Category: Simulator User Group

WOD: Château Village (Flickr) – blog post

Deploys for Week #43

There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, October 20th.

On Wednesday, October 21st, all three RCs should receive the same new server maintenance package, which include server-side improvements for delivering group notice attachments, which is hoped will provide some improvements to issues of trying to open such attachments from the group notice notifications.

The update also includes some simulator crash fixes, and while not advertised in the release notes, should also include simulator-side code to prevent the uploading of “hacked” mesh content (e.g. mesh items which show a LI of 1 no matter what their actual complexity, or which spoof a creator’s name).

As usual, updates can be found in the server deployment thread.

SL Viewer

The Quick Preferences RC viewer was updated to version 3.8.6.305942 on October 19th, most likely bringing it up to parity with the current release viewer.

Commenting on the status of the current RC viewers during the open Source Developer’s meeting on Monday, October 19th and in relation to any possible viewer promotion in week #44, Oz Linden said, “The Quick Graphics viewer has too many bugs to promote; mostly minor, but there’s no reason to go forward with it yet. HTTP has a couple of significant bugs to fix. So if I had to bet on the next promotion I’d guess the Notifications viewer.”

Expect more news on viewers following the TPVD meeting on Friday, October 23rd.

Other Items

A question was asked during the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, October 20th about making script time for in-world objects in a parcel available to the parcel holder (e.g. an extension of the region-wide Top Scripts functionality available to region / estate owners / managers). The idea here being to help parcel owners better understand how in-world objects within their parcel might be impacting simulator resources (see this forum thread and SCR-60 as well).

Commenting on the idea, Simon Linden said:

Since we send it to the viewer already, you have access to the info … You can probably get some of that info by scanning but I can see it would be a lot easier to get that in a different format. One of the limits (I’m sure you all know) of LSL is it’s not good with large data sets, so I’m not sure how you can expose that info for a large number of items … so maybe the top 10 or 25 objects on a given parcel? I can totally see the need for that to manage land.

… HUDs and attachments add a twist to it … they would probably be lumped together with the AV as they are now. I wonder if it would be easy to add something like PARCEL_SCRIPT_TIME to llGetParcelDetials()? that doesn’t give you what you want, but is a higher level for finding the parcels with the most scripts.

Those looking for such a capability are advised to raise a JIRA feature request.

Hestium (Flickr) – October 2015 – blog post

SL Server Deployments Week 42

There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, October 13th. Also, the server maintenance package planned for deployment to the three RC channels in week #42 did not pass final testing, and the deployment has been postponed as of LL CoB on Tuesday, October 13th.

SL Viewer Updates

The Maintenance viewer, version 3.8.5.305531, was promoted to the de facto release viewer on Tuesday, October 13th. The viewer has over 90 fixes, improvements and feature requests – please refer to the release notes (link above) for details.

Group Notice Attachments

The server maintenance package postponed from deployment in week #42 comprises a partial fix for  group notice attachments failing to respond when clicked, forcing recipients to open the Group floater, search the Notices tab for the relevant notice and retrieve the attachment from there.

This problem most frequently occurs as a result of some of the data relating to the notification and the original notification users open to access the attachment being lost to the simulator after about an hour, and the fix in question is geared to correcting this. However, there can be other circumstances where the attachment fails to respond, which might be either server-side issues, or viewer issues.

“I’m pretty sure there’s a viewer issue too,” Simon Linden said, discussing the matter during the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, October 13th. “If you notice when you click on notice attachments, sometimes when it doesn’t work you see nothing at all; no UI feedback where that attachment shading changes or anything. I think in those cases the viewer is dropping the click and not doing anything at all, and it might work if it actually sent a request to the server.” He added that he hopes the RC deployment, once available, will at least improve matters.

Other Items

Accessing Crowded Regions

A question was asked at the Simulator group about whether repeated attempts to access a crowded region by repeatedly trying to cross to it from neighbouring region or constantly trying to teleport into the region, causes it any significant issues in terms of performance. There are already some HUDs on the marketplace which will automatically re-try teleports to a specific location, and the question was prompted by a feature request to Firestorm to make a similar capability within the viewer.

Simon Linden was understandably cautious in his response, pointing out that any attempts to move between regions will use up time and network traffic, but suggested that a retry system with a delay of around 5 seconds or so shouldn’t put any stress on the simulator (some of the available HUDs actually work on a faster retry cycle than this, so could be having more of an impact). It was also suggested – although not by a Linden –  that moving such a capability client-side might actually reduce a small load from the simulators when compared to using a scripted HUD.

This question prompted the idea of some kind of list managed queuing system for crowded regions, so that people attempting to reach it would be automatically teleported when there is room, and in the order they were added to the queue.

However, as was pointed out in the meeting, such an approach would require a considerable amount of work in terms of just managing the list (keeping track of who is on the list, who joins the list, who opts to log-out before a space becomes available, forcing an update to the entire list, removing people who are teleported from the list, and so on).  As such, Simon indicated he’d rather work on improving simulator performance to allow more avatars into a region, and have the viewer improved so it can better handle large numbers of avatars.

Special Events Regions

In a similar vein, there have been rumours of large events getting dedicated servers to handle the load more effectively. Commenting on this, Simon said, “We’ve talked about that, and I don’t know what might happen; but we’ve discussed the short-term need people have for regions or better performance. It’s now more in the product folks lap … they need to figure out how we would offer something like that.”

Temp Attach from Object Inventory

A question was asked at the meeting about whether anyone at the Lab was working on a means to allow a temporary attachment directly from an object’s inventory (contents). Simon noted that while no-one is currently working on this, it is on the Lab’s feature list, adding, “it’s just an idea; but the current attach process used by experiences is rez the thing, then attach. It would be better to just directly attach.”

It’ll be interesting to see if this comes about.

The Trace Too – blog post

Server Deployments, Week 41

A light week this week. As per the server deployment thread, there will be no scheduled deployments / restarts for the three RC channels during the week. The Main (SLS) channel will, however, receive the same server maintenance package deployed to the RCs in week #40.

SL Viewer Updates – Quick Graphics Viewer

The Quick Graphics viewer reached release candidate status on Friday, October 2nd with the release of version 3.8.5.305528. This is the view which provides the new Avatar Complexity options and the new graphics preset capabilities for setting, saving and restoring graphic settings for use in difference environments / circumstances.

One of the more visible changes within this RC for those who may have used the initial project releases of this viewer, but not the more recent iterations, is that the Advanced Graphics floater has undergone further changes, and is now presented as a two column floater, rather than the single huge floater seen in the first releases of the viewer.

In terms of the graphic presets as well, it should be noted that this RC update does not appear to resolve BUG-10398 “Graphics preset changes to None each time the Advanced Graphics floater is opened, even when no changes are made”.

For Avatar complexity, the RC update sees further tweaks to the default Complexity value you will see displayed in the Advanced Graphics floater, which is based on your system’s capabilities. The colours used for avatars which are “Jelly Babied” for exceeding your Complexity setting have also been further toned down so that they are not quite so glaring.

However, a number of Avatar complexity issues still appear to be unresolved with this release, and which appear to be related to avatars with very high attachment byte sizes (the 4th value displayed over avatar heads by the viewer when showing Avatar Complexity information):

• BUG-9962 – Avatars often permanently stuck as jelly babies even when Max complexity = No Limit
• BUG-10401 – Blocked avatars are always fully rendered when imposters are disabled & other odd new behaviour with blocked avatars
• BUG-10330 – Some avatars remain invisible until imposters are disabled.

Note: I’ve seen a couple of comments in some group IMs and elsewhere suggesting some people are under the impression this viewer should produce faster in-world rendering (presumably because of the”quick graphics” project title). This isn’t actually the case; however, and depending on variables outside of the Lab’s control, much improved rendering should be seen when using the project Azumarill viewer.

Server Deployments week 40

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

• On Tuesday, September 29th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the server maintenance package previously deployed in week #39 to all three RC channels, comprising internal fixes to improve inventory performance.
• On Wednesday, September 30th, the three RC channels all received the same server maintenance package, comprising:
  • A fix for Region Debug Console help text
  • A fix for a server crash issue.

Following the Tuesday restarts there were assorted reports of issues being encountered on various regions – teleport failures, external communications issues (e.g. IMs to e-mail forwards, scripted object e-mail failures, etc). These appeared to be related to possible capabilities (caps) failures on restarts. Further restarts appear to have cleared some – but not all – of the issues encountered.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday, September 29th, the mesh uploader RC viewer, version 3.8.4.305119, was promoted to be the de facto release viewer. This viewer comprises a modified mesh uploader to (optionally) improve debug output, perform name-based LOD association, and handle models with many materials. It allows models with more than 8 unique faces to be uploaded. At import, these models are automatically split into pieces so that each satisfy the current face limits for a volume.

Also on Tuesday, September 29th, the Quick Graphics project viewer updates to version 3.8.4.305380, with further fixes for issues occurring with the Avatar Complexity options (such as avatars failing to render correctly after having been previously “Jelly Babied”). However, there still appears to be some issues which may require further updates (e.g. BUG-9962) before this viewer progresses to RC status.

Other Items

FmodEx Update

The Lab has received a contribution for FmodEx which should fix the “chirp” windows 10 users hear when launching the viewer.  This requires testing and a license update for the Lab to use, but should hopefully be making its way into a viewer update at some point.

STORM-2121

Cinder Roxley identified an odd little bug recently: if an object is set for sale at L$0 from the Object Profile floater, it will revert to a minimum price of L$1.00, rather than leaving it at L$0, as is the case when setting the price via the Build floater.

It’s not clear how long the bug has been around, but if it has been for a while, it hasn’t caused that much of an inconvenience – possibly because price may well price via the Build floater. Cinder has already contributed a fix for the issue – see STORM-2121 – and it is unlikely to encounter issues in being incorporated in a future Snowstorm viewer.