis!) be done in the case of avatar clothing and accessories.
It is also seen as something which might help enable SL to run graphically on mobile devices.
CCUG In Brief
There was some confusion over LL providing “instanced” regions, with some at the meeting being convinced it was a product offering indicated as “coming” or “premium”.
Currently, there are no clear plans for this to happen – the nearest to “instancing” the Lab offers is the cloning of event regions.
Instancing and on-demand products have been discussed at the Lab, but as pointed out in the meeting, providing them is not a certainty at present, and there are questions about what might happen WRT AWS fees, etc., should LL start to offer such a product (they may not actually go down as a result of unpredictability of use).
Alpha masks for the additional AUX wearable channels – a feature request has been received and accepted for these to be implemented, but no time frame on possible delivery, due the the need for both viewer and simulator updates as part of the implementation.
The question was asked of those attending the meeting as to which they would prefer to see: improvements to the in-world building tools or improving inter-operability with 3D tools.
This was something of a loaded question, inasmuch as those attending the CCUG are, for the most part, commercial content creators – people focused on generating income from their work. As such – and as demonstrated by the responses to the question (which included a call of in-world builders “leaching” off of others – hardly a fair categorisation) – inter-operability proved to be the more popular.
It was, however, acknowledged by Lab staff at the meeting that there are other creators in Second Life who are not necessarily driven by commercial aims but who can still contribute to the wider community and multiple ways and who still utilise the in-world tools, and as such, their feedback should also be sought.
TPVD In Brief
[Video: 8:51-9:51] Multi-Factor Authentication: there is an upcoming update which will see MFA enforced viewer-side. When implemented, it will mean users who have opted-in to MFA will only be able to log-in to SL on viewers with MFA support; they will no longer be able to switch between viewers with / without MFA support.
[Video: 9:59-11:00] Inventory Updates: discussed in previous meetings, it has been confirmed that as part of this work the AIS2 API will be deprecated and will “go away at some point”, and the viewer fully transitioned to AIS3 only.
This means that any new inventory fields added as a part of any forthcoming inventory project will only be accessible via AIS3.
It has been noted that the URL Profile field is now completely missing from the legacy Profiles viewer code from the Lab. A Jira for this has been requested.
Viewer with the Legacy Profile code now also incorrectly report an avatar’s rezday (listing it one day early). This is a known issue and will be addressed, but requires a back-end update.
[Video 32:51-39:14] A discussion on viewer code signing (e.g. for recognition of executables being from a trusted source) – please refer to the video.
Rosehaven Seafolk Sanctuary, August 2022 – blog post
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 20th, 2022 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
At the time of writing, there was no published deployment plan for the week.
On Tuesday, September 27th, the simhosts on the Main SLS channel were restarted with no deployment, leaving them on simulator release 574921, comprising the fixes from release 574611 + BUG-232593 “Mesh physics shapes changing unexpectedly when rezzed on a 574611 sim”, introduced with that update.
On Wednesday, September 28th, the simhosts on the RC channels should receive an update containing two new functions llGetObjectLinkKey (specified under llGetLinkKey) and llSHA256String.
Available Official Viewers
No changes to mark the start of the week, leaving the official viewer pipelines as:
Release viewer: version 6.6.4.575022 – hotfix for Crash at ~LLModalDialog() – promoted September 15 – NEW.
Release channel cohorts:
Maintenance 3 RC viewer, version 6.6.5.575257, September 23.
Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.5.575055 September 19.
Project viewers:
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.574545, issued on August 30.
Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.571296, May 10.
In Brief
Bugger all of note discussed as this was a “solstice party” and it was bloody hard enough just confirming RC server deployment details.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 