Category: SL User Group Meetings

2020 Simulator User Group week #9 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Lost Lagoon, January 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken at the Simulator User Group meeting held on Tuesday, February 25th.

Simulator Deployments

As always, please refer to the week’s deployment thread for updates.

  • The SLS (main) channel servers were updated with simulator update 2020-02-14T20:17:32.536748. It’s not clear on what this update contains, as the release notes generation process is currently broken.
  • A “large load” of RC simulators are planned to be updated on Wednesday, February 26th. However, at the time of writing, the status of the release was in the air due to some last minuted investigations to determine if the updates are fit for purpose.

SL Viewer

At the time of writing, the official viewer pipelines remain unchanged from the end of week #8:

  • Current Release version 6.3.7.535996, formerly the Yorsh Maintenance RC, dated February 7, promoted February 20 – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.536347, February 11.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.7.536179, February 10.
    • Camera Presets RC viewer, version 6.3.6.535138, January 24.
  • Project viewers:
    • 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.

Sansar and Second Life

While Sansar and SL are very different platforms based on different technology and capabilities, it has often been asked if / whether capabilities found in Sansar might be ported / developed for Second Life.

As a result of the recent decisions at the Lab to cease development work on Sansar, lay off staff and considered options (see: Sansar: lay-offs, rumours, and confusion and Lab seeking a “plan B” to secure Sansar’s future), these questions have been raised again, including at the Simulator User Group meeting, where Simon Linden responded:

We are going to take a look at Sansar tech and see what might be brought into SL but that’s a long-term project … nothing at all has been decided.

Whether this means the upcoming long-term graphics / rendering project mentioned in the February 21st Lab Gab session with Ebbe and Grumpity Linden (see Lab Gab: Second Life in 2020 with Ebbe and Grumpity (and Keira!) ) might look towards poking at the Sansar render engine for ideas or not remains to be seen. However, a recurring request that has cropped up vis. Sansar capabilities and SL has been the potential for a similar level of Marvelous Designer™ cloth simulation to be added to SL – although it’s unlikely this could be done without some headaches.

However, as Simon notes, any project related to what might be adopted from Sansar for Second Life is a long term thing, and LL has enough on its plate vis cloud uplift, etc.

2020 TPVD meetings week #8 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Valium Creek, January 2020 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on February 21st, 2020. No video this time around, as Pantera was unable to attend, so the notes are taken from my audio recording of the meeting.

SL Viewer News

  • The Yorsh Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.7.535996 and dated February 7th, was updated to de facto release status on Thursday, February 20th.

The remainder of the current SL viewer pipelines are 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):
    • EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.536347, February 11.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.7.536179, February 10.
    • Camera Presets RC viewer, version 6.3.6.535138, January 24.
  • Project viewers:
    • 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 next potential view promotion to release status is seen as being EEP, with Vir indicating that LL do not plan to promote any other viewer prior to EEP, unless there is a significant blocker.
  • After EEP, the next likely candidate for promotion is currently the Lover Me Render viewer.
  • The new Premium Plus subscription viewer-side code updates will soon be appearing in an RC. This is a set of log-in code changes required for easier management of values, etc., set for different Premium levels. At this point, the code will not interfere with anything.
  • The Camera Presets RC viewer is having some additional UI work done as a result of it experiencing a higher than average crash rate.

EEP Status and Deployment

As per Ebbe Altberg’s comments during the Lab Gab session of February 21st (see: for the video and a bullet-point summary), and the notes above, EEP will be moving to official release status very soon. With it comes notice from the Lab – with apologies –  that:

  • It is no longer a goal with EEP to make all environments across Second Life appear *exactly* as they do under Windlight.
  • Because of this, some content may look different under EEP lighting than it does under Windlight.
  • This means some region designers and some content creators may have to make adjustments to their region environments  / their content for optimal viewing with EEP.
  • There will be some known issues with EEP when it is released, but the belief is that these will be minor.
  • There will be fixes for rendering issues following EEP, mostly likely through the Love Me Render project.
  • If there are what LL consider to be “significant” breakages, then effort will be made to address these.

Ebbe’s comment on EEP can by heard between 44:10 and 46:45 in the official video of the Lab Gab session.

In Brief

  • BUG-228227: “Avatar face darkens when sitting on an object” – this is a lighting-related issue that appears to have been introduced with viewer release 6.3.6.535003 (formerly the Xanté RC viewer). It is a known issue and a fix should be appearing in the next maintenance viewer which should hopefully resolve the majority of these issues.
  • BUG-227179 – “All offline inventory offers from scripted objects are STILL lost” – remains an issue, but an internal request has been made to raise the priority so that investigation and resolution might move forward sooner rather than later.
  • It is hoped that the viewer caching work will reach project viewer status fairly soon.
  • There is a known issue of the viewer release pages and index not updating correctly to reflect the current status of viewers (e.g. at the time of writing, 6.3.6.535003 is still listed as the default release viewer, when in fact it is 6.3.7.535996).

2020 Content Creation User Group week #8 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Catena et Cavea, January 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, February 20th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Resources

Current Status

  • Work is continuing to clear the remaining rendering bugs, which are being described as “resilient”.
  • The hope is EEP could be ready to move forward by the end of the month.
  • There is a backlog of potential fixes / enhancements for EEP (e.g. further rendering improvements, improving the brightness of stars, etc). Some of these will form future EEP enhancements, others may be dealt with as part of other work such as on-going rendering system improvements, rather than being held for a future EEP-specifc project”.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. 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:

  • Immediate 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. This work can essentially be broken down as:
    • Collect data.
    • Update ARC function.
    • Design and provide tool within the viewer UI (i.e. not a pop-up) that presents ARC information in a usable manner and lets users make decisions about rendering / performance.
  • 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

  • Vir is still working on the Bake Service issue I’ve noted in my last two CCUG updates. However, he believes he now has a fix, and this is currently going through internal testing.
  • One thing that ARCTan testing has shown is the degree of variability in frame rates in terms of how long each frame takes to process. Part of this might be due to multiple operations running in the same thread when they should perhaps be separated into their own threads, particularly in terms of avatar loading.

Project Muscadine

Project Summary

  • Currently: offering the means to change an Animesh size parameters via LSL.

Current Status

  • Still on hold, but the Aditi simhost that did have the back-end code has also been re-purposed for other project work, so the back-end support for Muscadine is currently unavailable.

In Brief

  • Viewer caching project: this has been a long-term project, which has recently re-started (and which is usually a subject for discussion at the TPVD meetings).
    • There is code related to the VFS caching (referenced in the message seen at viewer-start up) the in in-memory processes that sit on top of it that has not been updated in a long while and which can give rise to stability issues.
    • The Lab now plans to work on this code “extensively” over the next few months.
  • There are claims that use of Animesh impacts simulator performance. As Animesh is predominantly a viewer-side capability, it is hard to see how it could impact simulator performance; it is possible that those experiencing issues could be conflating viewer and simulator performance.
  • Poser project: a contribution from the Black Dragon viewer, this is a project that is currently on hold.
    • The idea is to allow local (i.e. viewer side) joint-by-joint poses by entering different values for each of the required positions and rotations for a joint.
    • The fact that the tool is viewer-side with the results unseen by other users has been seen by the Lab as the project’s core limitation.
    • The Lab’s view is that the easiest way to share the results would be to place them in a single frame animation that puts the avatar into the required pose and which can be seen by other viewers, and this would like be the approach taken when / if the project is resumed.
    • This work has nothing to do with the pupeeteering project from 2011.
  • A further project awaiting resumption is the move to HTTP 2, which will hopefully improve things like asset data fetching, offer improved stability in data handling and improve scene loading.
  • Tidbit: the mesh uploader for Second Life apparently took around 10 people over 2 years to develop / get to work (and still has a UI element that might be incomprehensible to some). As such there is some concern at the Lab that attempt to extend SL to support other modelling formats (e.g. FBX) could result in something equally / more confusing – although this is not to suggest LL is resolutely against supporting other file formats for use with SL.

2020 Simulator User Group week #8 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Mimmo, December 2019 – click any image for full size

The following notes were taken at the Simulator User Group meeting held on Tuesday, February 18th.

Simulator Deployments

As always, please refer to the week’s deployment thread for updates.

  • The SLS (main) channel servers were updated with simulator update 2020-02-05T22:16:31.536040, providing support for the upcoming Name Changes feature.
  • At the time of writing, the deployment thread indicates there is no RC deployment scheduled for Wednesday, February 19th, however according to Simon Linden speaking at the SUG meeting, there will be an RC update. so again, check the deployment thread for updates.

SL Viewer

At the time of writing, the official viewer pipelines remain unchanged from the end of week #7:

  • Current Release version 6.3.6.535003, formerly the Xanté Maintenance RC, dated January 22, promoted January 27 – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.536347, February 11.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.7.536179, February 10.
    • Yorsh Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.7.535996, February 7.
    • Camera Presets RC viewer, version 6.3.6.535138, January 24.
  • Project viewers:
    • 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.

Brief Notes

  • Script running: concerns continue to be expressed over recent changes to script behaviour designed to improve script performance within a region may be affecting the ability of scripts to run in a timely fashion when their object is rezzed. Up to a 2-second delay has been observed, although this is by no means constant for any given object. This is a known issue with the Lab, who are continuing to work to improve the situation.

2020 Simulator User Group week #7 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
La Clef des Champs, December 2019 – blog post

The following notes were taken at the Simulator User Group meeting held on Tuesday, February 11th.

Simulator Deployments

As always, please refer to the week’s deployment thread for updates.

SL Viewer

On Monday, February 10th, the Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version, 6.3.7.536179.

At the time of writing, all remaining viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.6.535003, formerly the Xanté Maintenance RC, dated January 22nd, promoted January 27th – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Yorsh Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.7.535996, February 7th.
    • EP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.535668, February 4th.
    • Camera Presets RC viewer, version 6.3.6.535138, January 24th.
  • Project viewers:
    • 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.

Brief Notes

  • Work is continuing to try to clear the last blockers staying in the way on the Name Changes deployment.
  • BUG-228162 “Issue with experience_permissions_denied() and XP_ERROR_NOT_PERMITTED triggered when experience permissions are granted by more than one person” – appears to report an issue in granting permissions if dialogue requests are simultaneously open.

2020 TPVD meetings week #6 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Greenhouse, December 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on February 7th, 2020. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:

  • Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point.
  • Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.

This was a relatively short meeting, information-wise, with much of the actual meeting time given over to general text chat.

SL Viewer News

[0:27-2:21]

  • The Yorsh Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.7.535996 on February 7th.
  • The Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.6.535087 on February 6th.

The remainder of the current SL viewer pipelines are as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.6.535003, formerly the Xanté Maintenance RC, dated January 22nd, promoted January 27th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • 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.

General Viewer Notes

  • The three potential candidates for the next release promotion are quoted as being the Yorsh Maintenance RC, the Love Me Render RC and (even though it is still a project viewer at the moment) the Legacy Profiles viewer.
  • The Camera Presets RC viewer is experiencing a higher than average crash rate, with investigations on why still ongoing.
  • [19:47-20:30] As noted in my week #6 CCUG summary, EEP is now in burn-down mode – which means more bugs are being fixed than are being reported. It is anticipated that the formal deployment is now weeks, rather than months, away.
  • [28:06-28:41] The cache replacement viewer project is once more making progress, but there is no date as to when a public version of the viewer is likely to surface.

In Brief

  • [2:46-11:30] The new Premium Plus subscription level requires viewer-side changes. These predominantly relate to logging-in, where a user’s account level (Basic, Premium and – in the future – Premium Plus) is obtained from the back-end via a received block of LLSD code containing benefits tags and values.
    • This code is now in a public repository, and will be seeing some changes to various values specified within it prior to Premium Plus being launched.
    • The server-side code supporting the new LLSD code block will be made available on some Aditi servers soon, so TPVs can ensure the code doesn’t interfere with their ability to connect to the SL servers with their current viewer versions, and to start testing the viewer-side code in non-public versions of their viewers in preparation for the launch of Premium Plus.
    • At some point the server-side code will be deployed to the main grid, where it should not impact current viewer versions.
    • As side notes to this:
      • Once Premium Plus has been launched, the new code will refuse to connect if the required data is missing, but the system will let a viewer that ignores it to connect.
      • However, under the current roadmap, Premium Plus will not be going live until some time after Name Changes has been released (as per statements made at the monthly Web User Group meetings).
  • [14:42-14:50] Work on migrating viewer repos from Mercurial to Github is progressing.
  • [21:38-26:08] The SL system requirements page no longer references Windows 7 as this is no longer a supported operating system version. However, a broader update to the requirements page is being considered, as the current information is considered “woefully to aged.”
    • As part of this discussion, it was reiterated that when EEP does go live, it removes the option for turning off basic shaders, which will prevent systems than cannot support basic shader operates from accessing Second Life. The fixed function OpenGL code that supports the disabling will then be removed as a part of a future viewer code clean-up pass.
  • [15:19-17:20 (incl. text chat)] Both Singularity and Alchemy have been working towards making formal releases Soon™. Singularity has an up-to-date beta available to users, and Alchemy is close to making an updated beta available as well.