Category: Simulator User Group

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 1st, 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 and Pantera’s video of the meeting, which 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, October 1st, the SLS Main channel saw the deployment of the Picnic /Doubtfire update, making it grid-wide.
  • There were apparently some issues with the deployment, resulting in it taking longer than anticipated, due to a need to fix them on the fly.
• Wednesday, October 2nd should see all RC channels restarted without any deployment.

WebRTC Simulator Deployment Status

• • As a result of an Engineering team summit in week #41 (commencing Monday, October 8th), it now appears the deployment of the WebRTC updates to some of the main RC channels will now not take place until Wednesday October 16th.
  • In the meantime, WebRTC can still be tested on the four WebRTC regions (WebRTC1 through 4) on the Pop Rock channel, and on the Preflight test RC channel.

SL Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week:

• Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10800445603, (formerly the DeltaFPS RC), dated September 11th, was promoted to de facto release status on September 19th. This includes:
  • 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).
• Release Candidate: ExtraFPS RC, version 7.1.11.11074622243, issued September 30th.
  • Performance improvements: enhanced texture memory tracking, broader hardware compatibility and higher FPS gain.
  • Aesthetics improvements: new Antialiasing setting – SMAA; Contrast Adaptive Sharpening; Khronos Neutral Tone Mapping (can be changed to ACES via the RenderTonemapType Debug setting).

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• Game Control:
  • This work has apparently not been merged into the initial release of ExtraFPS. A bug fix failed to pass QA, causing issues on the Mac flavour of the viewer.
  • It is hoped that this issue can be resolved and the code merges in the near future.
• Combat 2.1:
  • Rider Linden has published a new proposal specification for “Combat 2.1”,  the next update to the Second Life Combat System (SLCS), this one expanding on teams and respawning.
  • Feedback is being sought on this, with the note that it should be offered sooner rather than later by anyone who may not have seen it, as Rider is hoping to start converting it into actionable items, after which he can then start to implement.
• A fix for at least some of the attachment dropping / loss / ghosting issues (see: Attachment loss on RC channel 2024-08-29.10619830788) which can be experienced during region crossing (TP or physical) is being deployed and tested.
  • The plan is to deploy it with either the WebRTC simulator updates or the Barbecue maintenance update that will follow, depending on which is the the next to go out (currently WebRTC, as noted above).
  • However, the fix is currently available on Aditi (the Beta grid) for those wishing to test it.
• Rider Linden is working on llSetAgentRot (turns the avatar to face the direction indicated by rot., with a +/- 3 degree variance), which should be going into the Barbecue simulator update.
  • However, there is a corresponding viewer change it requires in order for the avatar turning to be seen viewer-side, and this update is going into the viewer Develop branch for a future viewer update.
  • This sparked a further discussion which ran into the topic of Child Agents (instances of an avatar which are registered in regions adjacent to the region the avatar is in, allowing the avatar to be “tracked” in case it is actually going to move from the region it is in to the region in which the Child Agent is registered, for example) and the subject of ghosted objects.
• LDPW have requested a new LSL function – llTransferOwnership – which would allow a scripted change of ownership for an item with Transfer permissions.
  • This sparked an end-of-meeting discussion on how it might work and suitable safeguards.
  • As the function is still in the discussion phase at this point in time, please refer to the video below for further information.

Date of Next Meeting

• Tuesday, October 15th, 2024, due to the Engineering Team summit 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, September 24th, 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, September24th, the SLS Main channel was restarted without any deployment.
• On Wednesday, September 25th:
  • Picnic /Doubtfire should be deployed across all RC channels.

Note: I had been under the impression WebRTC was on the Picnic /Doubtfire simulator releases based on previous comments at various UG meetings; however, Rider Linden indicated that the WebRTC updates will be going to the BlueSteel RC channel on Wednesday, October 2nd, suggesting that have not been deployed beyond the Pop Rocks WebRTC regions. My apologies for the misunderstanding.

In the meantime, the WebRTC test regions are due to be updated on Wednesday, September 25th in preparation for the deployment to BlueSteel, per the above.

SL Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week:

• Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10708851543 (formerly the DeltaFPS RC), dated September 11th, was promoted to de facto release status on September 19th. This includes:
  • 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).
• Release channel cohorts:
  • None at the time of writing.

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• This was a party meeting, so discussions were sparse.
• Attachment losses / attachments getting stuck following teleports: a fix for some of this is set to be included in the upcoming WebRTC release.
• Leviathan Linden’s viewer-side GameControl work broke against the Linux-build changes due to appear in the viewer Maintenance-B branch (this should be the RC viewer to follow after the (yet to surface at the time of writing) ExtraFPS RC viewer).
  • Leviathan notes that while he has game controller devices working on Linux, the controller is not being detected on start-up, requiring it to be unplugged and plugged back in. He is currently working to resolve this.
• Future PBR LSL function (see this Canny and this Canny)  have received a lot of attention. These requests are being tracked, and may be implemented in the future.
• A discussion on SL wind, in which Leviathan Linden noted an idea he had some time ago for SL wind, but which is not part of any current or future work pack.

The idea is: create a large interesting zero-divergence wind field with continuous border conditions (think tile-able texture). The servers would then query into that wind field by computing a texture position that is a continuous function of time+gridXY position … the wind field would be pre-computed and static. For each region its value at any particular time would be a position that changes over time, thus producing the time variance in that region. Neighbouring regions would use the same formula but with different gridXY position. The result would be consistent wind values at region boundaries.

– Leviathan Linden

• The above followed into it discussions of SL weather, etc., but again, not anything that is being worked on; so take all of this as spitballing.

† 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 17th, 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 17th, the SLS Main channel was restarted without any deployment.
• On Wednesday, September 18th:
  • A new version of the Picnic simulator release (which includes the WebRTC support) called Doubtfire should be deployed to the BlueSteel RC channel.
  • Ferrari and the remaining RC channels will be restarted without update.

SL Viewer Updates

• The DeltaFPS RC, version 7.1.10.10708851543, dated September 11th, was promoted to de facto release status on September 19th. This includes:
  • 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).
• Release channel cohorts:
  • None at the time of writing.

Region Crossings Update

We have some attachment fixes available for testing on the Beta grid. Channel is ‘ghi-1419’.Some Blake Sea regions are running on it: Binnacle, Flotsam, Half Hitch, Hawser, Jones Locker, Lanyard, Swab.

– Monty Linden

Note that these fixes are entirely separate to the general tweaks Monty has been making to improve simulator performance on avatars entering / leaving a region, which are due to be deployed to the main grid soon.

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• 2K BoM texture bakes on mesh now available for testing on Aditi (the Beta grid). See my 2K BoM blog post for more.
• A further discussion on attachment losses / attachments getting stuck following teleports. In the case of the latter, Monty suggested a potential workaround:

As for the stuck attachment, there may be a workaround: 1) once stuck, TP to another region (not adjacent), 2) wait one minute, 3) TP back. You may find your attachments in the correct state. But they will get stuck again on re-attachment.

– Monty Linden

• Github issue #1519 (also Canny issue: llDetectedTouchPos returns TOUCH_INVALID_VECTOR when used in touch_start or touch) affecting Touch when in mouselook has been confirmed as a viewer-side issue, and not simulator-side (the viewer is reporting the wrong initial data). However, no current ETA on a fix.
• Rezzing delays affect all scripts in an object is currently being tracked, and Rider Linden indicated he hopes to get to grips with it and have it available for the Barbecue simulator update package. Barbecue (or BBQ, as the notation seems to change between meetings) will be the simulator update to follow-on from the WebRTC deployments currently in progress via Picnic and Doubtfire. This issue sparked a discussion commencing roughly half-way through the meeting.
• Note that the next SUG meeting (Tuesday, September 24th) will be a party to mark the autumnal equinox.

† 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 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.