Category: TPVD / Open Source User Group

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on February 21st, 2020. No video this time around, as Pantera was unable to attend, so the notes are taken from my audio recording of the meeting.

SL Viewer News

• The Yorsh Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.7.535996 and dated February 7th, was updated to de facto release status on Thursday, February 20th.

The remainder of the current SL viewer pipelines are as follows:

• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.536347, February 11.
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.7.536179, February 10.
  • Camera Presets RC viewer, version 6.3.6.535138, January 24.
• Project viewers:
  • 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 next potential view promotion to release status is seen as being EEP, with Vir indicating that LL do not plan to promote any other viewer prior to EEP, unless there is a significant blocker.
• After EEP, the next likely candidate for promotion is currently the Lover Me Render viewer.
• The new Premium Plus subscription viewer-side code updates will soon be appearing in an RC. This is a set of log-in code changes required for easier management of values, etc., set for different Premium levels. At this point, the code will not interfere with anything.
• The Camera Presets RC viewer is having some additional UI work done as a result of it experiencing a higher than average crash rate.

EEP Status and Deployment

As per Ebbe Altberg’s comments during the Lab Gab session of February 21st (see: for the video and a bullet-point summary), and the notes above, EEP will be moving to official release status very soon. With it comes notice from the Lab – with apologies –  that:

• It is no longer a goal with EEP to make all environments across Second Life appear *exactly* as they do under Windlight.
• Because of this, some content may look different under EEP lighting than it does under Windlight.
• This means some region designers and some content creators may have to make adjustments to their region environments  / their content for optimal viewing with EEP.
• There will be some known issues with EEP when it is released, but the belief is that these will be minor.
• There will be fixes for rendering issues following EEP, mostly likely through the Love Me Render project.
• If there are what LL consider to be “significant” breakages, then effort will be made to address these.

Ebbe’s comment on EEP can by heard between 44:10 and 46:45 in the official video of the Lab Gab session.

In Brief

• BUG-228227: “Avatar face darkens when sitting on an object” – this is a lighting-related issue that appears to have been introduced with viewer release 6.3.6.535003 (formerly the Xanté RC viewer). It is a known issue and a fix should be appearing in the next maintenance viewer which should hopefully resolve the majority of these issues.
• BUG-227179 – “All offline inventory offers from scripted objects are STILL lost” – remains an issue, but an internal request has been made to raise the priority so that investigation and resolution might move forward sooner rather than later.
• It is hoped that the viewer caching work will reach project viewer status fairly soon.
• There is a known issue of the viewer release pages and index not updating correctly to reflect the current status of viewers (e.g. at the time of writing, 6.3.6.535003 is still listed as the default release viewer, when in fact it is 6.3.7.535996).

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on February 7th, 2020. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:

• Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point.
• Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.

This was a relatively short meeting, information-wise, with much of the actual meeting time given over to general text chat.

SL Viewer News

[0:27-2:21]

• The Yorsh Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.7.535996 on February 7th.
• The Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.6.535087 on February 6th.

The remainder of the current SL viewer pipelines are as follows:

• Current Release version 6.3.6.535003, formerly the Xanté Maintenance RC, dated January 22nd, promoted January 27th.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.535668, February 4th.
  • Camera Presets RC viewer, version 6.3.6.535138, January 24th.
• Project viewers:
  • 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

• The three potential candidates for the next release promotion are quoted as being the Yorsh Maintenance RC, the Love Me Render RC and (even though it is still a project viewer at the moment) the Legacy Profiles viewer.
• The Camera Presets RC viewer is experiencing a higher than average crash rate, with investigations on why still ongoing.
• [19:47-20:30] As noted in my week #6 CCUG summary, EEP is now in burn-down mode – which means more bugs are being fixed than are being reported. It is anticipated that the formal deployment is now weeks, rather than months, away.
• [28:06-28:41] The cache replacement viewer project is once more making progress, but there is no date as to when a public version of the viewer is likely to surface.

In Brief

• [2:46-11:30] The new Premium Plus subscription level requires viewer-side changes. These predominantly relate to logging-in, where a user’s account level (Basic, Premium and – in the future – Premium Plus) is obtained from the back-end via a received block of LLSD code containing benefits tags and values.
  • This code is now in a public repository, and will be seeing some changes to various values specified within it prior to Premium Plus being launched.
  • The server-side code supporting the new LLSD code block will be made available on some Aditi servers soon, so TPVs can ensure the code doesn’t interfere with their ability to connect to the SL servers with their current viewer versions, and to start testing the viewer-side code in non-public versions of their viewers in preparation for the launch of Premium Plus.
  • At some point the server-side code will be deployed to the main grid, where it should not impact current viewer versions.
  • As side notes to this:
    • Once Premium Plus has been launched, the new code will refuse to connect if the required data is missing, but the system will let a viewer that ignores it to connect.
    • However, under the current roadmap, Premium Plus will not be going live until some time after Name Changes has been released (as per statements made at the monthly Web User Group meetings).
• [14:42-14:50] Work on migrating viewer repos from Mercurial to Github is progressing.
• [21:38-26:08] The SL system requirements page no longer references Windows 7 as this is no longer a supported operating system version. However, a broader update to the requirements page is being considered, as the current information is considered “woefully to aged.”
  • As part of this discussion, it was reiterated that when EEP does go live, it removes the option for turning off basic shaders, which will prevent systems than cannot support basic shader operates from accessing Second Life. The fixed function OpenGL code that supports the disabling will then be removed as a part of a future viewer code clean-up pass.
• [15:19-17:20 (incl. text chat)] Both Singularity and Alchemy have been working towards making formal releases Soon™. Singularity has an up-to-date beta available to users, and Alchemy is close to making an updated beta available as well.

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on January 24th, 2020. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:

• Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point in a separate browser tab for reference.
• Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.

The latter part of this (brief) meeting comprised a text chat discussion amongst Firestorm people on profile picture aspect ratios and Firestorm UI skins. If interested, please refer to the video.

SL Viewer News

[0:13-6:35]

• On Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020, the Xanté Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.6.535003.
• On Friday, January 24th, the Camera Presets RC viewer, version 6.3.6.535138, was issued. See: First looks: Camera Presets Second Life RC viewer.

The rest of the viewer release pipelines remain unchanged:

• Current Release version 6.3.5.533275, formerly the Wassail RC viewer, dated December 4, promoted December 12 – No change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.6.534234, January 9.
  • EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.534193, January 9.
• Project viewers:
  • 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

• It is anticipated the Xanté Maintenance RC will be promoted to de facto release status in week #5 (commencing Monday, January 27th). This is a milestone viewer for the Lab as it will be the first to be built and released using the new Github infrastructure.
  • Under the new structure, both viewer-dev and viewer build should have their master branch updated when a viewer is promoted.
  • Most viewer builds outside of the release version should now be seen as branches within viewer-dev.
• Viewer build work is now primarily focused on the transition to using Visual Studio 2017 and a recent version of Xcode.
  • Python 3 will be made a part of the viewer build process “over the next couple of months”.
• [13:48-14:00] Despite it being only a project viewer, the Legacy Profiles viewer is being touted as the next in line for release after the Xanté Maintenance RC, so it would seem the viewer is going to go through a rapid RC promotion and cycle.

In Brief

• [9:16-10:25] the graphics / rendering team has been focused on trying to clear the EEP bugs so that project can be released. However, the issue of OSX OpenGL deprecation issue is “pretty much” next on their list to dig into. Even so, it might still be a while before the Lab is in a position to discuss anything related to decisions and future direction on the matter, although as changes start to be made, they will be through publicly-viewable repos.
• [13:17-13:46] There are some issues in dealing with “long names” that are affecting the deployment of Name Changes. As this is a web-based capability, it is not anticipated there will be a project of RC viewer specific to the capability.

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on January 10th, 2020. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:

• Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point in a separate browser tab for reference.
• Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.

SL Viewer News

[0:44-2:27]

On Thursday, January 9th, 2020, the following RC viewers updated as follows:

• Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.6.534234.
• EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.534193.

The rest of the viewer release pipelines remain unchanged:

• Current Release version 6.3.5.533275, formerly the Wassail RC viewer, dated December 4, promoted December 12 – No change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Xanté Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.6.533748, December 19.
• Project viewers:
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16.

General Viewer Notes

• Both the Xanté Maintenance RC and the Legacy Profiles Viewer have updates that are “close” to appearing in the current viewers list, with Xanté possibly being close to promotion as the de facto viewer as well.
• As per my week #2 CCUG summary, EEP is still pending the fixing of around a dozen graphics-related issues.
• The Camera Presets Viewer, designed to allow users to set and save their own preferred camera presets in their viewer without having to use debug settings, is now closing on being “feature complete” and ready for release either as a Project or RC viewer.
  • This capability is being developed as a viewer code contribution by Jonathan Yap (who was responsible for developing the Graphics Presets options).
  • More information on the work can be found in STORM-2145.

Mercurial to Github Migration

[2:29-3:45]

Bitbucket, used to manage viewer repositories) will be sunsetting support for Mercurial in early 2020. Because of this, Linden Lab has been migrating their viewer repositories from Mercurial to Git on Bitbucket.

• Most of the Lab’s viewer development is now processed via Git.
• There is some work remaining on converting all of the third-party package repositories, and this is being done as part of the Visual Studio 2017 / Xcode upgrade, rather than being part of the Git migration per se, as these are relatively stable and not seen as a major problem in terms of migrating them.
• A document outlining the steps in migration has been provided specifically for TPVs to allow them to keep in sync with how LL main the viewer code and its branches. See: Viewer Repository Migration (Google Docs).
  • This is not the only way for TPVs to manage their own repositories, but it is the one that LL recommend for those wishing to reflect how LL manages things.

Visual Studio / Xcode Build Process Update

[4:58-7:30]

The VS 2017 / Xcode upgrade has been caught with a couple of issues:

• The Boost library used to implement coroutines in the build process would not build using VS 2017 & required conversion to Boost Fibre, which it turn had a number of impacts that also needed to be resolved.
• Currently, the project is caught on a GIT-related issue, with validating the integration scripts used in the build process, and which is still being worked on.

It’s hoped that the additional work involved in moving the build process to support VS 2017 should make a future move to using VS 2019 easier.

Deprecating Windows 7 Support

[3:48-4:28]

• Windows 7 officially reaches its end of life on January 14th, 2020. After this date, patches and security updates, etc., will no longer be provided, and the company is unlikely to provide any support.
• Linden Lab has officially blogged on the subject, which I also blogged about as well.

In Brief

• [7:55-8:30] There has been no work on the Linux front for official viewer over that last few months, and while still on the road map, is seen as a fairly low priority item, sitting well behind the Git migration, build tools updates, general viewer development and – particularly – the work in transitioning Second life to the AWS cloud.
• [9:32-10:55] Week #2 restarts. While not generally a part of TPVD meetings, the issues with the Tuesday, January 7th server restarts was mentioned, with Grumpity noting:

It was a rocky day on Tuesday. It came out of our desire to do things in a less disruptive manner and … once again, the road to downtime was once again paved with good intentions, because that way proved to be in no way less disruptive than if we had done things the regular way.

Essentially, the issue was with some restart code that hadn’t been used in a while, and which LL had thought had been fully tested, but when put to use proved to have issues.

• [15:33-20:23] A reminder was given that – particularly after a viewer crash –  it is better to wait for a short period, rather than immediately trying to re-log (particularly if the warning about logging back in is displayed). This is because each failed attempt refreshes your avatar presence, interfering with the post-crash clean-up (the “you are currently being logged out” part of the message).
  • Note: this part of the meeting included an extensive chat discussion on auto-relogging, as can be present in mobile and other clients, such as Lumiya and Radegast that continues through until the end of the meeting. Please refer to the video for more on this.

 

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on December 13th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:

• Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point in a separate browser tab for reference.
• Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.

SL Viewer News

Note: the comments below also include updates given at the Content Creation User Group meeting of December 12th.

[4:29-6:52]

• Copy / Paste viewer project vewer updated to version 6.3.5.533365 on December 9th.
• The Wassail RC viewer, version 6.3.5.533275, was promoted to de-facto release status on Thursday, December 12th. This was likely the last viewer promotion to release status for 2019.

The rest of the current viewer pipelines remain as follows:

• Release channel cohorts:
  • EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.532771, dated  November 20th.
• Project viewers:
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9th.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, dated September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.530473, dated September 11th.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16th.

General Viewer Notes

• It is thought the Legacy Profiles viewer could be next in line for promotion to defacto release status. However, this viewer is still awaiting the release of an update that integrates the profile feed into the viewer.
• There are reportedly multiple issues with the Copy / Paste project viewer, some of which are UI related – no specific bug report reference to relay here at present, though.
• In addition, and awaiting surfacing / further work internally, are further Maintenance viewers and improvements to the mesh uploader.

Mercurial to Github Migration

[0:05-2:51]

Bitbucket, used to manage viewer repositories) will be sunsetting support for Mercurial in early 2020. Because of this, Linden Lab has now started migrating their viewer repositories from Mercurial to Git on Bitbucket.

• This means the pace of viewer updates might slow down while this work is in progress.
• A document outlining the steps in migration has been provided specifically for TPVs to allow them to keep in sync with how LL main the viewer code and its branches. See: Viewer Repository Migration (Google Docs).
  • This is not the only way for TPVs to manage their own repositories, but it is the one that LL recommend for those wishing to reflect how LL manages things.
• [36:48-41:15] Thus far, the Lab have not run into problems in making the migration. It was also pointed out that:
  • There are a number of cheat sheets out on the web for TPVs and self-compilers to make / understand the switch from Mercurial to Git.
  • There will be fewer repositories used by LL for the viewer, as Git provides better support for branching and better matches the LL build process.

Viewer Updates for 2020

[24:27-27:05]

• Two viewer updates that will be surfacing in 2020 are Name Changes and Premium Plus.
  • With regards to Name Changes, TPVs many what to consider migrating people’s settings and chat histories when they change their names, as all of this information is stored in a local folder  / directory based on the avatar name.
  • This could take the form of switching to using the avatar key UUID, although this isn’t necessarily user-friendly when looking at log files, etc.

Deprecating Windows 7 Support

[27:54-31:54]

• Windows 7 officially reaches its end of life on January 14th, 2020. After this date, patches and security updates, etc., will no longer be provided, and the company is unlikely to provide any support.
• As a result of this, it is very Linden Lab will cease officially supporting Windows 7 after that date. While users will still be able to log-in to Second Life on PCs running Windows 7:
  • They will not receive assistance from LL support should they encounter problems.
  • Viewer updates from the Lab will no longer be tested against Windows 7 prior to release.
  • Bugs reported against Windows 7 that cannot be reproduced using Windows 8 or Windows 10 will not be investigated.
  • Around 12% of SL users are running Windows 7, and this applies to them.
• Obviously, given Microsoft is ending Windows 7, the recommendation is for users to upgrade to Windows 10.

Linden Lab No Change Window

[2:52-4:00]

The 2019 end-of year No Change window is from Friday, December 20th 2019 through Thursday, January 2nd 2020. During this time there will be no simulator or official viewer updates, and TPVs are asked also not to make releases during this period in case they accidentally cause support or operational issues for LL.

In Brief

• [7:15-9:02] The updates to the viewer build process (to support Visual Studio 2017 and Xcode 10.3) are in a bug hunting mode at the moment, and so will see light of day in early 2020.
  • It is possible that work on updating to VS 2019 might commence later in 2020.
• [9:07-11:23] One of the projects awaiting the deployment of the new build process is updates to the Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) responsible for handling media in the viewer. It is hoped that when these updates can be provided within the viewer they will help with media support playback and eliminate at least some problems.
  • These updates should help with MP4 playback as more codecs are being added – although again, MP4 is a container with flavours rather than a specific format, so all flavours may not play back equally.
• [12:08-19:00] Discussion on Bugsplat, the crash reporting tool. This is probably outside the interest of most users, so is not listed below – please refer to the video.
• [22:40-24:00] Discussion on a Firestorm OpenSim release. Again, this probably not relevant to the majority of readers of the blog (and I’ll be covering it separately as and when it appears anyway), so again – please refer to the video.
• [32:04-32:40] BUG-227179 – All off-line inventory offers from scripted objects are STILL lost: this bug is still awaiting work.

 

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on November 15th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:

• Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point in a separate browser tab for reference.
• Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.

Simulator Script Management Improvements

[1:25-2:35]

These continue to be deployed across the grid, with the Lab believe the results have been “mostly good”, but noting that there may still be some scripts that may be affected by the changes (and some have been reported – such as BUG-227864).

Those that are experiencing issues are asked to file a bug report, as the Lab is willing to offer assistance. Note that example scripts may be requested as a well.

SL Viewer News

[2:45-6:33]

• On Friday, November 15th:
  • The Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.5.532739.
  • The Copy / Paste project viewer updated to version 6.3.5.532780.

The rest of the current viewer pipelines remain as follows:

• Current Release version 6.3.4.532299, formerly the Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, dated November 4.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.532314, November 1.
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.4.532273, October 31.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.530473, September 11th.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.

General Viewer Notes

• A further update to the Legacy Profiles viewer is close to being made available. If the comments from the Web User Group are correct, this will see Profile Feeds appearing in the Profile floater, presumably in a new tab on that floater.
• The first of the viewer builds using the updated Visual Studio 2017 / Xcode 10.3 (?) that had been anticipated as appearing “soon” at the last RPVD meeting apparently did not pass QA testing, and is now subject to debugging code changes that were made to some of the coroutines in the viewer.
• It appears that work has resumed on the contribution towards viewer camera presets (STORM-2145), with “good progress” being made, but no indication on when a project viewer will surface.
• The Lab is trying to generate bandwidth to implement mesh uploader improvements (these are most likely based on the Firestorm improvements to the uploader, the code for which has been contributed to LL).

Two-Factor Authentication

[15:43-16:46]

Two-factor authentication for log-in has been s subject of comment and requests from some time. Linden Lab is actively working on it, noting it is “firmly on the roadmap”. However:

• There is no time frame at present on possible deployment.
• The work is dependent / linked to other work, requiring things are approached in order and care is taken to ensure that in making all the collective changes, nothing is broken.

SL Share

[16:50-18:55]

SL Share, the capability for sharing SL snapshots to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter via LL server-side support, is to be discontinued.

• The Facebook upload capability was removed some time ago after Facebook made changes to their API that broke the ability for the viewer to share to their platform, and did not implement any fix.
• More recently, the Flickr and Twitter uploads have suffered issues (the Flickr upload is currently broken in viewers using the Lab’s upload back-end).

The reason for discontinuing SL Share is due to Flickr and Twitter making frequent changes to their connecting APIs without any notice that require LL to update their back-end support, which is regarded as a “big distraction” from other server-side work.

TPVs are free to continue to offer their own viewer-side means of uploading to the likes of Flickr that do not require LL’s back-end support, if they so wish. Firestorm has already done this.

In Brief

• Singularity is apparently “very close” to a formal release to bring it up-to-date with current viewers.
• [7:22-15:15] There is a discussion on region issues that are specific to the London City regions. Whilst somewhat outside the normal remit for TPVD meetings, it might be worth listening to by region / estate owners who may have experienced recent restart issues.
• Emojis are coming to the viewer, courtesy of a code contribution that’s heading to Linden Lab.

• Next TPV Developer meeting: Friday, December 13th, 2019.