The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log and the video by Pantera – my thanks to her as always for providing 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):
- Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
- In text (no Voice)
- At this location.
- 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.
Simulator Deployments
- The Main channels was restarted on Tuesday, April 23rd with no update.
- On Wednesday, April 24th:
- Bluesteel RC will be updated with the back-end support for the the glTF updates available in the Graphics Featurettes viewer (e.g. PBR terrain textures and mirrors), joining the Preflight channel.
- The code currently contains a bug wherein the server can flood the viewer with too many updates to the “Material override” data. The fix for this failed to pass QA to be included in the Blues
- Le Tigre and Magnum and any other RC channels will be restarted without any new deployment.
- Bluesteel RC will be updated with the back-end support for the the glTF updates available in the Graphics Featurettes viewer (e.g. PBR terrain textures and mirrors), joining the Preflight channel.
Upcoming Deployments
- There are currently some bugs within the WebRTC voice support, and these caused the planned deployment of this to be delayed. See my Week #12 summary for an outline of WebRTC voice.
- The above means the Spring Break RC update (which has a fix for the hovering-at-login issue) is being moved to next-in-line for deployment.
SL Viewer Updates
- On Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024:
- The Maintenance Y/Z RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history) version 7.1.6.8745209917 dated April 19th, was promoted to de facto release viewer.
- The Maintenance X RC (usability improvements) updated to version 7.1.6.8758996787, on April 23rd.
The rest of the official viewers in a pipeline remain as:
- Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
- Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.5.8472515256, April 3
- Project viewers:
- Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.
In Brief
- Leviathan Linden has finished implementing the new VEHICLE_FLAG_BLOCK_INTERFERENCE which would allow vehicles to optionally prevent attachments on passengers from pushing the vehicle around (so as to prevent cheating in racing, for example).
- This particularly targets llSetVelocity(), llApplyImpulse() and llPushObject() calls.
- llMoveToTarget(), llSetForce() were also tested, but did not appear to work on the vehicle, so the code for blocking them in this circumsatances has been removed. However, if an exploit using them can be demonstrated, Leviathan is willing to add the code back into a simulator update.
- Leviathan hopes to get the functionality in the Spring Break simulator update before that goes to internal QA pre-deployment testing.
- There is a request to increase the server notecard cache. This is seen by the Lab as “doable”, but has yet to be actioned.
- The above lead to a lengthy discussion on n/card caching, and how best to define the cache (e.g. by n/card size, rather than the number of notecards) which segued into scripting and a viewer-side LSD editing interface(!).
- It was indicated that an update to the Bake Service to support 2K textures is “in the plan” – but no indication of when the update might actually take place.
† 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.