The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 10th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms 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
Apparently, there was an “issue” with the week #18 deployments which has lead to changes being deployed this week. .
In short, the list of avatar appearance details for a given agent that could be returned by llGetVisualPrameters (which went grid-wide with the deployment of server release 571166 to the Main SLS channel in Week #18) gave rise to a host of “Shape Stealing HUDs” that allowed people to obtain the full set of avatar body shape details for any shape (including those sold as “No Mod” by shape creators.
As a result, both the SLS Main deployment on Tuesday, May 10th, 2022 and the RC deployments of Wednesday, will see the list of returned values significantly reduced to:
33 – height
503 – platform_height
756 – neck_length
38 – torso_length
616 – shoe_height
814 – waist_height
80 – male
692 – leg_length
842 – hip_length
198 – heel_height
693 – arm_length
11001 – hover
Available Official Viewers
There have been no official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the current crop as:
Release viewer: version version 6.5.5.571282, – formerly the MFA RC viewer, dated April 26, promoted Wednesday, May 4th.
Release channel cohorts:
Performance Improvements RC viewer version 6.6.0.571507, May 5.
Makgeolli Maintenance RC viewer (Maintenance M) viewer, version 6.5.5.570983, April 26.
Project viewers:
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.569531, March 18.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
In Brief
There was a general discussion on multi-region events, in part focused on a) the incorrect assumption that adjoining regions are running on the same simhost (this has never been guaranteed, pre- or post-AWS uplift) b) visibility issues for those in the “audience” region of a multi-region event (i.e. being unable to see everything in the “performance” area that sits in another region); and c) the new Event regions (see: LL launches Event region product + some thoughts).
On the subject of Event regions, Mazidox Linden has provided information on how LL evaluated the region performance on the forum thread about the product.
There was further discussion on the requested scripted object capabilities for EEP See the week #18 summary), which will be “coming Soon™” – at some point.
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, May 4th 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 Update
On Wednesday, May 4th, the de facto release viewer was updated to version 6.5.5.571282, formerly the MFA RC viewer, dated April 26. See my notes on this viewer here.
On Thursday, May 5th, the Performance Improvements RC viewer updated to version 6.6.0.571507.
The focus for this viewer is now bug and crash fixes, rather than adding functionality.
This update also sees the viewer merged with the release viewer MFA code base, and so will require anyone who uses MFA and who has not logged-in to Second Life using an MFA token to do so -follow the link above for details.
The rest of the official viewers remain as:
Release channel cohorts:
Makgeolli Maintenance RC viewer (Maintenance M) viewer, version 6.5.5.570983, April 26.
Project viewers:
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.569531, March 18.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
Graphics Update
During the previous CCUG meeting, the potential direction for Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials support was discussed at length, and concerns were raised that for PBR to be effective, SL’s lighting / reflections model would need to be updated.
As a result, these branches of work have commenced:
The foundational work in creating a materials type with an associated inventory asset, as per the week #16 meeting. This will initially comprise the ability to copy a texture entry (with its specific parameters) to inventory.
Foundational work on the PBR graphics pipe in the viewer.
Work on an implementation of reflection probes which can be used both with PDR shading and with legacy content. This formed the focus of this meeting.
Reflection Probes
Runitai Linden envisages two forms of reflection probes:
Those that are part of a scene’s environment and are automatically placed, but which can (hopefully) be adjustable by scene builders – this is the current focus of the work, with the reflection probes married to the octree so they will align with octree nodes.
Reflection probes which can be specifically placed within structures by their creators (e.g. a probe within each room of a house) or which can be created and added to a legacy structure.
These would override “environment reflection probes” to prevent clashes (so that, for example, your nice shiny kitchen worktop is not reflecting the sky outside, but is offering reflections of the static objects on and around it.
Their size would be based on the volume they are attached to, which would allow for parallax correction, allowing the reflections to be accurately generated within a room space.
“Environment reflection probes” used with legacy content: on the left, shiny surfaces of a prop engine as most of us are used to seeing them today. Right: the same engine but with its shiny surfaces now showing reflections generated via a reflection probe in the scene. Credit: Runitai Linden
These probes:
Comprise an object (prim) defined as a reflection probe which essentially uses the 360º snapshot code viewer to produce a cube map of its surroundings with each face set to 512×512 resolution (so 6 x 512×512), which can then be used to generate object “reflections” on surfaces within their volume of control.
This will require some additional checkboxes to be added to the build floater / viewer, but otherwise means probes can be inserted into “indoor” scenes using the existing build toolset.
Capture everything except avatars (so no reflections of your avatar walking past a shiny surface).
Initially trigger the generation of their cube maps by the viewer on entering a scene.
Maps are cached on disk, with up to 64 held in memory.
Currently only 8 maps are active at any one time. However, given sampling of just 8 maps for rendering can take up to 70% of an RTX 3080 GPU, this number is likely to be dropped to 4, unless a more targeted means of sampling for a given pixel can be determined.
Are updated whenever the number of objects in them changes or the Day Cycle changes, although the update rate is no more than one probe per frame.
Glossiness and reflection probes: in this image, the centre left row of spheres have a white face, and the centre right all have black faces. Each pair, front-to-back, has a matching and increasing level of glossiness applied. Note how the greater the amount of glossiness, the sharper the reflections of the probe’s cube map. Credit: Runitai Linden.
The overall aim of this work is to provide a means to support more physically accurate reflections in SL than can be currently generated (seen as a requirement for PBR support). This work can then both:
Be integrated into the PBR work as that is added to Second Life.
Improve the existing SL environment map so that legacy content does not clash with PBR content as badly as might otherwise be the case – although it will not be a perfect blending of the two.
However, it will be “very, very hard for this to not break [some] content”, although the overall result should improve so SL looks.
Given this, the capability will need a lost of assistance with testing.
Concern has been raised about how to limit / control the use of probes so as not to cause potential performance issues (e.g. by creators including a probe with all of their products that have a shiny / reflective surface).
The plan is to have every single pixel in a rendered scene covered by at least one probe via the automatic placement, so objects that are outside certainly should not need their own reflection probes.
Even so, it has been suggested that time is taken to produce a “best practices” guide to using reflection probes and to provide examples of bad probe set-ups.
It was also suggested that a flag for “do not reflect” should be provided to help control what is included in a cube map in a given setting. It was not clear if this would be possible, so the question was set aside for the next meeting.
General Notes:
This work is still in its early stages, and elements may change.
Several aspects of reflection generation have yet to be tackled (e.g. handling 100% transparent and 100% alpha textured surfaces).
The work has yet to be tied-into the existing graphics controls in the viewer so that everything works consistently and logically.
Some of the additional work required for generating reflections might be compensated for by optimising other elements of the shader system as this work progresses.
At some point this work will be available within a project viewer for testing on Aditi.
Note: while reflection probes formed the core of this meeting, this does not mean this work will be shipped ahead of the more PBR-related work. All three project branches are in their early stages, and so no decision on prioritisation among them has been taken.
PBR-Specific Work
The PBR graphics pipe is still being plumbed-in.
No work has really started with the PBR shader set.
The plan is still to follow the glTF specification.
As this embraces the PBR Metallic Roughness workflow, this will be the first to be supported.
If demand surfaces, LL might add Specular Glossiness as a follow-up.
The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms 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.
Tuesday, May 3rd saw the SLS Main channel updated to server release 571166, which includes:
A new LSL function llGetVisualParams(). Returns a list of avatar appearance details for a given agent.
New options for llGetParcelDetails(): PARCEL_DETAILS_LANDING_POINT, PARCEL_DETAILS_LANDING_LOOKAT, PARCEL_DETAILS_TP_ROUTING, PARCEL_DETAILS_FLAGS, PARCEL_DETAILS_SCRIPT_DANGER.
New options for llGetObjectDetails(): OBJECT_MATERIAL, OBJECT_MASS, OBJECT_TEXT, OBJECT_REZ_TIME, OBJECT_LINK_NUMBER, OBJECT_SCALE, OBJECT_TEXT_COLOR, OBJECT_TEXT_ALPHA.
New options for llGetEnv(): “agent_limit_max”, “agent_reserved”, “agent_unreserved”.
Wednesday, May 4th should see all RC channels updated with a new new infrastructure server that sees an update to code housekeeping within the simulator, but should not result in any user-facing changes.
Available Official Viewers
The current official viewers are as follows:
Release viewer: version version 6.5.4.570575 – formerly the Lao-Lao Maintenance RC viewer, promoted Monday, April 18 – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
Makgeolli Maintenance RC viewer (Maintenance M) viewer, version 6.5.5.570983, April 26.
Performance Improvements RC viewer version 6.6.0.570163, dated April 4, issued April 14(?).
Project viewers:
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.569531, March 18.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
In Brief
The fixes for off-line Group and Friend invites were due to go to an RC update this week, but have been delayed pending further testing.
BUG-231582 – “Newly rezzed objects are invisible after relog under certain circumstances”: a fix is in development and should be appearing in an upcoming simulator update.
BUG-232107 – “Bring back fun Sim Channel Names” – the simulator RC channel names (e.g. LeTigre, Magnum and Bluesteel for the main three, plus the likes of Cake, Ferrari, etc), were all obfuscated some time back.
The reason for this was that people would frequently assume the simulator channel on which their region was running to be the cause of any issues being experienced, and insist their region be moved to another channel – even if that channel was using the exact same simulator release.
However, the obfuscation has caused an equal amount of confusion for some and added the need to constantly cross-reference simulator version numbers when troubleshooting, ergo this request has been made to revert the obfuscation, something that the server engineering team indicated they might be willing to entertain at the week #17 meeting.
There was an extensive discussion on making EEP more robust for estate owners by allowing better control of the environment through script objects (which essentially send out region settings every 2 minutes and request viewers switch to them). Some of this work may be addressed by Rider Linden in the near future, and details supplied when this happens.
The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 26th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms 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.
Tuesday, April 26th saw the SLS Main channel restarted but without any new deployment, leaving all simulator on release 570305.
On Wednesday, 27th April:
The RC channel regions already on release 570936 (comprising under-the-hood improvements and fixes for some crash modes) will be restarted without any deployment.
Those RC channel regions on simulator version 570305 will be updated to either release 570936 (above) or release 571166, which includes:
A new LSL function llGetVisualParams(). Returns a list of avatar appearance details for a given agent.
New options for llGetParcelDetails(): PARCEL_DETAILS_LANDING_POINT, PARCEL_DETAILS_LANDING_LOOKAT, PARCEL_DETAILS_TP_ROUTING, PARCEL_DETAILS_FLAGS, PARCEL_DETAILS_SCRIPT_DANGER.
New options for llGetObjectDetails(): OBJECT_MATERIAL, OBJECT_MASS, OBJECT_TEXT, OBJECT_REZ_TIME, OBJECT_LINK_NUMBER, OBJECT_SCALE, OBJECT_TEXT_COLOR, OBJECT_TEXT_ALPHA.
New options for llGetEnv(): “agent_limit_max”, “agent_reserved”, “agent_unreserved”.
Available Official Viewers
On Tuesday, April 26th:
The Makgeolli Maintenance RC viewer (Maintenance M) viewer, version 6.5.5.570983 was released.
MFA RC viewer, updated to version 6.5.5.571282, bringing it to parity with the current release viewer.
The remaining official viewers are as follows:
Release viewer: version version 6.5.4.570575 – formerly the Lao-Lao Maintenance RC viewer, promoted Monday, April 18 – No change.
Performance Improvements RC viewer version 6.6.0.570163, dated April 4, issued April 14(?).
Project viewers:
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.569531, March 18.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
In Brief
The fixes for off-line Group and Friend invites should be going to an RC update in week #18. This will likely be on a dedicated RC channel.
BUG-4245 “Feature Request: Prim property for blocking client-side interpolation (positioning, rotating or scaling) plus LSL constants for llGetStatus() & llSetStatus()” has been on the books for a while, and have now been re-opened for further consideration.
The majority of the meeting revolved around building efficiency, textures, scalable vector graphics (SVGs), object faces.
Mostly general discussions on possible options and requested features (e.g. BUG-230904). Please refer to the video below.
My audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, April 21st 2022 at 13:00 SLT.
The video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this piece, my thanks to her as always for recording the meetings) from the Third-Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting on Friday, April 22nd, 2022 at 13:00 SLT.
These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their respective dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.
This is a summary of the key topics discussed in each meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript of either. However, the video does provide a complete recording of the TPVD meeting, and timestamps to the relevant points within it are included in the notes below.
The list below reflects the rest of the currently available official Second Life viewers:
Release viewer: version version 6.5.4.570575 – formerly the Lao-Lao Maintenance RC viewer, promoted Monday, April 18.
Release channel cohorts:
Performance Improvements RC viewer version 6.6.0.570163, dated April 4, issued April 14(?).
MFA RC viewer, update to version 6.5.4.569725, on March 24.
Project viewers:
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.569531, March 18.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
General Viewer Notes
The focus remains on fixing the bugs reported on the Performance Improvements RC viewer so that it can be the next viewer promoted to de facto release status. The RC version has been updated but has yet to be issued.
The promotion of the Lao-Lao viewer to release status means the current RC viewers are going through the merge with that codebase, and a new Maintenance RC should be appearing soon.
The Copy / Paste project viewer has been languishing in project viewer hell for some time whilst the focus on viewer work has been elsewhere. It is hoped that this well move forward once more Soon™.
[Video 6:26-7:35] Additional work is being carried out on the Legacy Profiles viewer (such as allowing the avatar UUID to be accessed via scripts by the likes of greeters that display the avatar image, etc.).
CCUG: Additional Materials Support / PBR: Hitting the RESET Button – CCUG Meeting
This formed the core of the CCUG meeting. The notes below should also be referenced with my notes from the previous CCUG meeting.
As previously noted LL had proposed a two-step approach towards moved to “full” Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials support to give a high fidelity to SL rendering where PBR materials are used.
Significant concerns were raised about this approach at the last two meetings (e.g. a lot of creators do not use PBR-based workflows – a requirement for glTF – and so moving in this direction could create extensive issues for those creators).
As a result of the feedback, discussions at the Lab have been focused on an alternate approach:
Creation of a materials inventory type with an associated asset which could potentially have different forms (e.g. in one state it could be associated with PBR, another simply specify the legacy texture / materials parameters)
Where the PBR materials are specified, render using a new “PBR render path”; if the legacy parameters are used, render via the existing render path.
Move directly to a PBR implementation.
This would initially be limited to the materials aspect of glTF and not support any geometry for objects that can also be held by a glTF file (so no uploading for uploading complete mesh objects as glTF) – which is not to stay upload support for other formats wouldn’t be added at some point in the undefined future).
However – the above bullet points are all still under discussion at the Lab, so no final decision on the overall approach has been made.
It has also been noted that whatever happens, a significant requirement will be to provide specifications on which materials types are going to be supported, and what people can expect.
It is hoped that at least some of the Lab’s approach can built off of existing specifications rather than reinventing the wheel, then extended into those “optional” materials should be supported.
Cube Maps / Reflection Model
A concern was raised that current cube mapping used by SL is limited, and would need to be updated to a higher resolution for PBR support to be effective.
LL are aware of the limitations of the current cube map and would be “looking to address that” – although indicated this may not be done for the initial release of any related work.
This led to concerns that any release of PBR materials support without any corresponding update to SL’s cube mapping will result in creators attempting to implement their own workarounds to perceived limitations, resulting in content at odds with any cube mapping updates the Lab does make.
This latter point wasn’t seen as a problem, as LL’s view is that any updates to SL’s cube map will only be relevant to content created after the update, and it was further suggested that any “initial” updates to support PBR (and sans cube maps updates, environment maps, etc., might not even be user-facing, but purely for internal use / testing.
A similar concern was raised over the current reflection model + environment maps – that if not considered / managed as a part of the PBR project, it will lead to very poor results or limit the use of PDR materials.
Again, LL’s view is that reflection map / probes / environment maps re something that will be tackled “later”; some creators are of the opinion that it needs to be tackled as a core element of the work.
LL suggested that they might offer support of static environment maps initially, and then move towards the ability to cast reflection probes to allow reflections to be dynamically generated. However, all of this is still being discussed internally at the Lab.
It was also pointed out that lighting / reflections in PBR are calculated on physical properties (e.g. lumen equivalency) – which currently isn’t possible in SL without significant update to the rendering system. This was again seen as something that could be handled “later”.
Concerns were also voiced over the idea of things being set aside for “later” on the basis that LL has a long track record of breaking projects down into “iterative phases” – only to deliver the first one or two, and then push further work off into the future for assorted reasons (Examples:. the original materials project, Animesh, Experience Keys, EEP, the in-world aspect of ARCTan (allowing for the fact ARCTan as a whole seems to have become stuck)), with the results they become “someday / never”.
General Questions
Will the addition of broader materials support with PBR lead to alterations to the land impact formula?
Potentially for content using PBR, but this has yet to be fully determined. The feeling among creators is that a re-balancing of the LI formula would be required.
However, LI calculations themselves are in need of overhaul to more accurately reflect the cost of rendering objects (something the Lab has planned to do as “phase 2” of adjusting rendering calculations as a whole under project ARCTan, so while not intrinsic to PBR, LI / rendering costs might be reviewed as an adjunct to this work.
Will this lead to an increase in region land capacities? No.
Will it apply to all new content, post implementation? Yes, with the exception of system avatars and content requiring the the Bake Service.
Will this approach allow scripted update / changes to materials on faces? That is something that will likely have to be “tackled latter”.
Will this mean further updates to the uploader? most likely, yes.
TPVD: Off-line Friendship / Group Offers + Simulator Capabilities
Monty Linden has been working to fix issues of off-line friendship and Group invitation offers failing.
This has required a complete overhaul of the related capabilities for handling such offers, with the focus being primarily on getting them working again. Although “at some future time” the functionality might be revisited to do “something bolder and more interesting with it.”
This work is going to QA, and will be moving to Aditi (DRTSIM-537) for further testing.
The focus had been on making sure the list of capabilities in up-to-date.
Work will now be going forward to update / provide the underpinning documentation for all the capabilities. This will be done on an as time permits basis.
TPV In Brief
[Video 7:38-26:00] Extensive discussion on updating / refactoring the viewer code, updating the viewer build process, LL’s thinking on moving to more recent graphics APIs (e.g. Vulkan) and the problems involved,
Some of this has been covered previously in these summaries (e.g. options for future graphics APIs, the number of users running systems unable to run Vulcan, etc).
Much of the discussion is well into the long grass of viewer code, etc., and thus you are referred to the video.
[Video: 26:25-37:10] Accessibility options (close captions for when Voice is being used; text to speech, etc).
Accessibility is something that is looked at during general UI design work, but there is no project looking at specific questions of accessibility. However, it is recognised that perhaps a more formalised approach to handling accessibility should be adopted.
The issue of allowing Voice to be set so that all speakers can be heard equally irrespective of distance from the listener (as once supported by several TPVS, see: BUG-23172) is apparently difficult to implement in the current Vivox implementation and so has been subject to discussions between LL and Vivox.
The question was asked if TPVs felt effort should be pushed into a significant Vivox update.
A suggested response was given that any attempt to update to Vivox 5 would require a “wholesale change” to the Voice service, LL might be better looking at alternative offerings that offer better means of support.
Based on feedback from the meeting, Mojo suggested the keenness for LL to focus on large Voice related project isn’t there.
It was suggested that Pathfinding could be improved if the options in the viewer were all moved to a single tab on the Build / Edit floater. LL agreed this would be beneficial and requested a Jira on the idea.
LL more broadly noted that Pathfinding could benefit from a re-visit / update, although there are no current plans for any work. Some ideas for potential work have been submitted via BUG-229442. This in turn leads to a broader discussion on some of the additional issues with Pathfinding (lack of cohesive documentation, complexity of use, lack of automatic region rebakes, etc.).
[Video: 43:05-46:49] The above flows into a discussion on custom pivot points, some that was being worked on by LL but has been on the shelf of late, and the complexities involved.
[Video: 48:15-60:00] A general discussion on land impact calculations and making them more reflective of the cost of rendering (particularly textures, etc.).
This touches upon the ARCTan project, which was originally initiated to overall the formulas used to calculate both avatar complexity and the complexity of in-world objects – the latter of which may have led to adjustment in LI calculations, although ARCTan went on to initially focus on avatar complexity prior to being suspended altogether.
Folded into this is further discussion of alternate methods of calculating LI (e.g. through object geometry – although this doesn’t necessarily account for draw calls, which tend to be a big hit for the viewer), and ideas for encouraging best practices / finding a balance between control and offering the ability to create and upload.
There is further informal discussion after the meeting has ended. Please refer to the video if interested.
The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 19th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms 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.
Tuesday, April 19th saw the SLS Main channel updated with server release 570305, comprising:
Fixes issues with llRequestAgentData and llRequestSimulatorData sometimes failing after they’ve been called repeatedly.
A couple of crash fixes.
Additional logging around simulator start-up.
This was intentionally a slower-than-usual deployment so the Lab could monitor progress after some recent rough rides.
Wednesday, 20th April should see a small subsection of the Release Candidate channels updated with server release 570936 comprising updates that leverage more recent technologies from the viewer which the simulator can utilise as a result of the recent tools updates.
It is hoped that the upcoming week will see Rider Linden’s work with llGOD, llGetEnv and llGetVisualParams will make it to an RC deployment.
Available Official Viewers
All official viewer pipelines are as follows:
Release viewer: version version 6.5.4.570575 – formerly the Lao-Lao Maintenance RC viewer, promoted Monday, April 18 – NEW.
Performance Improvements RC viewer version 6.6.0.570163, dated April 4, issued April 14(?).
MFA RC viewer, update to version 6.5.4.569725, on March 24.
Project viewers:
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.569531, March 18.
Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
In Brief
As noted in these pages at the time, the channel name a region / simulator is running on was removed from the viewer a number of years ago.
The reason was simple: too many region holders tended to blame any performance woes they felt they were experiencing on the channel their region was a part of, and so would insist on a channel move – even if the alternate channel was running on the same simulator code.
However, and subject to a formal feature request Jira, the server team are open to considering re-surfacing the channel name within the region details found in the viewer’s Help floater.
It was asked if things will ever reach a point where there is no need for RC channels to run separate simulator on the main grid. The response was that this is unlikely, simply because even with extensive testing even with internal test grids and Aditi, all the available testing environments are too controlled to catch all possible use cases that might cause problems.
EEP: the ability to able to override a setting in the shared environment via script is promised for a possible simulator update that may surface in the next month or so.
There were further requests for a function that warns of possible issues if an avatar / object / vehicle attempts to enter a parcel with access restrictions – forgetting that BUG-231802 “Prevent vehicles from entering parcels their riders cannot access” has already been accepted, but no ETA on implementation.
Much of the latter part of the meeting focused on upcoming or potential script updates – see the video for details.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 