Category: Simulator User Group

2022 SUG meetings week #3 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
WQNC, January 2022 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 18th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary. Note this summary focuses on the key points of the meeting; where there is something to report, the video should be referred to should full details of the meeting need to be reviewed.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates and information.

  • Tuesday, January 18th saw the SLS Main channel updated to server release 567269, comprising a tools update previously deployed to the RC channels.
  • There is no planned deployment for the RC channels set for Wednesday, January 19th, and they will remain on server release
  • 567269.

In terms of the improvements wrought by the simulator updates, LL states that they have seen a considerable performance increase especially with respect to the number of scripts executed per frame, while Monty Linden added:

I’ve written up some release notes. Relevant points:
  • More script code executing may engage more throttles and drive external http services harder than previously.
  • SSL library updates move http-in/out away from sslv3, tls1.0, tls1.1.
  • This release does move the sims story forward a bit. We have seen http-out targets (llHTTPRequest) that only talk sslv3/tls1.0, for example.
  • Login is unchanged. Web properties have their own story.
In theory, some day, we’ll line up all our ingress and egress points and actually be able to tell you what’s going on there.

Available Viewers

This list reflects those viewers available via the first four links in the LL Viewer Resources section, below.

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.2.567427 – Mac Voice hotfix viewer, January 13 – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • The Jenever Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.5.2.566860, issued on December 17.
    • The Koaliang Maintenance 2 RC viewer, version 6.5.2.566879, issued on December 17.
    • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
  • Project viewers:
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
    • Performance Improvements project viewer version 6.5.2.566967, dated December 17.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

In Brief

  • Some are seeing an uptick in disconnects during teleports, prompting an extended discussion (full context in in the video, interwoven with a discussion on pivot points arising from the previous CCUG meeting).  In short:
    • Frustration has been voiced that Jiras have been raised in the past on specific TP issues and “nothing was fixed”.
    • Regardless, LL are still requesting reports with information – who, from, to, exact time – of teleports that fail in a specific way, filed in a timely manner so that the relevant server files can be reviewed for possible clues / causes.
    • It is the specific nature of the failures that is of particular interest to LL, with more than one user reporting them, as Monty Linden noted, also replying to the critique that because “Lindens are in California” (only partially true) “with tiny ping times”:
I want a handful of user events that match their idea of a *specific* type of TP failure and the data so that I can go trawling for insight. As for ping times, this absolutely does colour how lindens understanding networking issues. But I’m in Boston so have poor ping times as well. All TP/region crossing failures are not the same. I want to filter down on a single type – not the rainbow of failures I already know are present.
    • Logs attached to Jiras for these cases do not necessarily need be be captured using the official viewer.
  • The issue of Friends lists failing to load (see BUG-231680) should be improved / resolved following a (non-simulator) deploy due on Tuesday, January 18th.
  • There has been a noticeable uptick of avatars taking longer to rez / remaining as clouds over the last couple of weeks or so. Some have mistakenly seen this as a simulator issue – although assets come via the CDN. Jiras have been raised on this, and the Lab is looking into matters.

2022 SUG meeting week #2 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Florence, January 2022 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 11th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary. Note this summary focuses on the key points of the meeting; where there is something to report, the video should be referred to should full details of the meeting wish to be reviewed.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates and information.

  • The planned update to the SLS Main channel (comprising the simulator version deployed to the RC channels prior to the end-of-year break) has been pushed by to week #3. Instead, simhosts on the SLS channel were therefore restated without any deployment.
  • Wednesday, January 12th should see all simhosts on the RC channels updated to a new simulator release built – 566406 – using the updated toolset.

Available Viewers

There have been no updates to the current crop of official SL viewers, leaving them as follows:

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.1.566335, formerly the Cache+ 360 Capture viewer, dated December 7, promoted December 15 – No change
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • The Jenever Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.5.2.566860, issued on December 17.
    • The Koaliang Maintenance 2 RC viewer, version 6.5.2.566879, issued on December 17.
    • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Improvements project viewer version 6.5.2.566967, dated December 17.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

In Brief

  • Bug-225288 “llStopAnimation is stopping all animations on detach instead of only the one specified” has by an issue for more than three years, but user Lucia Nightfire has made an interesting discovery.
  • A core part of the meeting involved LSL / HTTP error returns – please refer to BUG-231657 and the video for details.
  • The second half of the meeting includes a discussion of the Map API and llRequestSimulatorData returning region grid coordinates, per BUG-231443. Again, please refer to the video for further information.
  • The last part of the meeting largely revolves around speculation / opinions on the “avatar expressiveness” feature said to be coming in 2022. However, as the Lab is not in a position to discuss this feature further, I’ll again leave it to the video to cover.

2022 SUG meeting week #1 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Drune Giger City, December 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 4th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary. Note this summary focuses on the key points of the meeting; where there is something to report, the video should be referred to should full details of the meeting wish to be reviewed.

Server Deployments

There are no planned server deployments for this week.

Week #2 should see the simulator currently deployed to the RC will by rolled to the Main SLS channel.

Available Viewers

This list reflects those viewers available via Linden Lab.

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.1.566335, formerly the Cache+ 360 Capture viewer, dated December 7, promoted December 15 – No change
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • The Jenever Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.5.2.566860, issued on December 17.
    • The Koaliang Maintenance 2 RC viewer, version 6.5.2.566879, issued on December 17.
    • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Improvements project viewer version 6.5.2.566967, dated December 17.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

In Brief

  • Questions were asked about the “avatar expressiveness” mentioned in the “2021 review” blog post issued by the Lab. Specifically:
    • How the system will work given the plethora of mesh heads available, the different brans (and perhaps even different styles within brands) being weighted differently / possibly making use of different bones / sliders.
    • How this will be handled without body tracking, in order to avoid head gestures / expressions being mis-matched with AO body animations.
    • Will it use a 3rd party facial morph system.

In response, Simon Linden would only note:

Dissecting that slightly, a) there is a camera involved and b) there are gestures and movement involved. You can probably guess / connect that a bit yourself, ’cause I can’t talk more about it … I don’t think you’ll get more info until it’s ready to go out – and it’s not at the present. It’s under development.

There is also the question of how many people actually use cameras with SL – or would be interested in doing so.

  • A lot of general chatter about what SL “needs” and “the metaverse”, please refer to the video.

2021 SUG meeting week #50 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hidden Bottle, October 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, December 14th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary. Note this summary focuses on the key points of the meeting; where there is something to report, the video should be referred to should full details of the meeting wish to be reviewed.

Server Deployments

See the server deployment thread for further updates.

  • On Tuesday, December 14th, all simulators on the SLS Main channel received a new simulator version 566406, which includes back-end support for the new IMs-to-e-mail options that go live on December 15th – see Lab announces change to e-mail preferences for Group notices).
  • On Wednesday, December 15th, the tools update simulator will be deployed to all remaining RC channels.

These deployments mark the end of planned simulator deployments for 2021. Monday, December 20th marks the start of the end-of-year No Change window.

The Main channel deployment / restart also saw a number of regions become inaccessible for an extended period (up or and possibly exceeding 3 hours), the latest to due so. These longer restarts are the result of LL still trying to get the concurrency – how many regions can be restarted in a pass – right.

Available Viewers

This list reflects those viewers available via Linden Lab.

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.0.565607, formerly the Maintenance RC and dated November 10, promoted November 15 – this viewer now contains a fix for the media issues caused by the Apple Notarisation viewer.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • The combined Simplified Cache and 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.5.1.566335, issued on December 7.
    • The Jenever Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.5.1.566306, issued on December 6.
    • The Koaliang Maintenance 2 RC viewer, version 6.5.1.565905, issued on December 6.
    • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Improvements project viewer updated to version 6.5.1.566443, dated December 8.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

In Brief

  • The SUG meeting on Tuesday December 21st, 2021 will be a party to mark the winter solstice. As such, this is liable to be my last SUG summary for 2021.
  • There has been a report of the viewer recording failing/timing out event polls for neighbouring regions, as seen from within a region.
    • This is something that has not apparently been reported to LL via Jira, and it is not clear if it is specific to a region.
    • The concern raised was that it might impact region crossings, but LL do not see why this should be so.
  • Map API:
    • The issue of “empty” land showing on the World Map was raised (i.e. just the terrain, no buildings, etc., despite the land being built-out). This is usually (but not exclusively) the result of a known map issue in rendering mesh objects, particularly if the mash structure is large, but has a very small prim root.
    • It has been reported that the World Map API (used to interrogate the Map and produce things like the web-based maps for SL) seems “happy” to return region name/location data for a “large number” of regions that no longer exists (search for them with the in-world Map, and you’ll get a “None Found” error.
The Lab’s experiment with using textures on “empty” Map tiles offers this compass.
    • As a side-note to this – and while revealed some time ago by Alexa Linden – Simon Linden noted the Lab has a proof-of-concept for replacing map tiles with textures, offered in the form of a compass rose visible on one part of the World Map. There are obviously some concerns over how such a capability might be used were it to be rolled out to users, so the idea appears to be to allow LL provide additional info on map tiles via “empty” spaces.

 

2021 SUG meeting week #49 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Paradiso, October 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, December 7th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary. Note this summary focuses on the key points of the meeting; where there is something to report, the video should be referred to should full details of the meeting wish to be reviewed.

Server Deployments

See the server deployment thread for further updates.

  • On Tuesday, December 7th, all simulators on the SLS Main channel were restarted to refresh them – no actual deployment was made.
  • On Wednesday, December 7th, two of the RC channels will receive a simulator update to allow for the upcoming change to off-line Group Notice receipt via e-mail. See: Lab announces change to e-mail preferences for Group notices for more).

Available Viewers

This list reflects those viewers available via Linden Lab.

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.0.565607, formerly the Maintenance RC and dated November 10, promoted November 15 – this viewer now contains a fix for the media issues caused by the Apple Notarisation viewer.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
    • 360 Snapshot RC viewer, version 6.5.0.564863, issued October 21.
    • Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.23.562623, dated September 17, issued September 20.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Improvements project viewer updated to version 6.4.24.565672 (dated November 17) November 22.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

Log-in Issues

As a result of a recent log-in server update, people experienced issues with scripted agent (bot) log-ins (see BUG-231530). and those with a double space in their user name. This updates should now have been rolled back, hopefully resolving the issues. Commenting on the situation, Mazidox Linden noted:

We’re updating the login hosts. We regularly deploy updates to most of Second Life’s service hosts. This one had some issues we weren’t able to find on Aditi [when testing the simulator code].

In addressing why the issue was allowed to “roll” for 24 hours, he added:

We needed the data that was being generated from the new login hosts.

libopenmetaverse Support Deprecation

Simon Linden had two items of news for those using libopenmetaverse for scripted agent operations:

  • Going forward, libopenmetaverse is no longer going to be supported, and will be replaced by libremetaverse.
  • Those using scripted agents should therefore switch to libremetaverse why building Python-driven bots.

LSL: llList2ListStrided

Whilst engaged in some LSL scripting work, Rider Linden encountered something which he is trying to determine how best to address:

I’ve been making heavy use of llList2ListStrided and I’ve noticed that in order to get something other than the first element in each stride you need to delete everything before the item you want. This leads to lots of calls that look like this:
llList2ListStrided(llDeleteSubList(src, 0, 0), 0, -1, 3)
Which is downright ugly. The question is would correcting the start parameter be the way to go or a new function (and perhaps throwing in a sort that lets you pick which column in the span to sort on).

Out of concern for content breakage with with way the function is currently used, the favour shown by those at the meeting was to have a new function that could be used going forward.

2021 SUG meeting week #48 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Rock, September 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 30th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary.Note this summary focuses on the key points of the meeting; where there is something to report, the video should be referred to should full details of the meeting wish to be reviewed.

Server Deployments

See the server deployment thread for further updates.

  • On Monday, November 29th / Tuesday, November 30th, all simulators on the SLS Main channel were restarted to allow for a hardware upgrade.
  • On Wednesday, December 1st:
    • The Le Tigre RC channel will be updated to the simulator version using the new toolset.
    • Pending a final QA decision, the remain RC channels may also receive a new simulator version.

Simhost Configuration

While the Lab is not prepared – yet – to discuss the simulator host configuration changes that are being made, we have been promised a blog post on the subject in the near future. However, in commenting on the work, Rider Linden stated:

Amazon offers a variety of hardware configurations. We’ve been switching from one that closely mirrored what we had in the colo[cation facilities, the Lab’s former dedicated server facilities] to a new one that fits our usage pattern better.

End-of-Year Deployments

  • There are potentially two more simulator deployment periods left for the year: December 7th / 8th, and potentially the 14th/15th, if anything has to be pushed back – although LL would prefer not to have that happen.
  • There should be restarts on the 21st / 22nd December for the holiday period, but no deployments.
  • The next scheduled restart / deployment period will then come on January 4th / 5th 2021.

Available Viewers

This list reflects those viewers available via Linden Lab.

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.0.565607, formerly the Maintenance RC and dated November 10, promoted November 15 – this viewer now contains a fix for the media issues caused by the Apple Notarisation viewer.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
    • 360 Snapshot RC viewer, version 6.5.0.564863, issued October 21.
    • Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.23.562623, dated September 17, issued September 20.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Improvements project viewer updated to version 6.4.24.565672 (dated November 17) November 22.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

In Brief

  • As many have noticed, avatar bakes have been taking noticeably longer when logging-in, with some also reporting changes of outfit. This looks to be a systemic issue.
  • Some have been reporting a log-in issue that manifests as a warning that the computer running the viewer may have an incorrectly set clock, exacerbated by the fact the suggested resolutions to the issue do not appear to correct it. However, LL believe the underpinning cause has been identified, and a fix should be deployed “soon”.