The will be one more week of releases (week 50), prior to the Christmas / New Year code freeze / no change window commencing, which is due to start on Monday December 16th, 2013.
SL Viewer
Two new release candidate viewers arrived in the release channel on Tuesday December 3rd:
Maintenance RC version 3.6.12.284430 comprises a number of fixes, including a fix for the issue of FPS dropping when the Expanded Chat option is enabled in CHUI (MAINT-3375) – download and release notes
Namefix RC version 3.6.12.284383 changes installer naming without modifying channel or application names, but contains no functional changes to the viewer code – download and release notes.
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for the latest news and updates.
Tuesday November 19th: the Main channel received the maintenance package previously deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre in week 46. This package comprises further infrastructure changes for the yet-to-be-announced Experience Keys (experience tools) project
Wednesday November 20th:
Magnum remained on the same maintenance project as deployed to it in week 47, but which features a further update to the grey goo fence, now only applies to objects which are both large andphysical. This alteration is in response to BUG-4448, wherein it was reported that building rezzers were running up against the fence when attempting to rez complex builds
BlueSteel and leTigre received a new maintenance package comprising those changes deployed to Magnum in week 46, with additional bug fixes.
Server Beta Meeting (stock)
Notes on the Deployments
Commenting on the BlueSteel / LeTigre updates during the Server Beta meeting on Thursday November 21st, Maestro Linden underlined the last four bug fixes listed in the release notes, together with the final “new feature” item, as being newly introduced with the deployment.
With regards to the BlueSteel / LeTigre fix for “Vehicles containing a mesh are returned to the owner upon region crossing when destination parcel is full”, he added, “I believe the issues with region crossing on vehicles due to ‘parcel full’ should be fixed, though there’s still that bug about certain vehicles sometimes going crazy upon region crossing.”
A question was asked if the change to the grey goo fence (BUG-4448) might impact llGiveInventory object-to-object transfers. Apparently there were reports n the Advanced Scripters of Second Life that people were encountering a “give inventory failure: grey goo fence: rapid or recursive inventory transfer” warning on Magnum regions following the update.
Commenting on this, Maestro Linden said, “I checked with Simon about this one; the GGF change should only affect rezzing of objects; when you simply pass items around with llGiveInvenotry(), the object geometry data hasn’t been loaded, so it wouldn’t have the opportunity to apply a penalty. However, he thinks that if you hit the GGF for rezzing objects , the GGF may also prevent llGiveInventory() from operating.”
Maestro also indicated that new restart scripts were using during the RC deployment which displayed the restart messages in “big, bold letters”. Whether these changes are in addition to the restart message changes made by Simon Linden and deployed in September is unclear; Maestro also referenced the fact that restarts will now occur as soon as the last avatar departs a region, rather than waiting for the countdown to complete, and this was a change initially deployed in September.
Week 48 (Week Commencing Monday November 25th)
A reminder that there are no deployments / rolling restarts planned for week 48 due to it being Thanksgiving week in the United States (which also means the Server Beta meeting will not be taking place.
SL Viewer
The SL release viewer was updated on Thursday November 21st to version 3.6.11.283787 (dated November 15) – formerly the GPU table updates RC. This release contained no functional changes to the viewer, but saw support added for the following GPU families: newer nVidia GTX 700 series; AMD R7/R9; Intel Iris Pro (download page, release notes).
Fitted Mesh Project Viewer
Redpoly Inventor, who first looked into the use of custom bones for mesh garment deformation in SL
Thursday November 21st also saw the release of the Fitted Mesh project viewer 3.6.11.283899. This viewer includes a new avatar skeleton with additional collision bones which allow mesh garments rigged to the collision bone structure to adjust with changes to an avatar’s shape using the Edit Shape sliders.
The system is modelled at the approach first mooted during the Closed Mesh Beta and later prototyped by RedPoly Inventor, and which has been subsequently employed in approaches such as Redgrave’s “Liquid Mesh” range of garments.
The official blog post on the release can be read here, and I was fortunate enough to be given preview access to the viewer a little ahead of the launch, and my own overview is also available.
This approach to fitting mesh garments is still at a project status, and those trying it are requested to file any issues they have via a JIRA to the Fitted Mesh project.
Other Items
Copying Large Numbers of Items to the Inventory of an Object
Many people are likely to be familiar with this issue: select a large number of items from inventory and attempt to drop them into the contents of a prim in a single go, and part / all of the process may fail. This is a long-standing problem, and there had been something of a limit of around 42 items which could be successfully transferred into an object’s contents in a single go. However, there have apparently been renewed reports of problems, and a suggestion that the threshold for moving a large number of objects in a single go may now be around the 30 mark. Maestro Linden has updated a bug report from Dan Linden on the issue with this information in the hope it will assist in narrowing-down the possible cause.
Aircraft Region Crossing Issues
Yuzuru Jewell reported further issues with some aircraft encountering problems on attempting to cross regions. It takes the form of aircraft using mono scripts with collision detection are failing to cross region boundaries. A similar bug has been reported for mesh vehicles – BUG-4084 is “Mesh car starts to bounce like pinball after sim crossing”, but the Lab has been having problems reproducing that issue. One workaround that seems to prevent the problem is for the collision event to be moved to a separate script compiled as LSL2 rather than mono.
In the discussion Maestro noted this approach had also been put forward in dealing with BUG-4084, except that in that case, all scripts were being compiled as LSL2, possibly because the issue hadn’t been identified as perhaps being with collision event handlers. Maestro believes the pointer towards collision events may well be an interesting lead and has requested that anyone able to reproduce the issue and show that specific events / functions are responsible, it will obviously make it easier to determine a resolution.
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for the latest news and updates.
Main channel: Tuesday November 19th
The Main channel received the maintenance package deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre in week 46. This package comprises further infrastructure changes for the yet-to-be-announced Experience Keys (experience tools) project
Release Candidate Channels, Wednesday November 20th
BlueSteel and LeTigre should receive a new maintenance package comprising the update deployed to Magnum in week 46, with additional bug fixes. However, at the time of writing, testing was still ongoing, and Simon Linden noted at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday November 19th that things were “down to the wire” in terms of getting the release out. If it does go ahead, the package will include:
Bug Fixes
Fixed “Sim crossing on vehicle fails when parcel at opposite sim border is full.” (BUG-4152)
Fixed a case in which a viewer with a high draw distance would not connect to distant regions which are within the draw distance area
Fixed some crash modes
Fixed “Vehicles containing a mesh are returned to the owner upon region crossing when destination parcel is full”
Fixed “Temp Attachments are sometimes not removed on the viewer when detached from a region change event.”
Fixed “Avatars inside a private parcel can see other avatars 2 regions away” (BUG-4356)
Fixed an issue with object return to inventory on test grids
New Features
Objects which are rezzed by sat-upon or attached scripts no longer inherit the temp-on-rez or auto-return timer of the parent object
Estate managers and region owners are now prevented from being teleported by llTeleportAgentHome()
Parcel owners are now prevented from being teleported by llTeleportAgentHome()
Magnum should remain on the same maintenance project as deployed to it in week 47, but which features a further update to the grey goo fence change made in week 46, but which now only applies to objects which are both large andphysical. This alteration is in response to BUG-4448.
Thanksgiving Code Freeze
Week 48 (commencing Monday November 25th) is Thanksgiving week in the United States, so there will be no server-side releases during the week. Sever updates will resume in week 49.
SL Viewer
No updates as yet in week 47 to the SL viewer.
Default Object Permissions
A number of TPVs include the ability to specify the default permissions applied to a new prim object (cube, cylinder, torus, etc.) on creation. A similar capability is being developed for the LL viewer (STORM-68) by Jonathan Yap, a long-time contributor to the viewer. Currently, the work is awaiting some server-side capabilities tweaking which will likely be done by Andrew Linden. This work is unlikely to be completed ahead of Thanksgiving, so there is no date as to when the new capability might appear.
Default Region Restart Sound and Notification
Jonathan is also working on STORM-1980 (“Improve awareness of region restarting message”) to add a default region restart sound added to Second Life. This would be played automatically by the viewer on receipt of a region restart message, adding an additional warning of an approaching restart for those who may miss the pop-up notices, giving them time to take the appropriate action prior to logging-out. The work on this is also progressing, with a modified notification which includes new colours and a countdown. again, further work is required on this, so there is currently no timescale as to when it will be showing up in an RC viewer.
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for the latest news and updates.
Main channel: Tuesday November 12th: no deployment
BlueSteel and LeTigre: received a maintenance package comprising further infrastructure changes for the yet-to-be-announced Experience Keys (experience tools) project
Magnum received a server maintenance project comprising a number of fixes and changes to script behaviours to prevent Estate managers and region owners from being teleported by llTeleportAgentHome() and so they are no longer affected by scripts which use ESTATE_ACCESS_BANNED_AGENT_ADD
Two further notable bug fixes with the Magnum release were “Sim crossing on vehicle fails when parcel at opposite sim border is full.” (BUG-4152) and a bug where a high draw distance set in the viewer would see the viewer to sometimes fail to connect to the requisite number of regions around it. According to Maestro Linden, this bug affects viewer using the current release viewer code (or earlier), but not the newer “Project Interesting” viewer code.
Speaking at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday November 14th, Maestro commented on the Magnum release, saying, “There were also under-the-hood changes to object inventory management, and llTakeControls() behaviour in LSL. Those shouldn’t cause any behavioural differences, but I added them to the release notes in case they did cause problems.” These are the “clean-up of ‘control grabbing’ in LSL scripts” referred to in the release notes.
Grey Goo Issues
The Magnum update also included updates to the grey goo fence, which is intended to combat griefing. The specific changes were to combat the use of large object rezzing, which can be used to crash a region. However, the tightening of the fence led to unforeseen problems, as Maestro reported:
There are reports in JIRA about building rezzer systems hitting the grey goo fence. The one case I saw was where one rezzed about a dozen large linksets rapidly, and when it hit the grey goo fence, it would ‘fail’ halfway through the rez. Anyway, Simon and I talked about how to address this; for now, I think he’s going to go with a fix where only large and physical linksets are penalised.
Another option under consideration is rather than denying the rezzing, to slow it down. It’s not clear which option will be taken forward by the Lab at this point, for now their intention is to deploy a fix to Magnum in week 47 which “unbreaks”, as Maestro put it, any affected rezzing systems on Magnum regions.
Maestro mixes and Baker be-bops at the Server Beta meeting, November 14th
Upcoming Updates
Maestro Linden gave an overview of some of the updates which will be making their way into a server maintenance package, which include:
A fix for ‘ Vehicles containing a mesh are returned to the owner upon region crossing when destination parcel is full’, which is similar to BUG-4152, fixed in the Magnum RC deployment in week 46, but only affects meshes and involved the actual entry parcel being full
A fix for “Temp Attachments are sometimes not removed on the viewer when detached from a region change event.”
A follow-up fix to “llTeleportHome() should not teleport estate managers”, mentioned above, which extends the protection to parcel owners (or a group owner if the parcel is group owned)
These may well form a small update package on their own and get deployed to one or more RC channels in week 47.
SL Viewer
The “Project Interesting” RC viewer, version 3.6.11283895,which has the viewer-side updates for the recently interest list updates was released on Thursday November 14th.
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for the latest news and updates.
Main channel: Tuesday November 12th
No deployment.
Release Candidate Channels, Wednesday November 13th
BlueSteel and LeTigre should receive the maintenance package originally scheduled for deployment to all three RC channels in week 45, but which was cancelled as a result of a last-minute issue being found. This package comprises further infrastructure changes for the yet-to-be-announced Experience Keys (experience tools) project
Magnum should receive a new server maintenance project this week. This project fixes some bugs, including BUG-4152 related to vehicles crossing region boundaries, as described in this thread; and which also includes some changes around script behaviour, comprising:
The fix to allow objects rezzed by sat-upon objects should have a fresh auto-return and temp-on-rez timer, This will allow them to last the full ~60 seconds (for temporary) or parcel auto return time. This should help is situations where combat vehicles in regions with short auto-return times can have their ordnance immediately returned when a weapon is fired, and any temp vehicles are unable to rez attachments, even when sat upon
Fixes to prevent estate managers / owners being teleported home through a misuse of llTeleportAgentHome(), and to prevent estate managers / owner being affected by “Trojan” objects manipulating ESTATE_ACCESS_BANNED_AGENT_ADD
Updates to the grey goo fence do that it is stricter for large object rezzes in a further attempt to limit the ability of griefers to bring down a region through multiple rezzing of large objects
More robust handling of inventory management within objects
Cleanup of controls-grabbing in LSL scripts (no functional changes).
A simulator UG meeting (stock)
SL Viewer
The SL release viewer updated on Tuesday November 12th to version 3.6.10.283403, formerly the Maintenance RC comprising finer access control for estate/parcel owners; CHUI: toggle expanding Conversations by clicking on icon; GPU table update + more.
It is thought the project viewer containing the last of the current viewer-side updates for interest lists should be appearing very soon now. After recent setbacks in getting the viewer publicly visible, the time frame for its arrival had been noted to be unlikely before November 12th. However, speaking at the Simulator User Group meeting on the 12th, Andrew Linden indicated he believed the viewer may well be out in the next few days.
Other Items
Andrew Linden’s Bug Fixing
Andrew Linden
Andrew Linden has been taking time to fix a some unusual bugs. The first, which is not generally visible, he describes as, “In some cases our servers will upload an asset multiple times before it successfully creates an inventory item (on take to inventory for example). Which creates garbage assets in the asset system.” This issue could also result in multiple notifications being sent to the avatar uploading the item, if they remained in the same region.
The second issue he’s fixed is that of “ghost objects” appearing in the viewer but which are not present on the region server. This issue appears to have been caused by a race condition which could occur under certain situations such as deleting the objects too fast on a region crossing, so they’d be removed server-side, but not from the viewer. Both of these fixes should be appearing in an RC soon.
Group Management and Culling
Request have been made to have the limit of banned avatar lists raised from 500, particularly for regions that are popular with users. Whether there is a widespread need for this is entirely open to debate, but during the discussion of the problem being faced by a particular estate, suggestions were put forward by which such lists might be made easier to manage, including:
Auto-culling from all ban lists of any account name banned from the grid
Such auto-culling to take place only as a ban list approaches its upper limit
Add a feature by which would allow the removal from a list any avatars that have not logged-in to SL for a given period of weeks / months / years. If implemented, this could either take the form of a selectable set of options (e.g. something like 6 months, 1 year, 2 years), or possibly be a free-format field the owner can use to specify as the time period.
Whether any of these options eventually get implemented, remains to be seen (and doubtless on whether feature requests are filed).
This conversation was also bound-up with matters of group chat and group chat lag. Various suggestions were put forward for trying to address this as well, ranging from replacing the current group chat mechanism with something like IRC and whether it would actually work / scale any better, through to implementing a server-side change so that when someone leaves a group chat, the channel is actually closed, rather than messages still being sent to the viewer, which just disregards them, as is currently the case. Commenting on the status of group chat in general, Simon Linden stated, “Just FYI, practically speaking we’re not going to be re-writing the chat system any time soon.”
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for the latest news and updates.
The Main channel was updated on Tuesday November 5th with the same maintenance package previously deployed to the three release candidate channels, and which comprised bug fixes and crash mode fixes
On Wednesday November 6th, all three release candidate channels were all due to receive a new maintenance package, comprising further infrastructure changes for the yet-to-be-announced Experience Keys (experience tools) project. However, an undisclosed test failure meant the deployment was cancelled.
Upcoming Releases
Week 46 should see a new maintenance package in RC, which will include:
A fix for BUG-4152 Sim crossing on vehicle fails when parcel at opposite sim border is full
A number of crash fixes, including some which combat a physics griefer object
The fix to allow objects rezzed by sat-upon objects should have a fresh auto-return and temp-on-rez timer, This will allow them to last the full ~60 seconds (for temporary) or parcel auto return time. This should help is situations where combat vehicles in regions with short auto-return times can have their ordnance immediately returned when a weapon is fired, and any temp vehicles are unable to rez attachments, even when sat upon.
An interest list fix for issues where you don’t connect to regions far enough away when draw distance is set to 512m
Maestro Linden’s disco-themed Server Beta meeting venue (stock)
Trojan Objects
A further update is a change to try to deal with a griefing situation wherein estate managers/owners can be added to a region’s the ban list or teleported them home with llTeleportAgentHome(). This is apparently achieved through the use of what Maestro Linden refers to as “Trojan” objects, in that the object appears perfectly innocuous until passed to the an estate manager / owner but which, when rezzed, will the manipulate the ban list via llManageEstateAccess().
Maestro described these scenarios thus:”I could give you ‘cute kitty’ which you then rez on your parcel. But the script with the ‘purr’ function also has a ‘manipulate ban list’ function. Since you (the parcel owner) own the kitty, the script there can do the operation.”
It has also been noted that the use of such “Trojan” objects isn’t restricted to manipulating llManageEstateAccess(); they are also used to clear-down ban lists using llResetBandList(). In the case of llManageEstateAccess(), the function is being changed so that the owner is notified, and is given the option to allow the function to run in “stealth” mode.
The problem here is that by the time the notification is received, the Trojan script has done its job, so the solution is not ideal; the same would be true in the case of altering llResetBandList(). However, as Maestro put it, “But you’ll know exactly what it did in case you need to undo it.” A further concern in the case of llResetBandList() is that some estate owners use the function remotely to legitimately manage their ban lists, so if anything is done to alter its functionality, it might break existing content. This led to extensive debate within the Server Beta meeting as to how such matters could best be addressed – or even if they needed to be addressed beyond people taking the proper precautions when receiving scripted objects from untrusted sources.
SL Viewer
Default Region Restart Sound
In part 1 of this report, I noted that a JIRA has been put forward (STORM-1980) to have a default region restart sound added to Second Life. This would be played automatically by the viewer on receipt of a region restart message, adding an additional warning of an approaching restart for those who may miss the pop-up notices, giving them time to take the appropriate action prior to logging-out.
The work is progressing on this idea, although a suitable sound has yet to be found, and precisely how the region restart messages will be redefined has yet to be entirely settled. Sound-wise, something is required that would universally recognised and which is preferably not language-dependent. One of the more popular ideas at the moment is to have a submarine dive / air-horn like sound (the “A-wooo-GAH!” beloved of films), although there have been some muted concerns about people possibly being offended by the use of “military” sounds. Torley Linden also joined the discussion and, in fun, offered up his own idea – just make sure you don’t have the volume up too loud before playing the clip!
Torley’s region restart warning
Sadly, it doesn’t meet that criteria of being language-independent, but it’s still fun to listen to.
Script Syntax Updates and Increasing Source Text Allowance
In week 39, I reported that Ima Mechanic and Oz Linden are working to improve syntax highlighting in the viewer’s LSL editor by allowing the viewer to obtain the information required for syntax highlighting directly from the simulator the viewer is connected to. This should eliminate issues of the current, manually updated, files used to manage syntax highlighting falling out-of-synch with new LSL syntax as new functions and parameters, etc., are added.
This work is progressing well, and may now additionally see the source code text allowance in the viewer’s LSL editor increased. Currently, the source code limit in the editor is some 65,000 characters, however a number of scripters having been finding that they frequently are coming up against that limit when writing the source code for their scripts, so it has been suggested the limit be raised to 256,000 characters.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 