Category: SL User Group Meetings

2020 SL project updates week #32: TPVD summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Jambo! A Voyage to Africa, May 2020 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, August 7th, 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.

SL Viewer News

[0:08-5:00]

The Tools Update 2 viewer updated to version 6.4.6.545962 on August 4th.

The rest of the official viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.4.543157, dated June 11th, promoted June 23rd, formerly the CEF RC viewer – ROLL BACK.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • 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

  • A further version of the Tools Update 2 viewer is anticipated for week #33 (commencing Monday, August 10th). This may appear as the de facto release viewer version.
  • Currently, the next viewer in line for promotion after the Tools Update 2 viewer is likely to be the current Arrack Maintenance viewer.
    • A further RC update to Arrack may be issued early in week #33; however, if the Tools Update 2 viewer is promoted to release status, this viewer may be held over pending a merge with the Tools Update 2 viewer code base.
  • Love Me Render (LMR) continue to be held as the graphics team work on various rendering issues.
    • There are apparently around 4 remaining open issues, with two more currently being worked on.
    • Of the open issues, all are performance related. Some of these may need further triage.
    • The issue of Linden Water continuing to give particularly degraded performance on EEP viewer is still being investigated by both LL and TPVs developers, but no potential fix identified as yet. There appears to be some combination of factors causing this (e.g. vertex buffer object (VBO) memory thrashing potentially being one).

In Brief

  • [10:50-13:46] During a text-based call for volumetric clouds from a developer, Ptolemy Linden pointed out an early feature for EEP was to have been atmospheric scattering that got dropped at the time and some of this work might potentially be “simpler” to implement than volumetric clouds – not that his comment means either will be forthcoming.
    • Crepuscular rays (“god rays”) were one aspect of this work, but had to be dropped as they  proved too performance intensive at the time. Two common means for generating “god rays” are via adding geometry to a scene, another is via ray casting and shadow map sampling – both of these can be computationally intensive.
  • The latter half of the meeting is dominated by a user-led discussion on relative performance, what constitutes as a viable demonstration of average performance (e.g. a lone avatar frolicking in a region with all the viewer’s upper-end graphics capabilities enabled, vs trying to do the same with even a moderate number of avatars also in the region, etc). As this was conducted in chat, you can catch it in the video, below.

 

August 2020 Web User Group: updates & upcoming attractions

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, August 5th, 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. However, other work is continuing as an when possible, and in the last month this has meant:

  • The new Second Life logo (see: Out with the green, in with the blue) continues to be rolled out across the various services – in this case, notably the Cashier pages – as the team get to them. This is a relatively low priority item so it will still be a while before the logo is consistent across all properties.
  • UTF-8 will now be accepted in response to security questions.
  • Additional back-end work on Name Changes was implemented, mainly tools used by the Lab but also some changes that may allow for some possible future features related to the capability.
  • The secondlife.com log-in page images received a refresh.
  • Fixes:
    • Marketplace: received a fix for images not showing correctly.
    • Events: fixes for images not showing with posted events; for multiple pages of hosted events not working and for the language picker drop-down not working on exiting events pages.
    • Place Pages received a number of fixes.
    • Land Auctions received a fix for beta lifetime users being unable to bid on auctions.
    • A back-end issue with Premium acquisition was fixed.
    • Viewer download page: now includes a link for Mac OS X Catalina (and later) users experiencing problems installing the Mac flavour of the viewer, and that takes them to the Troubleshooting Second Life Installation on Mac OS X page.
Viewer installation help for Mac OS X Catalina (or later) on the viewer download page

Mobile Client

  • The iOS version has been in a closed alpha for 2+ months. These is now a build destined to go to Apple’s App Store.
  • Work continues on the Android version, but is currently some way behind the iOS work.
  • See for more.

Post-Uplift Work

Note: the following is a general list of work LL are looking at, post-Uplift to the cloud, however, it is still subject to change, and none of it should be taken as a firm commitment for carrying out the work or any indication of the order in which it might be carried out:

  • Marketplace: variances for listings (e.g. one listing for an item offering it in different colours).
  • Events: bug fixes, category  and search refinements.
  • Names Changes: further tweaks.
  • Web properties in general: better optimisation for display on mobile properties.
  • Further work still to be added to the list.

Marketing Brief

  • Following the presence of Gen Con in Second Life (see: Coming to Second Life: Gen Con “the best four days in gaming”, Gen Con: sneaking a peek in Second Life and Gen Con in Second Life: let the games begin!), LL have had a debriefing with the VRazeTheBar team, and the hope is it will pave the way for further displaced conferences to be held within Second Life.
  • There are potential opportunities in the offing for a further media presence for Second Life which may be akin to the CSI:NY episode Down the Rabbit Hole (2007), or SL’s appearance in the US version of The Office. Details still TBA.
  • There is also an upcoming partnership with the Peale Museum in Baltimore, so the latter can bring their exhibits and events in-world with a reproduction of the museum building (itself a National Historic Landmark in the United States) and special virtual open house as part as the museum’s August 15rh Founder’s Day event.
  • These styles of events are seen as a way to broaden awareness of Scone Life and its potential.

Premium Plus

  • Still on hold.
  • May be revisited at some point.
  • May also be revised before being released.

Next Meeting

Wednesday, September 2nd, 14:00 SLT.

2020 Simulator User Group week #32 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey

**[Dream]** Village, June 2020 – blog post
The following notes were taken during the Simulator User Group meeting of Tuesday, July 28th, 2020.

Simulator Deployments

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

  • There was no deployment to the core SLS channel regions on Tuesday, August 4th, leaving the majority of the grid running on server maintenance update 544832, designed to resolve issues with some internal service updates, chat range improvements and capability improvements.
  • There should be two RC deployments on Wednesday, August 5th:
    • 545722 comprising internal changes.
    • 545966 updates to assist with the cloud uplift work.

SL Viewer

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

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.4.543157, dated June 11th, promoted June 23rd, formerly the CEF RC viewer – ROLL BACK.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • 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.

Region Crossings

As noted in my previous SUG meeting update, Simon Linden has created a fun challenge people can take to test region crossings on Aditi, where the Blake Sea regions have been cloned and are running on AWS services.

However, ahead of the challenge being issued, changes were made in how region crossings are handled by the simulators, and these have seen significant improvements in crossing performance (with the exception of corner-to-corner crossings). As a result, the same updates are to be deployed to an RC channel in week #33 (the week commencing Monday, August 10th, 2020).

A video documenting region crossings using the updated code  / handing on Aditi has been published on You Tube by the MIRAI group.

Note: If you still want to try Simon Linden’s Aditi region crossing challenge, go to secondlife://Aditi/secondlife/Morris/200/207/34 on the BETA (Aditi) grid and click on the red egg-shaped thing. It will give you the “Blake Sea Challenge” object which should be worn so it can give you instructions for sailing / flying / motor-boating around the 46 regions. See if you can make it without doubling back!

2020 Simulator User Group week #31 summary & the Blake Sea Cloud challenge

Posted on by Inara Pey
Auld Lang Syne, June 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken during the Simulator User Group meeting of Tuesday, July 28th, 2020.

Simulator Deployments

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

  • There was no deployment to the core SLS channel regions on Tuesday, July 28th, leaving the majority of the grid running on server maintenance update 544832, designed to resolve issues with some internal service updates, chat range improvements and capability improvements.
  • On Wednesday, July 29th, there should be a deployment to two of the RC channels (LeTigre and BlueSteel), primarily related to internal changes related to the cloud uplift.

SL Viewer

  • After being rolled back to RC status, the Tools Update viewer version 6.4.5.544639 was removed from the available viewer list on Monday, July 27th.
  • The Mesh uploader was promoted to RC status with the release of version 6.4.5.544027 on Monday, July 27th.

The remaining official viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.4.543157, dated June 11th, promoted June 23rd, formerly the CEF RC viewer – ROLL BACK.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Arrack Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544465, July 6th.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544028, June 30th.
  • Project viewers:
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30th.
    • 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.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

Blake Sea Cloud Challenge (Aditi)

As I was the first to report on July 21st, the Blake Sea regions have been cloned to the Aditi, the beta grid, and are running on AWS servers in the cloud (see: Blake Sea in the cloud on ADITI). At that time, region crossings for the regions were  – to say the least – unstable.

Since then, those regions (some 46 in total) have been further updated (Monday, July 27th), and to help with gathering data on cloud-based region crossings, Simon Linden has defined the Blake Sea Challenge:

We just did some updates this morning (Monday July 27th) that fixes a bunch of the region connectivity issues.    I just did a tour and didn’t hit any invisible walls.
Along those lines, I made a quick “Blake Sea Challenge”   Go to secondlife://Aditi/secondlife/Morris/200/207/34  on the BETA aditi grid, and click on the red egg-shaped thing to try it out.   It will give you the “Blake Sea Challenge”  … wear it and touch, and it’ll get you going.   Follow the instructions to sail / fly / motor around 46 regions without doubling back and see if you make it.   Have fun and keep letting us know how it goes!

– Simon Linden, Simulator User Group

Blake Sea is now on Aditi and running in the cloud for those wishing to test vehicle region crossings. If interested, try taking Simon’s challenge (above)

In Brief

  • There are renewed reports of delays to scripted object rezzing across many regions. see: BUG-228939 “on_rez action delayed for 2 to 3 seconds in many regions”.

2020 SL project updates week #30: TPVD summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Paris for Ara, June 2020 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, July 24th, 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.

SL Viewer News

[0:00-3:47]

The promotion of the Tools Update RC viewer to de facto release status didn’t go as intended, resulting in the promotion being rolled back to viewer version 6.4.4.543157, dated June 11th, promoted June 23rd, formerly the CEF RC viewer. In addition, a further version of the Tools Update viewer was issued in RC form.

The roll-back was due to the Tools Update viewer causing incoming new users to crash on arrival at the welcome islands. Presumably, the arrival of a second Tools Update RC viewer is to allow comparative testing between the two versions in an attempt to understand what is happening, the Tools Update 2 viewer having some form of internal differences to the Tool Update viewer.

There are reports that the Tools Update viewer also has a deadlock issue associated with it – see BUG-229110.

In the interim, the recommendation is for TPVs not to release version based on or incorporating the Tools Update viewer code.

Therefore, this leaves the current viewer pipelines as follows:

  • Current Release viewer version  6.4.3.543157, dated June 11th, promoted June 23rd, formerly the CEF RC viewer – ROLL BACK
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Tools Update 2 RC viewer, version 6.4.6.545538, July 24.
    • Tools Update RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544639, July 17 – ROLL BACK TO RC STATUS.
    • Arrack Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544465, July 6.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544028, June 30.
  • Project viewers:
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
    • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.4.543141, June 11.
    • 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

  • The “big push” is now on getting the Love Me Render (LMR) viewer promoted to release status. There are currently just “a few” open issues with the viewer, and the hope is these can be closed and the viewer cleared by QA for promotion “soon”. This is the viewer that includes several EEP-released fixes for things like HUD issues, specularity, etc.
  • The Legacy Profiles viewer has had some back-end web integration issues that have prevented it from progressing to RC status as had been hoped at the last meeting.
  • A further Maintenance RC viewer is close to being ready for issuing.

In Brief

  • [9:36-19:33] EEP issues:
    • People continue to report noticeable performance degradations with running EEP enabled viewers. The current work-round is for users to disable Linden Water rendering (CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-7), which appears to work even when Linden Water is totally occluded.
    • This is a recognised problem, and is being actively investigated. However, there may not be a single fix that resolves all performance issues, so this work may not delay the promotion of the LMR viewer, bu could end up being addressed as one or more “future fixes”.
    • There are also reports of increased sudden viewer freezes / stalls within EEP enabled viewers. Again, LL is aware of such reports and is investigating them.
    • In addition, there continue to be major questions as to the real value of EEP when compared to issues such as the overall impact on people having to remodel custom environments, ease-of-use within the tools, performance hits, etc.
    • Firestorm’s preview release of EEP has already resulted in considerable negative feedback even amongst a limited subset of users; there are concerns that when released, it could result an large-scale user backlash.
  • [20:54-24:18] Increasing the official viewer’s texture memory allowance: currently, the official viewer is pegged at using 512Mb of memory for texture handling, which can result in performance hits due to texture switching issues.  This is on a list of changes LL “would like to get to” – although Kitty Barnett has offered LL a code patch (already used by some TPVs, and baed on Runitai Linden’s own code) to help.
  • Reminders:
    • The fix for off-line inventory offers failing is now grid-wide. This is still awaiting an update in the official viewers, but TPVs capable of using the capability can now “go ahead and use it.”
    • Those wishing to test how regions running on AWS servers can do so on Aditi, the beta grid, as follows:
      • Regions Morris and Ahern (and possibly now Dore and Bonifacio, although this hasn’t been clarified).
      • The majority of the Blake Sea regions – see: Blake Sea in the cloud on ADITI.

 

2020 Simulator User Group week #30 summary

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

The following notes were taken during the Simulator User Group meeting of Tuesday, July 14th, 2020.

Simulator Deployments

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

  • On Tuesday, July 21st, the majority of the grid was updated with server maintenance update 544832, designed to resolve issues with some internal service updates, chat range improvements and capability improvements.
  • On Wednesday, July 22nd, the should be a single RC deployment comprising “a few internal changes (mostly logging)”. At the time of writing, the server deployment thread had yet to be updated with the release notes reference.

SL Viewer

The Tools Update viewer, version 6.4.5.544639, was promoted to de facto release status, Friday, July 17th. This viewer uses the new viewer build tool chain, but does not include any user-facing updates outside of bug fixes.

The remaining official viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • Arrack Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544465, July 6th.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544028, June 30th.
  • Project viewers:
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30th.
    • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.4.543141, June 11th.
    • 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.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

Further Regions in the Cloud

Following from the announcement concerning Ahern and Morris on Aditi, the beta grid, being in the cloud (see my previous Simulator User Group update),  most / all of Blake Sea has been cloned to Aditi and is now running in the cloud, specifically for the purposes of  region crossing tests with vehicles.

Again, just to emphasise, this is Aditi, the beta grid, only (at least one person has reported on region crossings on Agni (the main grid) in relation to this announcement). For more information, refer to my blog post Blake Sea in the cloud on ADITI.

Blake Sea is now on Aditi and running in the cloud for those wishing to test vehicle region crossings

What is Simulator “Sleep Time” and how are Scripts Processed?

The viewer provides a set of stats related to both itself and the simulator your user is on (CTRL-SHIFT-1). Most of the stats proved in this window are relatively self-explanatory, although some can cause confusion or can be misrepresented. One area of confusion  – what is simulator “sleep time”  – was raised in the forums recently, and Rider Linden took the time to explain it and a couple of other things in the stats panel. As his reply may help others, I’m including it in full here:

The short answer is that sleep time is the mean amount of time in ms per simulator frame that the simulator has spent idling over the last minute.
The long answer is that the simulators attempt to keep a constant number of processing frames (one cycle through the main loop) per second. This number is displayed in the statistics window as Sim FPS. This value is not the same as the Viewer’s FPS. When the Sim FPS starts to fall below 45 you will begin to see lag events like delayed movement and rubber banding, among other symptoms.
A single frame should take about 21ms. (21ms * 45) = ~1 second (less about 50ms overhead). If a single simulator frame takes less than that 21ms we need to add a few extra ms in order to maintain the constant rate. This extra time is reported as “Sleep Time” and tracks closely to “Spare Time”.
Every frame on the simulator is divided into a number of phases. The big ones are network message processing, advancing the state of the physics simulation, processing agents in the region and updating their interest lists, and executing scripts.
The amount of time allowed per frame to execute scripts is capped. The simulator will attempt to execute all the scripts in the region in that allotted time slice, if it can not make it all the way through the list it will stop and pick up where it left off on the next frame (this gives you the “Scripts Run %” statistic.) Since the time for script execution is capped you can see situations where the % of scripts executed per frame begins to fall even though there is idle time reported on the simulator.

– Rider Linden, July 23rd, 2020