Category: Simulator User Group

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 10th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end – my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice)
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• On Tuesday, September 10th, the SLS Main channel was restarted without any deployment.
• On Wednesday, September 11th:
  • There will be a further attempt to deploy the Picnic simulator update to the Ferrari simulator RC channel. A bug was found in llAvatarOnSitTarget() last week, which has now been fixed. The hope is that Picnic will now progress to the rest of the simulator RCs during week commencing September 16th, 2024, and thence to the SLS Main channel the week after.
  • The remain RC channels will be restarted.
• Monty Linden indicated he is very interested in feedback about avatar region crossings  / TPs, particularly with with Ferrari versus the rest of the grid.

Future Deployments

Currently, and following on from Picnic, upcoming simulator deployments currently have the following order:

• Doubtfire, which has some internal changes, will follow Picnic.
• Then will come the WebRTC deployments to make that code grid-wide.
• After WebRTC will come a new simulator update called BBQ, which is still gathering updates for inclusion.

SL Viewer Updates

No updates at the start of the week, leaving the currently available public versions of official viewers as:

• Release viewer: version 7.1.9.10515727195, formerly the Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling) promoted August 26.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • DeltaFPS RC, version 7.1.10.10708851543, updated September 5.
    • Performance boosts. Memory management has been optimized and users will experience a higher FPS across various systems. A comprehensive range of bug fixes are also provided. This includes better PBR material handling and resolving frequent crashes. See the release notes for more.
    • UI for scheduling region restarts now available via a new button located in the Region/Estate floater. (Note: there is currently an issue with scheduled region restarts working correctly and a fix is due to come in the next server release).

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• Issues have been reported with attachment behaviours. for example:
  • Attachments would disappear from everyone’s view except owner, who would be unable to detach, reattach, or interact in any way with the affected attachment, as the server no longer register them as attached.
  • This Canny issue (simulator release specific)).
  • Some of these are currently under investigation, and the subject led to an extended discussion through the first half of the meeting.
• Pepper Linden noted further updates to the Map service are due to be deployed, and that pruning of ghost regions (those no longer on the grid but still showing on the Map) should commence later in the week.
• 2K BoM texture bakes: it is possible that code for this may be deployed to Aditi (the Beta grid) some time in the next week or two, bugs allowing. Hopefully an update at the next SUG or CCUG meeting.
  • The rule of thumb is that the bake resolution will match the maximum of any texture. So, if all the textures are 1024×1024, then the bake will 1024×1024. But if one of the textures is 2048×2048, then the bake will be 2048×2048.
  • The exception to the above will be eyes, which are limited to a maximum resolution of 512×512.
  • The deployment of 2K Bakes on Mesh will have an associated official blog post as it becomes available.
• Add flag to llSetLinkSitFlags, SIT_FLAG_INVISIBLE is now being actively tracked by LL. The hope is to have the request in the simulator release after BBQ.
• Lua work:
  • There are no plans on LL’s part to provide a translate from LSL user-code to Lua user-code.
  • Luau will likely be in 32-bit mode, until LL get the simulator binary building in 64-bit mode.
  • LL do not intend to define standards on how to write a Lua script for Luau; they are hoping that the community will consolidate and settle on particular design patterns and approaches, and once the dust settles, LL may then standardise the most common approaches
• A general discussion on on throttling for llRegionSay and llRegionSayTo.
• Leviathan Linden indicated the a dedidcate Game Control viewer is on hold as he is currently engaged on other work, and the code needs to be tested in relation with the Lab’s updated Linux support.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end – my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice)
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• On Tuesday, September 3rd, the SLS Main channel was restarted without any deployment.
• On Wednesday, September 4th:
  • The BlueSteel and Ferrari simulator RC channels will receive the Picnic simulator update (which includes: llFindNotecardTextSync, llDerezObject, for the viewer side, group member lists can now be retrieved in a paginated manner).
    • The existing WebRTC regions of WebRTC Voice 1, WebRTC Voice 2, WebRTC Voice 3 and WebRTC Voice 4 might also be updated with Picnic.
    • Picnic also include the first of the region crossing improvements Monty Linden has been working on. These should see a) avatars already in a destination region getting better frame rates as others arrive in the region; b) crossing avatars with too many scripts will experience slower but smoother crossings.
  • The remaining simulator RC channels will be restarted without any new deployment / update.

SL Viewer Updates

No updates at the start of the week, leaving the currently available public versions of official viewers as:

• Release viewer: version 7.1.9.10515727195, formerly the Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling) promoted August 26.
• Release channel cohort: DeltaFPS RC, version 7.1.10.10622905308, issued August 30.
  • Performance boosts. Memory management has been optimized and users will experience a higher FPS across various systems. A comprehensive range of bug fixes are also provided. This includes better PBR material handling and resolving frequent crashes. See the release notes for more.
  • UI for scheduling region restarts now available via a new button located in the Region/Estate floater. (Note: there is currently an issue with scheduled region restarts working correctly and a fix is due to come in the next server release).

In Brief

• The recent updates to the SL Map system appears to have been generally well received, with those providing feeding at the meeting noting the Map does appear to load a lot quicker and that changes to regions are more timely in being reflected on the Map.
  • The ability to see ground-level details of regions using regions surrounds where the scale is > 256*1.33 on either the x or y axis (rather than them appearing a flat grey) has been particularly appreciated.
  • The next element of this work will include improvements to pruning “ghost” regions from the Map (i.e. regions that appear on the Map but are no longer a part of the grid).
  • This sparked a general discussion on the Map and its capabilities and possible updates.
• Github issue: [PBR] PBR Material resets to legacy material after teleport. #853 – while there is no fix for this at present, it sparked a discussion on issues related to broken meshes, which appear to result from the simulator and viewer not agreeing on how many faces a mesh has. Some of this may have been fixed in the Altasaurus release viewer, and Brad Linden noted, there are more coming in the 7.1.10 (DetlaFPS) RC and the viewer to follow it.
• A reminder that if people have issues where log files might help LL with investigations, this article provides information on where to locate said logs for attaching to a bug report.
• Need a function for easy PBR alpha switching: Brad Linden indicated he had started working on this, but he’s had to shift over to doing some viewer-related work, so things are currently on hold.
• A discussion on a means for scripted Group join invites, rather than requiring a bot – please refer to the last third of the video.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 13th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log. Pantera videoed the meeting, and the recording is embedded at the end of this piece – my thanks, as always, for her work.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice)
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• There will be no planned deployments for the week, but the channels will be restarted. LL have decided to hold-off deploying the Summer Fun / Combat 2 update to further channels for another week. Rider Linden described the reason thus:

As we rolled out further we encountered a product that had a scripting bug that caused it to misbehave on the new servers. We reached out to the creator and he’s fixed the issue and is issuing updates. We wanted to give him a chance to get those out all across the grid.

SL Viewer Updates

On Tuesday, August 13th, the WebRTC RC viewer updated to version 7.1.9.10325451220.

The rest of the current crop of viewers remains as:

• Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling), version 7.1.9.10220184061, August 7.
  • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.9.9555137545, June 21.
  • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.9.9469671545, June 14.

In Brief

Combat Partnership Reminder

• With Combat 2.0 becoming available, Linden Lab has announced the Combat 2.0 Promotion Partnership Programme has been launched.
  • The intention behind the Promotion Partnership Programme this is to give those actively involved in combat activities in Second Life the “opportunity to help us spread the word across the grid about Combat 2.0 in Second Life”.
  • In particular, this will see some of the LL combat regions (e.g. Concord and Lexington) a facelift and use them to showcase Combat 2.0, with participants in the Programme asked to donate free-to-use combat items for use in the regions.
  • In addition, participants will have their regions / communities included in a Combat section of the Destination Guide. There may be other benefits for participants as well.
  • Those interested can sign-up via this Google form.

General

• Recent bugs / requests under review / potentially to be pulled into upcoming simulator updates (e.g. BBG, which will follow Picnic):
  • [Combat2] Uncap 100 REZ_DAMAGE limit on llRezObjectWithParams.
  • llRezObjectWithParams making objects temp when damage scripted.
• Weird region crossing behaviour:
  • Various reports of a rare and intermittent vehicle region crossing oddity, in which the crossing goes wrong, unseating the rider- but rezzing a grey prim in the rider’s place as a par to of the vehicle’s linkset “created” by the rider. When unlinked, the prim slides around on the ground but has a rotation lock property on it that keeps it upright.
  • Some think this might be a very old bug that can replace the vehicle rider with an agent-sized cube, per [#BUG-3547] Sim Crossing Rezzes Objects Surrounding Individuals.
  •  It is unclear if any report has been filed recently against the problem, so if anyone encounters it, they are asked to raise a bug report with as much details as possible.
  • Leviathan Linden noted:

Avatars ARE prims, but with some meta data and a session that makes them special. The prim should have been deleted when the session was cleaned up or failed…. which suggests the session itself failed to be created on the far side of the region crossing.

• There was a discussion on regex functions, based off of llRegex* functions, of which Rider Liden said:

I’ve just not had time to get to it yet. I think I have the code organized to a point right now where they wouldn’t be too much work to implement.

• Please refer to the video below for further details of the meeting.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 6th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log. Pantera videoed the meeting, and the recording is embedded at the end of this piece – my thanks, as always, for her work.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice)
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• The SLS Main channel was restarted on Tuesday, August 6th 2024.
• On Wednesday, August 7th:
  • The BlueSteel RC is to be restarted.
  • The remaining RC channels should receive the Summer Fun simulator update, which includes the initial Combat 2 updates from Rider Linden.

Upcoming Releases

• The is an internal discussion going on at the Lab as to the next simulator update. This may either be Picnic or the back-end WebRTC updates – with the most likely order being Picnic first, then WebRTC.

SL Viewer Updates

• Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • WebRTC Voice RC, version 7.1.9.10084807842, July 26.
  • Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling), version 7.1.9.9981869229, July 22.
  • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.9.9555137545, June 21.
  • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.9.9469671545, June 14.

Game Controller

• As a reminder – Summer Fun includes the Game Controller updates from Leviathan Linden, but these have yet to reach a former viewer release.
• Also, and just as a FYI for those trying the pre-release game control viewer:
  • If the viewer is used on a simulator without the back-end support (e.g. any simulator on the SLS Main channel after toWednesday, August 7th, and Tuesday, August, 13th), the viewer will be logged out in what might look like a crash.
  • This generally only happens the the GameControl option is enabled, but has also been reported on occasion even with the option disabled.

In Brief

• A general and (theoretical) means of cleaning-up the viewer codebase, and the potential risks in doing so (e.g. apparently “unused” code removed or capabilities thought as no longer relevant resulting in content breakage.
• The above extended into the use of APIs in the viewer as well, with encouragement for those with ideas for APIs to file them as feature requests (such as this feature request).
• Rider confirmed that the promised facelift for the LL combat regions will focus on Concord, Lexington and No Man’s Land.
• It’s been noted that outdated map tiles are still appearing on the World Map despite recent updates – apparently, the final updates to the map server have yet to be deployed, hence the delays in updates some might witness.
• Please refer to the video below for further details.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  July 30th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log. Pantera videoed the meeting, and the recording is embedded at the end of this piece – my thanks, as always, for her work.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice)
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• The SLS Main channel was restarted on Tuesday, July 30th 2024.
• On Wednesday, July 24th:
  • The BlueSteel RC is due to (again) receive Summer Fun simulator update, which includes the initial Combat 2 updates from Rider Linden. Hopefully this third attempt will see it stick.
  • The remaining RC channels will be restarted.

SL Viewer Updates

• Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • WebRTC Voice RC, version 7.1.9.10084807842, July 26.
  • Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling), version 7.1.9.9981869229, July 22.
  • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.9.9555137545, June 21.
  • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.9.9469671545, June 14.

WebRTC Voice Update

Summary

• Replacing the use of Vivox for Voice in SL with WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”).
• Benefits:
  • WebRTC is something of a “defacto standard”, with features such as automatic echo cancellation, better noise cancellation and automatic gain control, etc., and offers much improved audio sampling rates for improved audio quality
  • WebRTC will be supplied within the viewer using a library and wrapper. This will mean no requirement to run a third-party voice plugin (SLvoice.exe, as supplied by Vivox) going forward.
  • The switch to WebRTC also opens the door to adding new features and capabilities to SL Voice, some of which have been long-requested.
  • Care is being taking to address potential security issues (e.g. preventing eavesdropping, exposing users’ IP address (by using an internal proxy server), etc.).
• Feature requests for WebRTC made via the WebRTC board on the SL Feedback Portal are being evaluated and some are being actioned, together with issues being investigated.
• LL will be looking to Linux devs to help give feedback on how well WebRTC is working on their Linux viewers.

Status

• The plan remains to potentially make a switch-over to WebRTC on the back-end in August.
• This is dependent upon third-party viewers picking up the WebRTC updates from LL and incorporating them.
• During the transition period, viewers will connect to either Vivox or WebRTC voice, depending on the service available to them. As such most voice services should be uninterrupted.
• HOWEVER, during the transitional period, there will be some short-term issues around peer-to-peer, Group and ad-hoc voice connections between those on regions running the two different voice services (Vivox and WebRTC).

In Brief

• A further conversation on Lua(u), including supported data types and whether an integer type will be added to LL’s implementation. The answer may be no, going on the Lua FAQ.
• There is a reported uptick in vehicle region crossing issues in the Blake Sea regions, but more than anecdotal reports are required (e.g. information such as timestamps, agents, and regions need to be properly reported which incidents occur.
• Changes related to avatar teleports are due to be included in the Picnic simulator update, which should start deployment as Summer Fun reached the Main SLS channel (or shortly thereafter).
• Monty Linden has some event-queue fixes to bring to life, and would like to get them up on Aditi as a pilot test for various viewers.

This is a re-writing of a fundamental service between viewer and server.  *Not* the LSL scripting event queue – communications event queue between viewers and simulators (we have lots of things called ‘event queue’).  [The] discussion is deep inside this [forum] topic for the interested.

– Monty Linden

• Concern was raised over recent changes to llSensor doubling the number of objects returned, causing some scripts to receive more data than they are designed to manage, resulting in increased stack heap collisions.
  • It was requested that when fundamental changes are made to a function like this, they are used within a new function, rather than changing the existing function. This sparked a conversation on what a new llSensor function (“llSensorPlus” or whatever) might include / work.
  • It was further equested that if llSensor is being updated, news flags / filters are added (e.g. HAS_SIT_TARGET, TOUCH_EVENT, SOUND_EMITTER).
  • A Canny feature request on the latter was requested, with examples of how the flags might be used.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.