Category: SL User Group Meetings

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”.

 

2020 Content Creation User Group week #34 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Cascadia, June 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, August 20th 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.

SL Viewer

Currently, the official viewers remain unchanged from the start of the week:

  • 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

  • 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.
  • The Mesh Uploader has been integrated with further changes, and is currently being merged up to the current viewer release code base, after which it will go to QA. Providing it passes, it could be appearing as updated RC viewer in week #35. This viewer provides:
    • Additional information on meshes at upload, a-la those added to Firestorm (see: Firestorm 6.0.2: Animesh release, February 2019)
    • UI improvements to give better information on avatar rigging & related error messaging.
    • Improved error messaging overall.
    • It will also include various fixes (such as BUG-229032 “[Mesh Uploader] Use Joint Positions Option causes ‘Collapsed Joints/Bones’ for some Files”) that are currently being worked on.

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.
  • Will include shape sliders for Animesh – although it should be remembered body shapes and sliders are intended for humanoid avatars, not animals, etc.

Using the JIRA

Complaints were raised about the need to raise Jira bug reports for issues that are “raised in chat”. Simply put:

  • Describing an issue (often loosely) in chat  – or Voice, which is often the medium for meetings – actually doesn’t mean the issue is captured and recorded. It also doesn’t necessarily mean the issue has been properly described, as those talking about it are not being encouraged to think about the issue in a structured manner or provide illustrations that can better help with understanding precisely where their problem lies.
  • The Jira system provides a means by which:
    • Information can be captured in a structured manner.
    • It can be illustrated.
    • It can be updated with further observations, feedback from others, etc.
    • It can be referenced, searched and cross-referenced, potentially helping other users understand a problem they are encountering and allowing the Lab to better understand the overall impact of an issue.
    • At the end of the day, issues reported by Jira stand a better chance of being fixed at some point that those just chatted about (which likely have a 0% chance).
  • Raising Jira reports – Bug or Feature Requests – isn’t actually hard. See:

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering either in the viewer. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

As of January 2020 ARCTan has effectively been split:

  • Viewer-side changes, primarily focused on revising the Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) calculations and providing additional viewer UI so that people can better visibility and control to seeing complexity.
  • Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.
  • The belief is that “good” avatar ARC values can likely be used as a computational base for these rendering calculations.

Current Status

  • It now appears that Vir’s work in updating Jelly Dolls will now appear in the ARCTan viewer, when that eventually emerges, but may also (and possibly sooner) appear in a Maintenance RC viewer.
  • Overall, ARCTan has been held-up awaiting a fix for an Bake Service issue. Vir believes he now has that fix, and is waiting for it to be deployed to one of the Lab’s internal text grids so he can check to see if it works. Assuming it does work, the fix will be queued for deployment to the main grid and allow performance data gathering to resume.
  • Discussions are to resume regarding better UI elements to support information on complexity, etc., that users can understand and use.

In Brief

  • Animesh:
    • minimum default 15 Land Impact: it is apparently putting some creators off of trying to make Animesh items (notably breedables). It’s been suggested lowering this to 10 LI might help generate greater interest in Animesh creation. Right now, LL haven’t done enough analysis to determine how the figure might conceivably be changed, rather than just making an arbitrary adjustment.
    • Bakes on Mesh support: this has been discussed on a number of occasions. There are no plans to provide support for Animesh to use Bakes on Mesh in the foreseeable future, as it requires Animesh to be overhauled to have full inventory support, together with outfit support, and would also require a significant update to the Bake Service to recognise and support Animesh characters.
  • Date of next meeting: probably Thursday, September 3rd, 2020.

2020 Simulator User Group week #34 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Conall-Vika, June 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken during the Simulator User Group meeting of Tuesday, August 18th, 2020.

Simulator Deployments

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

  • On Tuesday, August 18th, the majority of servers were updated to server maintenance update 546455, previously deployed to the RC channels comprising updates to assist with the cloud uplift.
  • On Wednesday, August 19th, there will an RC deployment comprising an updated version of server release 545166 with a new build ID which integrates all the changes made in the last month. Te release will have an updated build number, which was not available at the time of writing.

SL Viewer

The Arrack Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.7.546539 and dated August 11th, was promoted to de facto release status on Monday, August 17th.

The remainder of the current official viewers start the week unchanged:

  • 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

  • BUG-229219 “Group chat disabled after TP”  (the actual issue behind people not seeing group chat correctly as reported in my previous SUG summary): there have been several bug reports on this, and the Lab is investigating.
  • 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. Simon Linden is currently addressing this.
  • BUG-229207 “Stuck “Loading contents…” if object has more than 1 item in its content” is a bug that had been fixed 545166, but resurfaced following the deployment 456455 on August 18th. According to Rider Linden during the SUG meeting, it has now been “re-fixed” (or as he put it, referencing comments that the issue had been unfixed, it has be “un-unfixed”).

2020 Simulator User Group week #33 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
PhotoStudio Purple Cows, 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:

  • On Tuesday, August 11th, the majority of servers were updated to server maintenance update 545966, comprising updates to assist with the cloud uplift work and includes the updated region crossing code that came about as a result of testing carried out on Aditi in relation to running simulators via AWS services (see my previous SUG summary).
  • On Wednesday, August 12th, There should be at least one deployment, which should also include the adjustments made to the region crossing code, so these will be grid-wide.

SL Viewer

  • The Tools Update 2 viewer, version 6.4.6.545962, dated Monday, August 10th, was released and promoted at the de facto release viewer on Monday, August 10th.
  • The Arrack Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.7.546539 on Tuesday, August 11th.

All other official viewer remain unchanged at the start of the week:

  • 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

  • At least one large in-world group (60K+ members) is reporting group chat issues, vis: people engaged in group chat suddenly not seeing their own text when entered while other receive it; people typing into group chat and seeing their chat appear on entering, but some others saying they didn’t see it and others confirming they can see it, etc. This issue has thus far only bee reported via support ticket and a Jira has been requested.
  • There is a general request that those using the Blake Sea + Morris and Ahern regions on Aditi (all running via AWS) who notice unusual, reproducible issues, to please raise a Jira.

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.