Category: Simulator User Group

SL project updates 16 / 30: server, TPVD, Bento

Posted on by Inara Pey

Hestium; Inara Pey, July 2016, on Flickr Hestium – blog post

Some of the notes in this update are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, July 29th. The video of that meeting is embedded at the end of this update. My thanks as always to North for recording and providing it.

Server Deployments – Recap

  • There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, July 26th.
  • A new server maintenance package was deployed to all three RC channels on Thursday, July 27th, which comprised “minor internal logging changes”

It’s liable that this update will be promoted to the Main (SLS) channel in week #31 (commencing Monday, August 1st). However, we’re liable to be in a quiescent period, sever-wise for a while, doubtless in part due to it being vacation season.

SL Viewer

The Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 4.0.7.318189 on Thursday July 28th. This release includes an update to prevent the viewer using the deleted LLEventPollImpl upon rapid teleports. This is now the most likely candidate for promotion to release status, assuming no significant issues are found with this latest RC.

Thursday, July 28th also saw the VLC Media Plugin viewer achieve Release Candidate status with the release of version 4.1.1.318152. This viewer replaces the QuickTime media plugin for the Windows version of the viewer with one based on LibVLC. The RC release brings with it several additional fixes:

  • MAINT-6481 [Win LibVLC] MOAP mp4 mp3 playback missing video controls
  • MAINT-6502 [Win LibVLC] some .mov files play in LibVLC windows viewer
  • MAINT-6503 [Win LibVLC] some media file types prompt to download instead of play
  • MAINT-6527 [Win LibVLC] viewer plays MOAP video at maximum volume 50m away
  • MAINT-6577 [Win LibVLC] No sound in MOAP or browser video
  • MAINT-6578 [Win/Linux LibVLC] When media is enabled, many other textures in the scene get flipped upside down.

This viewer current has “very, very very” few users on it, thanks to the focus on the Maintenance viewer RC, although this should now start to change. It has apparently worked well as a project viewer, and would seem likely for promotion some time after the Maintenance RC and ahead of anything else which has yet to make it to RC status.

All other viewer remain unchanged thus far in the week:

  • Current Release version: 4.0.6.315555 (dated May 23rd), promoted July 5th – formerly the Inventory Message RC viewer
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions), version 5.0.0.317597, dated July 14th – incorporation of final skeleton and slider updates from the test viewer
    • Visual Outfit Browser viewer, version 4.0.6.316422, dated July 1st – ability to preview images of outfits in the Appearance floater – a further update to this viewer (possibly an RC release) had been expected, but it is currently awaiting a further fix for a bug discovered by the Lab’s QA team
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847 dated May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Upcoming Viewers

There is no set time frame for this, but the following viewers should have project version appearing in the future:

  • The 64-bit Windows and Mac versions of the viewer. There is no working version of this viewer at present, and while the developers working on it are keen to see it running, it does not share the same priority as various other viewer-related activities at this point in time, delaying it from reaching project viewer status – something which will change once wthe viewer does get a project release
  • A further Maintenance viewer with updates and fixes
  • The new Voice viewer update, which is part of a series of changes being made the voice service by both the Lab and Vivox (see my last TPVD report). This viewer should be backward compatible on Mac and Windows, allowing TPVs to adopt it, and will include a new codec which should improve Voice quality for those using the update. This update may include some additional code for monitoring connections issues and failures, so the Lab can gather more informed statistics on these issues, although determining root causes for them is difficult, given the complexities of the connections between viewer, simulator and voice servers.

Project Bento

Vir is still on holiday, and will return on August 4th. Until then, the project is on a holding pattern, with time being taken to test the new skeleton updates and for AvaStar and MayaStar to complete their updates.

A further viewer update is expected, but not until after Vir has returned.  A bug has been filed against jaw bone issues resulting from the most recent set of updates (see BUG-37546), and general feedback on the new skeleton continues to be made via the forum thread. Expect in-depth reports to resume from week #31.

Other Items

Presenting Inventory in the Viewer

During the July 29th TPV developer meeting, Oz indicated that if any developers who have ideas for presenting inventory in a more usable, user-friendly manner within the viewer, the Lab would be “more than happy to take a look at it”, acknowledging that the current method of presentation isn’t the most user-friendly.

SL project updates 16 29/2: viewer, Bento update 20 with audio

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Vordun: European Masters
The Vordun: a new Experience in presenting art in Second Life – blog post

Server Deployment – Recap

  • On Tuesday, July 19th the server maintenance package previously deployed to all three RC was rolled-out to the Main (SLS) channel,described as “minor internal changes”. One of these sees worn scripts capped at a count of 2500. Attempts to add attachments which take an avatar over this limit should result in the attachments failing to wear
  • There  no deployment and no scheduled restart for the RC channels on Wednesday, July 20th, so the entire grid is running  on the same simulator release

SL Viewer

The Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 4.0.7.317689 on July 21st, which includes the following additional fixes:

  • MAINT-6216 avatars are sometimes invisible
  • MAINT-6448 PERMISSION_DEBIT notification should default to Deny (my emphasis)
  • MAINT-6534 [MAINT-RC] Resetting scripts via the build menu no longer works on many scripted objects unless making the scripts visible in the contents tab of the objects first
  • STORM-2133 VOICE-36 prevents proper shut-down of connector.
The old debit notification (left) gave equal emphasis to accepting / denying the request to access account balances. The update to the Maintenance RC viewer new focus attention on denying a request for account access as the default option.
The old debit notification (left) gave equal emphasis to accepting / denying the request to access account balances. The update to the Maintenance RC viewer new focus attention on denying a request for account access as the default option.

Project Bento

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, July 21st at 13:00 SLT at the the Hippotropolis Campfire Circle . For details on the meeting agenda, please refer to the Bento User Group wiki page.

Note that this meeting was an “informal” meeting as project development lead Vir Linden is on vacation, as is Dan Linden, another of the devs who has been working on Bento. On-hand for the meeting were Troy, Coyot and Kyle Linden. These notes are not intended to offer a full transcript of the meeting, but rather covers the key topics of the discussion. Extraneous sounds in the audio are the result of someone leaving their microphone open during the meeting.

Internal Bento Presentation at the Lab

There’s an “SL summit” taking place in week #30 (commencing Monday, July 25th) within the Lab, at which Bento will again be presented. Troy Linden will be doing this, using screen shots and information on the recent work, and updating LL staff on the project’s process and on the ongoing collaboration between the Lab and Bento content creators.

Final Skeleton and Issues / Testing

With the release of the latest project viewer (version 5.0.0.317597 at the time of writing), the Lab hopes the Bento skeleton is now finalised. However, there are still a range of issues which are still being seen, some of which may be related to the most recent updates to the skeleton and sliders, others of which relate to earlier versions of the skeleton. There is also a further level of confusion due the AvaStar having to make a series of changes to their tool set, and these also being in a state of flux (version 2.0.13 (Alpha 4) was, at the time of writing the most up-to-date version, which should handle the new updates, although the .BVH animations handling may still be awaiting update). All of this means that most creators have yet to really experiment and test the latest updates.

Troy’s suggestion is that as 5.0.0.317597 does contain the must recent version of the skeleton and sliders, that creators work with models built with this skeleton, and report issues directly against it, to help ensure the Lab is correctly catching everything.

Avatar Reset / Reset Skeleton Option

In theory, removing an avatar mesh using custom joint offsets should reset the underlying avatar. However, this isn’t always the case.

For example, if the animations running on the mesh contain translations, and the last frame of those animations doesn’t move the bones back into their starting position, then an automatic reset of the avatar won’t occur. It is also possible that the update message may not be received by other viewers (e.g. due to Interest List limitations). These problems (which actually pre-date Bento) is why the Reset Skeleton option was added to the Bento viewer.

This prompted a discussion on the impact of sliders / bone rotations / translations and the order in which shapes / joint positions / animations are applied to an avatar, which in testing appear to be at odds with the order of application provided by Vir. Understanding what exactly is going on is again made a little harder, as it is believed there are still some disconnects between updates to the SL skeleton rig and updates made to Avastar.

Medue Simoni, Teager and Mel Vanbeeck discuss sliders, bone rotations / translations, and their impact on an avatar

Medhue Teager and Mel discuss the order in which joint offsets, shape offsets and sliders are applied to an avatar, in reference to Vir’s forum post on the matter

Expect further discussion on this following additional testing.

Brief Summary of  Additional Observations

Avatar Height: his has been the topic of conversation for the last few meetings. In particular see my Bento update #19 for details of the current issues arising from the most recent changes in how an avatar’s position relative to the ground is calculated / re-calculated by the viewer.

Vir has suggested that, as a part of investigations, people try to avoid changing the position of any of the bones used in the position calculation via an animation, and instead change the rotation of the bone(s) to achieve the desired result. Initial feedback voice at this meeting (via chat) is that this many not be an ideal solution.

Speech Gestures: A long-standing aspect of Second Life is that speech gestures (along with gesture in general) are not automatically attached / detached with an avatar. This makes sense in that it allows people to choose the gestures they wish to run with an avatar.

However, with Bento, it is possible that dedicated gestures are required (e.g. wing folding gestures, speech gestures that are specific to an avatar form, etc.). As the gestures are not auto-attached / detached this leaves the potential for users experiencing apparent “issues” (e.g. their avatar seems to behave oddly as something like a speech gesture fail to play, or there is a conflict with gestures as the user has multiple gestures trying to do the same thing running simultaneously, etc.).  It’s not clear what (if anything) might be done to address this.

Why Bento is Taking so “Long”

There have been some complaints in forum threads and non-Bento user group meetings about the length of time Bento is taking to mature. However, as Troy re-iterated in the meeting, a lot of this is both down to the fact that Bento needs to serve a very wide range of use-cases, not all of which are necessarily compatible with one another (e.g. supporting both human and non-human avatars).

Additionally, and in order to be as broadly useful as possible, the project requires an iterative development process between both the Lab and the expertise of in-world content creators in order to ensure Bento is as useful a product as possible when officially launched. This iterative process inevitably means the project will take time to fully mature.

Troy and Coyot Linden discuss the overall approach to Bento

SL project updates 16 29/1: server / viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

Hermoupolis Village; Inara Pey, July 2016, on Flickr Hermoupolis Village – blog post

Server Deployments

On Tuesday, July 19th the server maintenance package previously deployed to all three RC was rolled-out to the Main (SLS) channel,described as “minor internal changes”. One of these sees worn scripts capped at a count of 2500. Attempts to add attachments which take an avatar over this limit should result in the attachments failing to wear.

Immediately following this deployment, there were some reports of local caps failures following region restarts. However, most of these now appear to have been corrected.

There  no deployment and no scheduled restart for the RC channels planned for Wednesday, July 20th, so the entire grid should remain on the same simulator release through until Wednesday, July 27th, when a new RC deployment is due.

Viewer Updates

There have been no further viewer updates since my last SL project update, leaving the list as:

  • Current Release version: 4.0.6.315555 (dated May 23rd), promoted July 5th – formerly the Inventory Message RC viewer download page, release notes
  • RC viewer:
    • Maintenance RC viewer, version 4.0.7.317394, dated  on July 8th – fixes and updates.
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions), version 5.0.0.317597, dated July 14th – incorporation of final skeleton and slider updates from the test viewer  (download and release notes)
    • Visual Outfit Browser viewer, version 4.0.6.316422, dated July 1st – ability to preview images of outfits in the Appearance floater
    • Project VLC Media Plugin Viewer, version 4.0.6.316258, dated June 15th – replaces the QuickTime media plugin for the Windows viewer with one based on LibVLC
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847 dated May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

SL Project updates 16 28/1: Server, viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Unknown Theme Park - blog post
The Unknown Theme Park – blog post

Server Deployment

There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, July 12th.

Wednesday July 13th saw a new server maintenance package deployed to all three RC channels comprising “minor internal changes”. One of these sees worn scripts capped at a count of 2500. Attempts to add attachments which take an avatar over this limit should result in the attachments failing to wear.

SL Viewer

The Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 4.0.7.317394 on Friday July 8th, following a merge with the current release viewer code.

The Oculus Rift project viewer was withdrawn on July 6th, and development work with the headset has been suspended for Second Life – see my update from last week for more.

This leaves the rest of the current official viewer as follows:

  • Current Release version: 4.0.6.315555 (dated May 23), promoted July 5 – formerly the Inventory Message RC viewer download page, release notes
  • Project viewers:
    • Visual Outfit Browser viewer, version 4.0.6.316422, dated July 1st – ability to preview images of outfits in the Appearance floater
    • Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions), version 5.0.0.317134, dated June 30th
    • Project VLC Media Plugin Viewer, version 4.0.6.316258, dated June 15th – replaces the QuickTime media plugin for the Windows viewer with one based on LibVLC
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847 dated May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

 

SL Project updates 16 27/1: Server, viewer, Oculus Rift

Posted on by Inara Pey

Legacy Ridge; Inara Pey, July 2016, on Flickr Legacy Ridge – blog post

Server Deployment

Despite the holiday in the US for July 4th (which has previously pushed server deployments back 24 hours), the Main (SLS) deployment did in fact take place on Tuesday, July 5th. This was the server maintenance package previously deployed to the three RC channels in week #26, comprising the following fixes:

  • BUG-11836  Increase max animation size – animation files up to  250Kb can now be uploaded
  • BUG-6035 (non-public) LSL email registration (for receiving email from outside the region) can break without automatic recovery.

There was no planned RC deployment on Wednesday, July 6th.

SL Viewer

As expected, the Inventory Message viewer, version 4.0.6.315555 (dated May 23rd) was promoted to the de facto release viewer on Tuesday, July 5th. This viewer sees the removal of deprecated and unused UDP inventory messaging mechanisms from the viewer. Pending its adoption by third-party viewers, it will also eventually see the removal of server-side support for these messages, most likely towards the end of 2016.

Currently, this leaves the official viewer line-up, RC and project, as follows:

  • Maintenance RC viewer, version 4.0.6.316883, dated June 24th –bug  fixes and updates
  • Project viewers:
    • Visual Outfit Browser project viewer, version 4.0.6.316422, dated July 1st – ability to preview images of outfits in the Appearance floater. Expected to be updated to release candidate status soon
    • Oculus Rift project viewer, version 4.1.0.317313, dated July 1st – Oculus Rift DK2 + CV-1 support. However, this update appears to have significant issues, see below for more
    • Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions) viewer, version 5.0.0.317134, dated June 30th
    • Project VLC Media Plugin viewer, version 4.0.6.316258, dated June 15th – replaces the QuickTime media plugin for the Windows version of the viewer with one based on LibVLC
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847 dated May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Oculus Rift Project viewer 4.1.0.317313

There appear to be significant issues with this project viewer, which is intended to support both the DK-2 and CV-1 versions of the Oculus Rift headset. For further information, please refer to the following links:

 

SL Project Updates 16 25/2: server, viewer, animation files

Posted on by Inara Pey

Hell's Crossing; Inara Pey, June 2016, on Flickr Hell’s Crossing – blog post

Server Deployments – Recap

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

  • There was not deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, June 21st.
  • On Wednesday, June 20th, the three RC channels were updated with the same new server maintenance package, comprising  minor internal changes and Tool Tip/Constant text fixes.

The RC update includes a fix for BUG-18251, and a further fix for the Bento attachment issue documented in BUG-10979, which doesn’t change Bento models or how avatars are rendered by the viewer.

SL Viewer

The Maintenance RC viewer updated on Friday, June 24th to version 4.0.6.316883.

The remaining official viewers were not updated during the week, leaving them as follows:

    • Current Release version: 4.0.5.315117 (dated May 11), May 18 – formerly the Quick Graphics RC viewer
    • Inventory Message RC viewer, version 4.0.6.315555, dated May 23rd – removal of deprecated and unused UDP inventory messaging mechanisms from the viewer
    • Project viewers:
      • Project VLC Media Plugin viewer, version 4.0.6.316258, dated June 15th – replaces the QuickTime media plugin for the Windows viewer with one based on LibVLC
      • Visual Outfit Browser viewer, version 4.0.6.316123, dated June 6th – ability to preview images of outfits in the Appearance floater
      • Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions), version 5.0.0.316366, dated June 10th – bug fixes
    • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847 dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Larger Animation File Sizes

There has been a long-standing request to increase the file size for animations, a request which has been enhanced by the development within Bento, where there is now a far larger number of bones to be pushed around (see BUG-11836).

While the Lab had been open to this idea, it looked as if any change would be deferred until after the back-end services had been updated to deliver animation assets via the Content Delivery Network (CDN), which at the time of writing is used to deliver meshes and textures to the viewer.

However, the Lab has now decided to bring this change forward, rather than wait for the move to the CDN. As this is a server-side update, it is currently due to be in the Release Candidate channel updates for Wednesday, June 29th (from Caleb Linden, talking at the Server Beta User Group meeting on Thursday, June 23rd). This will see the animation file size limit raised from 120Kb to 250Kb.

One thing to bear in mind however, is that until animations are moved to CDN delivery (where they should enjoy somewhat faster delivery to your viewer on a first-time load), they will be delivered to your viewer via UDP, and the larger file size, as it comes into use, will probably mean a slightly longer delay before animations kick-in while they are being downloaded. Obviously, once caches locally, this should be an issue (unless you clear cache).

Vir Linden discussed this change at the Bento Project meeting, and I’m including the audio extract from that meeting below.