Category: SL User Group Meetings

2020 SL project updates week #36: TPVD summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Pony Box, July 2020 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, September 4th, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.

Two length text conversations dominated the meeting. The first focused on mesh heads and brains, the second on graphics and users and system updates.

SL Viewer News

[0:14-3:05]

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.7.546539, dated August 11, promoted August 17, formerly the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Bormotukha Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.8.547468, issued August 28.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.8.547427,August 21.
    • Mesh uploader RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544027, July 27.
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.8.547487, issued August 26.
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • 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.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • All three RC viewers have updates that are being queued for issue.
  • It is possible the Bormotukha Maintenance RC viewer will be promoted to release status at the start of week #37 (commencing Monday, September 7th).
  • As  noted in my previous CCUG summary, a new Love Me Render (LMR) RC viewer should be available soon (it is currently in QA, so could potentially appear in week #37). This viewer will have further EEP fixes, although not all of them may be in the initial RC release.
  • The Legacy Profiles viewer is awaiting a back-end update to the feeds, which may be being worked on.

In  Brief

  • [4:09-7:00] there is an intermittent problem of people viewing the Lab’s own web pages via the viewer’s built-in viewer finding at time that the website doesn’t see them as logged-in (although it should pick this up from the viewer).
    • This appears to be the result of a validation issue with the token generated at log-in and which should be passed to LL’s websites to allow the viewer to access them without the need for a further log-in.
    • LL are hesitant to fix the issue at the moment, as the back-end service handling the tokens is in the process of being moved to the cloud. Once the service has been transitioned, then the matter will be investigated and rectified.
    • This issue may have been triggered by changes make to the way server certificates are validated, which may have had an unintended knock-on impact.
  • [9:07-15:20]  a general discussion on performance issues that are most often tied to Linden Water, and suggestions on how it might be dealt with.  This largely matches the discussion summarised in my previous CCUG summary. These again included the idea of an update to prevent the viewer attempting to draw the Linden Water plane when above a certain altitude (and the majority of users cannot see it when at that altitude or above), or f having a UUID that can be set via the environment controls that effectively stops Linden Water Rendering when applied. Again, these are just *suggestions*, not things that have / are / will be implemented.
  • [21:12-23:12] OpenGL replacement: LL are not considering “seriously starting” on any OpenGL replacement work within the viewer until they have reasonable confidence the worst of the EEP bugs have been dealt with, simply because this is consuming the majority of the rendering team’s bandwidth.
    • Currently efforts are focused on gathering data on people’s systems – how they are running in terms of graphics options, what they are capable of running allowing for their GPU., etc., in order to hep the Lab better define parameters they need to consider. The code for this is in the current release viewer, and is propagating to TPVs as they merge and release that code.
    • One problem is that there are users who have hardware capable of running Vulkan, but they’ve not updated their Windows OS to a version that can support it.
  • [32:08-33:03] Viewer stats: by log-in session, the official viewer currently has a average of around 76% of sessions using Windows 10 64-bit; 15% using OS X, and the rest split between other Windows + Linux flavours. In terms of average users, Firestorm believe that have around 6% of users on OS X, perhaps 2% using various Linux flavours and the rest on various versions of Windows (32-bit and 64-bit).

 

2020 Content Creation User Group week #36 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Aspen Fell – The Notebook, July 2020 – 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, September 3rd 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

EEP Fixes

Love Me Render

  • The current Love Me Render (LMR) viewer (version 6.4.8.547427 at the time of writing) contains a number of EEP fixes (as well as other rendering updates) These include:
    • BUG-229107 [EEP] [Improvement] Ice level Slider Graduation.
    • SL-13539 [EEP] Large reflection on the water when facing certain angles.
    • BUG-228992 [EEP] Appearance lighting is broken when ALM is enabled.
    • BUG-228914 [EEP] Deferred Soften Shader fails to link when Atmospheric Shaders are disabled. This causes Debug viewer builds to crash.
    • BUG-228882 [EEP] Disabling glow rendering while ALM is off results in massive rendering flicker.
    • BUG-228781 [EEP] Specular color interpreted wrong (too bright) from point lights.
    • BUG-228581 [EEP] Specular map reflections are way too weak.
    • BUG-228840 [EEP] cloud texture is rendered backwards.
    • BUG-228431 [EEP] Water lighting is wrong at certain camera angles.
    • BUG-228752 [EEP] Sky turns black when render quality is lowered to Low-Mid.
    • BUG-225784 [EEP] BUG-225446 regression – HUDs are again affected by environment setting and BUG-225446 [FIXED] [EEP] HUDs are affected by Atmosphere & Lighting changes.
  • These a further EEP updates to come, likely in the next LMR viewer, which will hopefully be issued in the next week or so. These should include a fix  to allow horizon haze to modify the Sun’s light and tint when it is close to the horizon.

Additional EEP Issues

  • Moonlight: the Lab is also aware of a number of lighting issues related to the Moon (attenuation of moonlight through clouds, for example. Again, these will be addressed in time.
  • Mainland ambient lighting: users have repeatedly noted that the default Mainland environment remains darker than under Windlight.
    • This is the result of an error made during the EEP deployment that now requires a simulator-side configuration update to be made that is slightly complex in terms of implementation.
    • Essentially, a code fix needs to be made, and then a new estate setting added to the simulator code to manage it, together with code to ensure the update is correctly propagated to the affected regions.
    •  Currently, the resources required to develop, test and implement the required changes are all heavily engaged in cloud uplift work.
  • Density Multiplier issue: this is the result of the simulator restricting the multiple value. A fix for this is an upcoming simulator release.
  • Linden Water / performance issue:
    • As noted in previous CCUG summaries, rendering Linden Water appears to impact viewer performance to a greater degree than previously (leading to some simply disabling Linden Water rendering (CTL-ALT-SHIFT-7).
    • LL currently don’t have a solution for this, in part because the precise point in rendering where the bottleneck seems to occur is proving hard to pin down.
    • Some  suggestions for dealing with it were put forward at the meeting, including:
      • As there does not appear to be occlusion culling for water, perhaps auto-disabling Linden Water from being rendered in the viewer above a certain altitude (where the water generally isn’t visible anyway).
      • Or adding a special texture UUID that, when set via EEP in a region / parcel,  resulting in Linden Water rendering being disabled (CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-7, effectively) for all viewers within the region / parcel, rather than people having to manually disable Linden Water rendering. This could be helpful for major indoor shopping events, etc.
      • Note: both of the above were user-made suggestions, not ideas that have been implemented.
  • Specularity issues: EEP has altered specularity rendering such that specularity in point lights can appear too bright, and in Sun / Moon light, too dim. Fixes for this are in the currently LMR viewer referenced above, but there is some disagreement as to how well (or not) they correct issues.
    • Part of this may be the result of EEP making adjustments so the specularity in objects appears more realistic, but creators have previously had to manually compensate for a weakness in specular map rendering in the past.

ARCTan

  • Vir’s work in updating Jelly Dolls is now available in the Project Jelly viewer, currently availability as a project viewer (version 6.4.8.547487 at the time of writing). This work is also likely to find its way into a Maintenance viewer at some point.

In Brief

  • Date of next meeting: probably Thursday, September 17th, 2020.

September 2020 WUG summary: uplift and SL Mobile

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes are taken from my recording of the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020. These meetings are held monthly, generally on the first Wednesdays of the month, with dates and details of the meetings available via the Web User Group wiki page.

When reading these notes, please keep in mind:

  • This is not intended as a chronological transcript of the meeting. Items are drawn together by topic, although they may have been discussed at different points in the meeting.
  • Similarly, and if included, any audio extracts appearing in these summaries are presented by topic heading, rather than any chronological order in which they may have been raised during the meeting (e.g. if “topic X” is mentioned early in a meeting and then again half-way through a meeting, any audio comments related to that topic that might be included in these reports will be concatenated into a single audio extract).

Web Properties Updates

The primary focus for the web teams remains the transitioning of services from the Lab’s own servers to AWS servers as a part of the Uplift project, although non-uplift web properties work is being carried out where possible, as noted below.

Uplift Work

  • Place Pages and the land store pages are all now running in the cloud.
  • Various support tools as used by the Lab have also been transitioned to running in the cloud.

Non-Uplift Web Properties Updates

  • The Second Life Jira has been updated, although this caused some issues for users who had not used  the Jira for some time, but who had used the Name Changes capability to change their avatar (user) name. This has now been fixed.
  • A  similar update is required for the SL wiki (for those able to edit pages). This will be implemented after the cloud uplift work has been completed.
  • The Marketplace has received a number of fixes / updates, including:
    • A fix for some users being unable to create stores on the MP.
    • A fix for some of the merchant reports hanging when run.
  • The SL web properties (including the viewer’s web search) now have a Cookies Acceptance banner, as required under Californian law.

Premium Plus

  • Currently “shelved” due to cloud uplift work,
  • It is still “on the [road] map, but just not a target right now.”
  • Will be looked at again some time after the uplift work has been completed.

Mobile Client

  • Issues arose during the QA testing of the last iOS update, these are currently being worked  on.
  • The current plan is now:
    • A further QA testing on the iOS version of the app.
    • If  this version passes QA successfully, make it available to the current closed alpha testers AND submit it to Apple for their testing / review.
  • While LL will *not* be offering the ability for using to purchase L$ or make transactions in the initial releases of the app, they are watching the escalating Epic (Fortnite) / Apple + Google situation (see: Epic suing Apple and Google over Fortnite bans: Everything you need to know) to see how this affects fees levied by both Apple and Google regarding L$ transactions, once they become available through the SL mobile app.
  • As per last month, the Android version of the apps remain some way behind the iOS version.
  • General reminder: in its initial iterations, the app will be primarily focused on communications. It will not have a full range of capabilities when initially made available to users, but will be iterated upon; this includes the app not having any world rendering capability, although this may be added in the future.
  • General updates on the app can be found in my periodic SL Mobile updates.

Next Meeting

Wednesday, October 7th, 14:00 SLT.

2020 Simulator User Group week #36 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Carolina, July 2020 – blog post

No genuinely reportable news from the Tuesday, September 1st Simulator User Group meeting, outside of the server deployment notes, hence the brief summary.

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for news and updates:

  • On Tuesday, September 1st, the majority of servers were updated to server maintenance update 547626, comprising:
    • Internal fixes (to help with the Lab’s own simulator testing)
    • Logging improvements
    • Updates related to SL-13785 “Vehicle LSL scripts do not see any passengers shortly after a region crossing”. The Lab notes the patch deployed with this release may not fix all instances of this issue, but it should offer some relief for the issue.
  • On Wednesday, September 2nd, the Magum RC channel should also receive server maintenance update 54726, placing the entire grid on the same release (BlueSteel and LeTigre having been updates with it in week #35).

SL Viewer

The have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as follows:

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.7.546539, dated August 11, promoted August 17, formerly the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Bormotukha Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.8.547468, issued August 28.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.8.547427,August 21.
    • Mesh uploader RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544027, July 27.
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.8.547487, issued August 26.
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • 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.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

2020 Simulator User Group week #35 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Cascadia, June 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken during the Simulator User Group meeting of Tuesday, August 25th, 2020.

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for news and updates:

  • On Tuesday, August 25th, the majority of servers were updated to server maintenance update 547110, previously deployed to the RC channels comprising updates to assist with the cloud uplift.
  • On Wednesday, August 26th, there will an RC deployment with version number still TBA at the time of writing, so please check the deployment thread for update. This should  comprise, in the words of Rider Linden:
We hope will help with test pilots being cut in half by their helicopters and other such unpleasantness. There may still be a few issues with unexpected collisions on a region crossing. But we think we have most of the cases. That is going out to LeTigre at least, we may put it on other channels also.

SL Viewer

The have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as follows:

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.7.546539, dated August 11, promoted August 17, formerly the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • 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.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

In Brief

  • The improvements to region crossings have resulted in a race condition that mean the receiving region can start acting on a vehicle (running scripts, etc), before avatars are correctly re-seated. As noted, the RC deployment in the planning for Wednesday, August 26th, should help with addressing this.
  • Further thought is being put into how to improve region crossings further, but there will always be limits to what can be achieved due to the nature of the beast (handling data between two region simulators and the viewer), as Mazidox Linden pointed out:
Ultimately moving data blobs around takes time. Moving a lot of data blobs around to a lot of different places at once takes a lot of time and a lot of complexity. It’s never going to be totally seamless without I-Don’t-Want-To-Think-About levels of rearchitecting. And I’m sure even that would come with trade-offs.

Maxidox Linden, SUG Meeting, August 25th

  • HTTP-out restrictions remain in place on the Aditi regions running on AWS infrastructure. Work is progressing on code that will allow these restrictions to be lifted, although the implementation (when ready) will come in stages. One of these stages will be to make the new HTTP-out code available on regions still in the Lab’s co-lo (Aditi first, then Agni) to allow for more widespread testing.

2020 SL project updates week #34: TPVD summary + some uplift news

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Maps (and more!) of Second Life – June 2020

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, August 21st, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.

This was a very short meeting.

SL Viewer News

[0:22-2:30]

The Love Me Render RC updated to version 6.4.8.547427 on Friday, August 21st. This update to the viewer includes a number of EEP improvements and fixes (among a list of rendering fixes / improvements):

  • BUG-229107 [EEP] [Improvement] Ice level Slider Graduation.
  • SL-13539 [EEP] Large reflection on the water when facing certain angles.
  • BUG-228992 [EEP] Appearance lighting is broken when ALM is enabled.
  • BUG-228914 [EEP] Deferred Soften Shader fails to link when Atmospheric Shaders are disabled. This causes Debug viewer builds to crash.
  • BUG-228882 [EEP] Disabling glow rendering while ALM is off results in massive rendering flicker.
  • BUG-228781 [EEP] Specular color interpreted wrong (too bright) from point lights.
  • BUG-228581 [EEP] Specular map reflections are way too weak.
  • BUG-228840 [EEP] cloud texture is rendered backwards.
  • BUG-228431 [EEP] Water lighting is wrong at certain camera angles.
  • BUG-228752 [EEP] Sky turns black when render quality is lowered to Low-Mid.
  • BUG-225784 [EEP] BUG-225446 regression – HUDs are again affected by environment setting and BUG-225446 [FIXED] [EEP] HUDs are affected by Atmosphere & Lighting changes.

The rest of the official viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.7.546539, dated August 11, promoted August 17, formerly the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • 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.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • As noted in my CCUG summary,the Legacy Profiles viewer has been further prevented from making progress due to additional web-side changes that need to be made to enable privacy settings (who can see your feed posts) to work correctly.
  • An updated version of the Mesh Uploader RC viewer should be available in week #35.
  • [6:35-7:45] LL are running a test viewer internally with updates to address the FPS drop seen within EEP viewers on Windows when compared to non-EEP viewers (and for which one of the less-than-ideal workarounds people have been using is to disable Linden Water rendering via CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-7). While it may not completely resolve all FPS issues in EEP, it does offer noticeable improvements, and if all goes well, the updates will be merged into the current Love Me Render RC viewer.

Cloud Uplift

[2:37-3:03]

  • “Lots of progress going on” within Project Uplift (moving all SL services to AWS).
  • There will be “some posts to the LSL forum” in the near future specifically for scripters about things people should be testing. Details are scant at this point in time, but the changes are described as “not particularly scary”.