Tag: Simulator User Group 2021

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 10th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary. Note this summary focuses on the key points of the discussion where there is something to report.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for additional details / updates.

• Tuesday, August 10th saw servers on the Main SLS channel updated with simulator release 562252. This release comprises:
  • BUG-220541 for llUnsit expansion.
  • A new simulator console command that will let estate managers change the default EEP settings across an entire estate. This also paves the way for implementing a new default Mainland EEP setting that will be coming in a future update.
  • A fix to llChar to reduce returns being translated as “?”. Some will still do so, but this will be addressed in the next maintenance simulator update.
• Wednesday, August 11th should see the RC channels with simulator release 562252 with the same updated machine configuration deployed on July 21st, 2021 to approximately 15% of homestead and openspace regions. This does not include any visible behavioural changes for the simulator, but may provide better performance.
  • This update may also see some increase in the mesh physics impact calculation issue. If you should encounter a situation where an object has a noticeably different mesh physics impact value, please file a BUG report.

SL Viewer

On Monday, August 9th, the Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.22.561873, was issued. This is an update to the earlier Simplified Cache viewer that had to be rolled back due to unexpected issues.

On Tuesday, August 10th, the CEF viewer, version 6.4.22.561752, originally issued on July 24th, was promoted to de facto release status.

The rest of the current pipelines remain unchanged:

• Release channel cohorts:
  • Grappa Maintenance RC, version 6.4.22.561850, issued July 29.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

In Brief

• Simulator work remains focused on the back-end tools upgrade.
• Aditi – inventory synch and log-in:
  • It is now possible to have inventory on Aditi (the beta grid) synch to your main grid inventory by filing a support ticket.
  • As the Aditi log-in problem hasn’t been resolved, automatic inventory syncing is not working, and people may still encounter issues trying to log-in to Aditi.

Log ons are going to be problematic to Aditi for the foreseeable future. There’s a service that we can’t configure correctly in the staging environment due to internal limitations.

– Mazidox Linden

• Updates to sound (including questions on allowing sound loops longer than 10 seconds and the ability to play/loop/stop sounds in linked primitives other than the primitive where the script exist – see BUG-227641) came up during the meeting. Updates remain under some work related to sounds is on a list of things to be done, other work – such as possible alternate formats, etc., – is really just general discussions at this point.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary.

Server Deployments

At the time of writing there was no server deployment thread, so please refer to the Server section of the forums for updates.

• There was no deployment to the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, August 3rd.
• Wednesday, August 4th should see a deployment to the RC channels. This includes:
  • BUG-220541 for llUnsit expansion.
  • A new simulator console command that will let estate managers change the default EEP settings across an entire estate. This also paves the way for implementing a new default Mainland EEP setting that will be coming in a future update.
  • A fix to llChar to reduce returns being translated as “?”. Some will still do so, but this will be addressed in the next maintenance simulator update.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to the current batch of official viewers to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as follows:

• Release viewer: version 6.4.21.561414, Fernet Maintenance RC dated July 14, promoted July 19 – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • Grappa Maintenance RC, version 6.4.22.561850, issued July 29.
  • CEF91 RC viewer, version 6.4.22.561752, issued July 24.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

In Brief

• There have been numerous requests / feature requests for grater access to things like region performance states, etc. (e.g. BUG-10263, BUG-37717, and BUG-229172 – all of which which have been closed. Commenting on these and feature requests in general, Mazidox Linden commented:

We have to consider things like “How can this be abused” when we get feature requests like that, which is why even though I agree it’s better to have an API call than measure in a tight loop we might not want to make surfacing that data easier.

• Rider Linden hopes to take a second pass at the way scripts are scheduled, with the support of Monty Linden. He hopes to be able to make the simulator “smarter” in how it schedules what script to run in what order and how frequently. However, given current workloads, it is unlikely this work will commence before the end of the year.
• The simulator tools upgrade work has been “hanging fire” recently, but is due to resume.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 27th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for updates.

• All simhosts not restarted in the last week were updated to version 561609, which which should not see any changes to the behaviour of simulators, nor to the configuration of the machines running those simulators.
• The planned deployment for Wednesday, July 28th has been cancelled.

Mesh Physics Issue

The Lab is experimenting with optimising the configuration of the cloud simhosts to increase performance. However, a side effect of this has been that some meshes have a different physics impact calculation, which may be higher or lower than previously shown. This will affect both new and existing uploads. If you experience this issue, please file a Jira or contact support.

From Rider Linde on this matter:

It seems that for very very thin prims with physics there is a difference in the way Havok calculates their cost and that difference bubbles up into land impact.

From Simon Linden:

We had a problem reported where the costs changed. It wasn’t drastic, but this object was designed to be really close to a limit. The shift was small but enough to get noticed and we need to figure out why for those exact same reasons – it can cause some real headaches.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to the current batch of official viewers to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as follows:

• Release viewer: Fernet Maintenance RC, version 6.4.21.561414, dated July 14, promoted July 19 – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • None.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

In Brief

• Gaming bugs:
  • BUG-10908 “Ghost Objects Left over when things are removed from play” is an issue that has been around for several years, but appears to be increasing in incidence, particularly within games in SL. Some work was put into developing a fix for the issue, but the current status of that work needed to be established before the issue could be commented on further.
  • There are also reports that BUG-7084 “Prim properties visually revert to an earlier state since Interesting” being encountered more frequently, again within some hunt games.
  • Both appear to be related to Interest List updates, and conflicts with full / terse updates to objects within a region. Essentially, if an object is updated (e.g. rendered transparent because it has been “collected” by a player), and that the object is not in the interest list for the viewer of another player at the time of the update, then the update isn’t registered until that player attempts to touch the object – at which point it vanishes.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 20th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for updates.

• There was no planned deployment to servers on the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, July 20th.
• Wednesday, July 21st should see all servers on the RC channels re-started. Due to the manner in which simulator deployments are made, this will show as a updated release number (2021-07-16.561609), although there are no changes to the code itself. However, during the restart process, approximately 1/3 of RC servers (not the simulator code) will see changes designed to improve performance “in some situations”. In addition, the deployment notes further state:

As mentioned in some of our recent deploy plans we’ve been investigating the effectiveness of region restarts at the ten day limit. We believe some of the issues Residents are encountering with regions that have long uptimes are due to issues at the machine level, not the simulator level. Our instance refresh for Second Life RC channels this week is an attempt to gather data as to whether this is correct or not.

The two RC updates had been planned for the week have now been altered as follows:

• The ability for estate owners / managers to set a default EEP environment across an entire estate has been pushed back to a future release.
• Opening custom chat ranges to estate managers through the simulator debug console has been put on hold as a result of “privacy concerns” – primarily that people might not be aware how far their local chat is carrying on regions where the range has been increased over the “usual” 20m. As such, consideration is being given to adding a viewer-side change to inform people of the local chat range.

SL Viewer

The Fernet Maintenance RC, version 6.4.21.561414, dated July 14th, was updated to de facto release status on Monday, July 19th.  This leaves the rest of the currently available official viewers as:

• Release channel cohorts:
  • None.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

Agni / Aditi Account Syncing

This has been an issue for some time, causing pain for many creators who wish to use Aditi (the beta grid) for testing, due to significant issues in trying to log-in.  The matter has been under investigation for several months, and a solution new appears close, with Simon Linden commenting:

We’ve tossed together some code and stuff and now have the ability to copy your account from production SL (here) to our beta grid. If any of you would like that, send me an IM. We’ve tested it a bit and are ready to try the first volunteers. 

There are a few things to note, however: you should clear your viewer cache before logging in to Aditi; when you log in, your outfit may look messed up. Just change it. We’d love to get some feedback on this.

So, if you are interested in regaining access to Aditi, drop an IM to Simon, stating your reason for requiring access and willingness to participate in testing.

HTTP-Out Warnings

To quote Monty Linden (making a long-awaited return to SUG meetings!):

A refresh to a component of the HTTP-Out system, our HTTP proxy, is underway. Changes are meant to be transparent involving operational improvements, but we’re letting everyone know so if you see issues having to do with reachability of external servers or reliability of HTTP access, please speak up. Jira’s always appropriate for reporting issues but be specific in the details. We’re currently serving about 200K requests per minute via LSL so if you tell me “it happened last Thursday,” I’m not going to find anything. Time, place [region], target – details matter.  At some point soon, this will go out to Aditi as a non-simulator deploy. [I] Want to encourage reports of issues if anyone sees problems. Especially blockages of things that should not be blocked.

In Brief

• The meeting includes a general discussion on teleports. teleport failures, region crossings issues and how they might be related and one (physical region regions via forced unseat / teleport) might help in diagnosing force TP failures – and whether or not this is the case.
• There has been a question on whether texture transfer via UDP through the simulator is still / again possible. Commenting on this, Monty Linden stated:

Texture delivery was to be blocked for UDP but not certain that happened. They won’t enjoy it. Would like a capture of a shift-ctrl-3 screen. texture asset delivery via simulator is one of our most pessimal systems. Will check on the UDP status – that’s curious.

• Refer to the video below for additional information.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 13th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary.

Server Deployments

There are no planned deployments for the week.

SL Viewer

There have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the official pipelines as:

• Release viewer: Project UI RC viewer, version 6.4.20.560520, dated June 14, promoted June 23 – No change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Fernet Maintenance RC, version 6.4.20.560398, dated June 22.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

Week #29 (commencing Monday, July 19th should see a new RC deployment that includes the following:

• Opening custom chat ranges to estate managers through the simulator debug console (apparently requires a viewer update as well).
• Ability for estate owners / managers to set a default EEP environment across an entire estate.

In Brief

• A general discussion on EEP and possible fixes improvements, including:
  • A brightness slider for the Sun.
  • Possibly adjusting the relative sizes of the Sun and Moon to reflect their actual size ratio (see as possibly a content breaker).
  • Adjustments to cloud density, cloud detail (making it relative to the world) and bumping the maximum value on the cloud scale slider up to 5.
  • One (or more) feature requests have been suggested for these ideas, as well as raising them for discussion at the Content Creation meetings.
• There was further discussion around the potential to use the Nimble capabilities originally found in Windlight to provide rain, snow etc., with the ability to avoid entering closed structures.
  • Weather systems have been a discussion topic within the Lab, with no commitment on implementing anything.
  • Generating the data server-side is seen as possible, but to use Simon Linden’s words, “the real magic is rendering it on the viewer”.
  • The main issues may come down to the robustness of viewer-side physics and the effort required to get the viewer so it can render weather and the potential impact on performance (although pseudo-weather systems using ray casting, mesh faces, etc., are already either indirectly (waiting on the simulator calcs) or directly (rendering) impactful on viewer performance.
• There was also a discussion on dealing with AFK avatars at Linden Info / safe hubs, and the complaints that new users tend to make when arriving in one that no-one will speak to them:
  • One suggestion is to have an experience that sits inactive avatars after a period of time – that is, moves them away from the landing point and sits them on a seat, freeing space at the landing point.
  • A counter suggestion was to simply use a landing point mover, given the avatars that are seated are still effectively in the same space (although could in theory be moved to a separate “room”).
  • A further problem with the experience idea is that it assumes all those arriving will opt to join it at least once.

 

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 6th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary.

Server Deployments

See the server deployment thread for any most recent updates / changes.

• Tuesday, July 6th saw the SL Main channel servers updated with simulator release 560819. This includes internal fixes, a fix for BUG-202864 – “Change Mesh Uploader to preserve Scene File object names when a full linkset is uploaded”. and a fix for BUG230881 – “llHttpRequest(): HTTP_CUSTOM_HEADER flag is ignored”.
• Wednesday, July 7th will not see any planned deployment to the RC channels.

SL Viewer

There have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the official pipelines as:

• Release viewer: Project UI RC viewer, version 6.4.20.560520, dated June 14, promoted June 23 – No change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Fernet Maintenance RC, version 6.4.20.560398, dated June 22.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

Region Crossings

During region crossings, vehicles and avatars are packaged and transferred separately to one another, before being unpacked and put back together by the receiving region. Due to the fact that vehicles are generally less complex than avatars, then tend to arrive first, and this can cause issues as the scripts on the vehicle resume and make calls (animations, etc.), on avatars that have yet to “arrive”, which can result in vehicle errors.

While there is an event flag – CHANGED_REGION – triggered when the vehicle has correctly arrived in the new region, allowing its scripts to resume, there is no equivalent flag for arriving avatars.  So user Animats has suggested the creation of such an additional event flag: CHANGED_REGION_COMPLETE.

This would be sent once the receiving simulator has unpacked and seated the avatars using the vehicle. Should this additional event flag not be received, then it is indicative that something has gone wrong, allowing vehicle scripters to use it to determine how they’d like to handle the situation.

See BUG-230934 “Add event bit flag CHANGED_REGION_COMPLETE to “changed” script event” for more.

It has also been suggested that LL give thought to a way in which vehicles can detect upcoming parcel settings. A major issue of vehicular travel is encountering parcels where object entry is disabled – resulting in the vehicle being auto-returned to the owner and all those aboard violently unseated.

A means for the viewer to be forewarned of the access settings for a parcel would potentially allow vehicles to be scripted so they can respond to “unfriendly” parcel such as stopping at the parcel border (presumably with a test notification to the driver) in a similar manner to when they encounter ban lines, thus potentially preventing vehicle return and avatar dumping.

There are again complexities to this idea (e.g. what happens when the parcel(s) being checked are in the next region, and thus on a different simulator to the one the checking script is currently running on?). However, LL have requested the idea be filed via Jira to allow proper assessment and discussion.