Category: Simulator User Group

SL projects update 27/1: server updates, HTTP, group chat hardware updates

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments – Week 27

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread in the technology forum for any latest news, updates, issues on this week’s deployments.

As many noted on Tuesday July 1st, there was no Main (SLS) deployment, although there was a period of grid-wide maintenance.

There will be no deployments on the BlueSteel and LeTigre RC channels on Wednesday July 2nd. As such, these channels remain with the following simulator releases:

  • Main channel: inventory updates (AIS v3) – 14#14.06.13.29103 (release notes)
  • Bluesteel and LeTigre: LSL support for materials (normal and specular maps, and diffuse texture alpha mode) – 14/#14.06.20.291351 (release notes  – Bluesteel; LeTigre is the same).

On Wednesday July 2nd, the Magnum RC should receive updates to the Experience Tools project, intended to provide, “user facing fixes to address both UI and long-standing HUD updates included in this build.” – release notes.

SL Viewer

There will probably not be any viewer promotion from RC to de facto release this week. The sole RC in the snowstorm RC, version 3.7.11.291465 has yet to generate meaningful stats. Current SL viewers are as listed on the Alternate Viewers wiki page and on my Current Viewer Releases page.

HTTP Pipelining Viewer

Monty Linden has been continuing to work on the HTTP side of things, directing his efforts towards HTTP pipelining, which should yield further benefits in rendering texture and mesh, and in generally efficiency of HTTP connectivity between the viewer and the SL servers. As a part of this, and while it is not formally publicly available as yet, he has produced a viewer using HTTP pipelining.

This has been undergoing testing among a group of SL users, and is showing considerable promise in terms of texture rendering improvements, and a similar level of improvement is anticipated with Mesh.

Whirly Fizzle has produced a video comparing texture rendering between the HTTP pipelining viewer and the current release viewer, with the tests carried out under identical conditions.

Experience Tools

The new Experience Tools project will be officially announced on Wednesday July 2nd, with a blog post, video and the release of a project viewer.

Group Chat

Oz Linden: SL's Technical Director talks about coming updates to Group Chat
Oz Linden: SL’s Technical Director: work is continuing on group chat issues, including hardware upgrades for the service

“We have been looking much more deeply into why the problems which exist than we ever have before,” Technical Director for Second Life, Oz Linden stated at the Firestorm The Future of Second Life meeting on Wednesday July 2nd, in reference to group chat issues. “We’ve added a lot of instrumentation to the way it’s implemented, and we have learnt a lot from that.”

He went on to cover the fact that the Lab has begun to make changes as a result of this data-gathering which are starting to have an impact, although he emphasised that while this work is going to continue in the coming months, there is unlikely to be a single update which will be “the” dramatic change which instantly “solves” group chat lag. Things are liable to be a lot more in the way of incremental improvements (no doubt due in part to the sheer complexity of the chat service).  given this, he also suggested that there may be some fundamental work required in the future which could affect the viewer side of things as well.

He went on to say, “We’re going to be upgrading the hardware that the group chat servers run on, I believe this week or possibly next. We won’t announce when that is, because it would be bad science to tell anybody when it’s happened. We want to watch the stats, we now have very good visibility to what performance and failure rates are. So we have the way to measure what’s going on.”

SL project updates week 26/2: group chat

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Week 26 – Recap

  • On Tuesday June 24th, the Main channel was updated with the inventory / AIS v3 project, previously deployed to BlueSteel, which requires the current release viewer. See the release notes for more
  • On Wednesday June 25th, the three RC channels were updated as follows:
  • BlueSteel and LeTigre received a new server maintenance project with the new LSL functions to view and modify materials (see my notes) – release notes
  • Magnum remains on the Experience Tools project, but should additionally receive the inventory / AISv3 update deployed to the Main channel – release notes

Group Chat

Simon Linden is again working on improving group chat, with further tests being carried out during the Server Beta meeting on Thursday June 26th. Currently, the emphasis is on further improving reliability when engaged in group chat and moving between regions (either via teleport or directly by crossing between regions). A couple of people reported their chat windows appeared to freeze a lot less when switching between group chat sessions or following a teleport. Whether this was actually the case or a placebo effect is unclear, as Simon indicated he couldn’t see why it might be any different at this point in proceedings.

Other Items

Magnum llAttachToAvatarTemp Bug

An odd bug has been discovered on Magnum, which may be related to the Experience Tools code. It is defined in BUG-6438, “Objects attached via llAttachToAvatarTemp to object owner detach when script is removed from prim inventory”.

Essentially, using a script in an object which uses llAttachToAvatarTemp to attach an item to attach itself to the creator of the object, and which uses llRemoveInventory(llGetScriptName()) to remove the script from the object, results in the object itself detaching and being deleted. If the object is used by someone other than its creator, it will attach and the script will be correctly removed without detaching the object as well. It’s not clear if this happens with objects with multiple scripts in them or not, as it has only been tested against objects with the temp attach script in them.

Investigations are continuing into a fix, but in the meantime, it is believed that the Magnum code won’t be moving to the Main channel in week 27.

 ALM and Viewer Log Spamming

There is a viewer rendering issue, which can make itself particularly known when using the LSL functions for materials, where the face of an object will not be rendered, and the viewer will receive a lot of log spam (see BUG-6187). While things got sidetracked so he couldn’t expand on things, Maestro Linden did indicated at the Server Beta meeting that the issue is continuing to be looked at.

SL project updates week 26/1: server, viewer, Content Creation UG

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Week 26

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday June 24th, the Main channel was updated with the inventory / AIS v3 project, previously deployed to BlueSteel, which requires the current release viewer. See the release notes for more.

Release Candidate Channels

On Wednesday June 25th, the three RC channels should be updated as follows:

  • BlueSteel and LeTigre should receive a new server maintenance project with the new LSL functions to view and modify materials (see my notes) – release notes
  • Magnum remains on the Experience Tools project, but should additionally receive the inventory / AISv3 update deployed to the Main channel – release notes

SL Viewer Updates

The release viewer updated on Monday June 23rd to version 3.7.10.291134 (formerly the SL Share 2 RC – ability to upload Tweets and snapshots to Twitter and / or snapshots to Flickr).

The Group Ban project viewer updated to version 3.7.11.291394 on Tuesday June 24th.

Other SL viewers remain as per my Current Viewer Releases page.

Content Creation User Group

The regular Monday Content Creation User Group meetings came to an end on Monday June 23rd. Also at the meeting, as he has been for the past few weeks, doubtless getting up-to-speed with things as a part of his new role in heading-up the SL development team, Oz Linden indicated content creation issues could in future be raised at either the Simulator User Group meeting (which generally has a strong cross-over of attendees with the Content Creation UG meeting) or the Open Development meeting.

Commenting on the change to the meeting, Nyx said:

I’m moving on to other projects and haven’t been able to keep up with the details of content creation tasks as well as I used to be able to … I’ll still be inworld from time to time, and will be helping Oz whenever any avatar issues come up or with any other pieces where I can assist of course.

Whether this can be taken to mean Nyx is moving on to the new platform project is open to speculation. However, that the Content Creation meeting has now ended as an entity in its own right should not be seen as any indication that the Lab is starting to raise the drawbridge. Meetings over the pass few months have, for the most part, had a low attendance (with occasional sharp rises), and opportunities remain to discuss issues in other venues.

Experience Tools

Thanks to my getting a bullet point in the wrong place in my overview of Experience Tools, the article gave the impression that whitelisting experiences on mainland would only be possible with grid-wide experiences. This has been corrected. Experiences can be run at the parcel level on the mainland.

 

SL projects update 25/2: Experience Keys (Tools) overview and beta information

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update Wednesday July 9th: Dolphin Linden also attended the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday July 8th, where he further discussed the Experience Keys (Tools) project. As that discussion covered some of the information given here, I have provided a further update on the additional information provided by Dolphin at that meeting, to serve as a companion piece to this report. Please do ensure you read that article as a follow-up to this one.

During the TPV Developer Meeting on Friday JUne 20th, Linden Lab gave advanced notice to third-party viewer developers that the long-awaited Experience Tools project will be entering a beta phase in the near future – possibly within the next month.

Dolphin Linden is one of the people working on the Experience Tools / Keys
Dolphin Linden is one of the people working on the Experience Tools / Keys

The notice came via Troy and Dolphin Linden, two of the key players from the Lab working on the project,  who between them gave an overview of what it is and how it should work, and answered questions from TPV developers.

There has been considerable interest in this project at Simulator User Group and Server Beta User Group meetings over the last several months, particularly as mention of the tools has been made in various RC deployment release notes, and the fact that they are currently on the Magnum RC. However, until the June 20th meeting, the Lab has remained tight-lipped on the matter.

The notes which follow were taken from an audio recording I made of the meeting, and the salient extracts from that audio are included at the end of this article (see also North’s video recording of the meeting). I’ll have a summary of the TPV Dev meeting itself available soon.

What Are Experience Keys?

Experience Tools is essentially a new means of providing a set of “blanket” permissions against a range of actions which might be taken on an avatar participating in a defined activity (e.g. allowing the avatar to be animated, teleported, have items attached, etc., in accordance with the requirements of the activity).  The idea is that rather than having to constantly give permission for objects, etc., to act on your avatar while participating in an immersive activity, you give a single OK at the start of your participation, and then no longer be distracted by additional dialogue requests. The permissions within the Experience Tools comprise:

  • PERMISSION_TAKE_CONTROLS
  • PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION
  • PERMISSION_ATTACH
  • PERMISSION_TRACK_CAMERA
  • PERMISSION_CONTROL_CAMERA
  • PERMISSION_TELEPORT

Note that permissions such as DEBIT (i.e. take money from your L$ account) are explicitly excluded from the Experience Tools, and must still go the normal route of requesting permission from the user.

What is an “Experience”?

An “experience” in this context can be almost any immersive / interactive environment within SL where the user needs to provide permissions for objects, etc., to interact with their avatar. A list of examples of experiences might include:

  • A game or puzzle or hunt or quest which requires the use of a HUD and / or which requires certain items are attached to an avatar
  • An amusement park where every ride requires the user gives explicit permissions to every ride they take
  • A tour of an art or historical installation which utilises multiple teleports and / or the use of HUDs.

As noted above, within an experience, the user only needs to give permission to scripts and objects to interact with their avatar once, when they agree to participate in the experience.

Linden Realms, launched back in late 2011, was something of a precursor to Experience Tools, inasmuch as by entering a Linden Realm game area, players gave implicit permission for certain actions to be carried out on their avatars – HUD attachment, teleporting – without the need to explicitly allow each activity within the game. The difference between it and Experience Tools, is that with the latter, users must still  explicitly give that initial permission for objects, etc., within the experience to interact with their avatar.

Linden Realms, launched in 2011, was an initial release of what were to become known as the Advanced Creator Tools, the forerunner of the upcoming experience keys / permissions
Linden Realms, launched in 2011, was something of a precursor of what has evolved into Experience Tools / Keys

During the initial deployment, experiences using the Experience Tools will be restricted to running at the region / estate level for private islands / estates and parcel level for mainland. They will require white listing by the land owner in order to run. However, it is possible that the capabilities will be extended in the future to allow grid-wide experiences to be created (e.g. a grid-wide hunt involving multiple regions / mainland parcels). When / if implemented, this will mean:

  • Private estates / regions with access restrictions will have an additional level of access which will allow anyone participating in a grid-wide experience running on that estate / region to access it. However, should they revoke the experience permissions while on such an estate / region, they will be teleported away in accordance with the estate’s / region’s access controls
  • If a user opts not to take part in a grid-wide experience at one location, their refusal to do so applies to all locations running the same experience (so they do not have to keep refusing to participate when travelling around the grid).

See How it Will Work, below, for further information on allowing / refusing experiences and revoking permissions.

Continue reading “SL projects update 25/2: Experience Keys (Tools) overview and beta information” →

SL projects update 25/1: server, viewer, pathfinding and surprise guest

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday June 17th was busy even before the unannounced guest dropped in (see below)
The Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday June 17th was getting busy even before the unannounced guest dropped in (see below)

Server Deploys, Week 24

As usual, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest information.

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday June 17th, the Main channel was updated with the Group Ban project, which was previously on the LeTigre RC.  As the name implies, this project adds the ability to ban users from groups (see also SL Viewer Updates, below) – release notes.

Release Candidate Channels

On Wednesday June 18th the three RC channels should be updated as follows:

  • LeTigre should receive a new server maintenance project this week, which comprises an anti-griefing measure – release notes
  • BlueSteel should remain on the Sunshine / AIS v3 project, the viewer for which was promoted to the de facto release viewer (version 3.7.9.290582) on Monday June 16th. In addition, BlueSteel should receive the Main channel update with the Group Ban project and the anti-griefing update deployed to LeTigre – release notes
  • Magnum should remain on the Experience Tools project. In addition, Magnum should will receive the Main channel update with the Group Ban project and the anti-griefing update deployed to LeTigre – release notes.

SL Viewer Updates

Release Viewer

On Monday June 16th, the MemShine release candidate viewer, (version 3.7.9.290582, was promoted to the de facto release viewer. This viewer includes the final Sunshine AIS v3 updates (promoting the Lab to issue a blog post announcing the long-running project Shining is now complete), and also a series of memory leak fixes to help stabilise the viewer and hopefully reduce the number of memory related crashes.

Group Ban project Viewer

As noted above server-side support for the Group Ban project is being deployed to the main grid. To coincide with this, the Lab issued the Group Ban project viewer (version 3.7.8.290887) on Tuesday June 17th, which provides the necessary viewer-side support for accessing group ban functions. Initial instructions for using the viewer can be found in the release notes, and I’ve provided an overview as well.

Group Chat

Simon Linden recently completed an initial amount of work on group chat, implementing some small-scale optimisations which, while not expected to have “fixed” group chat, should have improved some aspects of using it, reliability-wise. He’s more recently had to work on what have been viewed higher priority items, but is hoping to make a return to group chat in the very near future and dig into it some more. “I learned a lot on the first pass,” he said on the matter during the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday June 17th, “we got a lot more information on where the load is.  Thus I have hopes the next round will be better.”

Other Items

Pathfinding and Terrain Editing

BUG-772 “Simulator refusing to rez objects after 10 hour timeframe” was raised at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday June 17th. This is an issue where if you are carrying out terraforming work on a region with pathfinding enabled, and are also making frequent Pathfinding navmesh updates, your region will rapidly run out of memory. the way to avoid this is to complete the terraforming activity, then rebake the navmesh and restart the region.

LSL Enhancements

Ideas were tossed around the Simulator User Group meeting on the limitations of LSL, many of which may only be resolved through a complete re-build of LSL, something which is unlikely to happen, as Simon Linden indicated in the meeting, “I don’t think we’re going to touch the internal design of LSL if we can help it.” Which doesn’t mean there will not continue to be enhancements to LSL functions etc.

One suggestion made to get around some of the issues was for the development of a viewer-side scripting language which might handle certain local functions and abilities. Responding to this, Simon would only say, “That would be a wonderfully big project :).”

Continue reading “SL projects update 25/1: server, viewer, pathfinding and surprise guest” →

SL projects update 24/2: viewer, LSL materials functions

Posted on by Inara Pey

 Server Deployments Week 24 – Recap

  • There was no new deployment to the Main (SLS) channel, although it was subject to a grid-wide restart following schedule maintenance on Tuesday June 10th
  • BlueSteel returned to the Sunshine / AISv3  inventory update, which requires the use of the Sunshine RC Viewer
  • LeTigre once more had the server-side group ban project updates deployed to it. See the release notes for details
  • Magnum returned to the Experience Tools project.

The RC channel updates were essentially the same updates as deployed in week 23, but subsequently overwritten following a grid-wide security issue update.

SL Viewer

The Snowstorm code contributions viewer appeared as a project viewer on June 12th. Version 3.7.9.290788 includes some 20 code contributions to the viewer, including:

  • STORM-68 Allow setting of default permissions on creation of objects, clothing, scripts, notecards, etc.
The new floater for setting default permissions for created items as it should appear in the Snowstorm viewer
The new floater for setting default permissions for created items as it should appear in the Snowstorm viewer
  • STORM-1831 Obtain LSL syntax table from simulator so that it is always up to date: this update allows the viewer to obtain the information required for syntax highlighting directly from the simulator the viewer is connected to, eliminating issues with using manually updated syntax files within the viewer falling out-of-synch with the simulators as new LSL syntax as new functions and parameters, etc., are added
  • STORM-1966 Block installation on old and unpatched versions of Windows: this updates causes the viewer’s Windows installer to check to see Windows XP systems have the latest patches installed (i.e. Service Pack 3 for 32-bit XP and Service Pack 2 for 64-bit XP). Any XP systems not meeting these requirements will be unable to install the viewer until such time as they are updated. Additionally, Windows Vista and Windows 7 systems  lacking a Service Pack update will receive a warning, but installation of the viewer will not be blocked

For the full list of OPEN and STORM updates, please refer to the release notes.

LSL Functions for Materials

The Server Beta Meeting on Thursday June 12th included tests to see whether the new LSL functions for materials might offer griefing opportunities. Maestro Linden had created two 256 prim linksets using default prim cubes, one of which was scripted to use PRIM_NORMAL to continuously set a unique material on each of the 6 faces of each prim, and the other was scripted to continuously set PRIM_TEXTURE on each face to a different alpha-blended diffuse texture.

Two sets of four of these objects were rezzed in turn, and meeting attendees asked to monitor their viewer performance (FPS and UDP bandwidth) while the Lab watched the simulator.

Server-wise, performance was largely unaffected by either type of object, with the load being largely controlled by the built-in LSL performance controls. Throughout both tests, and with no  objects rezzed, script spare time remained almost constant around the 14-15ms mark.

Viewer-wise, both types of object impacted FPS, with most people reporting around a 50% drop from the materials-enabled objects, compared to around 40% with the texture changing objects.

Both tests saw an increase in UDP information being sent to the viewer, with bandwidth use increasing by a factor of around 3.5 to 4 (e.g. 180-200kbps to 700-800kbps) with the materials objects and a factor of around 5 to 5.5 for the texture changing objects. As indicated by Maestro, the lower bandwidth use by the materials objects was due to the throttles already in place for how quickly the viewer will look up materials properties.

The takeaway from this (and other tests Maestro has performed) is that scripted materials controls are unlikely to be a major source of griefing. The simulator seems to handle excessive use of script materials in its stride, and impacts on the viewer’s frame rate can be mitigated by using Develop > Show Updates to Objects (CTRL-ALT-SHIIFT-U) to block the offending object.

There are still concerns over potential bandwidth impacts, such as by combining the materials LSL functions with other scripted controls, and concerns how the viewer might be affected by peculiar uses of the materials functions (such as combining them with the already laggy animated mesh tails that are available). However, it seems that for now, the Lab will continue to monitor things to see what happens and whether anything unexpected does crop-up, rather than moving immediately to apply throttles to the functions.

In the meantime, the arrival of these functions has prompted people to start putting together feature requests to be able to animate diffuse (texture), normal and specular maps on an object / object face independently to one another. The Lab has previously indicated that trying to do this via llSetTextureAnim() would be “pretty ugly to implement or would need some careful design …” and that as such they have no plans to try this at present. It’ll be interesting to see if any feature request(s) put forward persuade them otherwise.