Beneath a sky created by Whirly Fizzle, people gather to say farewell to Oz Linden ahead of his retirement (see below)
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 16th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.
Server Deployments
please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest news and updates.
Tuesday, February 23rd: no deployment to the SLS Main channel.
Wednesday, February 24th: all RC channels should receive server release 556138 (or a variant thereof). This release was originally deployed to the Apples test RC channel, and contains performance optimisations and internal fixes.
An Omnibus of Oz’s: to mark Oz Linden’s coming departure, several people – including Whirly Fizzle (l) and Alexa Linden (r) and Kyle Linden (pictured) – attended his farewell party as lookalikes. That’s the real Oz in the middle, seated on the Iron Throne.
SL Viewer
On Monday, February 22nd, the Simple Cache viewer updated to version 6.4.14.556088 (dated February 19th).
On Tuesday, February 23rd, the Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer updated to version 6.4.14.556118, February.
The rest of the current pipelines remain as:
Current release viewer: Project Jelly viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.13.555567 and dated February 5th, 2021, promoted February 17th.
Release channel cohorts:
Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.553437, January 7th.
Project viewers:
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26th.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.
At its peak, the farewell party for Oz Linden saw around 60 people in attendance.
In Brief
There wasn’t really a meeting, and for a special reason: as he announced earlier in February, Oz Linden, the Lab’s Vice President of Engineering, is retiring at the end of the month with Friday, February 26th marking his last day with Linden Lab.
As such, the meeting was given over to a farewell party, with around 60 people in attendance. I managed to get a few shots of the event, as shown here. For those interested, I wrote something of a look back at Oz’s time at the Lab in Oz Linden announces his forthcoming departure from Linden Lab.
The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, February 19th, 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.
The latter two-thirds of the meeting included a large amount of local text chat related to VRAM and texture handling. Please refer to the video for details.
As I recently blogged, Oz Linden, who initiated the TPVD meetings and who has, with the exception of when he’s been on vacation, chaired them is departing the Lab for retirement on Friday, February 26th (see: Oz Linden announces his forthcoming departure from Linden Lab). As such, this marked the last TPVD meeting he would attend, with – I believe – Vir Linden now set to carry them forward.
Given this, Oz had a few words to say to the TPV community at the start of the meeting:
I want to say that working with the third party viewer community has been – I mean this is how it started for me, and it has been a theme throughout, and it has been a very great pleasure working with all of you. It’s really been terrific, and thank you. Thank you for making me look good, and thank you for all you contribute to this really impactful and fun product.
Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.13.555871, February, 18, 2021.
Simple Cache project viewer, version 6.4.13.555641, February 16, 2021.
Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.553437, January 7, 2021.
Project viewers:
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.
Project Jelly Viewer
This viewer essentially improves the rendering of Jelly Doll avatars.
Originally introduced in 2015 (and with various improvements since) as a means to allows users reduce the avatar rendering load on their systems by having any avatars around them that exceed a certain complexity value (set via a slider) render as a solid colour and minimal detail.
There have always been a number of issues with the manner in which these avatars are rendered. For example: the colours used have been seen as intrusive so users often avoid the capability, while there have also been technical flaws such as the original code. attempting to render all of a Jelly Doll avatar’s attachments, defeating the intent of the code.
As a result, the Project Jelly viewer improves things by both rendering avatars as simplified grey humanoid shapes, and by not making any attempt to render attachments.
In addition it also improves to how avatar imposters are rendered and updated.
These improvements should result in demonstrable improvements in view performance in environments where there are a large number of avatars and the capability is sensibly used.
General Viewer Notes
Of the RC viewers, all three appear to be in good shape for promotion as the next de facto release viewer, although no decision has been taken on which will be promoted next.
At the CCUG meeting, some users expressed a preference to see the Love Me Render 5 viewer promoted next, but there is no commitment to this being the case, as promotions are governed by stability / crash rates.
A new Maintenance RC view is anticipated as appearing soon.
There are still no firm decisions as to how the viewer rendering API will be handled in the move away from OpenGL. for the most recent information I have on this, please see my February 5th CCUG meeting notes.
As per my February 18th CCUG meeting summary, the current focus is on bug fixes and UI performance improvements.
Other proposed UI work is related to the new user experience and making the viewer easier for new users to get to grips with the viewer.
[15:20-18:00] Chrome Embedded Framework (the media handler used by the viewer) will cease supporting Windows hardware that is pre SSE3 (2004). It is believed that few (if any) Sl users are running systems old enough to be affected by this – and if they are, they are liable to have more issues than simply losing their media playback capabilities.
Firestorm has entered a QA cycle in preparation for what will be something of a maintenance release with a focus on closing the gap between it and the more recent Lab viewer code releases. It is hoped this will be the first in a more regular cycle of 3-monthly releases.
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, February 18th 2021 at 13:00 SLT.
Project Jelly viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.13.555567 and dated February 5th, 2021, was promoted to de facto release status on Wednesday, February 17th.
The Love Me Render 5 (LMR 5) viewer was promoted to Release Candidate status on Thursday, February, 18th, 2021 with the issuing of version 6.4.13.555871.
The rest of the current pipelines remain as:
Release channel cohorts:
Simplified Cache viewer, version 6.4.13.555641, February 16, 2021.
Custom Key Mappings viewer, version 6.4.12.553437, January 7, 2021.
Project viewers:
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26, 2020.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.
Jelly Doll Viewer
This viewer essentially improves the rendering of Jelly Doll avatars.
Originally introduced in 2015 (and with various improvements since) as a means to allows users reduce the avatar rendering load on their systems by having any avatars around them that exceed a certain complexity value (set via a slider) render as a solid colour and minimal detail.
There have always been a number of issues with the manner in which these avatars are rendered. For example: the colours used have been seen as intrusive so users often avoid the capability, while there have also been technical flaws such as the original code. attempting to render all of a Jelly Doll avatar’s attachments, defeating the intent of the code.
As a result, the Project Jelly viewer improves things by both rendering avatars as simplified grey humanoid shapes, and by not making any attempt to render attachments.
In addition it also:
Improves to how avatar imposters are rendered and updated.
Ensures avatars and any Animesh attachment(s) they may have are updated in the same frame.
These improvements should result in demonstrable improvements in view performance in environments where there are a large number of avatars and the capability is sensibly used.
Project Muscadine (Animesh Follow-On)
Project Summary
Currently: offering the means to change an Animesh size parameters via LSL.
Current Status
Still officially on hold.
Unlikely to be resumed in the near-term as it requires simulator-side work and the engineering team is currently engaged in post-Uplift work.
Viewer Rendering
With LMR 5 at RC status, the focus has moved more to performance related work.
One element of this is Euclid Linden’s work to break out UI rendering from general scene rendering and reduce the amount of time rendering the former, as it updates a lot least frequently than the rest of the scene. This should help improve general viewer performance.
Ptolemy Linden is similarly engaged in rendering performance improvements and is also working on bug fixes, some of which are likely to to be included in the next LMR viewer update.
In Brief
Animesh LI Cost
There is still concern that the basic LI “cost” for Animesh is still too high, coupled with the view that there is not any sufficiently clear explanation of how impact costs are arrived at.
Vir acknowledged more could be done to make information more available – it currently requires digging into the object information floaters, something users may not always be aware of.
It was also indicated that until sculpties receive an LI impact reflective of their rendering complexity, there will remain a preference among some creators to continue to use them and alpha flipping (which can be performance intensive).
General
The Lab has an internal proposal for updating terrain textures, but it has yet to be formally adopted.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 16th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.
Server Deployments
At the time of writing, this is yet another week without published release notes. However, there was no deployment to the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, February 16th, leaving it on simulator release 555570.
Simulators on the BlueSteel channel are due to be subject to “some experiments” – one of which apparently involves splitting up the simulators currently on that channel into smaller channels. It is not anticipated that any of these experiments will have any user-visible impact.
Mazidox Linden also indicated that the LeTigre deployment channel may also be subject to being split into smaller channels, although this has yet to be confirmed.
The aim of this work is to hopefully to make it easier to tune groups of simulators for better performance on their underlying servers, with Oz Linden noting:
We have many more possible system types than we had before… we picked one for the initial uplift, but there are lots of others and many configuration options…. finding the best combinations requires lots of experimentation.
SL Viewer
The Simplified Cache viewer, which incorporates a replacement for VFS caching, was promoted to Release Candidate status on Tuesday, February, 16th, 2021 with the issuing of version 6.4.13.555641.
The rest of the current pipelines remain as:
Current release viewer Dawa Maintenance RC Viewer, version 6.4.12.555248, dated January 25, 2021, promoted February 1st, 2021 – NEW.
Release channel cohorts:
Project Jelly viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.13.555567, February 5, 2021.
Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.553437, January 7, 2021.
Project viewers:
Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.12.553511, issued on January 7, 2021.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.
In Brief
What does it look like when Second Life is lagging (or otherwise performing poorly) for you. What does it look like when Second Life is performing well?
This rather open question was asked by Mazidox Linden in an attempt to gain as wide a view as possible response – be it about “lag” that might be more directly attributable to viewer-side activities (e.g. rezzing / rendering, which are down to the viewer and may be using data already locally cached), or which are dependent on network connectivity or which may be attributable to definable viewer / server interactions (e.g. drops in general performance when the viewer receives the data relating to an avatar arriving in a region, slow script processing, etc.). From this, it is hoped a more detailed breakdown of server-side impacts for which metrics can be obtained can be drawn up.
It has been noted that some timing appear to be “off”. Examples include: landmarks failing to refresh, SLurl failing to copy correctly, through to issues of attachment load with RLV that sees the latter engage before all of the former have properly loaded in the viewer). LL are not aware of any Uplift changes that may have caused this (although some – such as the RLV issue were known to exist prior to Uplift).
Land Store – the recent Land Store issues (non-availability of new regions) appears to be down to assumptions made prior to Uplift that “didn’t hold up”, resulting in the need for a back-end bug fix. In the meantime, regions can be obtained by filing a ticket with Support.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 9th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.
Server Deployments
At the time of writing,the release notes for the week had yet to be produced. However, deploys can be summarised as:
On Tuesday, February 9th, the SLS Main channel was updated to server release 555570, previously deployed to the RC channels. This update comprises: feature request BUG-230026 Extended error return for llHTTPRequest – see here for documentation – and the following fixes:
BUG-228783 llSitOnLink() is not generating Notifications nor logs in Events in the viewer.
BUG-8265 (BUG-230131) CONTROL_ML_LBUTTON and CONTROL_LBUTTON not working when llTakeControls called in the experience_permissions event
SL-14802 experience notifications are sent to frequently.
There is no deployment to the RC channels planned for Wednesday, February 10th.
The Tuesday 9th Feb deployment means that all simulators should currently be running the same version.
Rider Linden also indicated that additional micro-channels (along the lines of the Cake and Snack, etc., mini-RC channels generally used for specific testing or code and fixes) are to be created, but this work will be done outside of the normal Tuesday / Wednesday deployment time frames. These new channels are described as being need because “We want to run some controlled tests on small manageable numbers of regions at a time.”
SL Viewer
No start-of-week changes to the current list of available official viewer versions, leaving the pipelines as follows:
Current release viewer Dawa Maintenance RC Viewer, version 6.4.12.555248, dated January 25, 2021, promoted February 1st, 2021 – NEW.
Release channel cohorts:
Project Jelly viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.13.555567, February 5, 2021.
Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.553437, January 7, 2021.
Project viewers:
Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.12.553511, issued on January 7, 2021.
Simple Cache project viewer, version 6.4.11.551403, November 12.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.
In Brief
Work is continuing on trying to get the Map tile updates working, but no ETA.
Questions were (again) raised on the new Linden Research board for directors and things like Town Hall meetings. for the latest available information, see: Linden Lab’s board of directors: snippets of news).
In terms of board members appearing in-world at public meetings, it is worth pointing out that the last time a board member appeared in-world was likely SL5B in 2008, when former board member gave his (in)famous keynote address
The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, February 5th, 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.
The Project Jelly viewer updated to version 6.4.13.555567 on Friday, February 5th. This presumably brings it to parity with the current release viewer code base, and moves it closer to potentially being the next viewer to gain promotion to de facto release status, although no decision has been made on this as yet.
Current release viewer Dawa Maintenance RC Viewer, version 6.4.12.555248, dated January 25, 2021, promoted February 1st, 2021 – NEW.
Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.553437, January 7, 2021.
Project viewers:
Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.12.553511, issued on January 7, 2021.
Simple Cache project viewer, version 6.4.11.551403, November 12.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.
General Viewer Notes
With Dawa now at release status, the current RC viewers are being bought up to parity with its code base.
As noted in my most recent CCUG summary, the Love Me Render (LMR) 5 graphics RC viewer is close to being ready for promotion from project to RC status.
The simple cache viewer (VFS replacement viewer) is in “decent shape” for promotion to RC status once updated to the Dawa code base.
There may be further UI work for the Legacy Profile project viewer (returns avatar profiles,etc., back into the viewer, a-la Firestorm) which may delay this viewer from progressing.
For OS X users, a viewer is in the works that will “get Apple’s notarisations working”. This has been something of a long standing issue, and the viewer should be appearing in the near future.
This viewer essentially improves the rendering of Jelly Doll avatars.
The idea behind Jelly Dolls (first introduced in 2015, with various improvements since) was to give users the means to reduce the load of having to render extremely complex avatars on computers with low hardware specifications by:
Explicitly selecting a nearby avatar and set its display value to Do Not Render, reducing them to a simplified, “flat” grey avatar form.
And / or setting a “complexity value” within the viewer that, if exceeded by any avatar in the field of view, will render it as a Jelly Doll.
Both the grey and the Jelly Doll forms are simplified avatar outlines, with the latter rendered as one of a number of solid colours selected by the viewer from a colour map. The term was coined by user Whirly Fizzle after the British Jelly Babies brand of sugared jelly sweets.
There have always been a number of issues with the manner in which these avatars are rendered. For example:
On the visual side, many users have avoided the viewer’s complexity setting (to the detriment of their viewer’s performance) as they do no like seeing solid, brightly coloured avatar forms in their field of view.
On the technical side, the code currently attempts to render all of avatar’s attachments. As these tend to be the most costly to render, this can defeat he object of the code.
Also, the baseline formula for jelly doll calculations doesn’t allow for consistent results.
As a result, the Project Jelly viewer:
Does not attempt to render attachments, but instead renders affected avatars as a simplified, easy-to-render humanoid shape.
Render all such avatars in grey, no longer using the previous colour map, in the hope this will encourage more people on lower-end systems to use the capability, as the grey avatar forms tend to be less intrusive within a scene.
[13:38 via chat] In relation to avatar rendering / Jelly Dolls, it was asked if better global controls for rendering could be provided. In reply, Grumpity indicated that in addressing performance as a whole, such global controls might be considered in the future.
Oz Linden is working on the viewer log-in process that are designed to prevent people logging-in to Second Life when their inventory is “broken” (and potentially making their situation worse).
The updates to the log-in process means there will be additional checking on the status of an avatar inventory data on the back-end as a user logs into Second Life.
If errors within the data are found, the log-in process suspended, in order to prevent the errors being propagated to the viewer, and then viewer then exacerbating the situation by trying to manipulate the inventory database further on the basis of the invalid data.
Should this happen, the user will receive a massage that explicitly states that log-in has failed as a result of inventory issues with the request the user contacts Support. This message will also provide some specific information the user can pass to Support when they contact them.
Support will then use the information supplied to initiate the required corrective action to resolve the issue.
While this may impede users with inventory problems from logging-in, the hope is that these changes will actually make the resolution of inventory-related issues easier to correct at source and thus have less of an overall impact on affected users.
This is seen as a priority change, and the Lab hopes to be in a position to have the back-end changes tested and the viewer-side updates available by the end of the month.
In Brief
[4:17-4:32] The Lab is making some changes to how deployments are managed within the AWS environment. If done correctly, this work should result in no user-visible changes.
There remain some issues still to be fully resolved as a result of the transition to AWS, including (but not necessarily limited to):
The problem with Map tile not being generated. This is being addressed.
The fact that the chat servers currently need to be restarted more frequently than pre-Uplift. This is still being diagnosed.
Teleport failures resulting in an “wrong” or “invalid” region message. This is also being diagnosed.
However, the Lab caution against assuming any issue that is encountered is a result of the AWS transition. The general rule remains, if you’re seeing a specific (and preferably reproducible) issue, raise a bug report.
[14:31-15:33] in response to a question on the avatar skeleton (why 159 bones, but capped at 110 on upload?), vir pointed out the 110 bone cap is per sub-mesh in a character, rather than on a complete character (which can have several sub-mesh components. The reason for the cap is down to older GPUs that can be used in SL being unable to handle the transform matrices.
[19:54-20:28] Premium Plus: internal discussions have resumed on the deployment of Premium Plus, but there is nothing to share in terms of time frame, etc., at the moment.
[21:49-24:15] The recent Marketplace issues are seen as a combination of both the continuing work to improve the Marketplace experience and the work to transition it to AWS.
As the MP involves multiple back-end services, there are a lot of interdependencies that can be impacted particularly as a result of the AWS transition work, and not all of these can be accurately QA’d, as the sheer volume of transaction, etc., the MP sees hourly cannot be easily or accurately replicated.
The current focus is on general MP stability (including its various dependencies) in order to hopefully make future maintenance and update easier / smoother.
The most preferable way to deal with the MP would perhaps be to take the service down entirely for a a period of time and overhaul it, and then re-release it. However, given the impact this would have, it is simply not a viable option.
[24:42-25:45] Generally speaking, LL believe SL to be a lot more stable / robust now than previously, simply because it is running on much more recent hardware and within an infrastructure where they no longer have to worry about things like hardware that is well beyond its operational life failing, whilst any underpinning hardware / infrastructure issues are more-or-less immediately addressed by AWS. This in itself allows LL’s engineering and ops teams to be more focused on running the software side of things.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 