Category: TPVD / Open Source User Group

Bellefleurs – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, September 7th, 2018. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it.

This is another short TPV Developer meeting, with a lengthy discussion (roughly from 7:00 to 13:15) on the Estate Access Management project viewer, the majority of which is covered by my overview of that viewer, and so not repeated here. There are also some extended silences on the video.

SL Viewer

[0:58-7:00]

The Rakomelo Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 5.1.9.519298 on September 5th.  The remaining viewer pipelines remain as:

• Current Release version 5.1.8.518593, dated August 14, promoted August 20. Formerly the SL Voice RC viewer – 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):
  • Animesh RC viewer, version 6.0.0.518949, August 24.
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 5.1.8.518751, released on August 20.
  • BugSplat RC viewer, version 5.1.8.518305, August 7. This viewer is functionally identical to the current release viewer, but uses BugSplat for crash reporting, rather than the Lab’s own Breakpad based crash reporting tools.
• Project viewers:
  • EAM project viewer, version 5.2.0.518362, August 9 – improved region access control tools; see my overview for more.
  • Bakes on Mesh project viewer, version 5.1.7.518013 August 3.
  • 360 snapshot viewer, version 5.1.6.515934, June 6 (see my hands-on update).
• 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.

Assorted Notes on the Viewer Pipeline

• The Bugsplat RC viewer is still awaiting a further update (to bring it to parity with the release viewer), and this update will include some Mac improvements.
• A second viewer with further round of rendering updates will be following on the heels of the current Love Me Render RC viewer.
• EAM Project Viewer:
  • The next update to the EAM viewer may see it promoted to release candidate status.
  • This update will include the ability to set time-based bans on individuals (i.e. banning someone for a period of time, after which they are automatically unbanned).
• The snapshot viewer is still awaiting internal resources at the Lab to be able to resume working on it.
• Both the Bakes on Mesh and Environment Enhancement Projects continue to await the AIS update (see below for more).
  • The Bakes on Mesh project also requires both a simulator update (as does EEP) and an update to the Bake Service. These  will take place some time after the AIS update has been deployed,
  • [7:51-8:49] As a sidebar to the Bakes on Mesh and EEP work, it was found that the existing viewer code did not handle inventory assets types very well if it could not recognise them. This has now been corrected with one of the updates in the Rakomelo RC viewer, so viewers with this code, but which do not have the BOM and EEP code should handle the new asset types delivered by the simulator / CDN for these projects a lot more gracefully than has previously been the case with adding new asset types.
• [6:16-7:00] The Animesh is now down to a small number of must-fix bugs before it can roll to release status; additional bugs have been tiraged and flagged as “fix later”. As noted in my most recent CCUG update, there will be a behavioural change to add a scale limit to the existing translation limit such that Animesh objects can’t become too large or too arbitrarily placed.

AIS Update

[4:00-4:34] As noted above, the AIS (Advanced Inventory System) update contains changes to support both the Bakes on Mesh project and the EEP project. However, it is primarily aimed at running the inventory services on a newer version of their operating system (the Lab is currently engaged in updating the operating system used across their servers, as noted by Simon Linden at the week #36 Simulator User Group meeting). This OS update is also one of the foundational requirements need to start moving more of the SL services to a cloud based infrastructure in the future.

The AIS update has now cleared the Lab’s QA testing, and is expected to be grid-wide in the next week or so.

ARCTan and Viewer Texture Caching

[13:30-14:40] ARCTan and the viewer texture caching updates have been on hold, the former because of the effort being put into the rendering updates in the Love Me Render RC viewer (and presumably its follow-up viewer) and the EEP project. Both ARCTan and the viewer texture caching project are expected to resume “real soon now^TM“.

In Brief

• A reminder that the SL Voice .EXE in the current release viewer (5.1.8.518593) is incompatible with earlier versions of the viewer, and cannot be used with them.
• There is also a report that viewer 5.1.8.518593 can disconnect voice when teleporting a lot more frequently that previous releases. This is to be the subject of the bug report.
• A reminder that the fixes for ensuring off-line Group messages and Friend requests are correctly delivered at log-in by the new HTTP capability can be found in the Rakomelo RC viewer.
• [21:27-22:10] There is still no confirmed date as to when the inventory UDP messaging will be turned off at the simulator end. All inventory messaging switched from UDP to HTTP earlier in 2018, and it had previously been indicated the UDP support would be switched off on the server end in late summer / autumn 2018.  This is in part due to the discovery the messaging system is being used by some “other things”, and this need to stop before UDP messaging can be disabled.

Ponto Cabana – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, August 24th 2018. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. The second half of the meeting is dominated by general discussions on the Environment Enhancement Project, which is covered via my CCUG updates, particularly the week #34 update, and so these aren’t repeated in the notes below – please refer to the notes in the link or watch the embedded video.

SL Viewer

[1:12-5:37]

The Voice viewer has had one bug filed against it following its promotion to release status, but this is considered “not too terribly serious”.

The Animesh RC viewer updated to version 6.0.0.518949 on August 24th,  in the wake of the promotion of the Voice RC viewer to de facto release status, bringing it to parity with the latter.

All other SL viewers in the various pipelines remain as per the start of the week:

• Current Release version 5.1.8.518593, dated August 14, promoted August 20. Formerly the SL Voice RC viewer – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 5.1.8.518751, released on August 20.
  • BugSplat RC viewer, version 5.1.8.518305, August 7. This viewer is functionally identical to the current release viewer, but uses BugSplat for crash reporting, rather than the Lab’s own Breakpad based crash reporting tools.
• Project viewers:
  • EAM project viewer, version 5.2.0.518362, August 9 – improved region access control tools; see my overview for more.
  • Bakes on Mesh project viewer, version 5.1.7.518013 August 3.
  • 360 snapshot viewer, version 5.1.6.515934, June 6 (see my hands-on update).
• 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.

Of these, the BugSplat viewer (previously reported as coming to the end of its run) is with QA following its merge up to the Voice viewer release, and so a new RC version should be appearing in week #35. At the time of the meeting, the Love Me Render RC viewer had yet to be merged up to the Voice viewer code base.

The Love Me Render viewer should also address the KDU issues previously noted, with a fix to prevent the OpenJPEG textures that create problems from being created. However, the Lab is still working with Kakadu to try to obtain a better fix for issues.

Week #35 should also see the release of a new maintenance RC viewer.

Estate Access Management Viewer

[6:55-7:38] Feedback on the new EAM project viewer hasn’t been as broad as the Lab had hoped (i.e. the viewer hasn’t been tested by many region holders); however, the feedback that has been obtained has been taken on-board by the Lab. Currently, it is anticipated this viewer should be proceeding to RC status relatively quickly.

There are discussions on the EAM viewer that take place around 14-20 minutes into the meeting, however most of this can be covered by reading my EAM viewer overview.

Bakes On Mesh

[4:24-5:20] The order of events to get Bakes on Mesh working on Aditi are:

• AIS update to support the new asset types used by Bakes on Mesh (and the new assets to be used by the Environment Enhancement Project). This is now due to clear the Lab’s QA and start deployment – at the CCUG meeting, Vir suggested this could start to happen in week #35.
• A simulator update to support the Bakes on Mesh messaging, etc.
• The Bake Service update to support  the use of 1024×1024 textures. This is ready to go, but is dependent upon to the simulator update being deployed.

EEP / TCO / ARCTan

[7:56-8:41] The Environment Enhancement Project, the TCO (viewer texture caching project) and ARCTan project (re-aligning rendering costs) all involve Graham Linden. His priorities are currently:

• EEP shader work  – see my week #34 CCUG summary for more.
• TCO viewer caching work.
• ARCTan – see my week #34 CCUG summary for more.

The TCO project will hopefully improve texture caching in the viewer (as well as allowing users with 64-bit operating systems to set larger caches than is currently possible) and also include improvements to texture handling in the renderer.

“Avatar Last Names” Project

[8:42-10:40] The project to re-implement avatar last names is progressing, but is still not ready for deployment. The current focus on the project is ensuring the all of the Second Life services, both visible and non-visible to users, will correctly handle and resolve name changes (e.g. everything from how an avatar’s name is displayed in their profile / in-world tab through their groups, to object / asset ownership to SL web properties like the Marketplace, forums, and so on).

Given this, there are no dates available on possible deployment of the capability or how things like user suggestions for last names will be managed. Nor has the cost for making a name change been determined.

Mac OpenGL Support  / Linux Viewer Builds

[34:23-35:40]

• Nothing new to report on how the Lab is going to handle rendering on the Mac viewer following Apple’s decision to deprecate OpenGL support. Options are still to be investigated.
• Work on the Linux 64-bit viewer is progressing as a background task. It is hoped that more positive news will be forthcoming towards the end of the year. However, any Linux build will have a degree of limited functionality, by virtue of the fact that Vivox has discontinued providing voice support for Linux on account of its low user numbers compared with other operating systems.

In Brief

[24:26-25:51] JIRA Update: the Second Life JIRA update is now scheduled for Wednesday, August 29th, 2018. During the update, the service will be unavailable for several hours. An official blog post should precede the update.

[26:15-27:27] Abuse Reports: a cap was introduced recently that loads Abuse Report categories from the server, rather than having them hard-coded in the viewer. However, some users remain on older viewers that ho not recognise the cap, and which have out-of-date categories stored within them. This causes  reports filed using the correct categories to be delayed in processing until then can be reviewed and correctly re-classified.  So far the Lab has opted not to block incoming ARs purely on the bases of them having an invalid category.

[31:35-33:15] Duplicate Calling Cards: some time ago there were improvements made to the viewer to handle the deletion of calling cards. However, duplication of cards can still be an issue for those who like to have them inventory. To help with this, the Lab’s support team is adding a function to their inventory fix transform that will also remove duplicated calling cards (and duplicated calling card folders).

Cloudbreak – blog post

The majority of the following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, August 10th 2018. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. This was a short meeting – 24  minutes on the video, which includes some lengthy silences.

SL Viewer

[0:24-4:50]

Bugsplat RC Viewer

Functionally identical to the release viewer, but used to test the Bugsplat crash reporting service (rather than routing crash reports to the Lab’s internal Breakpad based crash reporting mechanism), this RC is likely coming to the end of its test run, sufficient data having been gathered for the evaluation.

Voice RC Viewer

At least one more update is anticipated while this is at RC status. This will contain fixes for crashes within the SLVoice.exe (the viewer should detect the exe’s absence and automatically restart it). This update should appear in week #33 (commencing Monday, August 13th).

EAM Project Viewer

The EAM project viewer, version 5.2.0.518362, dated August 7th, includes revised and improved capabilities for handling region access control. See SL Estate Access Management project viewer – overview for more.

Upcoming Viewer Promotion and New RCs

• The new release of the Animesh viewer due in week #33 will most likely see that viewer promoted from project to RC status.
• A new Rendering Project RC viewer should arrive in week #33.
• A new Maintenance RC viewer is in waiting, but its release is dependent upon a server-side update for handling group invites and Friend requests whilst off-line (and part of the overall move to HTTP delivery for off-line IMs / notices). These changes should be going to the simulator RC channels in week #33. The Maintenance viewer will be deployed once these updates have reached the SLS (Main) simulator channel.
• [12:56-13:23] Viewer TCO project: this contains the updates to how the viewer handles texture caching, and should be entering the project viewer pipeline “soon”, together with some OpenJPEG fixes (also see the end of this report for more on OpenJPEG / KDU).

Project ARCTan

[5:26-9:20] This is the code-name for the project to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints.

As I’ve previously noted, the Lab is sensitive to the implications of doing this, if it results in significant changes – particularly in the area of Land Impact for in-world objects. Should this be the case, steps will be taken to ensure users have advanced notification of changes that affect content, so they can assess what needs to be done and to make any necessary changes to their land / regions.

Part of this work will involve the Lab deploying simulator versions running both the current and the “new” calculations, allowing them to see the overall potential impact of any given set of changes (number of parcels / regions affected), ahead of making any actual change. This would allow them to avoid the kind of mass auto-return situation that has accidentally occurred in the past, and enable them to find a means to inform people of the potential impact.

A further option the Lab has been considering is to raise the land capacity on regions / parcels to compensate for any impact of revised LI calculations. So, for example, if the new calculations result in parcels going over the capacity limit by and average of (say) 10%, region LI might be increased by 15% to offer some compensation. Then, for those who still exceed their limit, there will be a period of grace when then can consolidate and bring their LI use within the limit of the revised calculations before the latter are enforced.

The important aspect of the LI work is that while values may change, they overall why they are being calculated my result in their meaning being different – so numbers might actually coming out “smaller” than is currently the case, resulting in no  need for physical changes to be made in terms of what people have rezzed in-world.

Overall, this is a long-term project, and no changes one way or the other will be occurring in the immediate future.

Environment Enhancement Project

[14:01-14:44] No significant news. The project is awaiting the current Inventory AIS updated to be completed on the main grid. There is also an inventory patch for EEP that needs to be deployed and tested on Aditi. Once this has been done, the way will hopefully be clear for EEP to appear on the main grid.

Other Items

OpenJPEG Images and KDU “Downgrade”

[10:33-12:54] : there is an issue with KDU which means that textures encoded using OpenJPEG may not display correctly. As a result, the Lab is rolling by KDU support from 7.10 to 7.9. This is a temporary measure to alleviate the problem whilst LL work with KDU to get a fix. In the meantime, Graham Linden has been working on potential means to avoid the issue is a fix is not forthcoming from KDU.

Second Life Scheduled Maintenance

[16:03-17:03] There will be a scheduled maintenance period on Monday, August 13th, commencing at 05:30 SLT (13:30 UK; 14:30 CET). This should be about an hour in length, but will see SL logins suspended. See: https://secondlife-status.statuspage.io/incidents/vrpczxqtk8ls for more.

JIRA Upgrade

[17:06-20:37] A new version of the Second Life JIRA is in testing. This will see several changes to the JIRA system, notably visually and when logging-in. The planned deployment of the new system is Thursday, August 16th. Part of this update will ensure JIRA refreshes a user’s e-mail to match the one provided for use with Second Life when logging-in.

Strawberry Lake – blog post

The majority of the following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, July 27th 2018. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. This was a short meeting – 24  minutes on the video, which includes some lengthy silences.

My apologies for the tardiness in posting this – I wrote it up on Saturday, then got distracted by RL before posting and forgot about it!

SL Viewer

No updates during the week, leaving the viewer pipelines as:

• Current Release version 5.1.6.516459 and dated June 15, promoted June 21 – formerly the Pálinka Maintenance Release Candidate – No Change
• Release channel cohorts:
  • BugSplat RC viewer, version 5.1.7.518003, released July 20. This viewer is functionally identical to the current release viewer, but uses BugSplat for crash reporting, rather than the Lab’s own Breakpad based crash reporting tools.
  • Quinquina Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 5.1.7.517594, on July 12.
• Project viewers:
  • Animesh project viewer updated to version 6.0.0.518080 on July 25.
  • Bakes on Mesh project viewer, version 5.1.6.516270, dated June 14.
  • 360 snapshot viewer, version 5.1.6.515934, June 6 (see my hands-on update).
• 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.

The Bugsplat viewer has some issues logged against it, notably BUG-225112 -[Bugsplat-RC] Bugsplat viewer appears to misreport viewer crashes as freezes & other assorted annoyances. This is being looked into.

Upcoming Projects

• For Animesh Bakes on Mesh and EEP, please refer to my week #30 CCUG report.
  • In addition to the above notes, the Advanced Inventory System (AIS) is currently being updated, and this work is delaying both Bakes on Mesh and EEP, both of which make changes to the inventory system as well.
• A viewer with the updated estate management tools is in the process of being polished, and should be appearing “pretty soon”.
• Texture cache project viewer: this has been on hold recently while Graham Linden works on another project, however, he’ll be returning to it in the very near future.

Other Items

• Noted in my CCUG summary, BUG-225157 “[RC BlueSteel 18.07.17.517953] Adjusting specular horizontal offset also adjusts specular vertical offset on BlueSteel regions only” should be getting both server-side a viewer updates to correct. These updates were with the Lab’s QA team at the time of TPVD meeting.
• There are reports of a media issue arising from the Firestorm 5.1.7.55786 release (reviewed here), but the root cause appears to be with the Lab’s code – a JIRA is to be raised.
• Group Notices: the new capability to use HTTP rather than UDP for receiving off-line notices when logging in had a couple of issues relating to group notices and friend requests. The fixes for this are both server-side and in the viewer, and should both see the light of day soon.
  • Note that the HTTP capability is only for received messages held while off-line. IMs, group notices, etc., sent while you are actually logged-in to Second Life are still delivered via UDP.

The majority of the following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, July 13th 2018. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. This was a short meeting – just over 30 minutes in length, but with some significant pauses throughout.

SL Viewer

The Quinquina Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 5.1.7.517594, on July 12th. All other SL viewers in the various pipelines remain as for the start of the week:

• Current Release version 5.1.6.516459 and dated June 15th, promoted June 21st – formerly the Pálinka Maintenance Release Candidate – No Change
• Project viewers:
  • Animesh project viewer updated to version 6.0.0.516979 on June 25th.
  • Bakes on Mesh project viewer, version 5.1.6.516270, dated June 14th.
  • 360 snapshot viewer, version 5.1.6.515934, June 6th (see my hands-on update).
• Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17th, 2017 and promoted to release status 29th 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. This viewer will remain available for as long as reasonable, but will not be updated with new features or bug fixes.

Animesh

[0:44-2:20] Some bugs have surfaced in the server-side Animesh code which may delay the code from being deployed to the Main (SLS) channel in week #29 (commencing Monday, July 16th).

There is still some validation testing going on for the LOD / bounding box issue in Animesh viewer, but the viewer should be promoted to release candidate status “fairly soon”, possibly by the time the server-side code has been deployed grid-wide.

Bakes On Mesh

[2:21-2:38] A further update to the Bakes on Mesh project viewer is anticipated, possibly in week #29 (commencing Monday, July 16th). This will include several bug fixes.

Upcoming Project Viewers

Environmental Enhancement Project (EEP)

[3:01-3:40] A project viewer for EEP should be surfacing soon, but the functionality will not be available on the Main grid until the supporting back-end inventory updates have been deployed to Agni.

Texture Caching Updates

[3:44-4:21] A project viewer (the TCO viewer) with new texture caching capabilities is still anticipated as coming soon^TM.

Estate Management Tools Updates

[4:45-5:27 and 21:59-23:31] A viewer supporting the updates to the estate management tools – improved ban lists, etc., had been held up while some issues around Friend requests and group invites are fixed (these issues are related to the recently introduced capability to deliver off-line IMs, etc., via HTTP rather than UDP, with group invites and friendship offers requiring more back-end updates in order to work correctly through the new capability). These issues have now been resolved, and both the server-side updates and the viewer changes are with the Lab’s QA team.

Last Names

[16:30-20:25] Still no date for roll out, but as these keep coming up:

• There are no plans to re-introduce legacy last names (i.e. no Pey, Widdershin, Sideways, Munro, Fizzle, etc.).
  • [27:27 (text) and 28:18-28:25] However, a suggestion was put forward in the meeting to offer legacy names at a higher price than other last names, and Oz indicated this might be considered.
• People will be able to suggest last name options (excluding legacy last names, per above).
• There will be no change to Display Names, which will remain available as an option for those wishing to continue using them.
• Changing your name will levy a real-world fee – the exact amount is still TBD.

A focus on the work for this is updating back-end services so they properly support / recognised changed names. Until this work is completed, the Last Names capability cannot be deployed.

In Brief

• [5:43-6:36] Dynamic user interface (DUI): referred to at the recent Meet the Lindens sessions at SL15B, the ability to separate floater and panels out from the main viewer window is not being worked on at present, and so it is extremely unlikely anything on this will appear in 2018.
  • For a broader discussion on the idea and some of the Lab’s thinking on is – please refer to this section of my SL15B summaries.
• [7:11-7:30] Multi-core graphic pipeline: raised at the meeting, this is not something the Lab is liable to tackle at the moment. A more important focus is how to handle Apple’s deprecation of OpenGL.
• [9:29-9:45, with text comments to 11:43] BUG-225039: “with transparent texture and alpha masking at cut-off 1, the underlying colour shows through in small patches” – the Lab is actively investigating this.