On Tuesday, May 19th the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to the three RC channel, comprising Internal server logging changes, back-end system bug fixes and a change to Reply-To e-mail addressing on snapshots. There were no RC deployments on Wednesday, May 20th.
SL Viewer
The Attachments Viewer RC (Project Big Bird) was updated to version 3.7.29.301943 on Thursday May 21st. As noted in part 1 of this week’s report, the initial RC release of this viewer had an elevated crash rate compared to the current release viewer, including a crash-on-exit bug, so this release will hopefully address those issues.
Group Chat
A fix for issues around BUG-9130, where some people were unable to see any posts in some or all of there group chats, including their own posts, while everyone else in the same group could see their posts, has started to be deployed across the chat servers, and should be completed on Friday, May 22nd.
“The chat servers got stuck with bad info about where the sender was, so the messages never reached them,” Simon Linden said at the Server Beta User Group meeting on Thursday, May 21st, reiterating an explanation given at a recent Simulator UG meeting. “And unfortunately it wouldn’t fix with relogging or even a chat server restart.”
“Loading…” Issue with Names in Group Chats
This is a viewer-side problem which causes avatar names to appear as “Loading” under certain circumstances in group chat (see BUG-3829 and STORM-2114). A contribution by Ansariel Hiller is currently with the Lab and is expected to be released as a part of the next Snowstorm contributions viewer, which is expected to appear soon.
Other Items
Region Restart Glitch
There has been something of a rise in reports of regions experiencing issues following recent following restarts – most noticeably caps failures. This is something the Lab is looking into, and Simon commented, “we have a suspicion that after rolls, as that server host starts up regions, it’s doing enough of them at about the same time that things get overloaded. It’s still a theory but makes some sense why we’d get cap failures like that.”
The following notes are primarily taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, March 13th, a video of which is included at the end of the article (my thanks as always to North for recording it and providing it for embedding), and any time stamps contained within the following text refer to it.
Server Deployments Week 11 – Recap
As always, please refer to the sever deployment thread for the latest updates and information.
There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday, March 10th
On Wednesday, March 11th, all three RC channels received the same new server maintenance package comprising “internal improvements for premium users”.
SL Viewer
The Avatar Hover Height viewer reached the release channel on March 10th, with the release of an RC version (3.7.26.299635). Avatar Hover Height allows you to adjust the vertical position of your avatar within some preset limits. See the wiki page and my overview.
This brings the total number of RC viewers in the viewer release channel to four, however:
[0:41] It is unlikely the Maintenance RC viewer (currently version 3.7.26.299610, released on March 6th) will be promoted without further update, as it has been found to contain a significant number of additional bugs which require fixing
[0:51] As the Avatar Hover Height RC viewer has only just been released, it is unlikely that the Lab will have enough stats on it to judge whether or not it can be promoted to the de facto release viewer in the immediate future; it is therefore likely to remain at RC status for at least another week, although initial reports suggest it is stable and doesn’t hide any unpleasantness
[01:07] The back-end support for Experience Keys / Tools still isn’t ready for the service to go live, although the Lab is making further progress with whatever needed to be done; it is therefore remains unlikely the that Experience Keys viewer (currently version 3.8.0.299338, released on March 9th) will be promoted to the de facto release viewer until such time as the remaining back-end work has been completed.
Tools Update Viewer and XP Users
[01:20] This potentially means that the Tools Update RC viewer (currently version 3.7.26.299443, released on March 4th) may be promoted to the de facto release viewer in week #12.
When this happens, it will obviously mean that all future builds of the official viewer will be made using the new tool chain and autobuild process. This in turn means that any Windows version of the viewer built using the new tools set (which includes MS visual Studio 2013) will not run on any version (32-, or 64-bit) version of Windows XP. To this end, the installer is being set so that it requires a minimum of Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 installed, in order for it to successfully install the viewer.
Note that this is not a deliberate attempt to block XP users from Second Life; it is purely the result of the Lab moving towards the use of up-to-date tools for building the viewer (and which will yield positive benefits elsewhere, such as with greater tool commonality between the Lab and TPVs), and some of these tools do not support windows XP due to its age and it no longer being actively supported by Microsoft.
[16:54] Some TPVs may investigate / opt to build the viewer somewhat manually using the new tool chain in such a way that it can be used on XP, but this is reportedly requires a “very large amount of work” to achieve, requires a lot of command line input, an avoidance of VS 2013, and is “really hacky”.
Project Viewers
[03:28] The Viewer-Managed Marketplace project viewer (currently version 3.7.25.298865, released on February 13th) is liable to be updated in week #12 as a result of further fixes and updates that came out of the last round of testing
[04:20] The Mesh Importer project viewer (currently version 3.7.25.298441, released on February 3rd), is currently undergoing further update with new fixes and will be updated as a project viewer in the near future.
Avatar Layers Global Limit
Vir Linden – working on the new wearable layers code
[04:41] In response to BUG-6258, “Popularity of Mesh Attachments Facilitates Need For More Alpha Layers”, the Lab is working to implement a new “global” limit to the number of system clothing layers an avatar can wear.
Under the current system, there are 12 types of clothing layers or wearables (alpha, tattoo, undershirt, shirt, jacket, underpants, pants, gloves, socks, skirts, shoes, and physics), with (generally) up to 5 of each type of wearable able to be worn at the same time, giving a maximum of 60 wearables that can worn simultaneously.
Under the new code being developed by Vir Linden, a new “global” limit of 60 wearable layers is being set per avatar, and users will be able to wear any number / combination of layers up to that limit (so you could opt to wear 60 jacket layers if you wanted, or 10 each of alpha, shirt, pants, gloves, jacket and socks, for example).
This update requires changes to both the viewer and to the server-side Appearance (SSA) service. The viewer-side changes are updates to the viewer’s logic, so it is purely checking the number of worn layers against the global limit of 60, rather than limits set for individual layers. The SSA changes will similarly support the new “global” use of clothing layers, but will also continue to support the 5-per-layer limit for viewers that do not adopt the newer code, or require a longer lead time in order to adopt the new viewer code, once it is available, thus providing a measure of “back compatibility”. The viewer code is expected to appear in a project viewer once it, and the back-end changes have cleared the Lab’s QA team.
Group Chat
[09:29] As noted in my recent updates, changes made to the group change service in the last two weeks unexpectedly resulted in up to 20% of messages failing to be delivered correctly. Simon Linden spent a fair amount of time during week #10 stabilising things and delivering further updates to try to correct the problem. As a result, in what has been called an “educational” two weeks for the Lab, the situation has been largely reversed, although some problems still remain.
The Server Beta User Group meeting on Thursday, March 12th, saw a further set of updates from Simon undergo testing on the Beta grid, and during the TPV Developer meeting on Friday, March 13th, Oz indicated that the Lab will probably undertake a further round of “serious” upgrading of all the technology associated with group chat before they declare the project in any way “finished”. This will likely involve putting the back-end service support group chat on more up-to-date hardware and OS environments.
As always, please refer to the sever deployment thread for the latest updates and information.
There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday, March 10th
On Wednesday, March 11th, all three RC channels should receive the same new server maintenance package comprising “internal improvements for premium users”.
When asked during the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, March 10th whether the “internal improvements for premium users” was related to the change to the in-world receipt of off-line IMs, as mentioned at the last SBUG meeting, Simon Linden could only say, “I’m not supposed to announce anything, so I can’t go into details … but one thing we’re looking at this year is ways to make premium accounts better. This may or may not do something like that eventually.”
SL Viewer Updates
A new Maintenance RC viewer, version 3.7.26.299610,was released on March 6th. This includes multiple fixes and improvements as listed on the release notes and download page.
The Experience Keys viewer updated to version 3.8.0.299338 on Monday, March 9th, maintaining parity with the current release viewer.
Experience Tools
Although the Experience Tools viewer has been updated (see above), there is still no news on when Experiences might be fully deployed. In order to help build interest in Experiences a suggestion has been put forward to enable Experiences to be rated in terms of the number of people actively joining them (see BUG-6911), which could be optionally shown (at the Experience creator’s discretion in things like search listings, allowing people to judge Experiences by their popularity.
The Lab has considered allowing users to rate Experience themselves in a future update – but as point out in the JIRA comments, such a system could be open to gaming, much like the old avatar popularity ratings. BUG-6911 has been imported by the Lab, but it is currently unclear if the idea will be carried forward.
Group Chat
As also noted in my last updates, recent changes to the group chat service have seen up to a 20% failure rate in delivered messages. Simon Linden spent a fair amount of time during week #10 stabilising things once more, and notes that the situation taught the Lab more about how things might fail. He currently has a set of updates which may further improve things, and these are liable to be tested at the next Server Beta User Group meeting.
Other Items
Names Vanishing from Ban Lists
There have been reports of avatars added to a region / estate ban list or have been previously muted suddenly dropped from the list without an action on the part of the list owner. This might be connected to the old issue of bans made using radar on some older versions of v1-style viewers (notably Phoenix) failing to “stick”, or it may be something else, such as a failure to correctly update a ban / mute list.
Commenting on the subject at the Simulator User Group meeting, Simon said, “we’ve heard reports of that and have looked into it … if you ever can narrow down an instance of that happening, please note it in a JIRA … Our logs will record info about those changing but we have to know where and when to look
“I’m making wild guesses, but I think it would be either the viewer or the simulator making an update to the ban list, and somehow having bad data. Perhaps an incomplete list gets into the picture, and using that as a basis for the update it drops people. Our logs will show events like “MrNoisy was added” and “MrGoodBehaviour was removed” but finding the event is the missing part of the puzzle.
“If you have multiple regions in the estate, there’s another issue of having the changes sent out to all the regions. We’ve seen failures there and I know it’s been worked on a few times (and suspected in some of these reports).”
So, if you do encounter a situation involving an apparent ban list failure, and can log the exact circumstances / details, please consider raising a bug report.
The following notes are taken from the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 28th, 2015, and the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January 30th. A video of the latter is included at the end of the article (my thanks as always to North for recording it and providing it for embedding), and any time stamps contained within the following text refer to both it and the TPV Developer meeting.
Server Deployments Week 5 – Recap
On Tuesday, January 27th, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to Magnum and LeTigre
On Wednesday, January 27th, the RC channels should all receive a new server maintenance package comprising an Experience Keys / Tools related fix, and internal Experience Keys / Tools improvements.
It was stated during the TPV Developer meeting that this update saw the support for the Avatar hover Height (AHH) capability extend to all three RC channels, although no mention of it was made in the release notes.
SL Viewer
Tool Chain Project viewer
The Lab issued a new Tools Update project viewer, version 3.7.25.298587, on Wednesday January 28th. This viewer has been built using the new viewer tool chain for Windows and Mac builds (which includes the upgrade to Visual Studio 2013 for Windows and, Xcode (5 or 6) for Mac, and the use of the autobuild 1.0 process).
Wiki notes for using the new build tools are in the process of being written / enhanced for self-compilers – please note these are a work in progress. Notes on the new autobuild process can also be found on the wiki.
[06:42] It is anticipated that this viewer will progress through to release candidate status, quite probably in week #6 (week commencing Monday, February 2nd).
Maintenance RC Viewer Issues
Users receiving the Maintentance RC, version 3.7.25.298030, released on Tuesday, January 27th, have reported a series of irritating bugs with the viewer:
BUG-8324 (and duplicate BUG-8333) reports the appearance of the term “nolink>” in numerous places within the viewer – such as toasts and notifications – this issue has been imported by the Lab and a fix is apparently in development
BUG-8331 – some links containing the text secondlife or lindenlab incorrectly open a Place Profile in the Places panel when clicked
BUG-8328 – very jagged pictures created by the snapshot floater
BUG-1028 – the fix for MAINT-2056 “Lots of CURL GET FAILED spam in logs when browsing World Map – Beta viewer only” appears not to have fixed the problem, but rather replaced it with an equally spammy message.
Issues with this viewer can be tracked on the JIRA using this filter.
Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM)
[00:12] Brooke Linden was at the TPV Developer meeting to provide an update on the state of play with the Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM) work, which has been undergoing some beta testing with the project viewer on Aditi.
As a result of this testing, the Lab has been re-visiting the project viewer and incorporating feedback and observations for improvements into it, and are “really close” to having an updated version of the viewer available. When the appears depends on whether the Lab opt to release the updated viewer for limited beta testing on Aditi, or to wait until they’re ready to go with beta testing on the main grid, which is also not too far over the horizon.
The current plan is for more widespread beta testing to commence some time after February 14th (so as not to clash with any Valentines Day sales and promotions merchants may be running between now and Feb 14th), then run the beta for around a month, possibly longer, depending on feedback / issues. After this, VMM support will be deployed as a production tool, and things will move to a migration period which will also last around a month.
All this is still TBC, but a schedule will be posted (presumably via the Commerce / Merchant’s forum) once the Lab has worked through dates and requirements.
Experience Keys / Tools
[03:50] The Experience Keys / Tools project is currently awaiting some final server-side updates to be fully deployed (see the server release notes above). It is not anticipated that the Experience Tools viewer which is currently in the viewer release channel (version 3.8.0.298001) will require any further significant updates, so its promotion to the de facto release viewer is pending the server-side updates.
In the meantime, the Lab has already commenced work on a set of enhancement to the Experience Keys / Tools which will further extend capabilities once they are ready to be deployed.
Avatar Hover Height Project
As noted above, server-side support for the Avatar Hover Height project (see my overview for details) is now on all three RC channels, and the plan is to deploy the server code to the Main channel in week #6 (week commencing Monday, February 2nd). Because of this, the current project viewer (currently version 3.7.25.298129) is liable to be superseded by a release candidate viewer following the server-side deployments for that week.
Now in a project viewer (and soon to be a release candidate: Avatar Hover Height provides a means of adjusting your avatar’s graphical height above the ground / floor / objects, as seen by yourself and others
[18:00] A couple of small issues have been noted with AHH, and which only occur is very specific instances. One is that if an adjustment leaves your avatar floating more than around 1/2 a metre above the ground, an attempt to sit down can result in your avatar going up. In the other, standing on a prim and lowering your hover height into the prim can result in your avatar’s legs buckling as you slide into the prim. On terrain, where there can be limited physical penetration, this can be expected behaviour; but when occurring on a prim, it is suspected that the system may not be accurately assessing your avatar’s position.
[19:38] There have been one or two points of concern raised about the similarity in the name of this function – Avatar Hover Height – causing people to confuse it with the existing avatar hover slider (which will not be retired or removed from the viewer once AHH is fully deployed, as the two capabilities provide different use case solutions). The concerns are being fed back internally at the Lab, and if a name change is thought to be required, it may be slipped into the upcoming RC rebuild for the viewer, or the Lab may opt to wait and see if any confusion does arise.
There were no server deployments to either the Main (SLS) or RC channels for the week.
Upcoming Deployments
There is likely to be a server-side RC deployment in week 3 (week commencing Monday, January 12th). Details on what it will contain have yet to be finalised, however, during the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting on Thursday, January 8th, Maestro Linden indicated it would contain miscellaneous fixes an improvements which will likely include:
Removal support for legacy viewer-side avatar baking
Region crossing improvements.
Simon Linden – tidying-up avatar region crossings
The region crossing improvements are for avatars only (not vehicles), and are described by Simon Linden as, “all internal and pretty minor, so please don’t get hopes up for performance improvements,” and being about “clean-up and small polishing.”
A number of regions on Aditi are running the updates – DRTSIM-273 – (Ahern, Bonifacio, Morris and Rizal), and a group test was carried out during the SBUG meeting with people walking / flying and TP’ing between these regions and between them and other regions without the updates as a further check that the changes wouldn’t result in any failures / breakage. “I’m most worried about some data subtly changing or getting lost between crossings, Simon added in this regard, following the test. “but I haven’t seen anything like that.”
Details on the updates related to legacy avatar baking will be posted with the package release notes, when available.
SL Viewer
On Monday, January 5th, the HTTP pipelining RC viewer was updated to version 3.7.24.297623, bringing it up to par with the current release viewer, and therefore matching the Experience Keys RC viewer which slipped out just before Christmas.
Experience Keys / Tools
“It’s really quite close,” Oz Linden said of the Experience Keys / Tools project at the SBUG meeting. “We’re upgrading and testing some back end infrastructure to support it; when that’s ready, we’re good to go.”
As indicated in my original overview of Experience Keys / Tools, the tools come with a number of safeguards to reduce the risk of them being used for mischief. In addition, and as a further discouragement, those wishing to use the tools to build experiences will be required to pay a fee. This has now been set by the Lab, but is not at this time being made public. Expect to hear more about it when the tools are formally released.
In the meantime, you can read more on the project in these pages using the Experience Keys tag, and those wishing to try-out beta Experiences can do so via the Seamless Experiences section of the Destination Guide. You do not need to have the Experience Keys project viewer in order to do so – although it does provide you with access to more information about any Experience you try – see my project viewer overview for details (do keep in mind that both this and the project overview linked-to above are now several months old, and certain details may have changed in the interim; I’ll have a further article on Experiences when they are launched).
Group Chat
Simon Linden is continuing to work on group chat. No major news at this time, other than he’s been carrying out further digging into why some servers seem to get “stuck” every two weeks or so and require a restart. Further data was gathered during the region crossing tests mentioned above.
Other Items
Alpha Map Support for Mesh
I first reported on this matter, which forms feature request BUG-8100 – in week 52. Since then, the idea has received a lot more feedback and further thought. However, following initial triage, the JIRA was closed by Kyle Linden on Wednesday, January 7th, with the standard, “We’ve reviewed your request and determined that it is not something we can tackle at this time.”
The following notes are taken from the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting held on Thursday, December 18th, 2014, and the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, December 19th. A video of the latter is included at the end of the article, my thanks as always to North for recording it and providing it for embedding.
With reference to the meeting video, summary notes are provided below with time stamps to assist is spotting and listening to the associated conversations.
Server Deployments Week 51 – Recap
On Tuesday, December 16th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the server maintenance package deployed to the three RC channels in week #50
There were no deployments to the RC channels.
The end-of-year code freeze / no change window comes into effect from the end of the week, this means there will be no further server updates until January 2015.
SL Viewer
Release Viewer
The Maintenance RC viewer, version 3.7.23.297296, was promoted to the de factorelease viewer on Thursday, December 18th. This viewer comprises a solid collection of bug fixes and improvements to many areas of SL, and also includes a range of fixes to previously released changes in the way joint offsets in rigged meshes are handled. Please refer to the release notes for further information.
Experience Keys RC Viewer
On Wednesday, December 17th, the Experience Keys / Tools viewer was updated to release candidate status with the release for version 3.7.23.297364. Please refer to my overview of the viewer (written while it was at project viewer status) for information on the viewer.
Further RC Updates
[00:50] As a result of the promotion of the Maintenance RC, both the new Experience Keys RC viewer and the HTTP Pipelining RC viewer are currently being rebuilt to include the Maintenance release code. These updates may appear in the release viewer pipeline on Monday, December 22nd, or they may be held over from release until after the end of the no change window.
Viewer Build Tools Project
[01:41] The new year should also see the first release of a project viewer for Mac and Windows built using the new build tools chain and autobuild process.
Group Chat
The last of the 2014 updates are being deployed to the back-end servers. At the time of the Server Beta User Group meeting, there were just a “few more” hosts that had yet to receive the updates, so things should be completed in short order. These improvement are focused on improving the overall robustness of the service and dealing with overload conditions.
CDN Work
What is being referred to as a “mini CDN” test was carried out on the BlueSteel region on the morning (PDT) of Thursday, December 18th. The test was designed to check a more flexible CDN configuration that is going to make it easier for the Lab to deal with fall overs. “It should be invisible normally but lets us have better control of where the viewer gets those mesh and texture assets,” Simon Linden said of the work, which will likely see a formal deployment in the New Year.
Viewer-managed Marketplace (VMM)
[03:53] There was an in-world meeting held on Friday, December 12th to discuss the Viewer-managed Marketplace (notes and transcript).
There should be a summary post from the Lab, covering JIRAs raised on VMM and comments made on the forums, which should be appearing on the current forum thread around the time this update is published. A further feedback meeting is being planned for the New Year.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 