Tag: Simulator User Group

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.

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:
  • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.12.579927, May 11.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.

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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 9th 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 9th, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 579747, previously deployed to the RC channels.
  • An issue occurred during the deployment which caused it to be somewhat protracted, but this was overcome without any need for a roll-back.
• On Wednesday, May 3rd, a new simulator release will be made to the BlueSteel RC channel. This contains configuration changes on to help support the new “Social Casino“.

Upcoming Simulator Updates

• It is hoped that week #19 will see a new simulator release to the RC channel which contains assorted updates and fixes.
• No news on when the back-end for PBR Materials will be deployed to Preflight (and Snack?).

Server Deployment Forum Announcements

• A long-standing aspect of the Tuesday / Wednesday simhost re-starts / deployments is that they have been highlighted through (almost) weekly announcement posts to the Technology > Simulator sub-forum.
• In recent months this practice has grown increasingly sporadic and for the last multiple weeks, ceased altogether – which has apparently been a deliberate move, LL viewing the dedicated web pages for server and viewer releases as potentially more useful.
• In addition, LL are looking to try to produce “more substantial release notes”.
• HOWEVER: the problems here are that:
  1. The forums are a popular resource for users, and the summaries of deployments there do a lot to keep people informed as to what is going on, and how their specific regions might be affected by rolling restarts and updates contained in releases.
  2. Most particularly, while the server release pages provide a list available active and past releases, they do not make it particularly easy to discover information on upcoming deployments, unless you happen to have the actual release number – something what has only previously been made obviously public through – wait for it – the forum posts.
  3. Ergo, it really doesn’t matter how much more informative LL make the release notes if they cannot be found and read in time to understand what any upcoming releases might hold.
• Given the above – and as Rider Linden noted in the meeting, it would probably be a useful idea for LL to continue to provide the forum posts on upcoming deployments.

Viewer Updates

No official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

• Release viewer: Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579629, promoted April 25.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579766,  April 25.
  • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
  • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

• HTTP work:
  • Rider Linden is currently working on a server-side update to allow the PATCH method for both HTTP out and in. during the meeting, he raised the idea of possibly adding HEAD to both as well – both of which met with favourable responses.
  • He will attempt to add BUG-231657 “http_response body is blank if no Content-Type header was returned” to the current simulator maintenance update, if it can be fixed in time.
• KVP work:
  • A simulator update is in progress to de-couple the Experience KVP database from land (i.e. so it will work on land where there is no associated Experience running). It is not clear when this will be deployed within an RC – although it will not be in the next RC update.
  • A request as been made to give the KVP database the same search options as LSD has with llLinksetDataFindKeys(). This is unlikely to happen, with the reason given being that the storage system for experience key-value data and object LSD is totally different, so feature parity between the two doesn’t always make sense / isn’t possible.
  • However, additional work on KVP is on the simulator roadmap, but not work has started on it as yet. This work will likely include: updating the server/software that make that operate; a probable change to the way accounting is performed (e.g. rather than giving KVP users a pool of bytes, the limitation would be by the number of keys, with the overall byte pool increased).
  • This latter point gave rise to concerns about the potential for application breakage for grid-wide applications, particularly those which may expand in their use over time if they are related to a popular product (e.g. a grid-wide teleport system with multiple nodes throughout the grid).  Expect more on this as the ideas are more fleshed-out; for now refer to the last 15 minutes of the video below.
• There are some reports that BUG-232037 “Avatar Online Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” have worsened on the course of the last week, despite efforts to tamp down on some of the causes. LL are to take “another swing at it”.
• BUG-233384 “Scripts failing to receive rapid touch_start events under LL viewer” – whilst possibly more a viewer-side issue, was raised on account of it being marked as “resolved” (perhaps as far back as the release of the MFA viewer), and the report closed, but the issue still occurring for some. This led to a discussion on touch events (double-clicks vs. long clicks, games requiring both, the nature of the issue, etc. Those seeing the issue should refer to the video below.

† 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  May 2nd 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 2nd, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 579248.
• On Wednesday, May 3rd, the maintenance release made to the Bluesteel RC channel in week #17 will be deployed to the rest of the RC channels.
  • One of the updates in this release is designed to fix issues “in the vicinity of” BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating”. At the time of the week #17 deployment, it was noted that all instances of the issue may not have been fixed, and the time the release has been on BlueSteel proves this to be the case.
  • Similarly, while this update helps fix an issue with avatars colliding with their vehicles on region crossings, it does not fix all region crossing issues; more will be addressed is an upcoming simulator update which should be “heading for RC soon”.

Viewer Updates

No official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

• Release viewer: Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579629, promoted April 25.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579766,  April 25.
  • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
  • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

PBR Materials

With the promotion of the PBR Viewer to Release Candidate status, the plan remains to deploy the server-side code to a Release Candidate channel on the main grid “real soon now”. The code will initially go to the Preflight RC channel with a limited number of regions. Should it prove stable there, it will be expanded to the Snack RC prior to gaining promotion to one (or more) of the “major” RC channels.

In Brief

• A discussion on region crossings and also an apparent uptick in teleport failures. Again, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence here that might be causing incorrect conclusions to be drawn:
  • Those doing a lot of consecutive region crossings in relatively short order (e.g. through flying, boating, driving) believe issues are “increasing”, and thus drawing the conclusion failures are widespread / endemic, and that those who are not seeing the same issues elsewhere is simply down to those other regions being routinely restarted.
  • Those making region crossings / TPs on a more  extended basis (e.g. interspersed with some amounts of time with each region, rather than just passing through / hopping one to the next) are not seeing the same issues, even within regions subject to heavy use (as with Fantasy Faire), and therefore questioning whether there is any real increase in issues.
  • (Which is not to say region crossings are not problematic; just that they can be subject to subjective responses rather than objective measurement.)
• BUG-233784 “Add sensor type LOW_SCRIPTED as an option” sparked a debate on whether it should be a feature request or BUG report. This has been raised because the existing SCRIPTED sensor flag only locates objects that have used a substantial amount of CPU time recently, rather than ALL objects with any script in them set to “running”, as someone might reasonably expect when using it; so it is essentially a request for a new flag.
• BUG-233829 “llSetEnvironment() in neighbouring regions can cause issues with the viewer” –  it has been noted that if llSetEnvironment() (EEP) is set within an adjoining region to one where it is currently being set (and the avatar attempting to set it is registered as a child agent within the ormer region), this can impact attempts within the latter region to change its settings through the EEP options. Whether this means the simulator should be updated so as local environment settings are not sent to child agents, or the viewer should be updated so it does not ask for neighbouring region EEP settings has yet to be determined – as has the time frame for either change to be made.
• There is a further discussion on llMessageLinked, and the idea of an llMessageListLinked function towards the end of the meeting and script sleep cycles used in llRezObject and llCreateLink. Please refer to the video below for specifics.

† 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  April 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.

Server Deployments

• On Tuesday, April 25th, the SLS Main channel servers were restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 579248.
• On Wednesday, April 26th, simhosts on the Bluesteel RC channel will receive a bugfix maintenance release, highlights of which include:
  • “Fixes in the vicinity of” BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” – although all causes of this issue may not be fully resolved with this update.
  • A fix an issue with avatars colliding with their vehicles on region crossings.
  • Removal of a spurious error message that would pop up on llSetKeyframedMotion.
  • Being able to add UUIDs to the ban list that don’t belong to an agent or group and then being unable to remove them.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

• It is still hoped to get the server-side support for PBR materials to one (Preflight) or two (Preflight and Snack) RC channels. There is no ETA on this, with both viewer and simulator with LL’s QA team.

Viewer Updates

No official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

• Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.11.579629, April 20th.
  • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
  • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
• Project viewers:
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 10 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

• A discussion on llMessageLinked, and the idea of an llMessageListLinked function, starting some 27 minutes into the meeting. To avoid misunderstnadings, please refer to the video below for the full discussion.
• The above led into a general discussion on possible LSL updates / functions, including the likes of BUG-232312 and BUG-229174 – again, 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  April 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.

Server Deployments

• On Tuesday, April 18th, the SLS Main channel servers were updated with simulator release 579248, previously deployed to the RC channels. This means the doubling of linkset data memory (to 128KB) and the three LSL functions for strided list management – llList2ListSlice(), llSortListStrided(), and llListFindListStrided() – are now grid-wide.
• On Wednesday, April 19th, simhosts on the RC channels will be restarted, but there will not be any new deployments to them.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

• It is still hoped to get the server-side support for PBR materials to at least one RC channel – Preflight, with the potential it might also go to Snack as well – but there was no ETA on this at the time of the meeting. Currently, it remains with LL’s QA team.

Viewer Updates

No official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

• Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
  • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.11.579238, April 4th.
  • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
• Project viewers:
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 10 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

• llGetAgentInfo received a new flag – AGENT_AUTOMATED – in week #15, however, the simulator side has et to be released; it is currently in a maintenance simulator support which may go to QA for testing in week #17.
  • This raised concerns of whether or not llGetAgentInfo was the right place for this flag, and whether it could result in the dataserver being spammed with requests from people wanting to know if visitors to their land were avatars or scripted agents. However, as Rider Linden pointed out, the simulator already has information on scripted agent, so there is no requirement for the simulator to query the dataserver.
  • See the video for the broader discussion on when the flag for a scripted agent is propagated across the grid.
• There was a general discussion on possible LSL enhancements. This included:
  • Possible improvements to notecard handling by LSL (e.g. searching notecards – e.g. BUG-4906 -, faster notecard reading, a safe means of sending back the contents of a notecard so a script doesn’t need to build a web page on the fly / read the entire contents of the notecard into memory).
  • HTTP response expansion.
• Objects rezzing objects: it has been noted that if an object is set to rez other objects (e.g. say a “crate dispenser” which might be used as a visual enhancement to Get The Freight Out to simulate cargo loading), the rezzing tends to work perfectly when the rezzing object’s owner is present, but can experience issues when the owner is not present.
  • This tends to occur if rezzing within the land is restricted to Group membership, and object owner did not correctly set their active group prior to placing out the rezzing object.
  • As the owner’s group is checked when present, this allows the rezzer to work correctly, hence why the problem only surfaces when they are absent.
• For all other discussions, please refer to the view below.

† 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.