Category: SL User Group Meetings

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January 21st, 2021.

These meetings are generally held every other week.  They are video recorded by Pantera Północy, and her recording 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 News

[0:00-2:15]

• Current release viewer version 6.4.11.551711, formerly Cachaça Maintenance RC viewer promoted on November 12 – 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):
  • Dawa Maintenance RC Viewer, version 6.4.12.555058, January 20, 2021.
  • Project Jelly viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.12.553798, January 7, 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.

General Viewer Notes

• Viewer updates / releases had been held-up due to some Uplift related issues. This have now been rectified, and viewers should start rolling forward again.
• As noted in my 2021 week #3 CCUG summary, the Dawa Maintenance RC viewer was the only viewer updated during the week, and this will likely be the next viewer to be promoted to de facto release status.
• The Simple Cache project viewer (VFS replacement) and the Legacy Profile project viewer are both now “close” to be promoted to release candidate (RC) status. That latter had been blocked due to some required UI fixes, with Kylie Linden indicating these are in progress.
• Graphics fixes continue to be added to the LMR-5 project viewer, but this is liable to end in the next week or so, in order to allow this viewer to progress onwards through RC and eventual de facto release.

AMD GPUs “Blue View” Issue

[3:21-11:02]

Some users running systems with AMD GPU has been encountering a issue with scenes being rendered with a strong blue bias when running the SL viewer with Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) enabled and using the most recent (post October 2020, I believe, and particularly the latest Adrenalin drivers) AMD drivers.

• General reports can be found here, and a formal bug report is available: BUG229727.
• LL have acknowledged the issue, and believe it to be driver related. However, AMD driver bugs must apparently be reported using a specific reporting tool provided by AMD, and thus far LL have been unable to reproduce the bug when running said software and so are apparently having issues getting AMD to accept it.
  • The issue appears to be somewhat similar to an Nvidia bug of a few years ago, possibly resulting from a switch to using a BGRA for textures rather than the more usual RGBA format.
• There are reports that an AMD driver update issued on January 21st, 2021, but at the time of writing this summary, this has yet to be more broadly confirmed.
• In the meantime for those affected by the issue,the following workarounds are recommended:
  • Rolling back to an older driver version (e.g. Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.11.2).
  • If that doesn’t work:
    • Disable ALM in the viewer (Preferences → Graphics → uncheck Advanced Lighting Model).
    • Log out and back into the viewer.
    • Enable ALM (Preferences → Graphics → check Advanced Lighting Model).
    • Remember to disable ALM prior to ending your session (so you only need to re-enable ALM when you next log-in.

In Brief

• [16:32-34::45] The meeting saw a significant amount of text chat concerning the technicalities of viewer CPU / CPU core usage, TPV work in trying to rebuild viewer threading, etc. As this is text-based (and may not be of relevance to many users), please refer to the video from around the 16m 32s mark through to .
• [34:47-48:00] and continuing after the brief discussion on chat lag] A further text conversation is on graphic API options and moving away from OpenGL. This is covered in my 2021 week #3 CCUG summary, but it appears that around 20% of Windows users running systems incapable of supporting Vulkan (notably those using Intel integrated graphics).
  • That said, Vulkan isn’t the sole option available to LL, and much is still in discussion internally at the Lab.
• [48:37-49:15] Some are experiencing an increase in chat lag post-Uplift. LL are currently re-starting the chat servers as an interim means of improving reliability of chat services, but it’s not clear if this is also helping reduce general performance issues.

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January 8th, 2021. Unfortunately, other commitments prevented me from attending the meeting, so I am solely reliant on Pantera’s video. However, for some reason, the region hosting the meeting was re-started mid-session (possibly the result of a rolling restart), and on resuming, Pantera suffered a recording glitch that meant the second half of the meeting did not get captured.

While I have the chat transcript of the full meeting (my thanks again to Pantera), given that the majority of commentary is via Voice, replies to questions and comments are unavailable, so this summary only covers the period of the meeting that was recorded successfully.

SL Viewer News

[1:33-3:51]

On Thursday, January 7th:

• The Jellydolls viewer (updates to avatar appearance based on rendering costs) was promoted to Release Candidate status with the issuing of version 6.4.12.553798.
• The Custom Key Mappings RC viewer updated to version 6.4.12.553437.
• A new Love Me Render (LMR 5) viewer, version 6.4.12.553511,  was released as a project viewer.

The rest of the current official viewer pipelines remain as follows:

• Current release viewer version 6.4.11.551711, formerly Cachaça Maintenance RC viewer promoted on November 12 – No Change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Dawa Maintenance RC Viewer, version 6.4.12.553053, released December 3rd.
• Project viewers:
  • Simple Cache project viewer, version 6.4.11.551403, issued on 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

• Viewer updates have been delayed both due to the holiday break and as a result of a couple of processes being broken as a result of the cloud migration process.  The latter have now been fixed.
• Currently, the OS  X (Mac) build  process for the official viewer is currently “broken” and in the process of being fixed.
• The LMR 5 viewer comprises a number of EEP fixes together with fixes for water reflection rendering and for the Mesh uploader preview image. The full list of fixes from the release notes comprises:
  • SL-12740 [EEP] The EEP moon has a hardcoded blue light that is not present in Windlight-based viewers (Lab internal Jira).
  • SL-13888 The model is displayed with artefacts in the upload preview floater (Lab internal Jira).
  • SL-14275  Water Reflection new modes (Lab internal Jira).
  • BUG-228581 [EEP] Specular map reflections are way too weak.
  • BUG-228781 [EEP] Specular color interpreted wrong (too bright) from point lights.
  • BUG-228914 [EEP] Deferred Soften Shader fails to link when Atmospheric Shaders are disabled. This causes Debug viewer builds to crash.
  • BUG-229013 [EEP] Moonset inconsistent
  • BUG-229122 [EEP] Glow should be directly behind the sun or moon when it is near the horizon.
  • BUG-229689 [EEP] cloud texture is rendered backwards
• The Profiles viewer had been expected to be promoted to RC status, but there appears to be a UI issue that needs to be addressed before this can happen.
• It is not clear which of the RC viewers will be the next to be promoted to de facto release status. However, given the amount of testing against the Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, this could be a strong contender.

Upcoming UDP Changes

[10:35-14:45]

• Following on from the switch away from using UDP messaging for asset handling between the viewer and the Lab’s back-end systems that took place in recent years (assets are all handle by HTTP), the Lab is now looking to make a similar switch away from UDP messaging for all “mission critical” (e.g. messages that need to be handled in a specific order / receive responses in a specific order).
• These changes are to be made over time and on a “case by case” basis.
• Exactly how this is to be done has not been entirely worked through; it may be that some changes can be made without impacting TPV developers with a lot of additional work on their side of things.
• Part of this work will involve moving some of the message handling for chat to TCP as well.
• This work will take time to complete; however, once it is finished and once the replacement messaging protocols have been a part of the official release viewer for around 12 months, the Lab will seek to removing UDP message handling from both the viewer and the back-end code where it is no longer required.
• The reason for doing this is because UDP is not a reliable messaging format when information is required in a specific order, and can be at the heart of assorted issues users can experience. Ergo, the aim is to make things a lot more predictable and robust.

In Brief

• [4:02-5:06] There are a number of services still being adjusted post-uplift, these include:
  • World Map tile generation.
  • Land Store.
  • Some noticeable performance glitches.
  • These adjustments likely mean there were be a slightly higher cadence of server-side changes, but the focus is on trying to fix things and get back to the usual Tuesday / Wednesday simulator deployments  within the next week or two.
• [5:08-5:53] There is a further update to help with Group Chat issues   that will hopefully be deployed in week #2 (commencing Monday, January 11th).
  • This is not seen as a “total fix” for issues, but part of the continuing work to improve things.
  • The focus is to “sharply limit” the amount of group chat traffic generated by people logging into or out of Second Life. This means that the member lists for very large groups may not report everyone in the group who is on-line, but will report all those actively using the group chat function as being on-line.
• [5:55-10:17]There is to be a “real push” to make improvements to the Second Life Voice service. This will likely be based around a new Voice SDK supplied by Vivox.
  • As a part of this work, the Lab is gathering data on users who are still running on very old viewer versions / old version of the SLplugin.EXE for voice, as part of this work will likely result in some of the oldest, low-quality codecs used by the Voice API being disabled in the Voice package from Vivox at some point in the future – which may “break” Voice for those still using those really old versions.
  • The reason for disabling these old codecs is because they are of much lower quality output, and if just one person in a group voice chat is using a Voice package reliant on them, everyone in the same group chat is downgraded to the old codec, impacting the Voice quality right across the session.
  • This work will also focus on trying to correct / eliminate the “little” voice drop-outs that can occur (so those listening don’t hear every single word the speaker says).
• [13:55-16:25] Another change with the viewer is the on-going removal of code that is not longer being actively used. A  further example of this is that there are two protocols used for handling requests for logging-in to SL. One of these (XML-RPC) is almost never used nowadays, so this code may well be removed – with warning beforehand – in the future.