Category: SL User Group Meetings

2021 SUG meeting week #10 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Mount Campion National Forest: Roscommon Ridge – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.

Server Deployments

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

  • Tuesday, March 9th saw the servers on the SLS Main channel updated to server release 556255, containing “some internal tweaks related to launching region”.
  • There are no planned RC channel deployments scheduled for Wednesday, March 10th.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to the current pipeline of official viewers at the start of the week, leaving them as follows:

  • Current release viewer: version 6.4.13.555567 (Jelly Doll improvements) originally promoted February 17th, and re-established as the default viewer following the rollback of the Simple Cache viewer.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.14.556098, March 4.
    • Maintenance RC viewer – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.14.556149, released March 4.
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.14.556118, February, 23, 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.

Region Crossings

A simulator version currently in QA at the Lab has some region crossing changes in it. It is hoped the updates will take some of the load off of agents trying to enter crowded regions. The engineering team also intend to look at the protocol for moving an agent from region to another; however, this is viewed as “a much larger project” that has yet to be started.

In Brief

  • Group chat is being tweaked. It is hoped that an update will be ready for deployment Soon™.
  • Map tiles continue to be worked on, but not fully fixed. However, some updates to the World Map are being seen.
  • HTTP 5xx errors: some with internal services reliant on external web pages for data have been seeing an uptick in 5xx HTTP errors (see BUG-229660 and BUG-230059 as examples). Some this may be more directly related to the external service hosting the web pages (Cloudflare), while some are apparently seeing 503 errors when regions are down (rather than 404s), but are seeing recoveries once the region is back.
  • BUG-229871 TP issues: some people are experiencing teleport issues whereby they cannot teleport back to any region they’ve previously successfully teleported to previously in the same session, but are disconnected. This is being investigated. It has been suggested by some users the issue might be related to a past similar issue that was the result of a local firewall or router setting issue.

2021 CCUG and TPV Developer meetings week #9

Posted on by Inara Pey
Wildwood Gardens, January 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, March 4th 2021 at 13:00 SLT, and Pantera’s video recording of the TPV Developer’s meeting of Friday, March 5th, a copy of which is embedded at the end of this article.

The majority of the TPVD meeting was given over to a discussion of the texture cache issue, together with a general discussion on the simplified cache structure and also on Jelly Doll avatars.

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

[From the CCUG meeting & TPVD Meeting]

Release Roll-Back & Issues

  • The Simple Cache viewer, version 6.4.14.556088, had to be rolled back following its March 2nd promotion due to a number of bugs (e.g. cache location not being adhered to – BUG-230337; uploads of textures above a certain size were failing – BUG-230295).
  • The roll-back saw the Jelly Doll improvements viewer, version 6.4.13.555567 (originally promoted on February 17th) revert to being the de facto release viewer.
  • However, the roll-back resulted in some users who had updated to the Simple Cache viewer users experiencing a corrupted texture cache when using an older version of the viewer.
  • Unfortunately, LL are having problems consistently reproducing the texture caching issues, so it is unclear how matters will be resolved.

This means that for the meantime:

  • Those experiencing texture issues on the official viewer as a result of having used the Simple Cache viewer and then rolling back to, or installing, another version should try clearing cache and re-starting the viewer.
  • Until the Lab have more of a handle on the texture cache issues:
    • Those RC viewers that had been internally merged with the Simple Cache viewer will also be rolled-back to an earlier version.
    • Internal viewer testing procedures will be reviewed.
    • TPVs that have also merged the Simple Cache code will also likely need to roll back their code.
  • One suggestion for resolving this issue is for the official viewer to increment the texture cache version number, forcing a complete wipe / reset of the cache
  • Independent of the texture caching issues, and due to BUG-230337 and BUG-230295, the Simple Cache viewer will go back to a development status so the issues can be fixed.
    • Firestorm apparently has fixes for these particular issues, and these may be contributed to LL.

General Viewer Notes

  • A new Maintenance RC viewer – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.14.556149, was released on March 4th.
  • The Custom Key Mappings viewer updated to version 6.4.14.556098, also on Thursday, March 4th.

The rest of the official viewers in the pipeline remains as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.14.556118, February, 23, 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.

There may be a viewer promotion during week #10 (commencing Monday, March 8th).  While no final decision has been made, it is possible the LMR 5 may be the viewer that gets promoted.

Viewer Rendering

[CCUG Meeting]

  • Euclid Linden continues to work on separating UI rendering from general scene rendering in order to improve overall viewer performance.
    • Currently the UI is completely redrawn every frame, along with the rest of the scene, whether or not it requires update.
    • This can take up to 40% of the rendering time, depending on the complexity of the scene being rendered, with around 10-20% being an average, so it is hoped the changes will particularly help those on less-capable systems.
    • There may be some subtle / slight reduction in UI responsiveness under certain circumstances, so a means to tweak the UI update rate may be provided via something like a Debug setting.
    • Note: this work is not physically altering the appearance of the UI, only the frequency with which it is drawn.
  • Ptolemy Linden continues to work on more general rendering performance improvements and rendering bug fixes.

In Brief

  • [CCUG] Map tiles are still being worked on. In the future the lab may look to implement a new means of generating the Map tiles in a more robust way.
    • The Lab has an internal proposal for updating terrain textures, but it has yet to be formally adopted.
  • [CCUG] Allow upload of ground  constrained animations – on the LL’s list,  but has not been looked at as yet.  Vir believes that as the capability is already supported (but undocumented) is should only require an alteration to the simulator animation code to ensure the constraints are correctly understood.
  • [TPVD] Firestorm has entered QA, with a release planned for mid-March.

Date of Next Meetings

  • CCUG: Thursday, March 18th, 2021.
  • TPV Developer: Friday, March 19th, 2021.

March 2021 SL Web User Group summary

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, March 3rd, 2021. These meetings are generally held on the first Wednesday of the month, with dates and venue details available via the SL public calendar.

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

  • General post-Uplift work is continuing, much of it internal to the Lab. This means that it is likely to still be a while before new features and capabilities (including the Marketplace) start to be worked on again, although issues will continue to be addressed.
  • Name Changes: the next refresh of Last Name options will likely be in June 2021, around the time of the Second Life birthday. This should also see the list of last names put into alphabetical order.
  • As noted in my UG meeting summaries in week 8, the Land Store was re-enabled after encountering post-AWS transition issues. Further problems were encountered over the last weekend of February 2021, but is believed these have now been fully resolved.
  • A new link has been added to the secondlife.com home age + related pages. T-shirts and Gifts will take people directly to the Lab’s physical world merchandise store hosted by Red Bubble.
The new link to the SL / LL merchandise on Red Bubble can be found in the footer of secondlife.com and associated pages.
  • There have been non-user visible updates to the back-end of the communities services pages, and the World API has been updated to correct an issue with information being fed to the viewer splash screen.

Marketplace

  • A lot of work has been put into the Marketplace back-end systems.
  • This work includes:
    • Correcting the delivery delay issues that were being encountered.
    • Fixing a 404 error appearing on some pages.
    • Fixing a error with store managers being unable to open the correct management page.
    • Correcting the need for Support to clear Unavailable Item errors.
    • Updates to the French language pages.
    • Fixing an issue with new users being unable to log-in to the MP.
  • MP updates used to be published to the forums, but it has been suggested making them available more as release notes might be beneficial. This will be looked into.
  • BUG-230262 “Marketplace Website Bug/Error” causes people to be randomly logged-out of various web properties (notably the Marketplace). It is not clear if this is related to single sign-on confusion or a problem that is more generic or browser-specific.
  • It has been suggested that reviews on MP purchases be subject to a timed delay (e.g. you cannot leave a review for, say 24 or 48 hours following an MP purchase), to allow the purchaser time to contact the creator in the event of problems / confusion, etc., and act as a deterrent against bad reviews airing from simply misunderstandings, etc. The Lab have requested this be made as a formal feature request so that it can be properly reviewed / considered.

Single Sign-On

  • Single sign-on is now in place across many of the Lab’s web properties.
  • This means users with multiple accounts cannot have different accounts signed-on to these pages at the same time.
  • See Single Sign On, Coming Soon for more.
  • This should not be confused with Two-Factor Authentication (2 FA), which is still in development / discussion and no deployment date is currently available.

Premium Plus

  • Roll-out of Premium Plus was delayed in 2020 for a number of reasons, including the AWS migration work and the impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
  • The feature is currently being re-evaluated, including whether it should be rolled-out as originally planned.
  • In addition, further work may be required as a result of the migration work.
  • In short:
    • Work on the feature will be resumed in due course.
    • There is no identified date for when this might be, or when roll-out may commence.

Mobile Client

  • iOS Version:
    • Issues resulting from the last round of Apple Store testing (apparently related to how chat / communications are handled) have been addressed.
    • These fixes are currently subject to internal testing at the Lab. Providing this is successful, the app will be passed back to Apple for further testing at their end.
    • It is hoped the latter will occur towards the end of March 2021.
  • Android:
    • Development is still behind that of iOS.
    • However, the Lab now has devices to allow internal testing of the Android flavour of the app, although it will still be a while before anything becomes visible for users to test.

In Brief

  • User-created grid-wide experiences are still on the cards, but again, the capability is not being worked on at present, and there is no available time frame on when work will resume nor any indication of potential deployment.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, April 7th, 14:00 SLT.

2021 SUG meeting week #9 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ambient Hideaway, January 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.

Server Deployments

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

  • Tuesday, March 2nd saw a rolling restart of servers on the SLS Main channel as a refresh, but no deployment.
  • Wednesday, March 3rd should, if the notes are comments have been understood, see the following:
    • Server update 2021-02-17.556138 will be deployed to the Oranges RC channel (formerly part of the BlueSteel channel said).
    • “A couple more region tests” (per Rider Linden) planned for LeTigra and Magnum.
  • In addition, a fourth mini-RC channel, called Ferrari has been set-up.

Restarts are described as still having the kinks worked out within the new environment.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday, March 2nd, the Simple Cache project viewer, version 6.4.14.556088, dated February 22nd 2021, was promoted to de facto release viewer. Release viewer rolled back to version 6.4.13.555567 (Jelly Doll improvements) originally promoted February 17th.

The rest of the current pipelines remain as:

  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.14.556118, February, 23, 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.

In Brief

  • “Good progress” continues to be made on fixing the Map tile update issue, including the map stitching when zooming out (which was seen as the last problem to be resolved), but there is still no date as to when a fix may be deployed.
  • An extensive discussion took place regarding a delay in scripts starting in rezzed objects which can be variable for reasons unknown – other than the fact the delay seems to be minimal when a region has been recently restarted, but grows in time to 2-3 seconds the longer the region is up. However, the delay does not appear to relate to the usage of the region or its complexity (scripted objects within it).
    • Some appear to believe the delay is related to changes made in 2019 to try to improve script performance in general (and thus can be “easily fixed”).
    • Others have suggested the issue could be the result of some for of throttle being triggered.
    • The problem is having something of a “knock-on” effect in that some users have taken to pre-rezzing items and having them in an alpha / transparent mode around their avatar until needed – which is impacting region performance further.

2021 SUG meeting week #8 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
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.

2021 TPVD meetings week #7: summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Eulennest, January 2021 – blog post

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.

End of an Era

[0.00-1:06]

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.

SL Viewer News

[1:21-2:52]

  • Current release viewer: Project Jelly viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.13.555567 and dated February 5, 2021, promoted February 17.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • 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.

In  Brief

  • [12:36-14:09] Viewer rendering:
    • 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.