Category: SL User Group Meetings

2021 CCUG and TPV Developer meetings week #17 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Poison Rouge, February 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, April 29th 2021 at 13:00 SLT, and the TPV Developer’s meeting of Friday, April 30th.

These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar. The venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire, and the TPV Developer meeting is held at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

SL Viewer

The Eau de Vie Maintenance RC viewer version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23rd, was promoted to de facto viewer release status on Thursday, April 29th.

The remaining viewers in the pipeline comprise:

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.18.558365, dated April 22.
    • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.18.558441, dated April 21.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • The Legacy Profiles viewer should be getting an update that will include some cosmetic tweaks to the UI, but will be functionally identical to the current project viewer version.
  • The LMR 5 viewer is being readied for promotion to release status, and work on LMR 6 is continuing.
  • The revised Simple Cache viewer is back with LL’s QA team, and should be re-emerging fairly soon.
  • The improved UI viewer that is primarily intended to help new users looks like it will be issued during summer.
  • A viewer with a fix for the Mac notarisation fix (currently OS X users have to jump through some additional hoops to get the operating system to run the viewer) should be appearing Soon™.
  • Voice viewer: the Lab has been working to try to address the more annoying aspects of voice cutting out when someone is speaking. A viewer with various fixes / tweaks is currently being tested by Lab staff, and may be available for wider use also in a Soon™ time frame.
  • A further viewer in the works will include further updates / fixes for the Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF – used in media playback and streaming into SL).

One of the issues LL are running into is that thanks to the SNAFU following the release and roll-back of the original Simple Cache viewer, there is a growing number of official viewers stacking up waiting to enter the RC and project viewer pipelines.

RLV/RLVa and Experiences

Most people are familiar with the RLV and RLVa protocols / API functionality that is available in various third-party viewers. Whilst originally developed for more adult-oriented activities in Second life, these API options do have a wide range of other potential uses, some of which might be said to now be matched by Experience functionality (for example: automatic teleports).

While there is currently no specific project in the works to extend Experience functionality, the Lab has actually had internal discussions about the potential to provide various RLV-like options that could help improve Experiences. As such, the suggestion was made that if there are various (and generic, rather than adult-specific) use cases that might be achieved using RLV but would be useful to have as Experience functionality, these are noted in Jira feature requests so that they might be considered in due course.

 

Note: it was brought to my attention that not everyone is aware of the Soon™ joke. It is a play on the use of “Soon™” by Blizzard Entertainment, and the fact that, given LL’s preference not to present what might be taken as “tablets of stone” dates for the delivery of any given feature or bug fix, Oz Linden would refer to upcoming features / capabilities / fixes being available as “Soon”, “Pretty Soon” and “Real Soon / Real Soon Now”, which all become generally defined by the catch-all idea of “Soon™”.

2021 SUG meeting week #17 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Skrunda-2, February 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 27th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the week’s server deployment thread for updates.

  • There was no deployment to the Main SLS channel on Tuesday, April 27th, although a couple of the smaller channels were restarted with thee latest simulator code version.
  • On Wednesday, April 28th, the RC channels should be updated with server update 558586, comprising internal fixes.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to the current crop of official viewers to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as possible.

  • Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance RC viewer – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23rd.
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.18.558365, dated April 22nd.
    • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.18.558441, dated April 21st.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26th, 2019.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9th, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22nd, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16th, 2019.

In Brief

  • BUG-139309 – “Allow setting of Hover Height via LSL” – originally closed as “unactionable”, this feature request is seen  as having potential benefits (e.g. automatically adjusting the height of Animesh attachments such as a pets, so they appear to be on the ground, rather than floating above it as a result of a change of footwear on the controlling avatar) It has been suggested that the idea be re-submitted as a new feature request with examples, with Simon Linden noting:
We like the idea of making those adjustments easy to work with and use, and also don’t want to limit it to height. X and Y tweaks would be nice too.

2021 SUG meeting week #16 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Redwoods, February 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. There’s not actually a lot to report, with most of the meeting taken up with general comments on “nice to have” ideas (e.g. improved IK for locating an avatar’s position / height, options to improve sitting on furniture, LSL access to map tile information, etc.), none of which is currently under consideration by LL as potential implementations.

Server Deployments

No server deployments have been planned for this week. There will, however, be a general “clean-up” of some of the Snack RC and experimental channels, but should not impact more than a couple dozen regions.

Regular deployments are expected to resume from week #17 (commencing Monday, 26th, April, 2021).

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to the current crop of official viewers to mark the start of the week.

  • Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.18.557797, dated April 7.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

In Brief

  • There is a “minor” update to be deployed to the back-end Soon™ that may help with the current problems.

2021 TPV Developer meeting week #15 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Centre for Mindfulness, February 2021 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, April 16th, 2021.

These meetings are generally held every other week.  They are recorded by Pantera Północy, and her video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this report – my thanks to her for allowing me to do so – and it is used with a transcript of the chat log from the meeting and my own audio recording to produce these notes.

SL Viewer

[0:00-3:35]

The current run of official viewers is as follows:

  • Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27 – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • Maintenance RC viewer – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.18.557782, dated April 12.
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.18.557797, dated April 7.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • LMR 5 could now be set for promotion in the next week or so. No further active work is being carried out, and the current RC version has an “acceptable” crash rate.
  • Love Me Render 6 (LMR 6) is already in preparation with a further mix of fixes, including some that are EEP related (e.g. rendering the Moon with haze).
  • The current Maintenance RC viewer is also in good shape, and also have a further Maintenance RC rolling along behind it that is getting close to being ready for issuing.
  • The Legacy Profiles project viewer is now on hold pending the outcome of internal discussions related to it. These are related to whether or not there needs to be further UI changes within the viewer or changes made on the web side of things.
  • The Simplified Cache viewer has been overhauled, and should be re-appearing as an RC viewer very soon.
  • A viewer focused on correcting the problems of Apple notifications popping-up when trying to run the viewer on a Mac system is also getting close to appearing as a project viewer.
  • The “518” viewer (the Lab’s internal reference for an in-development viewer project) that has the UI updates specifically geared towards the new user experience changes LL have been working on is liable to be appearing “fairly Soon™”.

Fee Changes, 2FA and Map Tile Generation

[6:05-8:00 for map tile and 2FA / TPV comments]

The recently announced changes to Linden dollar “buy” fees, together with the upcoming (at some point in the future) shift to Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) has apparently given ground to worries it could spell the end of third-party viewers, and an update on map tile generation were all mentioned during the meeting.

All all three have broader interest than represented by those who follow viewer news, I’ve provided a separate summary of all three – please see: Linden Lab: L$ buy fee changes + 2FA and Map tiles news.

In Brief

  • [8:56-most of the rest of the meeting] Object spamming: the issue of widespread IM-to-e-mail spamming by a range of in-world objects (e.g. scanners that record your avatar UUID and then send out IMs on “offers” and “sales”, regardless of whether or not you’ve joined a related group) is a topic that does get periodically raised within the Lab, but tends to get pushed to one side while other issues are dealt with. It is possible something might be done to mitigate the problem, but further time is needed to determine what and how.

2021 CCUG meeting week #15 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Where Our Journey Begins, February 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, April 15th. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar, and the venue is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

The current run of official viewers is as follows:

  • Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27 – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • Maintenance RC viewer – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.18.557782, dated April 12.
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.18.557797, dated April 7.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

Graphics Work

LMR 5 may have a further update in the coming week and is now “close” to being ready for promotion as the de facto viewer. Love Me Render 6 (LMR 6) is in preparation with a further mix of fixes, including some that are EEP related (e.g. rendering the Moon with haze).

ARCTan

Summary: An attempt to re-evaluate avatar rendering costs and the cost of in-world scene rendering, with the current focus on avatar rendering cost / impact, with the in-world scene rendering to be tackled at some point in the future.

The UI updates for how avatar complexity information is presented to users now looks as if it will be presented as a project / RC viewer separately to any updates to to the ARC calculations.

In Brief

  • Feature request BUG-227670 “Official Viewer: New default of 32m DD on installation when low end GPU detected” – this was put forward to help those logging-in to Second Life for the first time and arriving at a gateways only to encounter loading delays.
    • While accepted, it has the problem that a 32m draw distance is less that the potential size of a linkset, and so may cause issues of its own (what should be drawn within the linkset if it extends beyond the viewer’s 32m cut-off?).
  • Creator  owner permissions issues: it appears that some are seeing various losses of permissions on items that have created / owned (e.g. a full permission object of their own becoming No Mod or No Copy after being rezzed in-world.
    • This is a long-term (12+ years – see VWR-16097 and SVC-6185 for example), hard-to-reproduce issue that some are reportedly seeing re-surface.
    • It can sometimes be down to a single linked item in a complex build randomly changing its permission, requiring a careful comb-through of the entire linkset.
    • It appears to happen more frequently to objects located within high traffic regions and where there can be a noticeable delay (e.g. between pulling an object from inventory and in-world, or taking it from a scene back into inventory), which may point to a simulator / viewer race condition.
    • An updated bug report of the issues being encountered has been requested.

Date of Next Meeting

Thursday, April 29th, 2021.

2021 SUG meeting week #15 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Nekomachi Street, Tonarino – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 13th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest news and updates.

  • Tuesday, April 13th saw the SLS Main channel servers updated with simulator release 557694, defined as containing “internal fixes an tweaks”.
  • There are no planned deployments to any of the RC channels. However, regions will be subject to a rolling restart.

SL Viewer

The start of the week saw the Eau de Vie Maintenance RC viewer update to version 6.4.18.557782, dated April 12th, brining it up to par with the de facto release viewer.

:All other official viewers remain unchanged from the end of last week;

  • Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.18.557797, dated April 7.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

In Brief

  • BUG-229871 “Unable to re-enter or teleport to a region that I’ve been to during same session” – now appears to be related to the use of Malwarebytes security software; or at least the vast majority of those experiencing the issues are reportedly using MWB. Whitelisting the viewer .exe filepath for all installed viewers with MWB appears to resolve the issue.
  • Issues continue to be seen with group chat following the changes made by the Lab (see Maestro Linden’s April 5th forum post). These aren’t the last changes to be made, and the Lab fully intends to keep working on issues and trying to improve the service(s).
  • Map tiles are “getting closer but not ready yet. So, as per my recent SUG summaries, those needing more reliable access to the world map might try the following: