Category: Simulator User Group

2023 SL SUG meetings week #42 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Dwejra, August 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 17th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and is not intended to be a full transcript.

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):
  • They 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.

Server Deployments

  • No deployments for the week (again). However, all simhosts (SLS Main and RC) will be restarted.

Upcoming Deployments

Viewer Updates

The current batch of official viewer versions is as follows:

Potential for Games Controller Use

  • This work sees the introduction of a new LSL event called game_control, the format for which Leviathan defined as:
game_control(key id, list buttons_edge_down, list buttons_edge_up, list buttons_down, list axes). Lots of lists, but that was necessary to support treating the keyboard as a “big controller with lots of buttons”. I created some docs for the game_control stuff on the LSL wiki.
  • Leviathan also noted there should be a GameControl category page, at the time of writing the link to it had yet to be added to the game_control wiki page.
  • The server work is now considered wrapped, and the focus is on the viewer support.
  • Overall, the work is seen as an initially simple pass to provide basic support for the use of game controllers in SL and intended to get things rolling; so capabilities such a building a “virtual game controller”, as requested at previous meetings are not available. However, he noted that, “Once the network protocol is nailed down and the script stuff… it will still be possible to modify the viewer. “
  • Key points of note include:
    • The feature doesn’t require permissions, but can be enabled via checkboxes in the viewer UI. However, Leviathan noted it could be piggybacked on controls permissions.
    • Subject to testing, the keystrokes are the remapped ones according to other UI settings.
    • The capability currently only works for attachments and seats, it cannot be used for avatar movement.
    • Doesn’t as yet support controller gyro, or rumble feedback nor support for trackpad position for game controllers that have it, nor does it support the use of mouse position recognition and buttons.
    • The above two points have a potential to be added later, “perhaps”.

In Brief

  • The official blog post on the deployment of a simulator update to resolved the communications / bandwidth issue referenced in recent CCUG meeting summaries was referenced.
  • Two feature requests for avatar movement were raised – BUG-234557 and BUG-233175 – leading Rider to note:
Adjustable avatar movement would be possible… the only thing about it that gives me pause is… I know how delicately tuned the avatar motion logic is under the hood, to allow for walking up low ledges, friction when stopping, and how the avatar tries to stand still when at rest but still be “bumpable” by other avatars and objects.

This led to an extended discussion on avatar movement and options for allowing the use of a velocity model for avatar movement (thus allowing for avatars moving at different walking speeds, etc). This lead to a broader discussion on avatar movement / animations, etc., which touched on the dormant puppetry project.

  • HTTP work. Rider Linden noted he is back to working on his HTTP code and simulator asset handling refactoring, and is hoping to get the underpinning code refactor completed in the next week(ish) and then work on the asset management side. This led to a request for the issue of Modify items becoming labelled as No Mod for the owner when a No Mod item is place in its contents & then taken back to inventory (even though the item still have Modify permissions), which in turn generated a request for a Jira report.

† 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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #41 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Waterfall Café, August 2023 –blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 10th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording 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):
  • They 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.

Server Deployments

  • No deployments for the week. However, all simhosts (SLS Main and RC) will be restarted.

Upcoming Deployments

  • The initial work on updates to the SL damage system – specifically making damage a property of the object (e.g. a bullet), rather than being a script property (see the previous SUG meeting notes and this forum thread discussion) will now hopefully be available for testing on Aditi in week #42 and are being lined-up with the upcoming “Fall Colours” simulator update.
  • The rez_object_fail update planned for the upcoming “Fall Colours” simulator update is likely to slip back to a later simulator release.
  • The ability to turn an avatar invisible when they are sitting is being targeted for a simulator release following “Fall Colours”. This will help address issues such as allowing avatars to sit on small vehicles without them having to be deformed and folded up inside them to fit. This may additionally encompass the likes of feature requests BUG-232678 and/or BUG-233175.

Viewer Updates

No updates to viewers for the start of the week, leaving the official viewer pipelines as:

  • Release viewer, version 6.6.15.581961, promoted October 2 (formerly the Inventory Extensions Viewer).
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

Potential for Games Controller Use

  • No major update, Leviathan is trapped in a loop of bug-hunting whilst trying to set-up a test region on Aditi with the necessary LSL support for controllers.

Region Crossing Code Tests

Monty Linden provided an initial breakdown on the recent region crossing code tests (see the two previous SUG meeting summaries). The summary being:

  • While chaotic and the resultant data not entirely reliable in all cases, it was sufficient to demonstrate the code tested can offer noticeable improvements to teleport and physical region crossings.
  • The tests specifically demonstrated that the impact of “bad” (script-heavy) attachments can be significantly reduced with the new code (up to around 5-6 faster in the very worst cases). That presumably relates to vehicle-related crossings more than anything, but hopefully Monty will clarify this once he gets to a stage of confidence in the data to perhaps provide a forum post).
  • Monty also commented that “bad” avatars (again for some undefined measure of “bad”) faired somewhat better during region crossings than he had anticipated.
  • More formalised testing method for crossings is being developed within the Lab, but Monty expects that the revised code thus far tested is likely to find its way into simulator releases in the future.

In Brief

  • Following the region crossing discussion, several people participating in the last pile-on test reported issues of attachments failing to re-load correctly following a teleport, and having to be manually re-attached. However, the same issue was also noted as occurring for some prior to the test, and also by some who didn’t attend the test, suggesting it may be an uptick in a pre-existing bug.
  • Rider Linden indicated he is considering implementing a fix to correct the following scenario:
An agent can select a physical object that they do not own and have no rights to edit and stop it in place. It is useful to be able to select the object, but causing it to stop interferes with events like racing. Somebody in the stands can grab the leader’s vehicle and hold it there.

This sparked a debate on the issue having been fixed with the implementation of llSetStatus(STATUS_BLOCK_GRAB_OBJECT) having already achieve this, together with suggestion to revise it (if it requires implementation) to exclude land owners, so they might continue to stop and move unwanted physical objects rezzed on their land by others. This discussion took-up most of the latter half of the meeting.

  • The end of the meeting includes a short discussion on revamping the Linden trees which focus on ideas and requests more than actual work being planned.

† 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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #40 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kuroshima, July 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 3rd Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording 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):
  • They 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.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, October 3rd, simhosts on the SLS Main channel were restarted without any code update.
  • On Wednesday, October 4th, the RC channels will be similarly restarted without any change to the simulator version.
  • A new simulator RC (dubbed “Fall Colours”) is due to go to QA in week #41, and then to deployment in week #42 (commencing Monday, October 16th).

Viewer Updates

The Inventory Extensions RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581961, and issued on September 28th, was promoted to de facto release status on Monday, October 2nd, 2023.

The rest of the current viewers in the pipeline remain as:

  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

Potential for Games Controller Use

Further to recent meetings, Leviathan Linden gave the following update.

Just a quick update on the “game controllers input exposed to LSL” project before everyone starts teleporting around: (1) I was having trouble getting game controller events from SDL2 (Simple DirectMedia Layer) to the viewer, but finally figured out what was blocking them –> SDL2 will work for us. (2) I’m working on getting the data streamed from the veiwer to the simulator in a new message. (3) After that I need to shuttle the data to the relevant scripted objects (attachments and seats only, for now). The new script event for the data is already written. (4) I hope to get a test region up and a compatible viewer available for download tomorrow. If I manage it then I will announce on the Scripting channel on the SecondLife Discord server for anyone who wants to try it out.

Region Crossing Code Tests

There was a further round of region crossing tests led by Maestro and Monty Linden, this two using two pairs of regions apiece using different simulator configurations, and intended to test avatar / vehicle physical crossings. As we all know, avatars entering a region that is busy / active with other avatars, can have an impact on simulator performance – which although not as bad as it once was thanks to an earlier tranche of this work a few years ago, is still a problem. The aim of this work is to smooth things even further for both teleports and direct crossings.

In Brief

  • Rider Linden raised the question of changing the Second Life damage system, and its potential impact on combat and similar systems (potentially removing the the need for scripts in bullets, for example):
Right now damage is a property of a script… what would be the impact of making that a property of the prim [instead]? It would remain script accessible/settable I’m just changing where it is stored. The big drawback would be that right now it would appear you could have multiple scripts apply damage… you’d lose that capability. The damage change is just the one ambiguity that I need to resolve before I go forward with something larger. But I’m going to save most of that discussion for next week. … I just want it bumping around inside people’s skulls for a bit

So, if you are into combat in SL – attending next week’s meeting might be beneficial.

  • As a side-note to the above, this change would also potentially allow negative values, which basically heal the target.

† 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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #39 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Enchanted Library, July 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 26th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording 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):
  • They 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.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, September 26th, simhosts on the SLS Main channel were restarted without any code update.
  • On Wednesday, September 27th, the RC channels will be similarly restarted without any change to the simulator version.

Viewer Updates

No updates to the official SL viewers at the start of the week, leaving the current list as:

Region Crossing Code Tests

Maestro Linden is leading work on trying to improve avatar arrival performance during regions crossings. As we all know, avatars entering a region that is busy / active with other avatars, can have an impact on simulator performance – which although not as bad as it once was thanks to an earlier tranche of this work a few years ago, is still a problem. The aim of this work is to smooth things even further, initially for the case of teleports, but later with direct / vehicle crossings.

As a part of this work, two regions have been opened on Agni – Arrival Terminal 1 and Arrival Terminal 2, each with a different configuration for handling avatar teleport arrivals. These were used through the greater part of the meeting for qualitative and comparative testing with controlled (and monitored) group teleports from regions with the current teleport protocol and directly back and forth between the two, with LL gathering up the resultant logs for review.

Following the session, Maestro indicated that further testing may take place at the next SUG testing, and the two regions may be places adjacent to one another to allow for testing physical crossing / vehicle crossings between them.

In Brief

  • Leviathan Linden is continuing to work on game controller integration with SL, but outside of having some issues in getting some buttons to recognise / be recognised by SL when using the SDL2 API.
  • Rider Linden is now in the midst of “a rather large refactor that should modernise how the simulators handle HTTP connections (both internally and with the outside world.”
  • A brief, general discussion on LSL, the Mono bytecode interpreter and its ability to potentially allow the use of other languages (e.g. C#) on top of it by having it call native functions in the selected language.

† 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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #38 summary + MFA enforcement

Posted on by Inara Pey
Evergreen, July 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 19th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording 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):
  • They 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.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, September 19th, SLS Main channel was updated to simulator update 6113592855 (aka “Dog Days”), previously on the majority of the RC channels. This update includes:
    • The unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database).
    • A scripted ability to set CLICK_ACTION_IGNORE, allowing an object to be clicked-through to reach an object behind it – a flag supporting this is included in the Maintenance U RC viewer promoted to Release status in week #34.
    • PRIM_CLICK_ACTION is added to llSet/GetPrimParams so you can set the click action on prims in a linkset.
  • On Wednesday, September 20th, the RC channels will be restarted without any change to the simulator version.
  • Monday, September 18th saw AWS experience issues which also affected SL. These are believed to have been rectified.

Viewer Updates

No updates to the official SL viewers at the start of the week, leaving the current list as:

  • Release viewer, version 6.6.14.581101, promoted August 23.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

Note: the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

Viewer MFA Enforcement

As I noted in my summary of the Friday, September 1st, 2023 TPVD meeting, Linden Lab is moving to enforce MFA through the viewer for all users who have opted-in the the Multi-Factor Authentication process. 

This move has now been made, as announced in an official blog post for Tuesday, September 19th, 2023. But what does it mean? Well, essentially this:

  • All users who have opted-in the MFA will only be able to log-in to Second Life using a viewer with the necessary MFA support.
  • It does not mean all users must use the authentication process; MFA as a whole remains optional – but very advisable, given the added security it provides.
  • Should anyone who has opted-in toe MFA find they are unable to log-into SL via a viewer due to problems with the MFA process, they should file a support ticket to have their MFA status reset.

Please refer to the blog post noted above for additional information.

In Brief

This was another Solstice music event meeting, so outside of the above, nothing of consequence was discussed in terms of simulator / server updates, etc.

 

† 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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #37 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Shambles, July 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  September 12th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording 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):
  • They 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.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, September 12th, SLS Main channel was updated to simulator update 581292, previously on the majority of the RC channels.
  • On Wednesday, September 13th, the “Dog Days” update should be deployed across all RC channels. This update includes:
    • The unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database).
    • A scripted ability to set CLICK_ACTION_IGNORE, allowing an object to be clicked-through to reach an object behind it – a flag supporting this is included in the Maintenance U RC viewer promoted to Release status in week #34.
    • PRIM_CLICK_ACTION is added to llSet/GetPrimParams so you can set the click action on prims in a linkset.
    • It was noted that as LL has “changed some of the tools that we use for simulator builds … the version number is now longer”.

Viewer Updates

No updates to the official SL viewers at the start of the week, leaving the current list as:

  • Release viewer, version 6.6.14.581101, promoted August 23.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance W RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581670, September 11.
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.581684, September 8.
    • Inventory Extensions RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581692, September 8.
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
    • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581557, August 30.
  • Project viewers:

Note: the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

Potential for Improving Vehicle Control Options

Further to recent meetings, Leviathan Linden gave the following update.

Last week it was suggested (although I missed it, Signal later pointed it out to me) that instead of using a new specific library for detecting devices we should use SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) since it is already used by various 3rd party viewers for Linux support. So, I’ve gone ahead and starting walking that road, FYI. This will bring the official SL viewer closer in compliance to some 3rd party viewers and won’t add a new dependency.

This led to an interim agreement that the API could be analog_control, and a discussion on the control events it should recognise / support, how the data should be transmitted, etc. This conversation commenced during the last 20 minutes of the meeting and continued through until then end.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for:

  • A potential issue with llRezAtRoot generating unexpected results.
  • Rider Linden indicated he’d like to implement an extended rez function similar to BUG-233084 “Rez function with prim properties, primarily for projectiles”, “soon”.
  • a discussion on llkeyframedmotion. and whether or not an object using can reliably differentiate between “I stopped moving because I ran out of keyframes” and “I stopped moving because someone with edit perms selected me”, which broadened into a discussion on kfm objects.

† 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.