
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 without 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:
- Release viewer: Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.12.579987, dated May 11, promoted May 16.
- 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 7.0.0.580085, May 16.
- Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.12.579927, May 11.
- Project viewers:
- Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.
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.