Category: TPVD / Open Source User Group

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.

 

2019 SL User Groups 13/3: TPV Developer Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

Sol Farm; Inara Pey, February 2019, on FlickrSol Farm – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, March 29, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. Time stamps are provided to the major topics of discussion, which will open the video in a new tab for ease of reference.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to any viewers since my Simulator User Group summary. The viewer pipelines there remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.1.0.524670, formerly the BugSplat RC viewer February 13, promoted February 28 No Change.
  • 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.

[2:22-6:55]

  • The hope is the EEP RC viewer will be eligible for promotion to de facto release status “pretty soon”.  However, as per my CCUG summary, both the EEP viewer and the new-to-RC-status Bakes on Mesh viewer  are awaiting some fixes.
  • The Estate Access Management viewer is good-to-go, but is awaiting some simulator update with a new capability, which is likely to be another couple of weeks, before it can be promoted.
  • All of this means that the next viewer liable to be promoted will be Love Me Render viewer.

EEP Limitations

[7:24-25:00] There are also a couple of user-identified issues with EEP that are being considered:

The first is that EEP doesn’t play well with RLV and RLVa capabilities that use Windlight settings. LL have offered to help see what LSL abilities within EEP might be used to overcome the issues.

The second is potentially more disruptive: the ability to locally change an environment for the purposes of photography is somewhat limited.

Currently, with Windlight, it is possible for a photographer to tweak the local environment in their own viewer (e.g. move the Sun to provide better lighting / shadows, alter the cloud and haze density / colour, etc.).

Within EPP, this ability is limited to only those settings a user has a right to alter, make such minor adjusts potentially impossible to achieve. This is related to the EEP permissions system that has been set to allow EEP assets to be sold by creators.

The only options are either a): completely replace the location environment with one attached to their avatar; or b) trying to build a personal “copy” of the location environment just to adjust the Sun position, etc., or c) trying to employ LSL to make the necessary changes, with b) and c) clearly being hard for most people to achieve.

Whirly Fizzle has raised a feature request (BUG-225921) to bring the matter to LL’s attention, and it is being examined. However, whether or not an alternative means to make such localised (/ personal) tweaks to an environment will make the initial EEP release or be held over to “EEP 2.0” has not been decided.

One suggestion put forward at the meeting allowing such minor tweaks might be to allow make changes without exposing the associated underlying values for the settings (thus avoiding people being able to copy  / rip EEP assets that they would otherwise have to buy), and to have the Save options disabled when doing so. Rider Linden indicated this is one of the approaches he was considering looking at.

Reminder: the EEP simulator code is now grid-wide. This means certain render feature – such as the stars – appear to be “broken” on non-EEP viewers (e.g. black “stars” can appear in daytime skies as square blotches, and at night white stars appear decidedly square. This is because the sky (including the stars) is rendered differently with EEP, but an attempt is made to convert things like stars back to a windlight setting for rendering by non-EEP viewers, which doesn’t entirely work.

This issue will obviously be fixed when the EEP viewer code is available in all viewers.

Simulator Update

[6:56-7:20] Simulator releases have been fairly quiet of late, with some weeks seeing no roles on either the SLS (Main) channel or one or more of the RCs. However, there are a number of simulator projects in flight which mean things are liable to be busy with simulator releasing over the coming weeks.

Teleport Issues

Teleport Disconnects

[25:37-34:01]

  • It’s been widely noted that there has been a sharp up-tick in teleport failures & viewer disconnections (with physical region crossings also causing similar issues).
  • This problem appeared to start with a server deployment, but the root cause(s) is / are proving hard to identify.
  • It took the Lab a while to realise there was a problem, as the tool they use to monitor the success / failure rate of teleports was not showing any significant issues, and Lindens in-world assumed that when they encountered the problem, it was an issue with their own connection.
  • Investigations are now in progress, but identifying a root cause is difficult, as it is proving hard to get a consistent set of circumstances by which the disconnects can be reproduced.
    • If anyone can determine a means to repro the issue, or determine the conditions under which the problem is more / less likely to happen, they are asked to put it in a Jira for the Lab.
  • Some changes have been made to the simulator code in the hope that they might either a) help alleviate the problem, or b) at least provide more data when teleport disconnects do occur, and some of these changes are likely to be deployed in week #14.

Attachment Loss on Teleport

[34:09-36:59]

  • This is another issue that has been of increasing notice for a while now (e.g. inventory being actually detached; attachments being ghosted in your local view whilst others still see them attached; experience-controlled temporary attachments becoming ghosted, etc.).
  • The Lab does not have a solution for the problem as yet. However, via testing, they have found a number of issues that contribute to worn inventory being detached as a result of the teleport (/ region crossing).
  • Fixes for these issues are being developed, and more news on these should be available once the Lab has some definitive testing results.
  • The hope is that the Lab will able to resolve most of the issues  – or at least make things behave more correctly – just through changes on the server-side, rather than the fixes being heavily biased towards the viewer.
    • Any viewer-side changes that might be required will be highlighted at future TPVD meetings do that other viewers can take and merge them as required.

Other Items

Adult Rated In-Viewer Web Searches

[40:45-43:15]

Despite certain pundits claiming otherwise, the Adult rating is not all about “extreme sex and violence” (there are numerous residential, art, photographic, and role-play regions for example, that err on the side of caution and opt for an adult rating). However, a problem that does exist is that the web search in the viewer currently opens on the Events tab, and with the Adult search parameter enabled, this can result in sexually explicit adverts being displayed, which some who might otherwise be using Adult to rating simply to find the type of location noted above to be uncomfortable.

  • Unchecking the Adult search option isn’t a solution, as disables Adult searching in other categories thus preventing the art galleries, etc., mentioned above being listed in results.
  • One way to lessen this impact might be to make the Destinations tab the default tab on opening the web search panel. While this still has Adult destinations in the banner ads, these are more mixed with ads for destinations with other ratings, and potentially less noticeable.
  • Another suggestion offered is to possibly sub-categorise Adult search results between sexual / non-sexual (although this could be hard to achieve in avoiding issues of gaming).
  • The suggestion made for this issue to also be raised at the next Web User Group meeting.

 

2019 SL User Groups 11/3: TPV Developer Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

Forest of Astray; Inara Pey, February 2019, on FlickrForest of Astray – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, March 15, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. Time stamps are provided to the major topics of discussion, which will open the video in a new tab for ease of reference.

There was a lot of general text chat during the meeting, there these notes are purely a summary of the key discussion points likely to be of interest to most users.

SL Viewer

[3:47-5:35]

There have been no SL viewer updates this week, leaving the current pipeline as:

  • Current Release version 6.1.0.524670, formerly the BugSplat RC viewer February 13th, promoted February 28th No Change.
  • 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 version 6.1.1.525044, March 7th.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.1.1.524929, March 6th.
    • Estate Access Management (EAM) RC viewer, version 6.2.0.524909, March 5th.
  • Project viewers:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17th, 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 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Updates to the RC viewer have been delayed due to “some small problems” being revealed when the viewers were updated with a security update to  Chrome and Chromium), which affects all versions except the very latest, 72.0.3626.121. This is being addressed by Linden Lab, but it will take time for the patch to filter out to all viewers. In the meantime, the current internal SL web browser is potentially vulnerable; do not use it to browse non-LL websites on it, and avoid using media on a prim from untrusted sources.

In addition, EEP, EAM and Bakes on Mesh are all awaiting server-side updates, with EEP apparently being deployed to the rest of the grid in week #12 (Magnum and SLS).

Attachments Detaching

[9:28-20:50 (including a lot of text chat)] : Linden Lab is getting some “large-scale” testing done on attachments detaching (e.g. after a teleport or following region crossings).

  • Some of the tests have involved region crossings carrying more than the permitted number of attachments, and data from these experiments is still being gathered.
  • It has apparently proven difficult to consistently reproduce issues, which has delayed data gathering and investigation.
  • Part of the issue seems to still be wearing to many items on a single attach point (mesh items are particularly susceptible to this due to many creators simply utilising the default right hand attach point for their clothing, etc., rather than rigging to alternates).
  • Some have pointed to stressed (i.e. those bring over-used by avatars and scripted objects – such as busy shopping event regions) can exacerbate the issue, which could be the result of messages to / from the viewer being lost.
  • Others have suggested the issue is related to the complexity of attachments (visual and scripting).
  • Some testing by users has suggested that it a result of kill messages being received during multiple region crossings (e.g. an avatar crosses from region A to region B and then to region C, and gets missing attachments after crossing into C as a result of a kill message being received from region A causing the viewer to think something has been detached).

In Brief

  • [20:53-28:07 (including text chat)] Inventory Requests During Log-In: the viewer has a series of tags related to inventory requests that are used during the log-in process. LL has asked TPVs to check on to see if they have made any changes to how the tags are used, as changes may be coming as an overall part of the project to improve inventory robustness.
  • [32:16-32:40] Group  tag change/group role change throttle: the is currently a means for users to change their group tag and role rapidly using RLV/a scripting. However, this can put enormous strain on server-side services. Because of this, LL are introducing a server-side throttle on requests to change group tag information, and it appears likely that this will be deployed in week #13 (commencing Monday, March 25th, 2019).
  • [33:08-37:15] Video playback issues:
    • Autoplay of You Tube videos within the viewer appears to be broken, and a check on recent server changes will be made to see if there is anything in particular that might be responsible.
    • There are no plans for further Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF – media playback) updates until after the work on updating the viewer build process to Visual Studio 2017 has been completed.
    • It is possible that after the VS2017 upgrade, the Lab may be able to re-enable codec support for playback of MP4 format videos – although there is no time frame for this happening at present.

2019 SL User Groups 9/3: TPV Developer Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

Provincial Life; Inara Pey, February 2019, on FlickrProvincial Life – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, March 1st, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. Time stamps are provided to the major topics of discussion, which will open the video in a new tab for ease of reference.

There was a lot of general text chat during the meeting, there these notes are purely a summary of the key discussion point likely to be of interest to most users.

SL Viewer

[0:44-4:48]

As noted in my CCUG Summary for the week:

  • The BugSplat RC viewer, version 6.1.0.524670, was promoted to de facto release status on Thursday, February 28th.
    • This has resulted in breakage for some open-source builds, and the Lab will be accepting patches to correct this, providing the patches do not interfere with the BugSplat changes.
    • There will likely be further fine tuning of the BugSplat code to assist with the reports generated.
  • The EEP viewer was promoted to RC status with the release of version 6.0.2.524683 on Wednesday, February 27th.

The remaining viewer in the pipelines remain 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):
    • Estate Access Management (EAM) RC viewer, version 6.1.0.524240, dated February 22nd.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.0.2.523177, dated January 16th.
  • Project viewers:
  • 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, dated May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

The EAM viewer requires a further simulator update, and there will be further simulator updates / deployments for EEP (which is not yet grid-wide).

The new Maintenance RC viewer – code-named Teranino (after the Croatian liquer) – has been delayed while it is being merged up to the BugSplat release. Among other things, this RC will have numerous crash fixes in it.

Also as noted in my CCUG summary, the Bakes on Mesh viewer is awaiting a Bake Service update. Once that has been deployed, the viewer will likely be promoted to RC status.

Asset UDP Messaging Deprecation

[4:54-6:08] The simulator update to remove the remaining Asset UDP messaging was delayed as a result of the week #9 deployments having to be deployed. The initial deployment of the changes will, I believe, be made to the Magnum RC channel.

As these updates are deployed the current Obsolete Platform viewer and the Linux Spur viewers will be increasingly unable to receive asset data – including avatar shapes, meaning avatars used using them will appear as clouds. These viewers will not be updated to render avatars, and will not be updated to enable them to do so.

In Brief

  • [22:29-22:52] Texture memory caching: this work is stalled at present, but LL hope to resume the work soon.
  • [23:12-23:35] Visual Studio 2017 update: “Good progress” is being made on the shift to using VS 2017 in the viewer build process, and it is hoped tested on the updated build process can commence in a few weeks.
  • [28:38-28:48] Avatar attachment issues: the issue of attachments belonging to other avatars randomly appearing to be briefly attached to your screen when logging-in to / teleporting to busy regions is thought to be the result of a race condition, with the viewer receiving object data for attachments before it gets the necessary avatar / attachment point data. While the problem does correct on receipt of the latter, LL are continuing to investigate.
  • [7:06- 19:23 – mainly in text chat] NiranV Dean (Black Dragon viewer) believes he has noted two performance improvement areas:
    • A means to prevent fps collapse when edit-selecting rigged mesh. He has offered to set up a repository so his ideas on this can be examined.
    • A means to reduce the number of getChild calls generated when using tools such as the Edit window (some TPVs may have already implemented fixes to reduce these calls).
    • Using sliders to make changes to glow and transparency (and possibly to materials – e.g. shine and glossiness, although the workflow here would be more complicated) to reduce the number of callbacks being made.
    • There is a willingness at the Lab to look at his ideas, once they’ve been submitted  / made available.
  • [29:38-31:31 (and beyond in chat)] General discussion on avatars appearing to float above platforms floors at altitude. In short, this is nothing to do with further height offset issues, but likely the result of floating point precision options (the same issues that can lead to things like “prim drift” when building at altitude). Any attempt to redress this could be a major project, if not a fundamental change in how the simulator works.
  • A presence of the Singularity team at the meeting led to suggestions a release for that viewer might be somewhere on the horizon.