Category: TPVD / Open Source User Group

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, August 7th, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.

SL Viewer News

[0:08-5:00]

The Tools Update 2 viewer updated to version 6.4.6.545962 on August 4th.

The rest of the official viewer pipelines remain as follows:

• Current release viewer version 6.4.4.543157, dated June 11th, promoted June 23rd, formerly the CEF RC viewer – ROLL BACK.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • Mesh uploader RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544027, July 27.
  • Arrack Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544465, July 6.
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544028, June 30.
• Project viewers:
  • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• A further version of the Tools Update 2 viewer is anticipated for week #33 (commencing Monday, August 10th). This may appear as the de facto release viewer version.
• Currently, the next viewer in line for promotion after the Tools Update 2 viewer is likely to be the current Arrack Maintenance viewer.
  • A further RC update to Arrack may be issued early in week #33; however, if the Tools Update 2 viewer is promoted to release status, this viewer may be held over pending a merge with the Tools Update 2 viewer code base.
• Love Me Render (LMR) continue to be held as the graphics team work on various rendering issues.
  • There are apparently around 4 remaining open issues, with two more currently being worked on.
  • Of the open issues, all are performance related. Some of these may need further triage.
  • The issue of Linden Water continuing to give particularly degraded performance on EEP viewer is still being investigated by both LL and TPVs developers, but no potential fix identified as yet. There appears to be some combination of factors causing this (e.g. vertex buffer object (VBO) memory thrashing potentially being one).

In Brief

• [10:50-13:46] During a text-based call for volumetric clouds from a developer, Ptolemy Linden pointed out an early feature for EEP was to have been atmospheric scattering that got dropped at the time and some of this work might potentially be “simpler” to implement than volumetric clouds – not that his comment means either will be forthcoming.
  • Crepuscular rays (“god rays”) were one aspect of this work, but had to be dropped as they  proved too performance intensive at the time. Two common means for generating “god rays” are via adding geometry to a scene, another is via ray casting and shadow map sampling – both of these can be computationally intensive.
• The latter half of the meeting is dominated by a user-led discussion on relative performance, what constitutes as a viable demonstration of average performance (e.g. a lone avatar frolicking in a region with all the viewer’s upper-end graphics capabilities enabled, vs trying to do the same with even a moderate number of avatars also in the region, etc). As this was conducted in chat, you can catch it in the video, below.

 

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, July 24th, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.

SL Viewer News

[0:00-3:47]

The promotion of the Tools Update RC viewer to de facto release status didn’t go as intended, resulting in the promotion being rolled back to viewer version 6.4.4.543157, dated June 11th, promoted June 23rd, formerly the CEF RC viewer. In addition, a further version of the Tools Update viewer was issued in RC form.

The roll-back was due to the Tools Update viewer causing incoming new users to crash on arrival at the welcome islands. Presumably, the arrival of a second Tools Update RC viewer is to allow comparative testing between the two versions in an attempt to understand what is happening, the Tools Update 2 viewer having some form of internal differences to the Tool Update viewer.

There are reports that the Tools Update viewer also has a deadlock issue associated with it – see BUG-229110.

In the interim, the recommendation is for TPVs not to release version based on or incorporating the Tools Update viewer code.

Therefore, this leaves the current viewer pipelines as follows:

• Current Release viewer version  6.4.3.543157, dated June 11th, promoted June 23rd, formerly the CEF RC viewer – ROLL BACK
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Tools Update 2 RC viewer, version 6.4.6.545538, July 24.
  • Tools Update RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544639, July 17 – ROLL BACK TO RC STATUS.
  • Arrack Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544465, July 6.
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544028, June 30.
• Project viewers:
  • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
  • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.4.543141, June 11.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The “big push” is now on getting the Love Me Render (LMR) viewer promoted to release status. There are currently just “a few” open issues with the viewer, and the hope is these can be closed and the viewer cleared by QA for promotion “soon”. This is the viewer that includes several EEP-released fixes for things like HUD issues, specularity, etc.
• The Legacy Profiles viewer has had some back-end web integration issues that have prevented it from progressing to RC status as had been hoped at the last meeting.
• A further Maintenance RC viewer is close to being ready for issuing.

In Brief

• [9:36-19:33] EEP issues:
  • People continue to report noticeable performance degradations with running EEP enabled viewers. The current work-round is for users to disable Linden Water rendering (CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-7), which appears to work even when Linden Water is totally occluded.
  • This is a recognised problem, and is being actively investigated. However, there may not be a single fix that resolves all performance issues, so this work may not delay the promotion of the LMR viewer, bu could end up being addressed as one or more “future fixes”.
  • There are also reports of increased sudden viewer freezes / stalls within EEP enabled viewers. Again, LL is aware of such reports and is investigating them.
  • In addition, there continue to be major questions as to the real value of EEP when compared to issues such as the overall impact on people having to remodel custom environments, ease-of-use within the tools, performance hits, etc.
  • Firestorm’s preview release of EEP has already resulted in considerable negative feedback even amongst a limited subset of users; there are concerns that when released, it could result an large-scale user backlash.
• [20:54-24:18] Increasing the official viewer’s texture memory allowance: currently, the official viewer is pegged at using 512Mb of memory for texture handling, which can result in performance hits due to texture switching issues.  This is on a list of changes LL “would like to get to” – although Kitty Barnett has offered LL a code patch (already used by some TPVs, and baed on Runitai Linden’s own code) to help.
• Reminders:
  • The fix for off-line inventory offers failing is now grid-wide. This is still awaiting an update in the official viewers, but TPVs capable of using the capability can now “go ahead and use it.”
  • Those wishing to test how regions running on AWS servers can do so on Aditi, the beta grid, as follows:
    • Regions Morris and Ahern (and possibly now Dore and Bonifacio, although this hasn’t been clarified).
    • The majority of the Blake Sea regions – see: Blake Sea in the cloud on ADITI.

 

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, July 10th, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.

SL Viewer News

[0:00-3:10]

• On Monday, July 6th, the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer, updated to version 6.4.5.544465.
• On Tuesday, July 7th, the Tools Update RC viewer updated to version 6.4.5.544474.

The rest of the current official viewer pipelines are as follows:

• Current Release viewer version 6.4.3.543157, dated June 11, promoted June 23, formerly the CEF RC viewer – No Change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.5.544028, June 30.
• Project viewers:
  • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30.
  • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.4.543141, June 11.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• Love Me Render (LMR) viewer: work is continuing to try to address rendering fixes – notably those for issues with EEP. As this work is taking longer than anticipated to complete, this viewer has been pushed down the list iin terms of promotion.
• The Tools Update viewer is apparently undergoing regression testing with Bakes on Mesh.
• This means that week #29 (commencing Monday, July 13th) will likely see the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer promoted to de facto release status.
• Both the Legacy Profiles Project Viewer and the Mesh Uploader Project Viewer are “close” to being promoted to release candidate (RC) status, although the latter may await the incorporation of an additional patch from Firestorm developer Beq Janus.

In Brief

• Media issues:
  • [3:50-4:48] BUG-229036 “Parcel media cannot be played if Media auto-play is set to No” – this is said to be specific to the CEF release viewer, and a fix has cleared QA testing, and may make it into the Arrack Maintenance RC, or if not will be in the Maintenance RC viewer to follow it.
  • [8:11-8:26] BUG-22838 “Media on a prim – loops when it should not” – is still awaiting attention, but will be added to the Maintenance queue for testing repos.
• [5:39-7:20] SL Mobile app:
  • It’s believed the current limited testing of the iOS version of app is drawing to a close, and work is moving forward on getting an updated version ready for a broader round of testing.
  • The Android version is still “some way behind” iOS development, and there is currently nothing available for initial testing.
• [11:09-12:01] Apple OpenGL / ARM CPU announcement: LL are still investigating options for moving away from OpenGL, and awaiting further news from Apple on their plan to move to ARM CPUs for systems. However, LL is still planning on providing continued support for Mac users.

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, June 26th, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.

SL Viewer News

[0:00-4:27]

• On Tuesday, June 23rd, the release viewer updated to version 6.4.3.543157, dated June 11th, formerly the CEF RC viewer.
• On Wednesday, June 24th, the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer, 6.4.5.544024, was issued. This viewer uses Viewer Manager 2.0.538279.
• On Thursday, June 25th, the Tools Update RC viewer updated to version 6.4.5.544097. This viewer is built using VS 2017 / a recent version of Xcode, and Boost.Fiber. It contains no user-facing changes.

The rest of the current official viewer pipelines are as follows:

• Release Candidate viewers:
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.4.543142, June 3.
• Project viewers:
  • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.4.543141, June 11.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The CEF viewer supports live streaming into Second Life by You Tube and Facebook. Other services may also work, but further bug fixes may be required for them to work smoothly.
• The Love Me Render (LMR) RC viewer should be the next viewer in-line for promotion, mostly likely in week #28, however, this is dependent on it getting some remaining priority fixes related to EEP.
  • These fixes include the reported specularity issues and now include the reported HUD issues (BUG-225784).
• The Legacy Profiles Project Viewer had been awaiting a web update which may have gone through. If so, and it correctly addresses the issue, then it is likely the viewer will go to RC status.
• The Copy / Paste Project Viewer also shouldn’t be “too far” from an RC update.

Simulator News

[4:42-5:35]

• A new simulator version that includes a fix for the failure to deliver inventory offers to a user who is off-line is available for testing by TPVs.
• Viewer developers wishing to test the updates can do so on regions Preflight3, Preflight4 and Preflight7.

Texture Caching, HTTP and General Viewer Caching

[6:05-9:51]

• Work had been in progress to update texture caching and HTTP2 (the TCO viewer. That viewer has been split between the texture caching work and the HTTP2 work, so it has effectively become two viewers in development.
  • The HTTP2 viewer will likely remain on hold until after the Uplift project work is complete.
  • It is not currently clear when work on the texture caching (TCO) viewer will resume.
• In terms of revising viewer caching as a whole, this is liable to be a fairly large project.
  • First item of business will be to completely replace VFS caching (the system used to cache information on in-world objects) with a new, more performant format.
  • Once this has been done, other aspects of caching with the viewer will be looked at.
• Inventory caching is another area of work that may be looked at in the future.

In Brief

• [9:36-12:02] Reports of low frame rates in EEP-enabled viewers continue, with the act of disabling Linden Water rendering (CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-7) continuing to be used as a temporary means of improving things.  LL are continuing to investigate this, but at this point in time, the thinking is there may not be a single fix, so these investigations may not hold up the release of the LMR viewer.
  • Currently, there remains a lot of dissatisfaction about EEP in terms of perceived benefits compared to things such as rendering changes, ease-of-use, performance hits (per above),  etc.
  • The current Firestorm preview EEP viewer has already generated a lot of negative feedback from the preview users, and there are concerns that any Firestorm release will generate a large-scale backlash against EEP.
• [21:15-22:15] In response to a question it was reiterated that Vulkan is being given serious consideration as the rendering API to replace OpenGL, given Apple’s intent to deprecate the latter.
  • One potential issue is that a lot of older PCs used with SL do not have support for Vulkan.
  • To assist in determining how big an issue this might be, the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer includes logging code to detect Vulkan support within client systems.
• [22:45-26:07] the announcement by Apple that they plan to switch away from using Intel CPUs to their own ARM-based CPUs starting in 2020 was discussed. LL will be looking into this more once they get some dev kits from Apple.

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, June 12th, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.

This was another short meeting!

SL Viewer News

[0:10-2:45]

• The CEF Update RC viewer updated to version 6.4.3.543157 on June 11th.

The remainder of the official views currently in progress are as follows:

• Current Release viewer version 6.4.3.542964, dated May 29th, promoted June 2nd, formerly the FMOD Studio RC viewer – No Change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Tools Update RC viewer, version 6.4.4.543148, June 5 – this viewer is built using VS 2017 / a recent version of Xcode, and Boost.Fiber. It contains no user-facing changes.
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.4.543142, June 3.
• Project viewers:
  • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.3.542535, June 3.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The Love Me Render (LMR) viewer is the next in line to be promoted. This may include a number of high-priority EEP fixes as well, which means the promotion is currently being held until these fixes can be merged into the viewer.
  • These EEP fixes do not appear to include BUG-225784 “[EEP] BUG-225446 regression – HUDs are again affected by environment setting” is also awaiting the Lab.
• It’s currently not clear what viewer is liable to be promoted after LMR.
• A further Maintenance RC is in preparation.
• Both the Mesh uploader and Copy  / Paste project viewers may be in a position to be promoted to RC status in their next updates.
• The Legacy Profile project viewer still awaits a back-end web change.

In Brief

• [11:49-20:42], including text chat] A further bug on the EEP list is BUG-226772 “[EEP] Full bright objects are not affected by fog”.
  • This was an issue common to the official viewer pre-EEP although Firestorm had a fix that is regressed by EEP.
  • As an alternative to a rendering fix, a request has been made to implements a viewer-side option to disable full bright should a user encounter the issue.  No statement from LL on implementing this idea  – or not.

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, May 29, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.

This was a very short meeting!

SL Viewer News

[0:00-5:10]

• The CEF Update RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542757, released on Wednesday, May 27th (with release notes!). This builds on the CEF “Special”; it has additional codec, improvements for streaming into SL, and a major update to the Chrome Embedded Framework.
• The FMOD RC viewer updated to version 6.4.3.542964 on Friday, May 29th.

The remainder of the official views currently in progress are as follows:

• Current Release version 6.4.1.540593, dated April 27th, promoted May 4th. Formerly the Zirbenz Maintenance RC viewer.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542484, May 19th.
• Project viewers:
  • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.2.541645, May 15th.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• Currently, it appears that the FMOD Studio RC viewer will be the next to be promoted to de facto release status in week #23 (commencing Monday, June 1st).
• The Love Me Render RC viewer is also close to being ready for promotion.
• There are some priority graphics fixes required for EEP, but these have yet to be merged into a viewer pipeline. These may be added to the Love Me Render viewer or may go to the next Maintenance RC viewer.
• The Legacy Profiles viewer may be close to promotion to RC status, depending on the status on a further web update.
• The Copy / Paste viewer is going through a further round of UI dates.
• The Mesh Uploader may be also in a position to be promoted to RC status in the near future.
• The Build Tools viewer is back with QA. If it passed muster, it may be issued in week #23.

Simulator Notes

[5:17-7:55]

The extended chat range project is now called the Voices Carry project. This is likely to be arriving in a simulator RC update in week #24 (commencing Monday, June  8th).

• Further details on this update can be found in my Simulator User Group update.
• It is important to note that this chat is only intended to apply to apply to nearby chat channel 0, so it should not impact scripted objects using other chat channels.

In Brief

[9:36-10:30]

Note: a lot of the following points were the subject of text chat.

The Firestorm team have encountered an issue with Bugsplat that results in the error “unable to create the error report” when a user is trying to send a crash report. Thus far, it appears LL has not seen this reported by users on the official viewer.

Bugs highlighted to the Lab during the meeting:

• [14:52-21:30]
  • BUG-228752 “[EEP] Sky turns black when render quality is lowered to Low-Mid” is still awaiting a fix.
  • BUG-225784 “[EEP] BUG-225446 regression – HUDs are again affected by environment setting” is also awaiting the Lab.
  • BUG-228821 “Occasional Freeze in Post-EEP Viewers” is also still awaiting investigation.
• [21:38-30:40] BUG-228592 “[Bakes on Mesh] editing clothing forces undergarments to top of the render stack” This is still to be fully investigated.
• [31:04-38:50] BUG-227725 “SL Viewer and third party viewers hang while launching – dual monitors” – this appears to be an Nvidia / Windows 10 issue, although it does not appear to impact all systems. There is a lengthy discussion in chat on this issue for those who may have experienced in.
• [39:57-end] BUG-228838 “Viewer changes have broken my entire outfit system” – this is an issue being experienced by people manually creating sub-folders within the My Outfits system folder / outfit folders within My Outfits in which to sort / copy outfit links.
  • Given that My Outfits is not designed to support sub-folder nests, whether this is a bug / breakage is questionable. H
  • However, LL will look at the issue – although it is unlikely that an “official” means of supporting sub-folders with My Outfits / outfit folders with My Outfits will be implemented in the near-term, as doing so will required server-side changes.