Tag: Region Crossings

SL project news week 51/2

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments

The RC channel deployment took place on Wednesday 19th December as planned, with no major hiccups or issues apparently being felt / reported. This release saw all three RC channels receive the same package, which is the Magnum deployment from week 50, with a single additional bug fix.

The release notes (for Magnum, but applicable to all three RC channels) can be found here, and the forum discussion thread is still open should anyone have comments (allowing to the start of the holiday period & delays in any replies from LL).

SL Viewer Update

The last beta release of 2012 arrived on Thursday December 20th with the release of 3.4.4.268479 – which as the name suggests, uses the 3.4.4 code from viewer-development. Chief among the updates in this release include:

  • Moving viewer crash logger and SLPlugin from the Carbon API to Mac OSX Cocoa for the Mac viewer
  • Fixes for fontconfig crash-on-start issues experienced with Linux
  • Revisions for pathfinding options, including additional of tear-off option for Pathfinding menu when opened from Build menu; introduction of Region Rebake option to Pathfinding menu
  • Fixes for 3.4.2.266708 release issue of flexiprims stopping flexing after teleports
  • Further fixes for llTargetOmega() issues

The full set of release notes can be found here.

Forthcoming Viewer Graphics Enhancements

Alongside of the upcoming materials processing capabilities of normal and specular maps, the SL viewer will be receiving further rendering improvements in 2013, comprising:

  • Gamma correction capabilities
  • Improvements to the “Shiny” capabilities in the viewer (Build floater > Texture tab >Shiny button) when running in deferred mode, to make shine appear more as it does in the real world, with the level of shine based on the amount of reflected light / angle from which a shiny object is viewed from relative to the light source
  • In-world scene reflections on shiny surfaces.
Gamma correction: from Exodus to the SL viewer in 2013
Gamma correction: from Exodus to the SL viewer in 2013

Gamma correction is a process by which lighting on a screen can be adjusted to make it look more natural to the human eye by adjusting the RGB channels to give a more natural-light contrast. It can also be used to produce interesting photographic effects. Exodus viewer already has gamma correction, which can be adjusted via the Visual Settings floater (above).

A simple, if extreme, example of gamma correction: both images were taken under the same lighting conditions
A simple, if extreme, example of gamma correction used for a photographic effect: both images were taken under the same deferred lighting conditions, the image of the left with “normal” (default) gamma correction in the viewer, the one on the right taken with all three channels increased in value to produce an image with a much deeper contrast

As with materials processing, all three of the new capabilities are being introduced to the SL viewer via the Exodus team, lead by Geenz Spad, who indicated that in the case of gamma correction, the new capabilities will be somewhat more capable as a process within the SL viewer than is currently the case with the Exodus viewer.

As with material processing itself, which is still progressing, as I reported last time, there are no time frames as to when each of these new capabilities will be available within the viewer.

Threaded Region Crossing Code Test

Wednesday 19th December saw a “pile-on” test take place on Aditi for the new threaded region crossing code. The test has been called by Caleb Linden with a view to trying-out region crossing under a range of tests, including avatars with heavy scripted loads, repeated crossings by vehicles, via teleporting, etc.

In all, six regions were / are available for tests: GC Test 9, 10, 15 and 16 forming a block of four running in “threaded” mode, and GC Test 2 and 8 running in “unthreaded” mode, but otherwise the same server code.

Turn-out for the tests wasn’t particularly great (around 15 people together in the test region at any one time), with a range of ground and air vehicles being used to try-out the crossings and compare them directly with crossing between the two unthreaded regions (and testing between threaded / unthreaded).

The overall consensus from those at the tests were that crossings between threaded regions were somewhat improved – but the overall improvements were not that spectacular. At times recovery from loss of control of a vehicle appeared to be faster – a matter of one or two seconds – but at other times, things seemed to be the same, with vehicles ploughing through the ground / flying into the air for 6-7 seconds at a time before recovering, giving pretty similar results to those encountered crossing between threaded / unthreaded and between unthreaded regions.

Crossing between threaded regions in a vehicle: some improvements, but not a lot
Crossing between threaded regions in a vehicle: some improvements, but not a lot

Crossing between regions on foot, even under an excessive HUD / attachment script load (373 scripts accounting for 2.87800ms cpu time) and with vehicles zinging back and forth, did appear to me to be somewhat improved, with little or no “rubber banding” or walking off into the sunset, but a recovery of control after just a few paces.

Post-test, Caleb has requested those participating in the test file JIRA on any specific issues they encountered, and include “Region Crossing” in the description / subject heading for the report.

With thanks to Darien Cauldwell for information on the viewer enhancements discussed at the Opensource Dev meeting.

Threaded Region Crossing pile-on test

Posted on by Inara Pey

I’ve been covering the upcoming improvements to region crossings – referred to as threaded region crossings – in my weekly SL project reports.

During the Server Beta meeting on the 13th December 2012, the subject came up for brief discussion, during which I suggested to Caleb Linden (who is heading-up the work) that perhaps a pile-on test would be an idea.

I’ve no idea if he read my suggestion, or was already planning to go ahead with such a test, but on Monday 17th December, 2012, he posted an announcement of just such a test to the Server thread of the TEchnology forums. The announcement reads in full:

In an upcoming server build, Linden Lab has changed the way agents and their attachments get carried over in the event of a region crossing. And we need your help to test region crossing in a pile-on fashion.

On Wednesday, December 19th at 16:00 PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) please join IRC (EFNET -> #sltest) to launch Second Life and join us via the following SLurl GC Test 9

The details of the tests are here

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Threaded_Region_Crossing_Beta_Tests

In the meantime, please let us know if you need access the test regions mentioned on the wiki or have additional questions.

How the tests will be carried out, and on the wiki page, Caleb invites suggestions to be e-mailed / forwarded to him. Currently, ideas for testing include:

  • Region crossing with regular avatar
  • Region crossing via manual TP
  • Region crossing on a vehicle (including Mesh based vehicles)
  • Region crossing while sitting on moving objects
  • Region crossing via scripted TP
  • Region crossing with attachments of varying sizes (including complex HUDs)

Issues have already been found with the new code when wearing script heavy objects during a region crossing and with repeated region crossings on vehicles, and the pile-on test looks in part to be a further investigation of these issues, as well as testing for other possible problems.

Note that this test will be on the beta Aditi grid, so you will need to be able to access that grid. If you haven’t done so in a while, you may want to check your ability to log-in, given recent issues. Also, as this is server-side code tests, it should not be required that you use a specific viewer, but keep an eye on the forum thread in case a decision is made to use a particular viewer.

Related Links

SL project news week 50/2: server and viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Update

The RC channel deployments went head as scheduled, and included the promised fix for offline IMs from scripted objects failing to reach people’s e-mail (BUG-1002). A further issue (BUG-1027) with group owners receiving garbled messages on ejecting group members was reported over the weekend of the 9/10th December, and this also received a fix which formed a part of the deployments.

As reported in part 1, Magnum received code to double the server-side memory allocation from 60KB to 120KB. Animations within SL have two core limits: loop time (30 seconds) and memory allocation (60KB). Apparently, some complex animations which ran within the 30-second time frame have been hitting the memory allocation limit. This initial change should help to ease that issue when encountered. A future change on the viewer-side of things should eventually increase the animation run-time as well, allowing for animations longer than 30 seconds to be uploaded and used.

Server Deployments Week 51

Given Magnum has all the same changes as both BlueSteel and Le Tigre, plus the additional stability improvements and memory leak fixes, it now looks likely that this code will be promoted to the Main Channel on week 51 (week commencing Monday 17th December).  No news was provided during the Server Beta meeting on any proposed RC releases during week 51.

Again, as a reminder, there will be no server code releases during weeks 52 (commencing Monday 24th December) and week 1, 2013 (commencing Monday 31st December). There will also be no further Server Beta meetings until Thursday January 3rd, 2013.

Viewer Updates

Linden Lab continue to work on the beta and development viewers in order to clear the backlog of releases resulting from the memory leak / crash issues. Currently, they are “almost” at the end of catching-up on the release schedule. Some of the focus at present is on the Mac side of things, with Oz Linden reporting that there should be “A bunch of changes for the Mac build and the Mac implementation coming into viewer development” over the next few days.

The beta viewer has seen a further 3.4.3 code release (3.4.3.268139 on December 14th). This should mark the last of the 3.4.3 code releases for the beta viewer prior to that code moving to the release viewer, possibly in week 51. After this, the beta viewer will move to the 3.4.4 code base, which will include the changes for the Mac side of things as well. This should then see the viewer branches all more-or-less back to a normal pace of development and update, with fresh releases on the order of every three weeks or so, including more HTTP service updates and improvements.

Tcmalloc has been set off to one side in order to clear the backlog, but “has not been forgotten”. Currently it is still enabled in the beta release, but appears to be disabled in upcoming viewer development versions.

Avatar Baking

The biggest news of the week came with the announcement that for Avatar Baking, the countdown has commenced. This is going to take the next few months to implement, and requires both changes on the server-side of things and significant changes to the viewer. An update had actually been promised at the Content Creation User Group on Monday 17th December, but given the large impact the changes have on viewers, Nyx Linden rightly announced the news relating to the project at the TPV Developer meeting on Friday 14th December.

Nyx linden discusses server-side baking at the TPV Developer meeting, Friday 14th December
Nyx linden discusses server-side baking at the TPV Developer meeting, Friday 14th December

Threaded Region Crossings

The work on multi-threaded region crossings is still with the LL QA team. In the meantime, further regions have been added to the simulator version (server code  DRTSIM-184) running the new code. Four of the latter are GC Test 9, GC Test 10, GC Test 15 and GC Test 16, which form a block of four regions which may assist with testing the capability (remember these SLurls are all to Aditi!). Caleb Linden has been testing the capability and reports that he has encountered some issues himself, with crashes during “automated horde testing” and with repeated crossing with heavy scripts. He’s interested in hearing constructive feedback from anyone willing to carry out informal tests on the code.

Related Links

SL project news week 48/1: server and beta, viewer, maps and memory

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments

After indications from LL that there may not be a Main channel deployment on Tuesday 27th November, restart commenced as the deployment made to the RC channels last week went ahead as per the usual schedule.

Wednesday 28th November should see the three main RC channels updated as follows:

  • BlueSteel and LeTigre: should receive a maint-server project.  There are a few new flags for the LSL function llGetObjectDetails(), but the most important changes are some fixes for physics and mesh-based crash modes – see the server release notes
  • Magnum should receive the say package, with additional stability improvement changes – see the Magnum server release notes.

As usual there is a forum thread for the week’s server deployments.

Viewer News

Release Viewer

The 3.4.2 viewer code finally reached the release (production) version of the LL viewer with the release of 3.4.2.267137 on Monday 26th November, which I briefly reviewed here.

Beta Viewer

The beta viewer, now cleared of the crash issue bottleneck, moved rapidly through the 3.4.2 code base prior to Thanksgiving in the US, as previously reported in the news updates, and then reached 3.4.3 with the surprise release of 3.4.3.267135 during Thanksgiving week, after it had been indicated there would be no viewer releases during the week due to decreased support staff availability during the long weekend period. As reported last week, this release includes the first phase of Monty Linden’s HTTP texture fetch project, which should see people experiencing significantly faster texture rezzing when in-world.

CHUI Viewer

The CHUI – the Communications Hub User Interface – project viewer is due to go through another couple of iterations before moving towards a development / beta viewer code merge. There has already been one update since the project viewer, which is aimed at improving the capabilities and reliability of in-world text and Voice conversations, first appeared.

CHUI: potentially a couple more iterations to come

While he has not followed the project first-hand, Oz Linden believes CHUI to be nearing a “feature complete” status. The advice is that if you haven’t tried it out and wish to give feedback, now is the time to do so.

Mesh Deformer

Nalates Urriah provides an update on some of the ongoing work around the mesh deformer. In the meantime, speaking at the Open Development User Group meeting on Monday the 26th November, Oz linden responded to a question from White Rabbit as to what garments are still required for testing by saying, “That’s a great question. I’m setting up a meeting with the people responsible for avatars to try to get a proper acceptance test defined for both that and STORM-1800.” STORM-1800 relates to the vertex weights of the default avatar character mesh.

While Oz didn’t specify a date for the meeting, those with a direct interest in either supplying mesh clothing for testing or in the JIRA should be hearing from him in the near future on the meeting details.

Continue reading “SL project news week 48/1: server and beta, viewer, maps and memory” →

SL project news week 45/2: server news, viewer updates Steaming ahead, and surprises

Posted on by Inara Pey

Week 45 Deployments

The deployments schedule for this week (Tuesday 6th and Wednesday 7th November) went ahead as planned, namely:

  • Tuesday 6th: the Main Channel received get the code currently running on BlueSteel and LeTigre – release notes
  • Wedneday 7th:
    • Magnum received get fixes and updates to the code currently running there (including the Group Services code) – release notes
    • LeTigre and BlueSteel should get the next bug fix server in the pipeline, which includes the code currently on Magnum, and more – release notes (BS) and release notes (LT)

The main channel deployment now means that all regions are running on the same version of Havok with the exception of Magnum regions, which should be getting the update in week 46 (see below).

LeTigre and BlueSteel both have an additional “feature”: Linksets which have bounding boxes larger than 64m (in any dimension) are prevented from being rezzed if rezzing would cause the object to collide with an avatar excluding the object owner (BUG-166).

In addition, both LeTigre and BlueSteel include the following oft-requested bug fixes:

  • Script Time in the Statistics Bar now correctly shows 0ms when scripts are disabled in the sim (BUG-311)
  • Script error messages now include information about the object’s root prim, when certain operations fail due to the object’s pathfinding setting (PATHBUG-198).

A crash bug was also found in the Magnum code, and this has received attention, with the fix due to go out next week.

Week 46 Deployments

Things are gradually slowing down in preparation for the Thanksgiving code release freeze which will see a suspension of code deployments during the Thanksgiving week later in November. As it stands, the following roll-outs are planned for week 46 (week commencing Monday 12th November):

  • Main channel: should receive the code currently running on Magnum (including Baker Linden’s Group Services code – see later in this article)
  • Magnum: should receive the code currently running on BlueSteel and LeTigre, which will mean the entire main grid is now running the same version of Havok
  • BlueSteel, LeTigre and Magnum should also get the same additional updates (details yet to be specified).

Beta Viewer Update – Steaming Ahead with Project Code Merges

As indicated in Part 1 of this report, the crash issues impacting the beta viewer code have been resolved, and LL have been engaged in merging-up code into the beta and paving the way for the first of the 3.4.2 beta releases. These were always intended to have the code from some of the major SL projects which impacted the viewer, including Baker Linden’s Group Services code and Monty Linden’s HTTP texture fetch code.

The first 3.4.2 beta viewer was release on Thursday 8th November (3.4.2.266708), which includes a range of updates from the Lab as well as a number of contributed updates and improvements (see the release notes), although precisely which of the LL project elements are in the release isn’t obvious from the release notes themselves – the removal of JIRA numbers from the release note entries makes identifying updates, features and fixes that much harder, even though the JIRA items themselves are still open for public viewing.

One element that is clearly in the latest beta viewer release is the code for the steam link-up, as evidenced by the arrival of the new splash screen which I first reported on back in August 2012 – complete with a promotional piece for the Lab’s Pattern’s game.

Continue reading “SL project news week 45/2: server news, viewer updates Steaming ahead, and surprises” →

SL project news: week 44/4: server and viewer news

Posted on by Inara Pey

Quick Links

Server Deployments, Week 44

There was some confusion on the server channel deployments this week. As reported earlier this week, roll-outs were put back by a day due to issues within LL. This meant that the main channel deployment did not occur until Wednesday 31st October, and the RC channels on Thursday 1st November.

There was further confusion as the main channel had been scheduled to receive the code which had been on BlueSteel and Magnum, but it instead received code which had been on BlueSteel some two weeks ago, and caused some confusion on the Server Deployment forum discussion for the week.

Other than being 24 hours late, the RC releases were more-or-less as planned and previously documented:

  • BlueSteel received the Havok updates deployed to LeTigre, complete with the lHTTPRequest header “fix”
  • Magnum has the Group Services code from Baker Linden for handling the editing and managing of large in-world group lists. The code includes some fixes to problems found in the Snack RC deployment of the Group Services code (again, see part 2 of this report)
  • LeTigre received further updates for the Havok deployment, etc.

In addition, Magnum received a fix for the Estate Tools debug capability to disable collisions. When enabled, the option freezes all physical objects in a region in place and prevents avatars colliding with objects. As such, it is primarily a useful tool when trying to sort-out performance issues or locate and remove unwanted objects (although in the latter case, any TPV with Area Search included can achieve the same result. The option has been broken for some time, and the code deployed to Magnum should fix it.

Also on Magnum, Qie Niangao reported issues which may – or may not – be linked to previously encountered problems with llsensor(). However, it is not clear as to how widespread this might be.

Deployments for Week 45

As they currently stand, the plans for Week 45 (commencing Monday 5th November) are:

  • Tuesday 6th: the Main Channel should get the code currently running on Bluesteel and LeTigre  – so this will be the Havok updates, etc
  • Wedneday 7th:
    • Magnum should get fixes and updates to the code currently running there (including the Group Services code)
    • LeTigre and Bluesteel should get the next bug fix server in the pipeline, which includes the code currently on Magnum, and more.
  • Further details will be available as the release notes are issued

Threaded Region Crossings

This has been a project which has been going on for some time now, with Lindens working on it quietly in the background. As it hasn’t been openly mentioned in User Groups for some time, it had led some commentators to believe the project was no longer being worked on. However, as I’ve commented in these pages (and more recently quoted Baker Linden as commenting on it), the work has been progressing, and may now be nearing the time when it will see greater light of day. As a part of this, it looks like there might be a call for volunteers to participate in a “pile-on” test in the near future, specifically to test whether the new code is easing region crossing issues and generally leading to an improvement.

Avatar Baking

Avatar bake fail

Questions about server-side baking are a common occurrence at OpenDev and TPV meetings.

Currently (and as all too often indicated in these reports!) work is progressing on both sides of the equation within LL, but there is currently little of major impact to report. The emphasis has been on the viewer code (which will be used as the basis for the new Texture Compositing server the Lab will be implementing.

However, it remains that are still  no ETAs on the availability of either the viewer code or the server. The plan, however, remains that TPVs should receive around 2 months notice as to the availability of code for merging into test viewers. Given this, it remains highly unlikely that there will be visible progress with the project before the start of 2013.

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