Tag: Server Updates

2023 SL SUG meetings week #35 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Briarwood Wildlife Refuge, June 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 29th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Server Deployments

  • There was no deployment to the SLS Main channel, leaving all simhosts on that channel running on release 581251, although the hosts were all restarted.
  • On Wednesday, August 30th, there will be a further attempt to deploy simulator update 581292 (“Bugsmash”).

Upcoming Release

  • Week #36 should see the RC deployment of the “Dog Days” simulator release. This includes:
    • The unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database).
    • A scripted ability to set CLICK_ACTION_IGNORE, allowing an object to be clicked-through to reach an object behind it – a flag supporting this is included in the Maintenance U RC viewer promoted to Release status in week #34.
    • PRIM_CLICK_ACTION is added to llSet/GetPrimParams so you can set the click action on prims in a linkset.
  • An upcoming release is “Fall Colours”. Among other elements is a new LSL function, llIsFriend – essentially “Is the avatar touching this object a friend of the object’s owner?”, and then act accordingly. Rider Linden put out a general request for suggestions as to what else should go in this release, which led to an discussion on possible notecard-related functions and options, as per the meeting video.

Viewer Updates

No updates to the official SL viewers at the start of the week, leaving the current list as:

Note: the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

Potential for Improving Vehicle Control Options

Further to the last meeting, Leviathan Linden gave the following update.

Right now I’m looking into exposing game controller buttons directly to LSL. All the other vehicle related ideas will have to wait until after this is done. The work is in progress, but one thing I learned is… our current game controller detection logic can’t capture all of the buttons/axes of a typical Xbox style controller. The logic is limited to 6 axes of motion and the Xbox controller I’m using has 8 axes. So I’m currently trying to hack in a different device detection [cross-platform] lib[rary] to see if I can get it working without breaking the SpaceNavigator support. … My hope is to support variable number of buttons and axes.

As might be expected, this led to a discussion on the potential game controllers offer Second Life.

In Brief

  • There are anecdotal reports that the issue of the Friends on-line list not correctly updating after log-in, etc., is now subsiding.
  • Monty Linden is continuing to look into issues of the simulator / viewer freezing during avatar arrival, although this work may be suspended whilst Monty is out-of-office for a while.
  • A discussion on options to use scripted function to gain information on the inventory contents of rezzed objects, per feature requests BUG-7395, BUG-34184, and BUG-202886.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #34 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Orcinus Isle, June 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 22nd Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Server Deployments

  • No deployments for the major simulator channels this week, but all simhosts will be restarted.
  • There may be a small deployment to the Snack channel (Yondercane), to test changes to the way avatar arrivals in a region are handled (see below).

Dog Days Roll-Back

  • On Wednesday, August 16th, the Blueteel RC channel was updated with update 581292 (“Dog Days”).
  • During testing, it was discovered the update was causing some worn attachments were being renamed “Object” when edited whilst attached while retaining the correct name when seen in Inventory / detached to Inventory.
  • However, if such an attachment was dropped in-world, it would be renamed “Object”. As this was deemed to not be optimal, the update was rolled back.
  • If all goes according to plan, an attempt to re-deploy the release will be made in week #35.

Viewer Updates

The glTF / PBR Materials viewer, updated to version 7.0.0.581368, on August 22nd. All other available official viewers remain as follows:

Note: the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

Avatar Arrival Update and Other Simulator Work

This is a first pass at working to improve avatar arrivals (AA) in regions and reduce the amount of “freezing” may occur whilst the arrival is processed, with further work indicated in the future, Monty Linden described this part of the work thus:

AA is the first part of an effort to tune the simulator’s main processing loop. There are *many* causes of very long frames currently. One of the worst offenders is avatar attachment handoff and rezzing at region crossings and teleports. AA attempts to break up and time bound that process, particularly when multiple avatars are involved in a crossing, allowing the frame to complete more closely to the scheduled time. [The] goal is to improve interactivity and responsiveness to those *not* involved in the RC/TP at the expense of those crossing having their glorious collections of stuff attached a bit more slowly. This first pass includes some of that monolithic execution breakup and some tuning.

Monty went on to note that the AA update will only be deployed for testing / data gathering prior to being withdrawn rather than being expanded to additional channels, whilst he continues to work on the matter in the background and possibly expands the scope of the work to include things like better script optimisations and hand-offs during teleports / crossings, etc.

This led to an extended discussion on region crossings / teleports which extended across most of the meeting, with Rider Linden noting he’ll attempt to have a list of regions on the channel for the meeting next week (assuming the deployment goes ahead), so that interested parties can test both teleports into them and regions crossings between them. This in turn entered into better / alternate means of script scheduling / management (and refactoring the former to reduce some of the simulator load), together with options for improved attachment / messaging, etc., handling.

As an aside to this work, Monty indicated he is working on a diagram showing the simulator main processing loop which could be published for public consumption, once it has been cleaned-up.

Potential for Improving Vehicle Control Options

Rider Linden raised this towards the end of the meeting for discussion, thus:

We’ve been having some discussions internally about taking controls and expanding the number of keys available and perhaps even allowing analogue input for movement to the simulator. Leviathan and I would love to get some feedback on how people would use that and how you’d like to see something like that work.

To which Leviathan added:

I’ve solicited for input and have received a bunch of input and ideas. I think the first sub project in that direction will be to try to expose raw game controller input (joysticks and buttons) to LSL. With regards to keyboard controls, if you look at all of the feature requests over the years, ultimately people want access to just about ALL of the keys. I was worried about the ability to make a keylogger in SL, however Signal thinks that wouldn’t really be a problem.

The majority of the feedback was for capabilities to be added to enable a broader range or controllers rather than trying to expand keylogging capabilities exponentially, although keystroke capture and use appears to be more of a focus for Leviathan.

Please refer to the last 10-12 minutes of the video for this discussion.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #33 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Seogyeo Town, Seogyeoshire, May 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 15th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, August 15th, all simhosts on the the SLS Main were restarted, but remain on simulator version 581251.
  • On Wednesday, August 16th, the Blueteel RC channel should be updated with simulator update 581292. Included in this release are:
    • The ability to (once more) see channel names via Help → About (and potentially announced via pop-up within TPVs supporting this capability).
    • Objects rezzed by scripts will now be correctly returned by estate managers + the throttle on llReturnObjectsByOwner has been removed.
    • GroupMemberData (used by viewers to return information about the members of a group) has been intermittently returning “well-formed but incorrect data” for several years. With this update, it should return “well-formed and correct data”.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

  • The simulator update “Dog Days” is being packaged for QA. This includes:
    • The unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database).
    • A scripted ability to set CLICK_ACTION_IGNORE, allowing an object to be clicked-through to reach an object behind it – a flag supporting this is included in the Maintenance U RC viewer.
    • PRIM_CLICK_ACTION is added to llSet/GetPrimParams so you can set the click action on prims in a linkset.

Viewer Updates

  • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.14.581315, issued on August 15.
    • Ability to display user-customized keybindings in chat, making it easier to provide key binding instructions to end users for vehicles, HUDs or anything utilising custom keybindings. See URI_Name_Space for more.
  • The Inventory Extensions RC viewer updated to version 6.6.14.581357 on August 14.

The rest of the available official viewers remain as:

  • Release viewer version 6.6.13.580918, formerly the Maintenance T RC viewer, July 14.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.581126, June 26.
    • Maintenance U(pbeat) RC viewer, version, 6.6.14.581101 July 21.
  • Project viewers:

Note: the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

Scripting Discussion

  • LSL contains a number of long-standing code errors / issues / limitations which have been around so long they have either become expected behaviour or have had a number of work-arounds implemented. This makes any attempt to correct the code difficult, as it can result in unintended script breakage, and because of this, LL has tended to take the attitude of, “we aren’t going to fix that because it is too ingrained.”
  • However, one idea now being considered for allowing such script issues to be fixed and hopefully avoid the potential for script breakage in the process, is to introduce a “compatibility” mode to LSL.
  • Such a mode would be set via some form of option (check box or button or something).
    • By default, with would be “off”, for all scripts (existing and new), and they would as they do now (“classic” behaviour), preserving any “incorrect” behaviour.
    • When toggled “on” for a script, the script will run in the “updated” mode, allowing it leverage the corrected LSL code / functions and any future behavioural changes.
  • This led to an extended discussion on the approach – which was broadly favourably viewed – which touched various ideas such as version numbering and other methods of differentiating “versions” of LSL (given it does not itself have any built-in notion of versions), the historical context on the introduction of Mono, the use of compilers

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for the following:

  • There is said to be increasing reports of avatars failing to load correctly following teleporting into a popular location (notably those at altitude) and of inventory attachment queuing and loading taking longer. Some thinking is that this may be interest list related, however, Bug reports have yet to be filed to allow for investigation.
  • Leviathan Linden put out a request for feedback:
I’ve been thinking about how to improve vehicles in SL so I’m soliciting input for the next week or so. You can email me directly (leviathan-at-lindenlab.com) you can IM me, or I’m even willing to schedule a chat/voice session if anyone wants to talk about vehicles: cars, airplanes, boats, motorcycles, etc. What got me on this subject were two things: (1) the idea of giving LSL scripts direct access to game controller inputs (joystick, button state, etc), and also (2) different API for configuring vehicles. For example, maybe airplanes would be better described using a thrust, stall-speed, attack-angle, aileron state model.
  • The above led to some additional discussion on options – as per the last 20 minutes of the meeting.
  • Rider Linden noted that during the LL engineering meeting in week #33, the subject of improved camera controls. Nothing firm on what might be done, but again, this sparked discussion during the last 10 minutes of the meeting.

 

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #31 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
NordShore, May 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 1st Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, August 1st, all simhosts on the the SLS Main channel received the “Summer Blues” simulator update, comprising:
    • llGetPrimitiveParams will be able to identify animesh.
    •  The estate ban limit gets raised to 750, and the number of estate managers to 20, Not that the viewer-side changes to access these updates can be found in the Maintenance U(pbeat) RC viewer, listed in the Viewers section, below.
    • Two new LSL functions for LSD llLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound.
    • Changes to UUID generation on certain items per my week 26 SUG meeting summary (e.g. textures, notecards, materials (particularly the upcoming PBR Materials)) to reduce the amount of duplication. These changes will not impact  UUIDs for objects rezzed in-world or made by the viewer.
    • Further work to correct some of the friends issues (as seen with BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating”). However, how effective these updates might be will not be fully understood until the update has been more widely tested through general use on Agni.
    • The update also included a certificate update for the simulators.
  • On Wednesday, August 2nd, the RC channels should all be restarted without any deployment.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

Simulator release now appear to be getting informal names (hence “Summer Blues”, above). The next up will be:

  • Dog Days – likely to include the unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database), and set to be the next release to be deployed.
  • Bugsmash – currently with QA, and as the name suggests, contains a range of simulator-side bug fixes. It will also see the welcome return of visible RC channel names (now, if only we could see the return of server release notes ahead of the actual deployments).  Some of the fixes in this update comprise:
    • A fix in llRetunObjectsByOwner so that it won’t hit a throttle on large returns, and a fix to estate manage object return.
    • A change to the stack that gets displayed in the case of some script faults, intended to make it a easier to read.
    • A fix for the GroupMemberData cap giving out intermittently incorrect (but still well-formed) responses.
    • A minor fix about abandoned group land not showing correct previous owner.

Viewer Updates

No updates at the start of the week, leaving the current official viewers in the pipeline as:

Note: the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for details on the following:

  • There is a general discussion on an exploit of llMapDestination().
  • BUG-234197 – “[PBR] Many duplicate material override messages for same object” – a potential need to throttle / omit scripted materials changes.
  • A further request was made for BUG-225228 “llStopAnimation is stopping all animations on detach instead of only the one specified” to receive LL TLC, together with requests for a series of other bugs and feature requests (such as the ability to click-through objects.
  • A question from Leviathan Linden on whether object inventory names – i.e. the names of items contained in an object – should be opened to allow leading / trailing whitespace. Short answer: “no”; suggestion, if whitespace alone is used in an object name, have the system replace it with the object type (e.g. object, notecard, texture, etc., possibly with a numerical indicator.

 

Note: there will be NO Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, August 8th, as the simulator team will be engaged in an internal meeting at the Lab.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #30 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Journey Garden, May 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  July 25th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, July 25th, 2023, all simhosts on the the SLS Main channel were restarted without any deployment.
  • On Wednesday, July 26th, 2023, RC currently on the BlueSteel channel should be expanded across all the channels. This comprises:
    • llGetPrimitiveParams will be able to identify animesh.
    •  The estate ban limit gets raised to 750, and the number of estate managers to 20, Not that the viewer-side changes to access these updates can be found in the Maintenance U(pbeat) RC viewer, listed in the Viewers section, below.
    • Two new LSL functions for LSD llLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound.
    • Changes to UUID generation on certain items per my week 26 SUG meeting summary (e.g. textures, notecards, materials (particularly the upcoming PBR Materials)) to reduce the amount of duplication. These changes will not impact  UUIDs for objects rezzed in-world or made by the viewer.
    • Further work to correct some of the friends issues (as seen with BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating”). However, how effective these updates might be will not be fully understood until the update has been more widely tested through general use on Agni.

Viewer Updates

No updates at the start of the week, leaving the current official viewers in the pipeline as:

General Discussion

  • [Video: 9:21 (start)] A discussion on integrated development environments (IDEs) for developing LSL code, leading to a broader discussion on LSL scripting, coding in general, helping new users with getting started with LSL, together with a significant discussion on better means of handling stack heap collisions, and more. This runs through the majority of the meeting.
  • [Video: 19:50-23:38] The unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database) is still awaiting a initial RC channel release.
  • [Video: 47:49] A fix for BUG-233772 “llHTTPrequest times out after 40 secs” is now live.
  • Further requests for LL to devote more resources towards improving region crossings.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #29 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Luane’s Magical World, May 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 18th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, July 18th, 2023, all simhosts on the the SLS Main channel were restarted without any deployment.
  • On Wednesday, July 19th, 2023, the BlueSteel RC channel should be updated with a new simulator version, comprising:
    • llGetPrimitiveParams will be able to identify animesh.
    •  The estate ban limit gets raised to 750, and the number of estate managers to 20 – however, a viewer-side update is required for these changes to be visible.
    • Two new LSL functions for LSD llLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound.
    • Changes to UUID generation on certain items per my week 26 SUG meeting summary (e.g. textures, notecards, materials (particularly the upcoming PBR Materials)) to reduce the amount of duplication. These changes will not impact  UUIDs for objects rezzed in-world or made by the viewer.
    • Further work to correct some of the friends issues (as seen with BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating”). However, how effective these updates might be will not be fully understood until the update has been more widely tested through general use on Agni.

Viewer Updates

No updates at the start of the week, leaving the current official viewers in the pipeline as:

General Discussion

  • Core discussion points in the meeting:
    • [Video: 5:57 (start)] A general discussion on the new LSL / LSD functions and associated constants, which widens into a wider discussion on LSL / LSD.
    • [Video: 18:58 (start – overlapping with LSL / LSD discussion)] Discussion on larger regions vs. attempting to fix current region crossing issues. In short: larger regions would be a deep, fundamental change to SL (much of the simulator and viewer code is built on the assumption that regions are sized at 256x256m) which would likely not resolve the overall issue of region crossing events; ergo, the general consensus was towards trying to solve for crossing issues with the current region size. This led to a broader discussion on region sizing, user on-boarding, etc.
    • [Video: 21:22 (start – overlapping with the above)] Questions on throttling glTF overrides on animations (particularly in reference to puppetry).
  • In brief:
    • Confirmation that the ability to allow experiences to access the key-store from anywhere without land permission should be in the next simulator maintenance update.
    • The work to lighten the impact of avatars entering a region (in particular via teleport) impacting region / viewer responsiveness has yet to reach the main grid.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.