Category: TPVD / Open Source User Group

2019 SL User Groups 26/3: TPV Developer Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

Atonement; Inara Pey, May 2019, on FlickrAtonement, May 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, June 28th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. The key points of discussion are provided below with time stamps to the relevant points in the video, which will open in a separate tab when clicked.

There are assorted text chat discussions scattered throughout the video covering various topics (e.g. Firestorm code that exposed a viewer setting to show the physics shapes of mesh objects, general discussion of LL hiring, avatar dot colours on the map, and opinions on a “lite” version of the viewer (remember the Basic viewer?), the technicalities of multi-threading, etc). These are not necessarily referenced in the notes below – please refer to the video.

SL Viewer

[1:30-7:00]

Recent Updates

  • As noted in my Content Creation summary, the Bakes On Mesh viewer is once again available with version 6.3.0.528495. This includes:
    • A new inventory icon for the “universal” wearable type.
    • A fix for a serious security issue type of bug.
  • The Love Me Render RC updated on Wednesday, June 26th to version 6.2.4.528505.
  • The Umeshu RC viewer updated on Thursday, June 27th to version 6.2.4.528492.

All of these RC viewer should now have parity with the current release viewer.

Note: at the time of writing, these viewers only appear on the Alternate viewers page; they are not listed on the the index of available viewers.

Viewer Pipelines

The remaining LL viewer list looks like:

  • Current Release version 6.2.3.527758, formerly the Rainbow RC viewer dated June 5th, promoted June 18th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.2.3.527749, dated June 5th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17th, 2017 and promoted to release status November 29th, 2017 – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • 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.

Additional Viewer Notes

  • Currently the BOM and EEP viewers appear vying for promotion to de facto release status. A new EEP RC is anticipated in early week #27 (commencing Monday, July 1st). It is hoped that both viewers are now functionally ready for release, and that both will go through promotion to release status by the end of July. Of the two, the more likely for promotion first is BOM – but this is not an absolute.
    • [9:40] The potential closeness of BOM and EEP going to release status relative to one another may raise questions within some TPV groups as to how to best handle them (.e.g. individual release or a combined release with both).
  • It is hoped that other projects – notably the texture fetching / texture caching re-write project – can start to be carried forward once more, with project viewers surfacing as a result at some point.
  • If the texture fetching can be improved, the Lab might also look at inventory fetching, although the two are somewhat different. There is already some work going on with the inventory back-end, which could also lead to opportunities to work on the viewer side of inventory handling.
  • [10:55-11:50 and 46:00-47:25] The 360 Snapshot project viewer has been brought up to parity with the current release viewer, and is currently awaiting QA. It should hopefully be returning to the viewer list soon™, and work should resume on the 360 snapshot function itself in the near future.
  • [12:52-14:26] Apple OpenGL deprecation: the Lab is working on a strategy to deal with this, but it is “too soon” for detailed discussion, however, part of it is dependent on the Lab getting an additional graphics engineer hired to work on SL.

Viewer Build Process

An issue with the new viewer build process using Visual Studio 2017 / the latest Xcode has been identified and hopefully rectified. The process will therefore be going to QA. Providing all goes well, the build process will then be deployed to the viewer build farm.

Script Processing Issues

[26:14-26:50]

The simulator updates that will hopefully improve script run time issues (see  BUG-226851 and BUG-227099) mentioned in my Content Creation summary, are unlikely to be deployed until at least week #28 (week commencing Monday, July 8th).

Other Topics

  • [7:01-8:00 and 28:22-29:00] There will be no viewer releases at the end of week #27, nor will there be any simulator RC channel deploys on Wednesday, July 3rd, due to the July 4th break. Similarly, there will be a period at the end of July / start of August with no releases / updates, as the SL team will be having their summer planning summit.
  • {21:15-25:15] iOS companion app: work has started on trying to get the initial test versions through Apple’s test process. It’s not clear how long this will take.
    • As per my summary and audio of Oz and April Linden’s Meet the Lindens session, this will initially be a basic communications app, allowing users to chat to others (users won’t even have an in-world location, per se).
    • Obviously, it is planned to evolve the app over time.
    • It’s not clear if users in-world will be able to discern if a user is on the iOS client.
    • Once the test version is available, iPhone users will require TestFlight on their ‘phones to play with it (hopefully, it should also run on iPads as well, although there may be some configuration differences).
    • Some of the back-end infrastructure the Lab is building is support of the app might be applicable to use with a web application, but that is not on the current plans.
  • [26:53-27:50] The Lab believe they have identified one of the causes of performance collapse when avatars teleport into a region. This is being queued up to be worked on.
  • [28:00-28:18] The latest versions of simulator code changes to help with region crossing and teleport issues should be fully deployed across the grid following the SLS (Main) channel deployment in week #27.
  • [32:00-43:30 – chat] Problems have been reported with ASCII characters used in group names displayed by the avatar tag taking time to correctly display in busy regions, which are notably seen with the Firestorm viewer, but which are proving difficult to reproduce in the official viewer. See: BUG26338.
    • This topic kicked off a length chat discussion that rolled into avatar dot colours on the map, viewer updates for avatar tags, etc.
    • The chat further rolled into a discussion of “why no VR in SL?”. Short answer: performance isn’t consider good enough to deliver a really comfortable VR experience, although non-LL driven tests have continued.
  • Having trouble with texture loading? I could be your system, depending on its age, but it also might be your anti-virus software – try explicitly whitelisting your viewer cache in you AV software and see if that helps.

2019 SL User Groups 24/3: TPV Developer Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

aZiLe; Inara Pey, May 2019, on FlickraZiLe, May 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, June 14th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. The key points of discussion are provided below with time stamps to the relevant points in the video, which will open in a separate tab when clicked.

SL Viewer

[0:23-3:40]

There have been no further LL viewer updates wince the Love Me Render and Bakes On Mesh RC releases on June 10th. This leaves the current LL viewer pipelines as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.2.2.527338, formerly the Teranino RC viewer, promoted May 22 – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.2.3.527749, released on June 5th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17th, 2017 and promoted to release status 29th November 2017 – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

BOM Alpha / Universal Wearable Issues

Please also see my week #24 CCUG update for details of issues around alpha handling and the universal wearable channels in the Bakes on Mesh viewer. Vir indicated that the Lab has a handle on this, which will require an Appearance Service update and a “small” viewer-side update that will include a new inventory icon for universal wearables.

Legacy Profile Project Viewer

[3:50-6:10]

  • As per my preview article, the Legacy Profiles project viewer (version 6.2.3.527749 at the time of writing), moves avatar profile in the viewer back into their own floater, rather than using a view of the web profile.
  • This work is in its initial stages, and the overall aim of the work is in flux. This means that the profile panel itself might be subject to further revision, and that even the web feed itself might gain its own floater, rather than being a tab within the new profile floater.

360 Snapshot Viewer

[6:15-7:33] Note that the 360 Snapshot viewer has been temporarily withdrawn, due to  the core viewer code being badly out-of-date. The viewer is currently in the process of being updated – no functionality changes to the 360 snapshot capability, purely an update to bring the core code up-to-date with the current release viewer. It is hoped this will reach the Lab’s QA team soon, and reappear as a project viewer in due course.

Group Chat Performance

[17:01-34:15]

  • A frequent complaint with Group chat is that it can be slow.
  • The Lab’s investigation in issues shows that actual chat messages and group notices account for the minority of traffic seen in the group chat system.
  • By far the largest volume of traffic is purely the on-line / off-line notifications that are being sent.
    • So, for example, in a group of 20,000 members, each time someone logs-in or out of SL, 20,000 messages are generated in the group chat system; for a 50,000 member group, the number is 50,000, and so on.
    • Note that a couple of years ago, to try to improve things, the Lab disabled the ability to see the group members list for groups over 5,000 members – but the actual messages themselves are still circulated.
  • The Lab is therefore seeking feedback on how big an impact it would be if these on-line / off-line messages were turned off on the simulator side, either just for very large groups (upper limit TBD), or simply for all groups, in the hope it will reduce the volume of traffic and help improve overall chat performance.
  • It has been acknowledged that if this is to be done, it would be useful for group members to still be able to see which group owners / moderators are on-line, and for group owners / moderators to see which group members are on-line, so that issues / enquiries can be dealt with. The Lab will investigate whether this can be done.
  • Note that removing these messages would not affect the “last login” date for the group members list.
  • It is likely the Lab may carry out some experiments on a small cohort of groups to see what might be done and check for any measurable performance increase in those groups.
    • Some experimenting has already been done in trying to batch the on-line / off-line update messages, but it’s not clear if this has had any positive impact where it has been done.
  • An alternative suggestion is to break groups into types: e.g. those purely for chat (which may require more information on users’ on-line status) and those just for outwards announcements.
    • This is already done to some degree by group owners setting group rules / members’ capabilities; however, it still means the on-line / off-line messages are still sent.
    • Were the Lab to try to implement a more robust system like this, there would be a major issue is handling existing groups and determining how to define them.
  • [41:00-41:15] More generally with group chat, the Lab have considered adding an ability to add a server-side block (accessible through the viewer) on chat from groups a user does not wish to hear from, chat-wise. This may be implemented “at some point”.

In Brief

  • [36:10-36:35] Avatar Teleport on Region Performance: as we know, avatars arriving in a region can have a significant impact on the region’s performance. The Lab believe that have a partial understanding of the problem, and has some ideas on how the impact might be lessened.
  • [44:20-46:44] BUG-225696 – “All offline inventory offers from scripted objects are lost” –  was believed to have been fixed in the Teranino RC viewer, however it still appears to be occurring. As such BUG-227179 has been raised against the issue, and the Lab will look into it again.
  • [52:16-53:30] Kitty Barnett (Catznip) has been working on trying to clean-up a series of viewer-side events that can cause the viewer to stall after the login.cgi process has completed that can cause region messages (including IMs) to be lost. The Lab is aware of these as well, but would be interested in accepting Kitty’s code contributions if she can get them finished.
  • The Lab is still looking for a Senior Graphics Engineer to work on Second Life (San Francisco based).

Total Aside

In discussing SL groups (and as a point of humour), Oz and Grumpity revealed the first three Jira items filed internally at the Lab:

  • SL-1: Second Life should grow to dominate the entire world, thereby making us the de facto world leaders.
  • SL-2: Build a time machine.
  • SL-3: Build an army of robot cats.

SL-2 was seen as necessary because the Lab knew that it would eventually need to go back and re-engineer some of the decisions made when first defining / building Second Life and its architecture. Sadly, and DeLorean cars notwithstanding, there are still considerable blockers that prevent its implementation!

2019 SL User Groups 22/3: TPV Developer Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

(Fae Forest), Elvenshire; Inara Pey, April 2019, on Flickr(Fae Forest), Elvenshire – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, May 31st, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. The key points of discussion are provided below with time stamps to the relevant points in the video, which will open in a separate tab when clicked.

Note this meeting involved a lot of text-based chat on VRAM, script limits, and avatar complexity which, in the interest of brevity with these notes, I leave to the video.

SL Viewer

[01:18-2:22]

The Rainbow Maintenance viewer – version 6.2.3.527584 – was released on  Wednesday, May 29th. This viewer specifically fixes a known Windows / Nvidia issue where on exiting Second Life, the system video is distorted – see BUG-226803.

Note that at the time of writing this summary, the Rainbow RC viewer is not listed on the new Alternate Viewer page; if you are experiencing this particular issue, and wish to try the new RC, please go to the main Viewer Release page, where it *is* listed.

There should be a project viewer forthcoming “soon” with a number of open-source contributions

The remaining LL viewer pipelines are unchanged, as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.2.2.527338, formerly the Teranino RC viewer, promoted May 22 – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • Project viewers:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

As per my CCUG summary, it is anticipated updated versions of EEP and Bakes on Mesh RC viewers should be appearing in week #23 (commencing Monday, June 3rd, 2019).

Official Linux Viewer

[5:47-7:05]

  • The Lab has received a comprehensive open-source Debian-based contribution for Linux.
  • This will have restricted functionality (e.g. no Voice, as Vivox who supply the Voice EXE for the viewer no longer support Linux).
  • The Lab is currently putting time into trying to build this Linux option within their existing viewer build. If this succeeds, they will likely issue the viewer (I’m guessing as a project viewer initially).

Group Notices to IM

[10:50-12:00]

  • As per my April 26th TPVD meeting notes, the Lab is considering the possibility of no longer sending group notices to e-mail when a user is off-line.
  • This will only be for off-line group notices. It will not block / change the receipt off-line IMs.
  • The reason for making the change is to help is secondlife.com being regarded as a spam domain by e-mail services.
  • Work has not yet commenced on this.
  • The Lab expects to be doing “significant” work on groups in general “pretty soon”. This will include work on group notice delivery reliability, general group chat lag, etc.

In Brief

  • [2:24-3:28, 13:49-14:10, and 17:20-19:15] Teleport improvements:
    • Work continues in trying to stabilise / improve teleports to avoid any repeat of recent problems.
    • Work is also in progress to improve how attachments are handled on teleports to lessen instances of attachment loss, ghosting, etc.
      • Some of these issues might be related to viewer changes, and the Lab is currently testing fixes and experimenting with the viewer, and the latter may result in some tweaks to the way the viewer handles attachments.
      • More on this to follow once the internal tests are complete and have been assessed.
      • As it is, improvement have been deployed to help prevent attachments getting killed on teleports, although further work on this may still be required.
  • [7:05-10:08] Mobile client:
    • LL continue to work on the iOS mobile client for Second Life.
    • iOS was selected because “at the time the decision was taken, there wasn’t anything for iPhone”, and the Lab didn’t have the resources available to handle both iOS and Android development.
    • More details on the iOS client’s functionality are hoped to be available “before too long”.
    • Android remains a hoped-for goal, although there is no time line for when it might happen.
  • [12:10-12:30] Last names: work is continuing on the return of last names, although deploying the capability is not imminent.
  • [12:57-13:30 and 14:33-16:15] Transitioning SL to the cloud:
    • Again, work is progressing, and some services have been transitioned (note: not any user-accessible simulators), without any impact being noted / felt by users.
    • More services will be transitioning in the next few months.
    • The Lab is intentionally not providing information and when and which services are being transitioned in an attempt to more accurately garner from user feedback if things have go well or not (e.g. by preventing people reporting on the assumption that because X has been changed, it “must” be the cause of their issues).
  • [19:24-19:40] Viewer Caching Re-work: this has been paused for a while, but is due to resume.
  • [29:28-30:00] Visual Studio / Xcode Update: the Visual Studio 2017 (Win) and Xcode (Mac) update to the viewer build process is working locally but is not working within the viewer build farm. However, the switch to using them within the farm is expected “very soon”.

2019 SL User Groups 20/3: TPV Developer Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

Hotel California; Inara Pey, April 2019, on FlickrHotel California – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, May 17th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. The key points of discussion are provided below with time stamps to the relevant points in the video, which will open in a separate tab when clicked.

There was a lot of inconsequential text chat about Display Names during the meeting, which these notes ignore.

SL Viewer

[00:00-01:47]

The rest of the SL viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.2.0.526190, formerly the Estate Access Management RC viewer, dated April 12, promoted April 17 NEW. – see my EAM overview for more information
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Bakes on Mesh RC viewer, version 6.1.1.525409, March 26 (and not currently recorded on the the new release notes pages)So, a
  • Project viewers:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Emoji Support

[4:00-9:30 – also in text, with broader text discussion on unicode in Display Names]

  • A frequent feature request for Second Life is for emoji support in chat.
  • This is not something the Lab has the bandwidth to support.
  • An invitation has been put out to any open-source developers who would like to pick this up as a project for submission as a viewer contribution on all supported operating systems, the Lab is willing to work with them.
    • Note that this is not a promise that SL will have emoji support soon.
    • If the work is taken up by an open-source developer it will only be for emoji support in chat; it will not include the use of emojis in Display Names.

Group Notices to IM

[19:47-26:44]

  • As per my April 26th TPVD meeting notes, the Lab is considering the possibility of no longer sending group notices to e-mail when a user is off-line.
  • This will only be for off-line group notices. It will not block / change the receipt off-line IMs.
  • The reason for making the change is to help is secondlife.com being regarded as a spam domain by e-mail services.
  • it is hoped that changes being planned to the way SL events work (and which have yet to be formally described / announced) will naturally reduce the need for at least some group messages in the future.

In Brief

  • [13:56-16:12] There is reportedly a viewer crash related to Animesh that is estimated to affect around 2.5% of Firestorm crashes. However, it does not appear to be easy to reproduce (example crash stack).
    • The issue appears related to rideable Animesh and region crossings. In short, when it happens, the Animesh (such as an Animesh horse), existing in the two regions when crossing between them, and for some reason the “wrong one” unloads, causing the viewer to crash.
    • At the time of the meeting, a bug report on the issue had yet to be raised, due to the issues in trying to reproduce the problem, however, it seems to be particularly prevalent in the Bellisseria (Linden Homes) continent – probably because there are a lot of people out and about in that region and using Animesh, rather than the problem being specific to the regions in the continent.
  • [29:20-33:20, with further text discussion on inventory offers and IMs through until close to the end of the meet] It appears that BUG-225696, “All offline inventory offers from scripted objects are lost” still remains an issue for viewers adhering to the off-line IM cap.
  • [34:08-35:20] BUG-41379 “Script (running) state is lost when logged out during forced teleport” – this is a known issue that is being addressed at as a part of a broader project.
  • [51:36-52:20] The Lab still has job openings for a senior graphics engineer and a QA server engineer, both working on Second Life.

2019 SL User Groups 17/3: TPV Developer Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

Authors Point; Inara Pey, March 2019, on FlickrAuthors Point – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, April 26th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. This was a relatively short meeting, with several periods of audio silence and text chat. The key points of discussion are provided below with time stamps to the relevant points in the video, which will open in a separate tab when clicked.

SL Viewer

[00:00-01:17] There have been no SL viewer updates this week, leaving the pipelines as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.2.0.526190, formerly the Estate Access Management RC viewer, dated April 12, promoted April 17 NEW. – see my EAM overview for more information
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

The EAM viewer is awaiting one simulator side update; the next RC viewer likely to be promoted to de facto release viewer will probably be the Teranino Maintenance RC viewer.

Teleport (and Region Crossing) Issues

[1:20-3:35]

Disconnects

  • Major effort has been put into trying to resolve the teleport disconnect issue – hence the multiple deployments this week.
  • In the process of developing and deploying the fixes, the Lab has significantly improved its ability to monitor teleports.
  • This improved monitoring / stats gathering will help baseline teleports for future reference, should further issues crop up.
    • It appears to suggest teleport success rates are now significantly better than prior to the updates being deployed.
    • The added monitoring has no appreciable impact on performance.

Attachment Loss on Teleport

  • Progress has continued with fixes for the issue of attachments coming off / becoming ghosted/ etc., as a result of a teleport / region crossing.
  • It will likely be a couple of weeks before these are deployed server-side, as the Lab will be keeping an eye on the teleport / region crossing disconnect issue to ensure the fixes that have been deployed really do help break down the issues that have been experienced.

Snapshots: Flickr Cap Fail and Withdrawal of Facebook Support

[4:15-5:50]

Flickr Cap Fail

There is an issue with the snapshots to Flickr capability failing see BUG-226826). This appears to have perhaps been an unannounced change at the Flickr / Smugmug end of things, rather than anything the Lab has done, but investigations are still ongoing.

Update April 30th: the Flickr cap fail now appears to be fixed. 

Facebook Support

It was announced on Friday, April 19th, that support for uploading snapshots from the viewer to Facebook has now been completely  withdrawn. As such, the viewer-side code is to be shortly removed, with the Lab noting:

Due to continued changes in the Facebook API, as of today the Second Life viewer will no longer be able to support Facebook Connect for sharing your in-world photos and posts.  We apologise for this inconvenience and will be removing the UI from the viewer shortly. We will, of course, be happy to see your SL posts on Facebook going forward, and you can always say hello and check out what’s happening on our official page: https://www.facebook.com/secondlife.

Script Processing Issues

[6:50-13:45]

Issues with script processing have been raised at a number of meetings recently, and were mentioned again at this TPVD.

  • Specifically, it was reported at this meeting that since the April 18th roll-back / update, some Full regions seem to have script run-time capped 12ms, so only around 60% of scripts are run, while some homesteads appear to only run around 20% of scripts..
  • As it was also reported that these affected regions were running OK following the initial deployment of the newer version of the OS, this issue appears to be specifically related to the changes made on April 18th.
  • The Lab is not aware of anything having been changed that might have impacted script run-time.
  • The newer version of the operating system (which is specifically required as a part of preparing the simulators to a cloud-based infrastructure) is due to be further deployed to simulators Agni (the main grid) in week #18. This should provide the Lab with a broader cross-section of simulator running both the older and newer versions of the OS, which will allow a more informed comparison of metrics from the two versions to be made, which could help determine if there is a more broad-based issue with scripts on the newer OS version.

Group Notices to IM

[16:00-22:33]

  • The Lab is considering the possibility of no longer sending group notices to e-mail when a user is off-line.
  • Right now, if IM to e-mail is enabled for when a user is off-line from SL, it will allow both IMs and group notices to be forwarded to e-mail. This can result in message volumes / content being seen as spam.
    • As it is invariably the secondlife.com domain that is linked to such reports, this can lead to it being regarded as a spam site, degrading the ability for secondlife.com to deliver e-mails in general, as e-mail services mark the domain as an originator of spam.
    • This move is therefore intended to make e-mails from the secondlife.com domain for reliable.
    • Although other forms of messaging forwarded to e-mail can potentially add to the problem of spam labelling (e.g. object IMs to e-mail), group notices are seen as by far the biggest cause.
  • No decision on this has been taken either way, but disabling the ability for group notices to e-mail is easier than other options (such as requesting user go through all their groups and disable group notices).
  • Were this change to be implemented, then only IMs would be sent to e-mail; group notices received when off-line would be held until the user next logs-in, as is currently the case.
    • It has been suggested that increasing the limit on the number of messages that can be queued when a user is off-line might ease the blow of blocking group notices being sent to e-mail. While this idea is already under consideration, no decision has been taken either way.

[25:06-26:18] If this idea does move forward, it is hoped that changes being planned to the way SL events work will reduce the need for at least some group messages.

  • No specifics were available on the updates that are being planned for events, but it has already been suggested that the updates include an API to allow events to be properly listed on viewer log-in screens (see feature request BUG-226867).

In Brief

  • [13:58-15:00] Following the release of a video on You Tube by a Lab employee, the question was asked about the Lab’s policy on staff using TPVs. In short:
    • Lab staff must use the official viewer on Lab equipment and/or their official Lab accounts.
    • Lab staff may use any viewer of their own choosing on their own hardware and when using their personal user account.
      • This was actually the case with the video in question: it was filmed and released via a personal account, not an employee account.
  • [31:43 (text)-35:30] Questions continue concerning LL’s support of 32-bit operating systems (it was mentioned that Microsoft will apparently stop supporting 32-bit “with the next [Windows 10?] update”). However, one of the reasons for LL’s continued support of 32-bit Windows is the number of users on less capable / 32-bt specific GPUs.
  • [35:40-36:25] At least some of the EEP regressions witnessed following the April 18th roll-backs / redeployments should hopefully be corrected with the simulator updates due in week #18.
  • [39:36-40:56] It’s often asked when simulator updates aren’t “more thoroughly tested” by the Lab. Simply put, such is the number of Agni (main) grid simulators coupled with the wide variety of ways people use Second Life (think of all the different in-world scripted object, or even all the purpose-built, custom windlights, for example), that replicating it all in a comprehensive test environment simply isn’t possible. Hence why the Lab use the release candidate channels: while testing is carried out (and the Lab is constantly trying to improve its test environments), the RCs provide a further means of “testing the water” before deploying updates grid-wide.
  • [42:39-43:11] video playback support (MP4): work is on the roadmap for this, but the Lab has yet to get to it.

2019 SL User Groups 15/3: TPV Developer Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

Green Acres; Inara Pey, March 2019, on FlickrGreen Acres – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, April 12th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. This was a relatively short meeting, with several periods of audio silence and text chat. The key points of discussion are provided below.

SL Viewer

  • The Estate Access Management (EAM) RC viewer updated to version 6.2.0.526190 on Friday, April 12th, 2019.
  • As noted in my CCUG summary, the EEP viewer updated to version 6.2.0.526104 on Thursday, April 11th.

All other viewer in the pipelines remain as:

  • Current Release version 6.1.1.525446, formerly the Love Me Render RC viewer, dated March 26, promoted April 2 NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Bakes on Mesh RC viewer, version 6.1.1.525409, March 26.
    • Teranino Maintenance RC viewer version 6.1.1.525401, March 20.
  • Project viewers:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7. This viewer will remain available for as long as reasonable, but will not be updated with new features or bug fixes.

With the necessary back-end updates now made, it looks likely that the EAM RC viewer will be the next viewer to be promoted to de facto release status.

Teleport Issues

Teleport Disconnects

  • The Lab continues to try to understand the root cause(s) of the teleport disconnects. So far, they can only confirm it is not specific to any single viewer.
  • As previously indicated in my updates, the root cause of the issue is a race condition / timing issue – something that could be exacerbated by the distance of a user from the Lab’s servers (the grater the distance = the more time required for communications = the greater the chance of a timing issue / race condition).
  • Similarly, a high packet loss between viewer and simulator(s) might increase the chances of a disconnect occurring.
  • The problem remains in trying to identify precisely what has changed to cause any race condition / timing issue.
  • As noted in this week’s SUG meeting summary, there was a server RC deployment on Wednesday, April 10th – version 19#19.04.09.526122,. This included additional logging to help capture further data on the teleport disconnects, particularly capturing where the region handshaking may be failing.
  • Multiple regions have been replicated on Aditi, and having further enhanced logging enabled on them. This additional logging capability may be deployed to Agni in week #16, but not necessarily enabled, due to the performance impact it will have. However, the code will be in place should it be required.

Attachment Loss on Teleport

  • The Lab now has a “solid” repro for this issue. As anticipated, much of the problem appears to be related to having too many scripted attachments stacked on the same attachment point (e.g. the right hand, the default attachment point, and often used by default by mesh clothing makers).
  • However, the work on developing a fix has slowed as a result of resources being moved over to the teleport disconnect issue.

Asset UDP Messaging Deprecation

As noted in my SUG summary, it appears the code for the Asset UDP messaging deprecation didn’t work as anticipated, likely the result of one code element failing to merge correct. There will be a be a further RC deployment in week #16 with the corrected code.

A reminder that assuming the deployment is made and the code works as anticipated, anyone using very old viewers still reliant on UDP messaging for assets and which do not have support for HTTP messaging will not be able to receive any updates for the following: animations, body parts, clothing, gestures, landmarks, meshes and sounds whilst connected to regions on any RC channel.

In Brief

  • The are reports of issues with the EEP code interfering with Interest List culling, with Draw Distance having little effect on scene rendering (BUG-226752). This is being investigated.