Category: Simulator User Group

SL projects update 30/2: server, viewer, group chat

Posted on by Inara Pey

The Bayou, April 2014; Inara Pey, May 2014, on FlickrThe Bayou, April 2014 (Flickr)

Server Deployments – Week 30 Recap

  • On Tuesday July 22nd, the Main channel was updated with the infrastructure project deployed to the Magnum RC in week 29, and which adds support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy, and includes the updates previously on LeTigre and BlueSteel- release notes
  • On Thursday July 24th, all three RC  channel were updated with the infrastructure support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy, and the updates previously deployed to LeTigre and BlueSteel – release notes.

SL Viewer

The Library Refresh viewer was updated to release candidate status with the release of version 3.7.13.292194 on July 23rd. This viewer contains an update to a large set of the libraries used by the viewer to provide security, stability and consistency improvements to this and future viewers.

Group Chat

Simon Linden: continuing to work on group chat issues
Simon Linden: continuing to work on group chat issues

The anticipated group chat test didn’t materialise at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday July 24th as a result of Simon Linden coming across a last-minute issue which needed to be resolved ahead of further tests. He and Oz did, however, explain some recent discoveries within the chat system.

“While the earlier update to group chat didn’t give us any significant performance boost, we got a lot more information out of the servers,” Simon said. “And what we found was a big part of the group chat system load is not the chat messages you care about, but the updates to who is in the session or not.”

Oz added, “Those updates happen whether or not you’re displaying who’s in the session, in every group you’re in.”

Simon continued, “You can actually see this in the viewer if you add a line of code to log something whenever an update comes in to tell you who’s in the group chat … you’ll be surprised how many you get. The load goes up as the group size goes up … with a larger group, people are joining and leaving more often, and there are more people to update.”

People joining / leaving a session are recorded by the chat server. “It has a list of who’s online and in the group chat at that moment,” Simon explained, “it’s adding and removing from that list, and [generating] the resulting updates, that are the problem, [causing them] to be sent to everyone else still active in the group as they do so.”

The growth curve of these updates is described as exponential, and there is a knock-on effect with them as well; as group chat sessions share server resources, it is possible that a large group chat session, with multiple users joining  / leaving it and thus causing it to generate lots of updates can affect other group chat sessions hosted on the same group chat server, slowing them down as well.

While the chat servers are due for a hardware change, which is hoped will improve performance to a degree, simply adding more hardware to the chat service back-end isn’t seen as a solution, as it’s the exponential manner in which the updates grow which needs to be reduced and controlled. The testing Simon had hoped to run during the Server Beta meeting was to test some improvements he had been making to the queuing of the updates and in combining messages to hopefully reduced the load. However, in running over the code, he encountered a glitch that he needs to resolve before the testing can proceed.

Another issue with the group chat system is that when users log-in to a Second Life session, they automatically join all 42 of their groups, sending a “I’m here!” message to all 42 groups so that they can start receiving messages from active groups. This has obviously been exacerbated each time the limit on how many groups a person can join has been raised, so as Oz pointed-out during the meeting, “upping it again would make it even worse, so until this is dealt with, don’t even ask… 🙂 .”

HTTP Updates

As indicated by Monty Linden at the last TPV meeting, there are further server-side updates which should further assist with improvements to texture and mesh asset downloads. These are now nearing the point where they are likely to be surfacing (although quite when isn’t clear), prompting Oz to comment, “We’re setting up some experiments with server side changes that will complement the pipeline viewer, but are not strictly speaking dependent on it. When we’re confident that our test setup is ready, including how to measure the results, we’ll invite you folks to help us test.”

 

SL projects update week 30/1: server, viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments – Week 30

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread in the forums for the latest information and updates.

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday July 22nd, the Main channel was updated with the infrastructure project deployed to the Magnum RC in week 29, and which adds support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy, and includes the update to improve L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects previously on LeTigre and BlueSteel- release notes.

Release Candidate Channels

On Thursday July 24th, all three RC  channel should be updated with the infrastructure support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy, and includes the L$ transaction logging update and Temp attachment fix previously deployed to LeTigre and BlueSteel.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday July 22nd, the de facto release viewer was updated to version 3.7.12.291824, previously the Maintenance RC release candidate. This viewer includes over 40 MAINT fixes, including:

  • MAINT-3135 Cocoa Viewer: Mac: Maximizing the viewer leaves garbage on the screen
  • MAINT-3171 Alt-clicking while moving mouse can move the camera significantly
  • MAINT-2980 Reevaluate the 512 meg texture cap
  • MAINT-4216 Double clicking on anything in COF removes it from your avatar – including skin, shape, hairbase and eyes – results in bakefailed avatar
  • MAINT-4001 Received Folder is movable within Recent Tab – see my notes here on this issue
  • MAINT-3610 SL viewer partly ‘eats’ chat-message.

Tuesday July 22nd also saw two other viwer updates:

  • Tthe Group Ban RC viewer updated to version 3.7.13.292225. This allows group owners and those assigned to a specific role to ban (and eject) others from joining the group. Useful for dealing with spammers and other trouble-makers in open enrollment groups. For an overview of the group ban viewer, please refer to my preview notes
  • The Oculus Rift project viewer also updated to version 3.7.12.292141, to bring it up to parity with the release viewer 3.7.12 code base. Note at the time of writing, there were no supporting release notes for this update – please refer to the Alternate Viewers wiki page for the downloads.

Group Chat

Simon Linden is planning on a further group chat test at the Server Beta User Group meeting on Thursday July 24th. Commenting on this at the Simulator UG meeting on Tuesday July 22nd, he said, “those have been really helpful with our development.   The more people who can come, the better. The test is usually at the end, a little before 4:00 if we don’t run out of other topics.”

SL projects update week 29/1: server, viewer, Experience Keys

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments – Week 29

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest status / updates / issues.

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday July 15th, the Main channel was updated with the Experience Keys project, which had previously been running on Magnum. This roll-out coincides with the release of the Experience Keys project viewer (see below) and the release of the Lab’s first Experience Keys demonstrator game, The Cornfield.  Please refer to the release notes for further information.

Release Candidate Channels

On Wednesday July 16th, the Magnum RC should be updated a new infrastructure project that adds support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy. This would appear to be the changes required to support the new Skill Gaming region type. Release notes.

On Thursday July 17th, BlueSteel and LeTigre will both be updated with the Experience Keys project, but will otherwise remain on the same  server maintenance project as week 28, which addresses a JSON-related bug, an interest list related race condition, and to improve L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects. See the release notes (BlueSteel) for details, and part 2 of my projects update for week 28.

SL Viewer

As noted above, the Experience Keys project viewer, version 3.7.12.291846, was released on Monday July 14th. This provides viewer-side support for accessing and managing SL experiences using the new Experience Keys permissions capabilities.

The Search tab on the new Experience floater - part of the Experience Keys project viewer
The Search tab on the new Experience floater, accessed from the Experiences option in the Me menu in the Experience Keys project viewer

This viewer can be used in conjunction with the Lab’s Experience Keys demonstrator game, The Cornfield, and with other experiences as they are opened to public use. Please keep in mind that the viewer may not behave correctly until after the server-side deployment of Experience Keys support has completed on Thursday July 17th.

For further details on Experience Keys, please refer to the following:

There are also some further notes from Dolphin Linden on the subject, below.

Yet More on Experience Keys

Dolphin Linden at the Simulator UG meeting
Dolphin Linden at the Simulator UG meeting

Dolphin Linden again attended the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday July 15th, where he answered more question on the Experience Keys project.

Lucia Nightfire offered up a couple of points of feedback which appear especially relevant to the new capabilities:

  • An estate / parcel setting to disable all non-experience scripts. This would be useful in game experiences, as it could prevent participants cheating by using non-game scripted objects
  • An estate / parcel setting to block all grid-wide experiences from running on an estate / parcel. Currently, any grid-wide experiences which come on-line have to be explicitly blocked by name, which means if an estate / parcel owner didn’t want any grid-wide experiences running on their land, they’d have to keep adding them to their block list as and when they become aware of them. A single check-box option would eliminate this.

Feature requests are to be filed on both of these points, which the Lab have agreed to look into.

Other Bits

Sim Crossing Hiccups

There have been renewed reports of region crossing issues which seem to be occurring regularly, but only between certain regions when tested. The issues mainly appear to affect vehicles and take the form of the avatar taking an exceptionally long period of time to cross between regions – with the vehicle the avatar is say upon taking up to 30 seconds longer. When this happens, the avatar appears to be visually unlinked from the vehicle, but the vehicle itself fails to get auto-returned, as the simulators appear to consider the avatar and vehicle as still being linked.

Motor Loon provided some specific details on the issue, and has indicated he will raise a bug report using the information he has, as the Lab are unaware of any specific problems which may cause this. However, while it has yet to be confirmed, it was also reported at the meeting at a similar issue on a region crossing between two regions was resolved by restarting them in a specific sequence.

SL projects update 28/3: more server and viewer news

Posted on by Inara Pey

Banana Island - The Pilgrim's Dawn; Inara Pey, March 2014, on FlickrBanana Island, The Pilgrim’s Dawn, March 2014 (Flickr)

Server Deployments Week 28 – Recap

  • On Tuesday July 8th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the server maintenance project that was previously on BlueSteel and LeTigre.  This project adds the ability for LSL functions to view and modify the render materials (normal map, specular map, and diffuse texture alpha mode) properties on prims, via new prim parameters – release notes
  • On Wednesday July 9th, the RC channels were updated as follows:
    • BlueSteel and LeTigre received the same new server maintenance update to address a JSON-related bug, an interest list related race condition, and to improve L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects
    • Magnum remained on the Experience Tools project, and receives the same updates as the Main channel, so LSL support for materials is now grid-wide.

 BlueSteel / LeTigre Updates

Commenting on the server maintenance update deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre at the Server Beta UG meeting on Thursday July 10th, Maestro Linden explained one of the bug fixes (BUG-6466) and the L$ transaction update thus:

The LSL JSON bug fix, BUG-6466, just makes it so that numbers in the format “1.0e+2” get parsed as JSON numbers.  Previously, they’d be treated as strings (though “1.0e2”  would be treated as a number). The spec says that “+” is optional, so we added that support.  I’d be surprised if more than 2 people end up noticing that change 🙂 .

The one non-bug fix change in BS and LT is more verbose logging of certain L$ transaction types … Historically, a L$ transaction from scripted payment (llTransferLindenDollars or llGiveMoney ) would not include the name of the object that did the payment, when you viewed it in the “L$ Transactions” section of the website. However you would see that information if somebody had paid L$ into an object.

Previously, the entry would just look like this: Destination: Maestro Linden; Object Pays; Region: Morris.

But now, with the update to BS and LT, transactions in those regions will additionally include this line: Description: <Name of object which paid>. The page where you see the difference is https://accounts.secondlife.com/transaction_history/. Anyway, it could be useful for understanding which of your objects are paying out L$. Assuming they’re not all named “Object” :).

The remaining fix, “Temp Attachments are sometimes not removed on the viewer when detached from a region change event”, was related to a race condition, and explained by Simon Linden:

Updates were out-of-order there. Basically if your script took things off on the region change, anyone might get the updates out-of-order. It was worst on slow connections. For those who are curious, it went like this:  if the first update from the new region was slow, the “kill” message removing the object would happen first, and get ignored.

So in other words, items which should have been removed appear to remain in place, with Simon adding:

In this case you can’t detach it … because for the sim, it’s already gone. The viewers are the ones out-of-sync with the server. So you right-click and detach again and nothing happens.

The fix on BlueSteel and LeTigre should hopefully prevent this from occurring during a region change to regions on these channels.

SL Viewer

Maintenance RC Viewer

A new Maintenance RC viewer appeared late on Thursday July 10th. Version 3.7.12.291824 contains almost 40 MAINT fixes intended “to make your Second Life smoother”. The list of fixes include:

  • MAINT-3135 Cocoa Viewer: Mac: Maximizing the viewer leaves garbage on the screen
  • MAINT-3154 Alt zoom zooms way out when attempt to zoom in on Mac build running with external monitor
  • MAINT-3171 Alt-clicking while moving mouse can move the camera significantly
  • MAINT-2980 Reevaluate the 512 meg texture cap
  • MAINT-4216 Double clicking on anything in COF removes it from your avatar – including skin, shape, hairbase and eyes – results in bakefailed avatar
  • MAINT-4001 Received Folder is movable within Recent Tab – see my notes here on this issue
  • MAINT-3610 SL viewer partly ‘eats’ chat-message.

 

Please refer to the release notes link above, for the full list of MAINT fixes.

Library Refresh Project Viewer

The Lab issued a new project viewer on Wednesday July 9th, version 3.7.12.291799, which contains a number of updates related to the third-libraries used by viewer. This viewer has grown out of Monty Linden’s ongoing HTTP work, which required the update of several essential libraries used by the viewer, and Monty took the opportunity to undertake a more extensive update of the libraries.

These library updates should provide better security, stability and consistency improvements to the viewer. However, an advisory to Mac users warns that the updated libraries in the viewer have been built with a minimum OS level of 10.6. Therefore, this viewer, and future viewers based upon it, will not run on OS X 10.5.

While the viewer is primarily intended for testing purposes, and doesn’t contain updates which are liable to be noticed by most LS users, it is thought that it might help those encountering very specific SSA-related issues, the release notes stating:

A few users have experienced problems with avatar appearance due to their very specific network configuration. Gray avatars are accompanied by ‘Transferred a partial file’ errors in the SecondLife.log file. Linden has not been able to reproduce this internally but a possible workaround is found in this release.

A list of related JIRA reports is also given, but none of these appear to have been switched back to public access at the time of writing. They are: BUG-3323, BUG-3770, BUG-3877, BUG-3879, BUG-3882 and SH-4375.

Other Items

SL AIS Viewer login / Attachments Issue

Users on the SL viewer using the AIS v3 viewer code are reporting issues with attachments when logging-in to Second Life.

Some of the issues are described as a user logging-in to find their hair or (mesh) foot / hand or other attachment incorrectly positioned, and the only way to rectify the situation is to re-log. Some have suggested that swapping between a non-AIS v3 viewer and the AIS v3-enabled viewer may trigger the situation.

Some bug reports (BUG-890 and BUG-2772, both unfortunately non-public at the time of writing) have been pointed-to as examples of the problem, and further reports have been requested should it be encountered, with Coyot Linden noting for those wishing to file a JIRA on the matter:

One way to get a grapple on that sort of thing is to start a test run and keep track of the login times and regions.  When you hit a fail, logout and do one more and see if it succeeds.  If you provide that and the viewer logs, it would be easier for someone to do some log diving to figure out what the problem is.

Coyot Linden Takes the Driving Seat

Maestro Linden is  taking a three-week vacation from the Lab and Second Life. In his absence, Coyot Linden will be occupying the driving seat for the Thursday Server Beta meeting.

SL projects update 28/2: more on Experience Keys (Tools)

Posted on by Inara Pey

On Tuesday July 8th, Dolphin Linden, a member of the team responsible for the Experience Keys (Tools) project,  attended the Simulator User Group meeting, where he took time to provide further information on the project via what amounted to a Q&A session.

Dolphin Linden at the Simulator UG meeting
Dolphin Linden at the Simulator UG meeting

The following notes have been taken from Dolphin’s comments, and should be read alongside my original overview for Experience Keys, and the Lab’s invitation for experience creators to participate in the Experience Keys beta programme.

Note that because some aspects of Dolphins comments on Experience Keys have been covered in my original article (e.g. the concept of trusted Experiences running on regions with access control enabled, permissions covered by Experience Keys, etc.), they can not reproduced here.

  • Documentation for the projects will be finalised “shortly” – it is currently undergoing final review and update
  • Precisely how Experience Keys will be made available to people is still to be decided; as Dolphin reiterated at the meeting: “We are working out the details, but we want them to be reasonably available, but not so easy acquire that people will make throw away ones to try to grief people; we are still working on the rules about who can have them.”
  • Those applying to be part of the Experience Keys beta do not necessarily need to convert an existing experience they may have, but
    • They should be able to demonstrate that they have the experience with building/scripting to make use of the tools, and
    • They should provide as much information on possible about the kind of experience they’d like to present through the beta
  • Experiences and region maturity ratings:
    • Experiences must respect the maturity of the region(s) on which they run – so an adult rated experience cannot run on a general region, for example
    • Experience ratings are set by the experience owner, and this rating is used to determine the region maturity rating required in order for the experience to run
    • A sample Experience profile
      A sample Experience profile

      The rating is part of the Experience’s public profile, all of which must be G rated

    • The list of experiences running on a region is public information
  • Experiences and scripts:
    • A script can only be associated with a single experience
    • However, a single object can include multiple scripts belonging to different experiences, if required – although this might prove difficult to manage, depending on what the scripts are doing / how the object is used
    • Assigning an Experience to a script must be done by the Experience owner or by a member of the Experience’s group with the appropriate group power (“Contributor”)
    • Existing scripts can be converted to work within an experience, the permissions request to an Experience permissions request and then the event handler would need to be modified to handle tw new events – EXPERIENCE_PERMISSIONS and EXPERIENCE_PERMISSIONS_DENIED
    • An Experience is set on a script through a combo box in the script editor. This lists all Experiences the script creator either owns or has Contributor rights to
    • The selected Experience is set at compile time (similar to the compile type), and is part of the compiled script. The script must be re-saved if it the association is changed to another Experience
    • If a modifiable script associated with an Experience is passed to someone who does not have Contributor permissions for the Experience, they will not be able to save the script unless they remove the Experience or change it to one for which they do have permission
  • The Experience database:
    • Every Experience has its own database, which can be accessed wherever the Experience is running
    • The database is fairly simple, but should make storing the current state-of play for avatars engaged in an Experience (e.g. what they have been doing, what they have attached, etc.)
    • It is basically string-to-string mapping
    • The database supports create, read, update, delete, count, and iterate, and the update can be made atomic, so it can be safely updated from multiple scripts
    • The overall size of the database will be limited, although the Lab is still determining an appropriate limit
    • The database size is also configurable (per Experience), so the Lab will likely offer Experience creators the opportunity to increase their database size for a L$ fee, if needed, although this policy has yet to be finalised
  • As indicated in my original notes, an Experience can be refused or blocked by a user, and can be revoked by the Lab. Additionally, an Experience can be suspended by the Experience owner (so as to allow a bug to be fixed, for example). All of these will result in an EXPERIENCE_PERMISSIONS_DENIED event being sent to all scripts associated with the experience
  • Also as indicated in my original notes, 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
  • All temporary attachments made to an avatar will die should the person go to a place where the Experience is blocked or if they block the Experience.

Again, please do be sure to read the above notes alongisde my original overview of Experience Keys.

Dolphin Linden will be available at the next Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday 15th July to answer further questions.

SL projects update week 28/1: server and viewer updates

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest news and information.

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday July 8th, the Main channel was updated with the server maintenance project that was previously on BlueSteel and LeTigre.  This project adds the ability for LSL functions to view and modify the render materials (normal map, specular map, and diffuse texture alpha mode) properties on prims, via new prim parameters – release notes.

Release Candidate (RC) Channels

On Wednesday July 9th, the three release candidate channels should be updated as follows:

  • BlueSteel and LeTigre should receive the same new server maintenance update. This project addresses some miscellaneous bugs, and improves L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects.
  • Magnum remains on the Experience Tools project, and receives the same updates as the Main channel, so LSL support for materials will be grid-wide following the deployment.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday July 8th, the Snowstorm RC viewer, version 3.7.11.291465 was promoted to the de facto release viewer. The viewer includes multiple contributed updates from the SL open source community, including (but not limited to):

  • STORM-68 Allow setting of default permissions on creation of objects, clothing, scripts, notecards, etc.
  • STORM-1831 Obtain LSL syntax table from simulator so that it is always up to date
  • STORM-1972 Restore particle debug display
  • STORM-2011 Improve loading of Group member list
  • STORM-2015 Region restart sound alerts play only locally.
  • STORM-2020 Restore RenderSpecularExponent.
With the new release viewer, users can now set their own default permissions for newly-crated prims, textures, etc.
With the new release viewer, users can now set their own default permissions for newly created prims, textures, etc.

Windows XP users please note: with this release, you must have either Service Pack 3 (Windows XP 32-bit) or Service Pack 2 (Windows XP 64-bit) installed on your system in order to install this and future versions of the SL viewer – see the release notes. Please also note that no Windows XP operating systems are supported by Linden Lab.

Other SL viewers remain as per the Alternate Viewers wiki page and my Current Viewer Releases page.

 Experience Keys (Tools)

There was a Q&A session at the simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday July 8th with Dolphin Linden, to discuss the Experience Keys (Tools) project. For ease of reference, I’ve included notes from that session in a separate report.