Tag: Simulator User Group 2023

2023 SL SUG meetings week #25 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Natthimmel – Göbekli Tepe. May 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 20th 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 on the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, June 20th. However, the simhosts were restarted.
  • On Wednesday, June 21st, the RC release deployed to the BlueSteel channel will be deployed to the rest of the RC simhosts. This release includes:
    • The “bot detection” update (i.e. AGENT_AUTOMATED constant for llGetAgentInfo() – so only detects if that flag is set, not if an agent is a bot or not.
    • The second part of the LSD rezzing fix + lLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound, among other things.

Viewer Updates

No changes to the crop of official viewers for the start of the week, leaving the available list as:

In Brief

  • This was a solstice party week, so not a lot of technical discussion.
  • Depending on who was speaking, vehicle-based region crossings either appear to have improved for some reason, or at exactly the same.
  • There is a bug with the automated Map refresh / clearing which can result in regions removed from the grid being removed from the Map. Anyone noticing this is asked to raised a support ticket requesting the Map be updated.
  • The Lab is playing with an experimental capability for adding labelling to the Map – some of this was shown by Alexa Linden some time ago, but the experiments at the Lab are continuing, although it is not clear if any of this work will result in anything user-facing, as currently the overlay is effectively a replacement for the actual Map tile, hence why the examples below are on “empty” parts of the the Map.
The latest in LL’s experiments with Map overlays
  • llLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound are awaiting documentation, but are now integrated into the next maintenance simulator.
  • A semi-entertaining discussion on Babylon 5 and Star Trek – who would’ve said Rider Linden is a B5 fan?! All I’ll say is not Zathras – because no-one ever listens to Zathras. Zathras, however, probably did say so. Even if only to Zathras.‡.

† 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.

‡ No, I’m not going to explain that further. Watch Babylon 5 and find out. You won’t regret it 🙂 .

2023 SL SUG meetings week #24 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Burrow Wood: Road to Nowhere, April 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 13th 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 13th:
    • The SLS Main channel servers were updated with a simulator release providing support for the new inventory thumbnails viewer capability soon to be forthcoming. See my recent TPVD meeting summaries for more on this capability. This project – or at least the simulator element – is apparently known as “Manicure” internally at the Lab!).
    • The Preflight RC channel was updated with simulator support for glTF PBR materials – see below for more on this deployment.
  • One Wednesday June14th, the BlueSteel RC channel will be updated with a maintenance release, which include:
    • The “bot detection” update (i.e. AGENT_AUTOMATED constant for llGetAgentInfo() – so only detects if that flag is set, not if an agent is a bot or not.
    • The second part of the LSD rezzing fix + lLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound, among other things.

glTF PBR Simulator Deployment

  • The Preflight channel is a small channel compromising the following controlled access regions: Preflight 0] though Preflight 8, Rumpus Room 1  through Rumpus Room 5 and Testylvania Sandbox.
  • Access to these regions must be requested – but will remain limited; the purpose of this deployment is for small-scale testing of the PBR materials support on the Main grid.
  • A larger, more public deployment of the simulator PBR support code will be forthcoming, so those who do not have access to the Preflight regions should consider waiting for that deployment.

Viewer Updates

No changes to the crop of official viewers for the start of the week, leaving the available list as:

In Brief

PBR Terrain Work

To re-iterate:

  • This work is in development, but is a follow-on to the current PBR Materials project, not a part of it.
  • It is primarily viewer-side changes, allowing the application of PBR materials instead of the current terrain textures. It is *not* PBR terrain painting.
  • Extensions to the project are being discussed internally at the Lab, but the real focus will be on this initial work for the time being, and further information can be found in this official blog post.
  • Discussions on the work are held at the content Creation User Group meetings – see my  meeting summaries or attend the meetings in person.
The PBR terrain project will allow PBR materials to be used on Second Life terrain in place of textures. Credit: Linden Lab

Inventory Thumbnails

  • This is primarily a viewer-side project which keeps coming up for discussion at the SUG meetings.
  • It will allow persistent thumbnail images with a maximum resolution of 256×256 to be produced, which can be stored within inventory with the items they represent  such that they display an image of an item to be displayed on Mouseover.
  • Testing is currently underway to limit the impact the inclusion of thumbnails may have on inventory load time, texture memory use.
  • The viewer is not yet ready for a project viewer release, but the Lab is working on a blog post to outline more of the intended functionality of this capability.

In General

  • BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” has further fixes in the works. No estimated time for deployment.
  • There is still upset circulating about the reduction in Linden Water reflections as a result of performance optimisations to help offset the impact of PBR rendering in the viewer. Currently, there are no plans to offer higher quality reflections in the future, but it is hoped that evolving work on screen space reflections will offset so of the loss of quality.  For discussions on this, please see my Content Creation User Group (CCUG) summaries or attend the meetings in person.
  • A general discussion on updating Linden trees / plants, re-introducing the “wind” to sway trees, how physics calculations and costs are made / arrived at (with the latter noted as potentially being for a future (e.g. not this year) internal discussion at the Lab, so outside of the scope of comment from the La at present).
  • It was noted that there is a further simulator update in development which is hoped will reduce the hit simulators take when handling avatars arriving in a region (and with a focus on better handling of attachments). No ETA on when this will see the light of day.
  • A further discussion on region crossings and vehicles, which also rolled into vehicles hitting ban walls and avatars being ejected / vehicle returned, and a means of preventing this by forewarning on an impending region / parcel with access control enabled. Please refer to the video for all of this.

† 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 #23 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Sunnmøre, April 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 6th 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 6th, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any user-facing changes. Those regions within the channel which still supported LSL XML-RPC functionality had that capability switched off.
  • On Wednesday, June 7th the RC channels should be updated with a simulator release providing support for the new inventory thumbnails viewer capability soon to be forthcoming. See my recent TPVD meeting summaries for more on this capability.
    • This project – or at least the simulator element – is apparently known as “Manicure” internally at the Lab!).

Viewer Updates

No changes to the crop of official viewers for the start of the week, leaving the list as:

In Brief

  • The long-requested Linkset Data (LSD) functions llLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound should be going to LL’s QA team for testing in the upcoming week, and so could be appearing in a maintenance simulator update Soon™. Although it will first go to Aditi for testing.
  • BUG-233832 “llCreateLink LSL function sleep time might be excessive” is due to be addressed in a simulator update due to go to RC in week 24.
  • BUG-202560 “Allow us to pass list data between links to vastly reduce script time” is currently under consideration. Rider Linden’s thinking is that, rather than send the 3 predefined int, string, and key data items, it would be possible to send an arbitrary list.
    • He also noted that at some point he “would love” to add JSON as a first class datatype. Ding so would vastly reduce the time spent parsing and the memory usage, as it would remove the need to keep playing with strings and substrings.
  • The latter pert of the meeting includes a discussion on sensors (and sensing avatars), which touches on BUG-233784 “Add sensor type LOW_SCRIPTED as an option”, and BUG-4329 “Feature Request: New sensor functions that are not bound to a prim’s position & rotation plus inclusion of an Owner filter”. Refer to the video below 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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #22 summary (and a LSL XML-RPC reminder)

Posted on by Inara Pey
Photo Café, April 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 30th 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, May 30th, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any user-facing changes.
  • On Wednesday, May 31st, a new RC update, providing back-end support for the new inventory thumbnails viewer capability soon to be forthcoming. See my recent TPVD meeting summaries for more on this capability.

Viewer Updates

  • The Emoji Project Viewer (😊😒🥱😬🤪🫣😲🐱🦄 – depending on your personal point of view!), version, 6.6.13.580279, was issued issued on May 30th.
    • This viewer enables the use of emojis in local chat and IM conversations, encoded as their corresponding unicode characters as well as via the use of the Windows (Win+. or Win+;) and MacOS (Ctrl-Cmd-space) emoji pickers (note any animated gifs displayed in these pickers are obviously not supported).
    • This capability comes as a code contribution from Kitty Barnett, who first implemented it within the Catznip viewer. As such other TPVs may already present their own support of the capability in some flavour (such as supporting / recognising input via an emoji picker).

The remaining list of available official viewers is as follows:

LSL XML-RPC Reminder

A reminder that, as per my March 23rd relaying of the news that LSL XML-RPC functionality will be permanently ended on Thursday, June 1st, when incoming LSL XML-RPC traffic on the remaining small channel of regions on Agni (the main grid) will be blocked. The reason for this is that  LSL XML-RPC has been deprecated since the introduction of HTTP-In back in 2009, and by the time the March announcement was made, had dwindled to just a few dozen per hour across the entire grid, making maintenance and support of the capability no longer beneficial to LL in term of time and resources, which could be put to better use in improving SL.

In Brief

  • The glTF PBR materials project is still awaiting a small RC simulator release to allow for broader testing on the main grid.
  • BUG-227303 “collisions makes a script stop running and revert its mono status” is on LL’s “backlog” of issues to be resolved, down to the fact it has been proving difficult to reproduce consistently.
    • It was suggested at the meeting that looping around the regions forming the Jeogeot Gulf does consistently repo the issue (particularly when using vehicles with a lot of content / scripts), and this could be used for testing.
    • A discussion on region crossing flowed throughout the meeting, please refer to the video below.
  • BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” – further work is in progress to try to address this issue, and will be targeted for an upcoming simulator release Soon™.
    • A temporary workaround LL is suggesting whilst this work in is progress is for people noting their Friends list is not display the correct status for their contacts to try teleporting to a an unoccupied region / region with relatively few avatars and then re-log from there.
  • Feature Request BUG-231702 “Allow scripts with PERMISSION_TRACK_CAMERA to detect FoV” was commented on, leading to a general discussion on the potential for greater LSL control of the viewer’s camera. Please refer to to the video below for details.
  • Blocking  / Muting:  it was pointed out that some people are using a new vector to harass people who have otherwise blocked them, by making a minimal L$1 payment to them through the viewer. It is not clear how widespread this is, and whilst a governance / viewer issue, requests were made during the meeting for LL to look into making blocking / muting more robust to prevent such edge-cases.

† 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 #21 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Blue Finch, April 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 23rd 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.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, May 23rd, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted with a configuration change intended to help with the “Social Casino” region(s), and which has no user-facing changes.
  • On Wednesday, May 22nd, a new simulator release will be made to the BlueSteel RC channel. This contains configuration changes required to support the new Inventory Thumbnail feature which will surfacing soon in a project or RC viewer, and which allows users to see a small thumbnail image of items / outfits in their inventory – see my recent TPVD meeting summaries for more on this capability.

Server Deployment Forum Posts

  • Following on from a recent SUG meeting, it has been confirmed that LL have discontinued forum posts announcing upcoming simhost server updates for the current week.
  • Instead, the Lab is pointing people to the official release notes pages (which cover both simulator and viewer updates), and specifically the list of current and previous releases, whilst noting releases can be discussed at the SUG meetings.
  • Whether this move is beneficial to users is debatable. Referring people to the release notes pages is all well and good, except:
    • These pages currently do not contain the notes for upcoming releases. Ergo, getting advanced insight into releases so as to be able to discuss them at the SUG meeting (as the official blog post suggests) is somewhat impossible.
    • The forums offer one of the few means by which users  – particularly those unable to attend the SUG meetings – can communicate back to LL and to one another with concerns on upcoming simulator updates / changes, and this channel is now effectively removed.
    • While it has been promised that there will be more frequent Tools and Technology blog posts on simulator changes, the fact is, these are a) generally  reactive / post-informative in nature and not open to comments, rather than pro-active and presenting an opportunity for discussion; b) frequently aren’t widely promoted (if they are promoted at all).

Viewer Updates

No updates to mark the start of the week the current official viewer pipelines standing as:

In Brief

  • The inventory thumbnails feature raised questions and discussion (including speculative concerns and ideas for the capability) which took up the majority of the meeting, even though this is predominantly a viewer-side feature (with some simulator support), and I’ll be covering it when the viewer is issued. Given this, please refer to the video for details of the discussion. However, in brief:
    • Creators will be able to create thumbnail texture for their products that will have a lasting association with those products.
    • Thumbnails can be associated with different item types and  / or categories of items.
    • Individual thumbnails will expand automatically on Mouseover when the item / folder with which they are associated is subject to Mouseover.
    • There may be a gallery function to display multiple thumbnails associated with a folder.
    • The display resolution of thumbnails is capped at 256×256 (although images of higher resolution can be used to create a thumbnail).
    • The will potentially be no charge for creating preview images.
    • A future update to the capability may allow LSL to prompt the viewer to display thumbnails, etc.
  • Further Linkset Data (LSD) updates are in progress (e.g. findcount; finddelete) earmarked for an upcoming “summer” simulator maintenance update, although a fix for a LSD / unicode issue is due to surface sooner.

† 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 #20 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Borkum, March 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 16th 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.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, May 16th, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 579747.
  • On Wednesday, May 17th, a new simulator release will be made to the BlueSteel RC channel. This contains configuration changes on to help support the new “Social Casino“.

Viewer Updates

On Tuesday, May 16th:

  • The Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.12.579987, dated May 11, was promoted to de facto release status.
  • PBR Materials project viewer updated to version 7.0.0.580085.

The rest of the pipelines remain as:

  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

Region Crossings

This took up a major part of the meeting.

  • BUG-227303 – “collisions makes a script stop running and revert its mono status” is still causing headaches, despite a recent attempt to stomp it. Rider Linden is going to attempt a test configuration set-up with the theory that the issue might be related to transfers between physical simhost server, rather than between simulators.
    • This came with a suggestion that those experiencing the issue should provide a detailed summary of where / when and – particularly – how they encountered the problem and, if possible supply him with the vehicles in use at the time the problem was encountered.
    • A further suggestion was made that those who experience the problem and have hight ping times to the servers (and a means to accurately repro the issue) invite Rider to ride with them and witness the problem first-hand and in real time, in case it is related to network latency.
  • BUG-233691 “Animesh re-renders at lowest LOD for extended interval after long-range llSetRegionPos” – whilst not strictly a region crossing issue, it can be experienced on a region crossing. It is believed a fix is currently in the PBR RC viewer.
  • For full details on the discussion, please refer to the video, below.

In Brief

  • BUG-232037 “Avatar Online Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” – work is in progress on a further fix, and will be included in an upcoming simulator maintenance release.
  • The last part of the meeting is a general discussion on LSD, pivot points, the glTF specification. Refer to the last 20 minutes of 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.