Category: TPVD / Open Source User Group

SL projects update 29/2: server, viewer, TPV meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

My apologies for this appearing a little on the late side; things have been a bit manic in the physical world of late (not helped by the Tour de France and the German GP this weekend!), and I’ve been slipping behind on blog posts (I’ve also got to talk to my minions about vacation scheduling….).

Note that the following notes are taken from both the Server Beta User Group meeting of Thursday July 17th and the TPV developer meeting on Friday July 18th, the video of which is supplied below (my thanks to North, as always). Items taken from the later are time stamped within the text, so you can locate and listen to the discussion in full via the video.

Server Deployments Week 29 – Recap

  • On Tuesday July 15th, the Main channel was updated with the Experience Keys project, which had previously been running on Magnum. This roll-out coincides with the release of the Experience Keys project viewer (see below) and the release of the Lab’s first Experience Keys demonstrator game, The Cornfield.  Please refer to the release notes for further information
  • On Wednesday July 16th, the Magnum RC was updated a new infrastructure project that adds support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy. Release notes
  • On Thursday July 17th, BlueSteel and LeTigre were both be updated with the Experience Keys project, but otherwise remained on the same  server maintenance project as week 28, which addresses a JSON-related bug, an interest list related race condition, and to improve L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects. See the release notes (BlueSteel) for details.

SL Viewer

Group Ban Viewer

The Group Ban viewer reached release candidate status on Wednesday July 16th, with the release of version 3.7.12.292031. This viewer allows certain group members to ban avatar from a group or from joining a group  When an existing group member is banned, they are also automatically ejected from the group. Please refer to my Group Bans overview for further information, if required.

Maintenance Release RC

[04:20] This viewer, version 3.7.12.291824, has been tracking with the same crash rate as the current release viewer (3.7.11.291465), and as such is expected to be promoted to the de facto release during week 30 (week commencing Monday July 21st). However, it has been reported that the Mac Alt-Cam bug (BUG-6760) fix doesn’t work and has been referred back to the Lab for further investigation.

Oculus Rift Project Viewer

[04:56] It is anticipated that an updated version of the Oculus Rift project viewer will be appearing soon, potentially in week 30. The update will bring the viewer up to par with the current 3.7.12 release code base.

Log-in Test Viewer

[04:44] There is a special log-in test viewer currently on closed use (there is no publicly available version), which is being used for some kind of A/B testing related to logging-in to Second Life. Precisely what this testing is geared towards is unclear.

Viewer Autobuild Process

[05:50] Oz Linden has been working on improving the viewer autobuild process, and there is a new version of autobuild, together with a wiki page on the changes and improvements. The new version brings with it a number of improvements, such as stricter library version checking, full transitive dependency checks, additional error checks, etc. This is considered to be one of the steps required in order for the viewer to be compiled using Visual Studio 2013. Full details in the video for those into self-compiling viewers.

 Third-party Viewer Directory Updates

[00:20] The Third-party Viewer Directory, which lists all Second Life viewers and clients which have gone through the self-certification process, has been revised.

Until recently, the directory was listed by viewer crash rate – with the most stable at the top. However, this was something of a hit-and-miss approach due to a number of factors, including significant changes made to the code within the viewer which is used to detect and report crashes. So instead, viewer and clients are now split into three categories:

  • Those which are actively maintained “full” viewers which are updated regularly to track new developments in the Linden Lab viewer, and implement a full graphical environment
  • “Lightweight”, text and mobile clients, such as Lumiya, Group Tools, Radegast and so on
  • Those viewers which have not been updated recently enough to be considered fully compatible with current Second Life services (e.g. they lack things like server-side appearance, etc.).

Group Chat

[11:56] Work is continuing on group chat. At the TPV Developer meeting, Oz Linden summarised this work as:

We are working on group chat; I don’t really have much to report on that this week. We’re doing a set of experiments and collecting a lot of data, and then we’re going to come up with the next round of changes to make. One of the things we’ll try to do, once we think we’re done with this project – and I have no predictions for when that will be – is tell people how it went and what we’ve done.

It may well be that before we’re done, we’ll come back to this group and say we’re making changes to interfaces to viewers for group chat in order to improve the situation. I don’t know of any of those yet, but I’m not ruling them out. We’re going to try to make group chat a lot better, and if that means not being 100% backwards compatible, then that’s what it means. At this point we’re not looking at changing the protocol with anything else. Not ruling it out, but that’s not the correct direction.

Experience Keys

The Cornfield, the Experience Keys demonstrator game
The Cornfield, the Experience Keys demonstrator game

The current creator beta programme for Experience Keys has now been filled. Commenting on it at the Server Beta meeting, Coyot Linden referred to it as proving “wildly popular” and that the Lab have “heard some really cool ideas for new experiences”. He also referred to this being “round on” of the beta programme – so there may be more opportunities for creators to be involved in the future.

During the Server Beta meeting, a request was made for the Linden to consider allowing the popularity of an Experience (e.g. the number of people engaged on it) to be made available, with the suggestion it could be done in a number of ways:

  • As information made available only to the Experience owner (so they can see how popular a given experience they’ve created is proving to be
  • As information which can be (perhaps optionally) published by the Experience owner (e.g. via the Experience Profile)
  • As information which can be displayed in the Search tab of the Experience floater, allowing users to search for the most popular experiences at any given time.

Commenting on this, Simon Linden said, “The numbers will definitely be interesting, but we’ll have to think carefully about what and how to expose it.   As an owner, it makes sense for you to have an idea what’s going on with your experience.  I’m not so sure about others.”

Part of the concern here is about the popularity figure potentially being used by griefers as a means of targeting popular regions / activities and causing disruption. Following Simon’s observation, Dolphin Linden added, “yeah, technically the number can be made available. But how and to whom needs to be thought about, but numbers about your own xp can be tracked if you want with a little bit of work. We might also be able to just get an ordered list of the top 10 experiences or something, without disclosing actual numbers.”

Continue reading “SL projects update 29/2: server, viewer, TPV meeting” →

SL projects update: week 25/3: server and TPV meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Week 25 – Recap

  • On Tuesday June 17th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the group ban project server code – release notes
  • One Wednesday June 18th, the RC channels were updates follows:
  • LeTigre received a new anti-griefing measure – release notes
  • Magnum remained on the Experience Tools project, but also received the group ban server code and the anti-girefing measure – release notes.
  • BlueSteel remain on the Sunshine / AIS v3 project, and the  but also received the group ban server code and the anti-griefing measure, the viewer for which was promoted to the de facto release viewer on Monday June 16  – release notes.

There has been some interest voiced at both the Simulator UG meeting and the Server Beta UG meeting, in the “anti-griefing measure” deployed to the three RCs this week. Commenting on this at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday June 19th, Maestro Linden said, ” I think I’ll be able to discuss the change next week,” (after it has been deployed to the Main channel as well). ” But right now, some people would unfortunately use the information as a how-to-grief instructional.”

Upcoming Deployments

The LSL functions for materials may be set to arrive on an RC in week 25. This depends on how this week’s RCs continue to perform, but assuming the anti-griefing measure on LeTigre is promoted to the Main channel, then that RC would theoretically be available for the LSL functions for materials, assuming no significant bugs are filed against it as a result of Aditi testing.

TPV Developer Meeting

A TPV developer meeting took place on Friday June 20th. The core items discussed in the meeting are reported below, with timestamps in the relevant paragraphs indicating the point at they are discussed in the video embedded here.

As has been noted elsewhere, the meeting was attended by Ebbe Linden, who took an impromptu Q&A session at the end of the meeting. This commences at around the 51:00 mark in the video. While this report does not cover that Q&A session, information on his comments about the Lab’s in-development new virtual world platform can be found in Ebbe confirms: “we’re working on a ‘next generation’ platform” (with audio).

My thanks, as always, to North for the video.

SL Viewer Updates

[0:01:18] The SL Share 2 viewer, providing Flickr and Twitter upload support and the snapshot filtering capabilities for both and for snapshot uploads to Facebook was updated to version 3.7.10.291134 on Thursday June 19th, bringing it to parity with the current release viewer code base

The Snowstorm viewer, released as a project viewer on June 12th was updated to version 3.7.10.291042 on June 19th, bringing it to parity with the current release viewer code base, and issued as a release candidate viewer. This has had a significant bug reported against it, which is currently being fixed. As such, it is unlikely that this RC will be in the running for promotion until after it has been refreshed with the fix and the updated version has been in the viewer release channel sufficiently long enough for the Lab to obtain meaningful statistics on its performance.

Avatar System Clothing Layers

[0:4:00] BUG-6258, “Popularity of Mesh Attachments Facilitates Need For More Alpha Layers” is a request to raise the number of alpha layers which can be concurrently worn (at the moment this is 5).

Rather than increasing the number of an individual layer which can be worn (such as alphas), the Lab is considering setting a global limit – so as with attachments, an avatar can wear as many clothing layers in any combination, up to the global limit (with attachments, this is set to 38).

The Lab is still investigating this approach in terms of feasibility and what the upper limit for clothing layers might be for an avatar.  Until they do make a final determination on the issue, they have requested TPVs do not arbitrarily add to the existing layer limits, as there is a risk that anything the Lab does do on this front may conflict with alternatives put in place by TPVs.

SL Experience Tools

[0:07:10] The major technical announcement of the TPV meeting was that the long-awaiting Experience Tools will be entering a beta test phase in the very near future. You can catch-up on this in my initial Experience Tools overview .

Z-offset Height Adjustment Proposal

[0:39:06] One of the issues with the introduction of Server-side baking is that it broke the “Z-offset” capability common to many third-party viewers. This allowed the vertical height of an avatar above the ground to be adjusted, such that sits and kneels don’t leave the avatar apparently floating in the air, and which allow those with very tall / giant avatars or very small / petite avatars and those wearing full body mesh to similarly adjust their vertical placement relative to the ground / floor.

In response to the issue being raised as a bug report (see SUN-38, “As users of kneel/lay/sit animations and tiny/giant avatars, we need a way to change the body size in SSB sims”), the Lab, via Nyx Linden, introduced the hover feature, which allows an avatar’s standing height to be adjusted to some degree via an appearance slider.

sitting
Jessica Lyon demonstrates part of the avatar height offset issue: when seated using her preferred sitting pose, her avatar floats above a chair, and she has no means of adjusting the height so that she appears to be sitting in the chair

However, as a solution, it has a number of limitations (your shape has to be modifiable, it won’t work in cases where you are trying to adjust your avatar’s default sitting / kneeling pose height to prevent floating, as the hover option requires the avatar to stand in the default shape edit pose, etc).

In order to try to revisit the problem and possibly gain a more thorough solution, Zi Ree from the Firestorm team has written a proposal document entitled Height offset Proposal.

This clearly explains the issues in not having a more flexible approach to adjusting height offset, and also offers a couple of suggestions on what might be done to improve things. This was presented to the Lab at the TPV Developer meeting, together with a concise demonstration by Jessica Lyon of some of the issues.

Obviously the Lab hasn’t at this point committed itself to tackling the matter, but those from the Lab at the meeting were appreciative that the proposal has been written and the issues  / possible approaches clearly laid out. There has been an agreement to look into further, and there might be some feedback at the next TPV Developer meeting (scheduled for July 18).

Cocoa Issues

[0:48:20] The Lab continues to work on the Cocoa issues affecting Mac users and there is some good news from them and Firestorm:

  • The Lab has a fix for the ALT-cam bug, which is expected to be in the next Maintenance RC viewer
  • Firestorm has a fix for the issue of severe typing lag when in a location with several other avatars (see: FIRE-12172). If successful, this is likely to be contributed to the Lab, and once in a Firestorm release, may see version 4.4.2 of that viewer blocked.

 

SL projects update 23/4: TPV developer meeting, Friday June 6th

Posted on by Inara Pey

A TPV developer meeting took place on Friday June 6th. The core items discussed in the meeting are reported below, with timestamps in the relevant paragraphs indicating the point at they are discussed in the video embedded here.

Note that the timestamps are not necessarily chronological; some subjects have been grouped together for ease of reading. Also, the last 8-10 minutes of the meeting is taken-up with general conversation (Oz’s vacation, trying-out the Oculus Rift, etc.), which is not reported upon here.

My thanks as always to North for the video.

SL Viewer Status

[0:18] Other than the release of the MemShine RC viewer, version 3.7.9.290582, reported upon in part 1 of this week’s report, there have been no significant SL viewer updates. If the stats on this viewer remain good, it is likely that the individual MemPlug and Sunshine AIS v3 release candidates also still in the release channel will be closed-out, leaving just the MemShine version. As the overall stats between the RCs, which apparent include the SL Zipper RC which is currently absent from the Alternate Viewers wiki page,  are all so close, it is not clear which is most likely to be promoted as  the next de facto release viewer.

Oculus Rift Project Viewer

[1:33] Alongside the release of the Oculus Rift project viewer, the Lab also made the code repository available to the public as well. However, TPVs are warned against integrating the code for release purposes at this time, as it is anticipated there will be significant changes to the viewer once the new version of the Oculus Rift Development Kit is available. However, the Lab is not opposed to TPVs producing experimental versions of their viewers using the code if they wish to gain some familiarity with it.

The project viewer itself is unlikely to undergo update until at least after the new Oculus Development Kit is available to the Lab, although it is expected that the viewer will undergo periodic merges with the viewer release code in the coming weeks / months so that it does not stray too far out of step with viewer releases.

As well as supporting the Oculus Rift, the code within the project viewer is also intended to support other, similar VR headsets, although the Lab obviously does not have any definitive time frames as to when such headsets will become available or when they are liable to be officially supported in the viewer.

ANTVR: to be supported by Second Life at some point? (Assuming it gets to a production status)
ANTVR: to be supported by Second Life at some point? (Assuming it gets to a production status)

Group Ban and Snowstorm Viewers

[03:08] Again, as reported earlier this week, the Group Ban viewer is currently awaiting the server-side code to be fully deployed across the main grid prior to it officially appearing in a project / RC form. This is now likely to be delayed a little longer as a result of the GnuTLS issue, which promoted an additional server-side deployment which replaced the initial Group Ban deployment to LeTigre (the server code should return to the RC channel in week 24).

[03:20] There are further tweaks being made to the Snowstorm release, which should include the likes of STORM-1831, “Obtain LSL syntax table from simulator so that it is always up to date”, which has in turn been impacted by STORM-2026. Hopefully, the viewer will be heading for the release channel very soon.

Maintenance Viewer Updates (with more Cocoa Fixes)

[06:40] There are more maintenance (JIRA: MAINT) fixes coming down the pipe, none of which are expected to be particularly huge, but as things progress there could be a number of MAINT-related viewer releases.

[14:24] The next MAINT viewer to be released should include further Mac Cocoa fixes within it. Unfortunately, Oz did not have a list of what these might be, so expect an update at the next TPV developer meeting if the MAINT viewer hasn’t already appeared by then.

Upcoming Viewer Items

New Viewer Log-in Screen

[03:52] This has yet to make a public appearance, but the Lab is working on a new viewer log-in screen. Details are not clear as to precisely what is changing layout-wise, but it will not result in any actual changes to how log-ins are physically handled between the viewer and the SL servers, nor will it carry any significant updates other than to the initial splash screen. Commenting on it at the meeting, Oz Linden described it as, “yet another attempt to make a friendlier intro for new users”, as a part of ongoing attempts to smooth people through the sign-up and initial log-in activities.

It is expected that this viewer may appear as a release candidate as the current number of RC viewers in the release channel thins down (particularly if the MemPlug and Sunshine RCs are retired, as noted above).

The official viewer log-in screen is due for a revamp, although the mechanics of the log-in process will remain unchanged, and at least some of the widgets will remain in some form. In addition, at some point grid status updates *may* be returning to the screen
The official viewer log-in screen is due for a revamp, although the mechanics of the log-in process will remain unchanged, and at least some of the widgets will remain in some form. In addition, at some point grid status updates *may* be returning to the screen (see below)

Continue reading “SL projects update 23/4: TPV developer meeting, Friday June 6th” →

SL projects updates: TPV developer meeting, Friday May 9th 2014

Posted on by Inara Pey

A TPV developer meeting took place on Friday May 9th. The core items discussed in the meeting are reported below, with timestamps in the relevant paragraphs indicating the point at they are discussed in the video embedded here. My thanks as always to North for the latter.

SL Viewer Status

[00:35] As noted in part one of this week’s updates report, the de facto viewer was updated on Tuesday May 5th with the promotion of the Interest List viewer (version 3.7.7.289461). The viewer contains what’s being referred to as a number of “non-trivial” merges, as the team responsible for the viewer took the opportunity to clean-up “a lot of old and unpleasant code”, and this “touched on a lot of things”. As such, it may be a while before this code filters into all TPVs.

[01:27] On Thursday May 8th, the SL Share-2 RC updated to version 3.7.8.289775 (download and release notes). This viewer includes the ability to upload Tweets and snapshots to Twitter and / or snapshots to Flickr, and to use pre-set filters on images being uploaded to either service and / or to Facebook, and to create your own filters.

The remaining viewers in the release channel (Sunshine / AIS and the Maintenance viewer) and the Zipper project viewer will be updated in week 20.

[02:11] There are two or three other viewers which are expected to be appearing in the near future. One of these contains a number of Snowstorm contributions (such as STORM-1831, currently awaiting two minor bug fixes), Baker Linden’s group ban work should be generating a viewer soon (see below for more), and there is a viewer which contains a series of memory leak fixes which is currently in QA.

Group Ban List

[03:40] Baker reports he has two “major” bugs and three or four “minor” bugs still to deal with; however, it doesn’t appear is if these are going to stop the viewer arriving as a project viewer. As noted in part two of this week’s report, the repository for the code has already been made public, and TPVs have been invited to pull code from the repository if they’re in a position to do so (the group ban viewer is built to LL’s 3.7.8 code base).

Obviously, and again as noted in part two of this report, the code will not be usable on the main grid until such time as the server-side changes have been deployed, and this isn’t likely to happen for a couple of weeks or so, so don’t expect it to be appearing in release versions of any viewers for a while.

The server-side code is available on a channel on Aditi (DRTSIM-234 14.05.05.289712 – which includes the Morris region where the Server Beta meeting is held and now includes the BUG-5929 fix), and there may be a grid-wide Aditi deployment of the server-side code. If this is the case, it will likely be confirmed via a Server Beta group meeting.

One aspect that has not been looked into as yet is ensuring that when someone is ejected / banned from a group, they are also ejected from group chat. Currently, due to the way the back-end services operate, if someone has the group chat window open when they are ejected from a group, they can continue to chat / spam into the group chat up until the point where they close the window. Commenting on this, and given that Simon Linden has been working on the chat service, Baker has indicated that he’ll look into things with Simon and see if this problem cannot be resolved.

Leap Motion Integration

[12:18] In November 2013, Leap Motion approached Linden Lab about integrating their gesture controller into the view.  Due to the amount of work the Lab had on its plate, the work was handed-off to TPV, with members of the Firestorm team working with Leap Motion to get things integrated.

Since that time, the work has been subject to a number of hiccups – including the need for Leap Motion to update their software. As it stands, the work is slightly stalled as the Firestorm team no longer have the resources needed for the work, so a call has gone out to TPV developers who are willing to take a lead in bringing this work to fruition.

Third-party Library Work (Webkit et al)

[26:14] Monty Linden is continuing his work in cleaning-up the third-party libraries used within the viewer build process. This work has been focused of late on Webkit, which is used for a number of tasks, such as powering the built-in web browser and to display profiles, and is used with Media on a Prim (MOAP) and many in-world televisions. However, Monty has more recently been working on the COLLADA DOM library as a means of “taking a break” from Webkit. He describes this as the “last big one” on his list.

Despite still having to finish-up with Webkit, Monty is already in a position of being able to use a windows version of the viewer which makes use of his updated and cleaned-up libraries, although he emphasises the work is not ready to enter prime-time use as yet.

Continue reading “SL projects updates: TPV developer meeting, Friday May 9th 2014” →

SL projects updates 17/3: TPV developer meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

A TPV developer meeting took place on Friday April 25th. The core items discussed in the meeting are reported below, with timestamps in the relevant paragraphs indicating the point at they are discussed in the video embedded here. My thanks as always to North for the latter.

Release Candidate Status

Interest List, Sunshine and Maintenance RC Viewers

[01:02] All of these RC viewers have been rebuilt during the week to use the current release viewer code base (version 3.7.6.289164, formerly the VoiceMO RC), and all look to be performing reasonably well. However, none have been in the release channel for long enough for significant stats to be gathered.

SL Share 2

[01:26] The SL Share 2 viewer was issued as a release candidate viewer on Friday April 25th, version 3.7.7.289497 (download and release notes). This viewer provides options to upload Tweets and snapshots to Twitter and / or snapshots to Flickr, and includes optional post-process filter capabilities which can be applied to snaps being uploaded to Flickr, Twitter and / or Facebook. See my review of the project viewer for further details.

Snowstorm Viewer

[02:30] The next Snowstorm viewer, featuring third-party code contributions from the open-source community (including Ima Mechanic’s BUG-1831 LSL syntax highlighting work, developed with the help of Cinder Roxley and Oz Linden), is now with LL’s QA team, and it is hoped this will be appearing as a project viewer in week 18 (week commencing Monday April 28th), assuming no issues are uncovered during the QA process.

Oculus Rift Viewer

[04:05] Other than bug fixes, the  current Oculus Rift closed beta viewer is not expected to go through any significant updates for the time being. However, it is anticipated that there will be further work on the viewer once the Lab has access to the new Rift SDK, and that this may well be “very significant”.

Zipper Project Viewer

[04:30] It is anticipated that the faster installation “zipper” viewer (currently version 3.7.5.288507 – download and release notes – dated March 28th) will become a release candidate viewer “very soon”.

Mac / Cocoa Update

[06:48] There is still no single project at the Lab which is focused on Mac Cocoa issues. However, fixes are being developed and are starting to appear as a part of overall viewer development and release process.

The current release viewer (version 3.7.6.289164), includes a Vivox update to the 4.6.x libraries, and so should resolve Mavericks-related voice issues (among other voice issues). Also, the Maintenance RC (version 3.7.7.289405) has a number of Mac / Cocoa fixes, including: MAINT-3135 “Cocoa Viewer: Mac Maximizing the viewer leaves garbage on the screen”; MAINT-3288 “MAC – Fullscreen mode issue in Viewer 3.6.7 (281793)”; MAINT-3506:  “Copy & Paste on mac viewer often generate undesired special characters at the end of the pasted line sometimes leading to crash “; and MAINT-3642 “Mac viewer can no longer export textures to TGA format”. However, as there is no over-arching project for Mac / Cocoa fixes, it is a case of checking the release notes for new RC and project viewers as they appear.

The infamous ALT-camera Cocoa bug (see FIRE-12241 (MAINT-3171) is an issue the lab has been looking at but have so far been unable to work out  why it is happening. Oz Linden invited TPV developers to consider poking at it and contributing code if they felt it is something they might be able to resolve.

Webkit Update

[12:01] Webkit is a third-party library used within the viewer for a number of tasks. For example,  it powers the built-in web browser, and is used to display profiles (unless you’re using a viewer supporting legacy profiles). It is also used with Media on a Prim (MOAP) and many in-world televisions.

There have been an increasing number of issues with webkit. The libraries used within SL are out-of-date, for example, something which has caused the Lab and TPVs a considerable amount of pain (see BUG-4763 and FIRE-12642, and FIRE-11057). Given these problems, Monty Linden has been focusing on trying to improve matters, notably by creating a new lqtwebkit library repo, which he describes as “extremely experimental”.

Firestorm have re-worked webkit for themselves, updating to version 5..2.1 for Windows, which seems to be resolving issues. They’re working to do the same with Linux and Mac, although there is a problem with the latter where buttons embedded in a Flash video will not work.

As reported last time, a further problem here is that the qtwebkit (on which lqtwebkit is based) has been deprecated by QT, so the Lab is faced with a decision as to what to do going forward. One option may be to go with CEF, but which direction the Lab will take has yet to be decided.

SL projects updates week 15/3: TPV developer meeting: webkit, Cocoa, Oculus

Posted on by Inara Pey

A TPV developer meeting took place on Friday April 11th. The core items discussed in the meeting are reported below, with timestamps in the relevant paragraphs indicating the point at they are discussed in the video embedded here. My thanks as always to North for the latter.

Release Candidate Viewers Status

[00:34] The VoiceMO RC (version 3.7.6.288881) combines the former SL Voice RC (3.7.5.288516) and the former Merchant Outbox RC (3.7.5.288408), both of which have now been withdrawn from the release channel. Both of these RCs were performing well, and it is hoped that by combining them, they’ll both have an accelerated path through to formal release status.

The Lab is keen to see the Vivox updates for voice gain wider traction in viewers, as these not only improve people’s voice experience, they also lighten the load on the back-end servers.

The Interest List RC updated to version 3.7.6.288879 and the Sunshine / AIS v3 RC updated to 3.7.6.288822, both dated April 10th, and appearing on the wiki page on April 11th.

These, together with the Maintenance RC (version 3.7.6.288799), released on Wednesday April 9th, are now the four remaining release candidate viewers in the release channel. As these are all recent updates, data is still being gathered on all four, so it is unlikely that any of them will be promoted to the de facto release viewer in week 16 (week commencing Monday April 14th).

Google Breakpad Reporting and Issue

[01:40] The Google Breakpad changes mean that all viewers with the updated Breakpad code have the marker files for crash reporting created much sooner in the initialisation process and deleted much later in the viewer shutdown process. This means that more crash stats are being collected, but it also means that the crash rate measurement has gone up slightly as a result.

[03;30] Whirly Fizzle has identified an issue occurring with both the Maintenance RC and the current viewer release (3.7.5.266464) which appears to be linked to the Google Breakpad updates. BUG5707, “While logged in, crash reporter pops up, sends in a crash report but the viewer does not crash”. Whirly describes the issue in part as:

The crash reporter window does not just sometimes flash up briefly at viewer launch or viewer close, the crash reporter stays on-screen and appears to be actually sending in crash reports – I see the “Sending to server…..” window, which stays onscreen for some time.
Often I have more than one “Sending to server….” window open – often as many as 3 of them will all open at the same time.

This is happening on viewer launch, on viewer close and even while logged in.
When it occurs while logged in, the viewer does not crash, I am still logged in and the viewer appears functional.

Commenting on the situation, Oz Linden said, “Yeah, we’ve got people looking at some of the Google Breakpad crash reporting issues … I’m not really sure what that’s about … we’ll see if that can get some refinement.”

Oculus Rift

An update to the Oculus Rift project viewer, currently on closed beta, is expected in the next week. The lab is still accepting applications from those who have the hardware to join the closed beta the requirement being that applicants actually have the Oculus hardware. Applications should be addressed to sl_oculus_beta@lindenlab.com.

Further updates to this viewer are expected, particularly once the Lab received the SDK2 headsets, although these are not anticipated to be arriving for another couple of months. The viewer most likely won’t be opened-up publicly until after these latter updates have been made, so TPVs will not be able to integrate the code for some time to come.

SL Share

[05:26] Merov Linden was on-hand to talk about the recent changes to the SL Share capability in the SL viewer – notably the updates which allow people to post pictures to Flickr, post text and images to Twitter and once again post images to Facebook. It is likely that this viewer will be progressing to release candidate status in week 16.

As I’ve previously noted, an important thing to remember about SL Share is the all of the capabilities are opt-in. No-one is forced to use them, and the Facebook option in particular has nothing to do with trying to “push” SL users to Facebook, and while Facebook may not allow people to have accounts in their avatar names, there are a lot of people who are happy using it to connect their SL account with their real life account on Facebook.

One issue that did cause a problem was the inclusion of SLurls with photos being uploaded to Facebook, which caused the image upload capability to be blocked by Facebook. The SL Share updates have removed the “include location” option in the photo upload tab of the Facebook floater, and as a result, Facebook have removed the block once more.

The SL Share photo upload panel as it was prior to the change (l) and as it appears in the SL Share project viewer and some RC viewers since the change
The SL Share photo upload panel as it was prior to the change (l) and as it appears in the SL Share project viewer and some RC viewers since the change (r)

The issue here was not so much that SLurls were being included in uploaded photos, but the fact that they were being added automatically as a part of the automated processing of snaps during the upload process. Apparently, a requirement in using the Facebook API is that all text uploaded or appended to images must be manually entered by the user …

As well as restoring the upload capability, Facebook also restored photos with SLurl include which had been uploaded prior to the block coming into effect, again apparently because of the SLurls being automatically added.

One of the most interesting parts of the new capabilities is that of the preset filters within the upload panels for Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, and the ability for people to create their own filters.

When SL Share 2 appeared, questions were asked on various blogs on whether the filter capabilities would be added to the viewer’s snapshot floater, so that they could be used with the snapshot options there – most notably with the profile feeds option.

A preview example of a snapshot using one of the SL Share built-in filters
A preview example of a snapshot using one of the SL Share built-in filters

I took the opportunity at the TPV developer meeting to ask, and Oz Linden replied:

The SL Share project doesn’t include putting the filters in to the snapshot floater, but Niran [NiranV Dean, creator of the Black Dragon viewer] is working on that. So we may get that as another open-source contribution.

Merov then added:

It’s not overly difficult to do that. Actually, I did it for a demo once, so it’s pretty easy to add. I didn’t do it because the snapshot UI on the official viewer has plenty of … how can I put this nicely? …. Oddities, let’s say … so if I really wanted to do it, I’d have to re-do everything …. so I went to the designers and said, “You know, we should really re-do all this,” and they said, “Yes, but not now.” so I’m not working on that just now. but yes, it’s possible … so if you want to put it into your own snapshot floater, I won’t be offended!”

One of the aspects of the SL Share 2 capability that didn’t get to be in this initial update is a filter editor capability such that the filters can be more easily combined to create custom filters. Oz invited any TPV developers who might like to take this on to do so and to consider contributing it back the Lab should they do so.

The authentication aspect of the SL Share capabilities is all handled by the Lab’s back-end to the capability, so that the viewer-side code can be taken by TPVs and amended without any risk of users’ private information being leaked or tracked.

Webkit Woes

Monty Linden
Monty Linden

[15:48] Webkit is a third-party library used within the viewer for a number of tasks. For example,  it powers the built-in web browser, and is used to display profiles (unless you’re using a viewer supporting legacy profiles). It is also used with like Media on a Prim (MOAP) and many in-world televisions.

There have been an increasing number of issues with webkit. The libraries used within SL are out-of-date, for example, something which has caused the Lab and TPVs a considerable amount of pain (see BUG-4763 and FIRE-12642, and FIRE-11057).

Monty Linden has been poking at the problems, and gave a further update on his work:

I’m doing a bunch of damage, and then trying to move forward, just to get to 4.7.4 first, and then the 4.8 a little bit later on. I’m just about at the end of that … my goal is to kill the current third-party lqtwebkit library repo and I’ve created a new one that’s a little healthier and working a little bit better.

It’s not clear at the moment when Monty’s work will appear in a release stream. A further problem here is that the qtwebkit (on which lqtwebkit is based) has been deprecated by QT, so the Lab is faced with a decision s to what to do going forward. One option may be to go with CEF, but which direction the Lab will take has yet to be decided.

The Firestorm team have reported they have re-worked webkit for themselves, updating to version 5..2.1 for Windows and are looking to do the same for Linux and Mac. This work appears to have fixed issues with Media on a Prim and it is hoped it may also resolved the YouTube issue of videos failing to play on in-world TVs, etc.

Firestorm are going to liaise with Monty with regards to the work they’ve done. currently, the Windows updates are still subject to internal testing by Firestorm, although they plan to make the work visible to all once they are confident enough that it behaves as expected.

Mac / Cocoa Update

[22:45] There has been some progress in addressing the Mac / Cocoa issues, with some fixes now in the Maintenance RC release, including:

  • MAINT-3135 Cocoa Viewer: Mac: Maximizing the viewer leaves garbage on the screen
  • MAINT-3288 Mac: Fullscreen mode issue in Viewer 3.6.7 (281793)
  • MAINT-3642 Mac viewer can no longer export textures to TGA format
  • MAINT-3674 Mac: “Hide NewApplication” under Second Life menu, should be “Hide Second Life”

Referring to Cocoa issues in particular, Oz again confirmed that “all of them” are on the Lab’s to-do list, but not all of them are getting done as yet. In particular, there is no news on the long-standing ALT-cam bug.

Other Items

We’re all aware that there are options within the viewer to run more than one instance (so if your computer doesn’t grind to a halt, you can run two versions of the official viewer or two versions of Firestorm, etc). However, what some people may not be aware of is the fact that while the viewer can allow multiple instances, this is not actually a supported feature. It should also be remembered that because of the way voice is handled, it is currently not always possible to run two instances of a viewer (or two different viewers at the same time) with voice enabled without encountering significant issues and potential lock-ups (although Singularity has a fix for this).

What also may not be realised is that because some of the viewers use different mechanisms to detect how many instances they are running, it is possible to encounter conflicts and issues when running, for example, the SL viewer and the Firestorm viewer simultaneously on a computer.

So if you are running multiple instances of the same viewer or multiple viewers on the same computer, and start experiencing unexpected issues, try shutting all but one instance / viewer down and seeing if the problems go away before seeking support assistance.