On Tuesday, February 3rd, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package deployed to the three RC channels in week #5, which includes:
a fix for BUG-8247 “[Experience Tools] Issue with llRequestExperiencePermissions() triggering experience_permissions_denied() and XP_ERROR_NOT_PERMITTED_LAND after prior 5 minute no response period.”
Internal improvements for experience tools key-value functions.
There were no deployments to the RC channels for the week.
Following the Main channel deployment on Tuesday, a number of regions reported issues with objects failing to load and render, textures remaining grey, mesh outfits failing to rez / render teleport issues, etc., all of which appeared to be consistent with region capabilities failing on re-start, and thus requiring the affected regions to be manually restarted. As reported by Whirly Fizzle in the forum thread linked-to above, this has been an intermittent problem which has been occurring for over a year.
SL Viewer – Mesh Importer Update
On Wednesday, February 4th saw the release of the Importer project viewer, version 3.7.25.298441. This viewer brings various improvements to the mesh uploader / importer, which are given in the release notes as:
In this viewer we’ve modified the importer to (optionally) improve debug output, perform name-based LOD association, and handle models with many materials.
Using these new features, models with more than 8 unique faces can be imported. Gone are the days of importing complicated meshes in pieces with “some assembly required”. At import, these models are automatically split into pieces so that each satisfy the current face limits for a volume.
The same limitations on LODs and materials remain in place (e.g. your low LOD mesh materials must be a subset of the full LOD materials).
LODs and Physics reps can now be explicitly associated with a given mesh in the full LOD model using name-based matching.
By properly naming the meshes in your lower LOD meshes and physics reps, you can avoid issues with ordering of the meshes within your DCC tool and other material mismatching errors.
An ImporterDebug option has been added to the settings.xml file which, if enabled, causes more information to be output during import than you can shake a stick at. The extra output can be very helpful for diagnosing authoring errors (e.g. violating the material subset constraints mentioned above) and pinpoint what needs to be fixed in the source model for successful import.
Note that project news is a little light this week due to on-going SL planning meetings taking place at the Lab.
On Tuesday, January 27th, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to Magnum and LeTigre, and which introduced the following changes:
A fix for BUG-8223 “Pictures Fail to Upload and send when Using Email Option from RC Regions”
a fix for BUG-8002 [Experience Tools] Allowed & Blocked experiences are lost with parcel subdivision.
Crash mode fixes
Code clean-up around avatar region crossings.
On Wednesday, January 27th, the RC channels should all receive a new server maintenance package comprising:
A fix for BUG-8247 “[Experience Tools] Issue with llRequestExperiencePermissions() triggering experience_permissions_denied() and XP_ERROR_NOT_PERMITTED_LAND after prior 5 minute no response period.”
Internal improvements for experience tools key-value functions.#
BlueSteel will also retain the Avatar Hover Height (AHH) server code with this release
SL Viewer
A new Maintenance RC viewer arrived in the viewer release channel on Tuesday, January 27th. Version 3.7.25.298030 brings with it over 30 fixes and updates to the viewer, ranging from language improvements through build issue fixes to feature requests. Using-facing updates include:
Uniquely identifying URLs for Second Life or Linden Lab domains
Interest list fixes for:
Preventing some prims / items in linksets from being deselected as a result of camera movement
Preventing Intan solo dance animations from ceasing to animate as a result of camera movement
A fix for voice / speak button failing to enable after activating voice on a parcel if it was disabled on entering said parcel
A fix for pixel width and height of the preview is not matched to value of Width or Height text-box in the “Snapshot to inventory” tab
A fix for prim size reverting to default size when scaled down and shift copied
A fix for an avatar’s sitting position becomes corrupted if ALT-SHIFT-S keyboard short cut is used while editing appearance
Feature request: CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-T shows up as notice toasts.
One of the changes in the new maintenance viewer allows SL / Lab URLs to be automatically indicated within the viewer – note the icon compared to an URL for an external link
While it is all over Twitter, it’s probably worth pointing out that as well as hiring for their new platform, the Lab is also still hiring people specifically to work on Second Life.
There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment during the week
On Thursday, January 22nd, the RC channels were updated as follows:
LeTigre and Magnum received the same server maintenance package which included a fix for BUG-8223, introduced to all three RC channels in the week #3 deployment
BlueSteel received a server maintenance package which contained the same fix for BUG-8223 and also support for the new Avatar Hover Height capability
SL Viewer – Avatar Hover Height
The Avatar Hover Height project viewer was released on Wednesday, January 21st, however, an issue with the SL wiki means that it currently cannot be reached via the Alternate Viewers wiki page, which is currently showing an out-of-date listing. Those wishing to download the viewer can do so from here.
For details on Avatar Hover Height in general, please refer to my overview.
Other Items
SL Wiki
The ability for users to edit SL wiki pages was re-enabled on Thursday, January 22nd, after an extended period in which they were only editable by Lab personnel. However, whether the two are connected or not, but subsequent to the wiki being opened for editing, a number of pages appeared to revert to earlier versions or became inaccessible (e.g. the Alternate Viewers wiki page reverted to a version from late December 2014, while the pages for the RC channel release notes were replaced by blank pages).
The Lab is obviously aware of the issue, and looking into it.
CDN News
The Lab has been / is testing an additional CDN provider (to Highwinds, whom they currently use). It’s not clear where the testing is going, and when asked about it at the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting on Thursday January 22nd, Simon linden could only say, “it was going to allow a lot more flexibility so we could have different regions on different CDNs … or something similar. It might have been different areas of the world on different CDNs.”
Doubtless, if / when the project moves forward, we’ll get to hear more.
And on a Lighter Note
On Monday, January 19th, people started reporting that an old group logo – Whore Couture – was appearing in place of assorted group’s usual logo, as shown in the image below, taken from BUG-8255, “Whore Couture Logo Appearing on Several Groups”, where the problem was formally reported.
BUG-8255 reported the random appearance of an old SL brand logo – Whore couture – appearing in place of various group’s usual logo
The cause of the problem was later revealed by Soft Linden:
An engineer grabbed a random group’s image as a placeholder and put it in place of an old asset ID that was used as the default image for many groups. It was meant as a temporary measure while he was doing some other texture work. Unfortunately, he didn’t look at the image he selected and I expect he would have chosen plywood instead if he had.
The image has been removed, but it may take some time before that propagates through the CDN and viewer caches.
Don’t worry, we’re not going to let him live this down. In the mean time, we’re building some better process around this.
Coming soon: Avatar Hover Height provides a means of adjusting your avatar’s graphical height above the ground / floor / objects, as seen by yourself and others -see below for details
Server Deployments – Week 4
Due to Monday, January 19th being Martin Luther King day in the USA and holiday for many, the scheduled deployments for the week have been put back by one day.
There will be no Main (SLS) channel deployment for the week, as the server maintenance package deployed to the RC channels in week 3 has resulted in the snapshots-to-email functionality in the snapshot floater failing (see BUG-8223).
On Thursday, January 22nd, and as a result of this issue, the LeTigre and Magnum RC channels will receive a further server maintenance package which includes a fix for BUG-8223.
BlueSteel will also receive the same update, but with additional support for the new avatar height adjustment capability, as noted below.
Avatar Hover Height
Prior to the arrival of server-side appearance (SSA), many TPVs included a capability commonly referred to as “z-axis height adjustment”. Simply put, this allowed the height of an avatar to be adjusted up or down, relative to the ground or to an object they were sitting on, which allowed for a wide range of adjustments to be made (such as when sitting or kneeling on the ground, to prevent the appearance of hovering over it or to more finely tune the avatar’s pose on the ground, or to re-adjust an avatar’s height relative to the ground when using things like dancing posballs, etc, and so on).
This capability was lost when SSA was deployed, and as a result SUN-38 was raised, requesting a means by which greater freedom for avatar height adjustment could be given to users. While the Lab did respond to this request through the introduction of the “Hover” slider in the Edit Appearance floater, it only met a very narrow subset of use cases for adjusting an avatar’s height, and even then would only work with Modify shapes.
In June 2014, a formal proposal was put to the Lab more fully explaining why a height offset capability is required, and offering suggestions on how it might be achieved. As a result of this, Vir Linden has been working to provide such a capability, which is now officially called Avatar Hover Height (AHH), preliminary details of which, together with notes on testing it, can be found on the wiki.
This is now available for testing on Aditi using the new AHH project viewer. In addition, and as noted above, the server-side support will undergo initial deployment to the BlueSteel RC of the main grid on Thursday, January 22nd.
Within the viewer, AHH adds a new option called – wait for it – Avatar Hover Height to the right-click Avatar context menu in the viewer. Clicking on this displays the Set Avatar Height slider / spinner which can be used to adjust an avatar’s height by up to +/- 2 metres from the nominal default height.
Note that this is purely a graphical change – there is no associated change the avatar’s height in terms of platform physics. The slider allows for quite rapid adjustments to be made, while the spinner supports finer manual adjustments of up to 3 decimal places.
The slider allows your avatar’s graphical height to be adjusted by +/- 2 metres from its nominal default
Once adjustments have been finalised, they are sent to the simulator, and then back to all viewers connected to the simulator, allowing your adjusted height to be consistently seen by everyone around you (or that will be the case once the capability is fully deployed; during the roll-out, there will be a couple of caveats, as discussed further down in this article).
The slider works regardless of whether you’re using a No Modify shape, and allows adjusts to seated poses as well as standing poses, and works with poseballs (thus allowing couples dances to be correctly adjusted to prevent one or other partner either floating over the dance floor or being buried up to their ankles in it).
Avatar Hover Height will allow you to fine-tune your apparent seated position relative to an object or to the ground when dancing with a partner, allow you to kneel / lie / sit on the ground correctly, and so on – thus meeting the majority of use cases the Hover slider in Edit Appearance fails to address.
As noted above, the capability can be tested on Aditi right now. You’ll need the project viewer (when available), or you can download the latest version of the viewer from the link given above. You’ll also need to be be on regions which have the necessary server-side support for Avatar Hover Height. These are any region on the DRTSIM-274 channel, and nominally Hover1 and Hover2. Please read the notes on testing (again linked-to above).
Note on Initial Deployment
As AHH requires both viewer and server-side support, a couple of things do need to be noted while it is being tested / deployed:
Until such time as server-side support for AHH is fully deployed, any adjustment you make to you avatar’s height using it will only be effective while you are on regions with the necessary server-side support. If you move to a region without the support, your avatar with revert to its nominal default height above the ground / objects, and the AHH options will be greyed-out in your viewer. However, any setting you have made using AHH will be automatically re-applied when you re-enter a region with server-side AHH support
Until such time as the viewer-side code is incorporated into all viewers, any adjustments you make to your avatar’s height using AHH will only be visible to you and other people using viewers with the AHH code. anyone on a region supporting AHH who is using a viewer without the necessary AHH code will continue to see your avatar at its nominal default height.
Do keep in mind that until the AHH code is fully deployed across the grid, it will only work on regions with the server-side support. Similarly, adjustments made using it will only be visible to others using viewers with AHH support; those using viewers that do not support AHH will continue to see your avatar at its nominal default height, as shown in the image on the right, taken with Firestorm which shows my CTA standing on the ground, rather than hovering over it, as seen in the AHH viewer.
From the rapid testing I’m managed to do with AHH, it appears to work for the majority of cases where some fine tuning of avatar height is required, and offers a suitable level of granularity in adjustment through the spinner (although a suspect most people will perhaps finder the slider adequate for their needs. It will therefore be interesting to see how detailed testing progresses.
Assuming no major issues are found, it would seem likely this update will be one targeted for fairly rapid deployment, at least on the server-side, although the viewer code may take longer to filter through and to be picked-up by TPVs, depending upon what else is in the pipeline.
The following notes are taken from the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 15th, 2015, and the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January 16th. 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 stamp contained within the following text refer to both it and the TPV Developer meeting.
Server Deployments – Week 3 Recap
There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday, January 13th.
On Wednesday, January 14th, all three RC channels received the same server maintenance package comprising: a fix for BUG-8002 “Experience Tools Allowed & Blocked experiences are lost with parcel subdivision”; crash mode fixes and avatar-related region crossing code clean-up related to “clean-up and polishing” rather than to performance improvements.
SL Viewer
The Experience Tools RC viewer was updated to version 3.8.0.298091 on January 15th, bringing it up to parity with the current release viewer (the HTTP pipelining release).
[00:15] There is a new maintenance release candidate viewer that is being queued-up for the viewer release channel.
[09:52] The Lab now has both Windows and Mac versions of the viewer building successfully using the new tool chain (which among other things, used Visual Studio 2013 for Windows and xcode 6 for Mac), and may be “pretty close” to achieving the same with Linux, although that is still to be determined.
It is anticipated that project viewers using the new build process will start to appear soon, and the process gradually be applied to RC releases and the viewer release itself, but only after full regression testing has been undertaken to try to ensure there are no hidden issues remaining.
This work does potentially make it easier for the Lab to start producing 64-bit versions of the viewer, but there are currently no detailed plans for them to start doing so at this point in time.
Experience Key Tools
[01:20] The initial release of the Experience Tools is still on the horizon, with the release candidate viewer currently the only RC in the pipeline, and which has no further viewer-side changes waiting to be implemented (which doesn’t automatically mean it will be promoted to release status next). However, the Lab is still working on some back-end issues which must be fixed before the key can be turned and the capabilities formally released.
Group Chat
[01:24] The lab is continuing to push out changes intended to make group chat more robust. While happy with the overall improvements that have been made to performance in terms of reducing the noticeable amounts of group chat lag, the problems to the chat servers locking-up every so often and requiring a restart are still being worked on. Additional testing is continuing, and Oz linden indicates that the Lab aren’t about to give up on getting to the bottom of things.
Z-offset Height Adjustment
Vir Linden: working on the z-offset height solution
[02:52] This is intended to provide a means of on-the-fly adjustments to be made to an avatars height above the ground / objects and which can be used whether the avatar is standing or sitting, without the need to use the current Appearance hover slider. It will work in a manner similar to the old z-offset height adjustment found in some TPVs, and will likely comprise a slider access through the avatar right-click context menu. As well as working for individual avatars, it is thought the capability will also work against thinks like couples poseballs for dancing, although this has yet to be tested.
Vir Linden, who has been working on the project reports that the capability is now to be persistent across logins on a per-account basis (so you will be able to set it for each of your accounts, and have the viewer remember the setting for those accounts, rather than having a global setting in the viewer applicable to all accounts using that viewer).
The viewer code is about to go through internal QA testing with the Lab, and the hope is that it will appear as a project viewer during week 4 (week commencing Monday 19th January). This will be available for testing the capability on Aditi (the beta grid), where a number of regions have been set-up on channel DRTSIM-274 (notably regions Hover1 and Hover2). The project viewer will be released with notes on how to use it, and people will be invited to tes it both on these regions with the necessary server-side support and on regions without the server support (and when moving between the two), with a request that any issues found are reported via the JIRA.
Assuming no major issues are found, the server-side changes are already in the queue for release onto Agni (the main grid), and the viewer code will hopefully rapidly progress to RC status as well.
[05:21] A further server-side update which is forthcoming and will assist with this testing is the avatar attribute testing fix, about which I reported in part 1 of this update.
There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday, January 13th. As indicated in my last update, Wednesday, January 14th should see a new server maintenance package deployed to all three RCs. This comprises:
A fix for BUG-8002 “Experience Tools] Allowed & Blocked experiences are lost with parcel subdivision”.
Crash mode fixes
Code clean-up around region crossing.
The region crossing improvements are for avatars only (not vehicles), and were described by Simon Linden, speaking at the Server Beta User Group meeting on Thursday, January 8th as, “all internal and pretty minor, so please don’t get hopes up for performance improvements,” and being about “clean-up and small polishing.”
Upcoming Deployments
Avatar Attribute Testing Fix
Oz Linden Linden chaired the Simulator User Group meeting, Simon being away on a skiing vacation
Note: no time frame has been set for the following, so it may not appear for another few weeks.
The Lab expects to have a server-side update running soon which, while perhaps not directly noticeable to users, should make it easier for testing new avatar attributes as they are being developed by the Lab.
In summary, the current approach means that when a new avatar attribute is being tested, the attribute must be understood by each region the avatar visited; if the avatar passes through a simulator that could not identify the attribute (e.g. the attribute is only supported on a server RC channel and the avatar testing it crosses into a simulator region running on the Main channel), the value assigned to the attribute is lost, and cannot not be easily recovered (simply crossing back into the simulator region with the necessary support, for example, would not restore the attribute value).
The new update will fix this issue and will thus make it easier to test new avatar features. Potentially, one of the first of these that will benefit will be the new avatar height offset capability.
SL Viewer
The HTTP Pipelining viewer, version: 3.7.24.297623, was updated to the de facto release viewer on Tuesday, January 13th. This viewer provides reduced pipelined texture and mesh fetching time-out so that stalled connections fail quickly allowing earlier retry, with the time-out value changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds.
Mesh Import Project Viewer
Chairing the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, January 13th, Oz Linden indicated that a project viewer is in the works which contains “a bunch of fixes” for mesh imports to SL. Details on precisely what issues are addressed weren’t given, but those interested might want to keep an eye on the Alternate Viewers wiki page, and I’ll of course have updates and information here as and when the viewer appears.
Webkit Replacement
Webkit is a third-party library used within the viewer for a number of tasks. For example, it powers the built-in web browser, and is used to display profiles (unless you’re using a viewer supporting legacy profiles). It is also used with like Media on a Prim (MOAP) and many in-world televisions. However, it has been something of a problem for the Lab, with out-of-date libraries and other issues.
During 2014, Monty Linden carried out work to improve things, but the aim has always been to replace it with the Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF). However, this project got sidelined in the push to implement a new tool chain for viewer building, and implement a new autobuild process. This work is now very near to completion for both the Mac and Windows versions of the viewer (Linux is lagging behind, unfortunately), and the hope is that attention will again be focusing on the CEF work in the near future.
Z-offset Height Adjustment
The new “z-offset” adjustment, once available, means you’ll be able to “fine tune” your avatar’s height when sitting, standing, etc., in addition to general adjustments made using the Avatar Appearance hover capability
This is intended to provide a means of on-the-fly adjustments to be made to an avatars height above the ground / objects and which can be used whether the avatar is standing or sitting, without the need to use the current Appearance hover slider. It will work in a manner similar to the old z-offset height adjustment found in some TPVs, and will likely comprise a slider access through the avatar right-click context menu.
As I’ve previously reported, Vir Linden has been working on this for a while, as a result of a direct proposal from TPV developers setting out the problem of avatar height adjustment introduced by the deployment of server-side baking and the avatar appearance “hover” parameter (which the new capability is designed to compliment, rather than replace). The indication are that a project viewer with the new capability will be appearing “very shortly”.
Umbral Photography, Hydra Isles (Flickr) – blog post
In the mean time, we’re building some better process around this.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 