The following notes were taken at the Simulator User Group meeting held on Tuesday, May 26th. Not a lot was discussed in terms of meaningful reportage (again), so just a short update on server deployments / official viewer updates.
Simulator Deployments
Please refer to the simulator deployment thread for updates.
- On Tuesday, May 26th, the majority of the grid was updated to server maintenance release 542403, comprising the fix for the group notice archive timestamps bug.
- On Wednesday, May 27th there will be a single RC deployment – maintenance update 542737, comprising infrastructure improvements related to the cloud migration work.
SL Viewer
There have been no updates to the official viewers to mark the start of week #22, leaving them as follows:
- Current Release viewer version 6.4.2.541639, dated May 11th, promoted May 19th, formerly the Camera Presets RC viewer.
- Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
- FMOD Studio RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542486, issued May 21st.
- Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542484, May 19th.
- Project viewers:
- Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.2.541645, issued May 15th.
- Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
- Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
- Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
- 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.
New Simulator Chat Range Capability
As noted in my May 16th TPV Developer meeting notes, a new ability is being developed to allow region / estate owners / managers to set the open chat range on a region (see BUG-228333). This update is only intended to affect nearby chat channel 0 (the default open chat channel).
The change has caused a certain amount of confusion. For example, will the chat range be defined by originating region or the recipient region? For example, if you are in a region with a 100m chat range and are 10m from a neighbouring region, does your chat travel 90-100m into the neighbouring region, or will it be limited to the chat range set within the neighbouring region, if less than 100m?
Or what if you’re 10m from a region boundary, and the region has a chat range of 40m, and the neighbouring region 70m – does it mean people 50m from you in your region cannot hear your chat, but a) your chat will be relayed 70m from the region boundary in the other region, or b) just 60m (due to the 10m between you and the region edge)?
Replying to questions like these, Rider Linden indicated that it would be the recipient region that would determine the distance chat is relayed within it, where you are close enough to be heard across a region boundary. Oz expanded on this, suggesting it would be a combination: the originating region’s chat range determining which, if any, neighbouring regions can “hear” chat from it, and the chat range in those regions determining which avatars within those regions can then hear the chat.
Rider further indicated that whatever the chat distance set, chat will never be relayed beyond the region(s) immediately adjoining the originating region. So, for example, if you have three region, A, B, and C, arranged in a single line one to the next, chat from A could be relayed in B, but not to C (and vice versa), but, depending on the chat range set in B, it might be relayed by both A and C or only in A or C, depending on the speaker’s location in B.
Hope that clears things up!
Obviously, the new capability won’t override parcel privacy settings. There is still no time frame as to when this feature will be implemented both server-side and in the viewer, which will require an additional UI element to allow the chat range to be adjusted.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 