Tag: Simulator User Group 2023

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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #28 summary

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

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  July 11th 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 are planned for the week, but all simhost channels will be restated on the Tuesday and Wednesday slots.

Upcoming Updates

One (or more) upcoming simulator code updates will include:

  • A fix for the bug on the simulators running the recent LSD additions (llLinksetDataCountFound() & llLinksetDataDeleteFound()) being unable to save scripts.
  • The changes to UUID generation on certain items (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. for further background, see my week 26 SUG meeting summary.

Viewer Updates

  • On Monday, July 10th, the Maintenance T RC viewer updated to version 6.6.13.580918.

The rest of the official viewer currently in the pipeline remains as:

  • Release viewer version 6.6.13.580794, formerly the Windows 32 + macOS pre-10.13 RC and dated June 30th and promoted on July 5.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.580782, June 30.
  • Project viewers:

PBR Materials

There continue to be a lot of questions as to when PBR will be deployed across the entire grid. In response to such questions at the SUG meeting, the following observations were made:

The server has to go through the full RC process still, once it is deemed ready for that. the messaging formats and api interfaces are expected to be stable, but if a showstopper bug is found that can change if needed to fix it.

– Brad Linden

I am about 80% confident the interface is complete and also about 80% confident that we have some server side changes to behaviour within the confines of the existing spec (things like: what can you do with reflection probes). Internally we’re answering questions like “can you kick a reflection probe like a soccer ball? Can you put a reflection probe as the root of your physical vehicle?”

– Maxidox Linden

It almost goes without saying that there are a lot of significant changes in the glTF server & viewer. It’s a case where it is much better to be safe than sorry.

– Rider Linden

In Brief

  • The Asset store is now standing at 2 petabytes.
  • BUG-233853 “Scripts failing to receive rapid touch_start events under LL viewer” had had been seen as fixed in The Maintenance T RC viewer. however, it has been reported the issue has still present, so the bug report has been re-opened.
  • Refer to the latter part of the video for:
    • A general discussion on bots.
    • A discussion on using estate_environment command to update EEP settings across an entire estate / the issues around updating Mainland on a continent-wide basis to overcome the current somewhat darker (than private regions) default environment (short form: it is hoped PBR with its updated environment settings will help matters).

† 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 #26 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ethereal City Estate – Ethereal City Noir, May 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  June 27th 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, June 27th, the simulator release 580543 was deployed to the SLS Main channel, placing all of the simhosts across the grid on the same release. This release includes:
    • PATCH method now enabled through LSL HTTP for both send and receive.
    • HEAD method now allowed through llHTTPRequest.
    • Linkset Size has been increased from 54 to 64m to match maximum prim size.
    • llGetAgentInfo can now detect scripted agent status.
    • See this official blog post for more.
  • On Wednesday, June 28th, the PBR Materials simulator code, currently on a limited Main grid deployment (Preflight channel only, I believe), will be updated. All other RC channels will be restarted without any changes to their simulator versions.

Viewer Updates

The Second Life Project Inventory Extensions viewer, version 6.6.13.580656, was issued on June 26th – see my overview for more.

The remaining viewers in the pipeline are:

Changes to How Asset UUIDs are Assigned

Right now when assets ids are assigned it is simply generated. We’re going changing that a bit. We’re going to start trying to de-dupe new assets. So if you were to upload to identical pictures of Kevin Bacon they would both end up with the same asset ID.

– Rider Linden

  • This is a major change to be deployed in an upcoming simulator release.
  • It will apply to textures, notecards, scripts (possibly gestures).
  • UUIDs for rezzed objects will remain unique.
  • The change also will not affect any UUIDs the viewer makes
  • The reason for this change is the Firestorm Bridge – which saves the same LSL script when it is created.
  • Refer to the latter half of the video below for further details on the discussion.

In Brief

  • Teleports:
    • Some are reporting increases in teleport failures, possibly the result of a failure mode wherein the simulator from which an agent (avatar) is departing closes the connection with the receiving simulator before the teleport has completed.
    • BUG-234022 “Teleport just before to change state will prevent the change state to occur” has also been filed, relating to issues with large scripts within worn attachments failing to correctly update on teleport / logging-in.
  • BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” has seen some work put into it (currently with the Lab’s QA team) which many held ease the problem once it reaches a deployment status.
  • A general discussion on scripting issues – please refer to the video for details.

† 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.