Tag: SL Viewer

SL projects updates: TPV developer meeting, Friday May 9th 2014

Posted on by Inara Pey

A TPV developer meeting took place on Friday May 9th. The core items discussed in the meeting are reported below, with timestamps in the relevant paragraphs indicating the point at they are discussed in the video embedded here. My thanks as always to North for the latter.

SL Viewer Status

[00:35] As noted in part one of this week’s updates report, the de facto viewer was updated on Tuesday May 5th with the promotion of the Interest List viewer (version 3.7.7.289461). The viewer contains what’s being referred to as a number of “non-trivial” merges, as the team responsible for the viewer took the opportunity to clean-up “a lot of old and unpleasant code”, and this “touched on a lot of things”. As such, it may be a while before this code filters into all TPVs.

[01:27] On Thursday May 8th, the SL Share-2 RC updated to version 3.7.8.289775 (download and release notes). This viewer includes the ability to upload Tweets and snapshots to Twitter and / or snapshots to Flickr, and to use pre-set filters on images being uploaded to either service and / or to Facebook, and to create your own filters.

The remaining viewers in the release channel (Sunshine / AIS and the Maintenance viewer) and the Zipper project viewer will be updated in week 20.

[02:11] There are two or three other viewers which are expected to be appearing in the near future. One of these contains a number of Snowstorm contributions (such as STORM-1831, currently awaiting two minor bug fixes), Baker Linden’s group ban work should be generating a viewer soon (see below for more), and there is a viewer which contains a series of memory leak fixes which is currently in QA.

Group Ban List

[03:40] Baker reports he has two “major” bugs and three or four “minor” bugs still to deal with; however, it doesn’t appear is if these are going to stop the viewer arriving as a project viewer. As noted in part two of this week’s report, the repository for the code has already been made public, and TPVs have been invited to pull code from the repository if they’re in a position to do so (the group ban viewer is built to LL’s 3.7.8 code base).

Obviously, and again as noted in part two of this report, the code will not be usable on the main grid until such time as the server-side changes have been deployed, and this isn’t likely to happen for a couple of weeks or so, so don’t expect it to be appearing in release versions of any viewers for a while.

The server-side code is available on a channel on Aditi (DRTSIM-234 14.05.05.289712 – which includes the Morris region where the Server Beta meeting is held and now includes the BUG-5929 fix), and there may be a grid-wide Aditi deployment of the server-side code. If this is the case, it will likely be confirmed via a Server Beta group meeting.

One aspect that has not been looked into as yet is ensuring that when someone is ejected / banned from a group, they are also ejected from group chat. Currently, due to the way the back-end services operate, if someone has the group chat window open when they are ejected from a group, they can continue to chat / spam into the group chat up until the point where they close the window. Commenting on this, and given that Simon Linden has been working on the chat service, Baker has indicated that he’ll look into things with Simon and see if this problem cannot be resolved.

Leap Motion Integration

[12:18] In November 2013, Leap Motion approached Linden Lab about integrating their gesture controller into the view.  Due to the amount of work the Lab had on its plate, the work was handed-off to TPV, with members of the Firestorm team working with Leap Motion to get things integrated.

Since that time, the work has been subject to a number of hiccups – including the need for Leap Motion to update their software. As it stands, the work is slightly stalled as the Firestorm team no longer have the resources needed for the work, so a call has gone out to TPV developers who are willing to take a lead in bringing this work to fruition.

Third-party Library Work (Webkit et al)

[26:14] Monty Linden is continuing his work in cleaning-up the third-party libraries used within the viewer build process. This work has been focused of late on Webkit, which is used for a number of tasks, such as powering the built-in web browser and to display profiles, and is used with Media on a Prim (MOAP) and many in-world televisions. However, Monty has more recently been working on the COLLADA DOM library as a means of “taking a break” from Webkit. He describes this as the “last big one” on his list.

Despite still having to finish-up with Webkit, Monty is already in a position of being able to use a windows version of the viewer which makes use of his updated and cleaned-up libraries, although he emphasises the work is not ready to enter prime-time use as yet.

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“Project interesting” viewer reaches release status

Posted on by Inara Pey

On Tuesday May 6th, the Lab announced the “Project Interesting”  viewer has finally made it to a release status with the arrival of version 3.7.7.289461 of the viewer as the de facto release version.

Available since mid-November 2013 as a release candidate viewer, this release represents the last stage in the current work on improving interest list functionality, the code which controls how the data relating to your in-world view is handled by both the server and the viewer. This includes what is sent to the viewer, what is retained by the viewer for reuse and things like the order in which objects are rendered when you log-in to SL or teleport (so that the “interesting” objects which are closer to you or which are particularly large should render first, for example).

To mark the viewer’s formal release, the Lab has re-issued a video by Torley Linden, originally released when the viewer first made it to release candidate status, which neatly encapsulates the key updates contained within the viewer, and how they relate to server-side changes which have already been implemented.

Related links

SL projects updates 19/1: SL viewer, group chat and miscellaneous things

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments

There are no scheduled simulator deployments this week to either the Main or RC channels, and so no associated rolling restarted expected.

SL Viewer

The Interest List RC finally made it to the de facto release viewer with its promotion on Tuesday May 5th (version 3.7.7.289461). This leaves just three RC viewer in the release channel at present: SL Share 2 project viewer version 3.7.7.289497; Sunshine / AIS v3 RC  version 3.7.7.289441; and the Maintenance RC viewer version 3.7.7.289405. Please refer to my Current Viewer Release page for up-to-date information on all viewer releases.

 Group Chat

Simon Linden’s optimisation work for group chat was deployed across all of the back-end chat servers on Monday May 5th. while these should see some improvements in group chat (particularly in sending / receiving chat and moving between regions), Simon does warn that these optimisations are not expected to “fix” all of group chat. However, he will continue to work on further improvements as well.

Other Items

New Starter Avatars

Ebbe Altberg used one of the upcoming new starter avatars at the VWBPE conference in April (image: Strawberry Singh)
Ebbe Altberg used one of the upcoming new starter avatars at the VWBPE conference in April (image: Strawberry Singh)

During his appearance at the VWBPE conference in mid-April, Ebbe Altberg appeared using one of the new starter avatars. At the time he did, it was hinted that the new avatars would be appearing relatively imminently. However, almost a month on and they have yet to officially appear, although there is some speculation they’ll do so in May.

these new avatars are said to take advantage of some of the latest features in SL, which is being taken to mean that some / all are full or partial mesh. This has in turn raised questions as to whether it is wise giving new starters full mesh avatars, given they may not work with freebie items often offered to or picked-up by new starters.

LSL Functions for Materials

While there is no confirmation any work is being carried out on this (except, as Simon quipped, “perhaps in a parallel universe or something”), the Lab is still sounding out how and where such calls would likely be used, and the frequency with which such calls would be made.

The option of having scripted control of materials has been debated often, and still remains a desired item among builders and scripters. However, some of the concerns still remain – notably, have such capabilities might end up causing performance issues, deliberately or otherwise. Much has already been written on how rapid map flipping on multiple objects could deliberately impact performance and potentially result in viewer crashes, plus there are already animated mesh elements available which can also have a significant impact on viewer performance (some types of animated mesh tail can reportedly overload a viewer on a 32-bit system with out-of-memory errors in a matter of seconds), so there are also concerns that were this to be combined with the ability to change textures via script, they could (even unintentionally) have further dramatic impacts on performance.

One way around this would be to throttle the rate at which material maps can be changed via scripted command. What is interesting for the moment is that the Lab appears to have not completely closed the door on scripted control of materials, but is considering options and informally seeking feedback on potential use cases.

 

SL projects updates 18/1: miscellaneous items

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Week 18

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates and news.

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday April 29th, the Main channel received the server maintenance project that was on the Magnum RC in week 17, comprising:

Release Candidate Channels

On Wednesday April 30th, all three RCs should receive the same maintenance package. This comprises the same fixes as deployed to the Main channel and sees the Magnum RC rejoin BlueSteel and LeTigre with AIS v3 support, which requires the use of the Sunshine RC viewer.

SL Viewer

As per my recent post, the Lab have updated their SL system requirements page for Windows and Mac OSX to better reflect the public status of both operating systems.  There is an official blog post on the subject as well, which essentially confirms that Windows XP and OSX 10.6 are considered as no longer supported. While accessing SL from computers using these OS versions will not be blocked, users will no longer be able to obtain SL-related support should they encounter issues, and the Lab is advising people update wherever possible.

Additionally, the Lab is updating the Windows installer so that it will verify whether the latest service packs for Windows XP versions have been installed, otherwise viewer installation on XP will be blocked until such time as the relevant service packs have been installed.

The aim here is to help people enjoy improved stability in the SL experience. However, once these new requirements come into effect, they may cause some upset among those affected. How widespread this is liable to be is debatable; the Firestorm team have been running a similar process since the release of Firestorm 4.6.1, and they are reporting minimal complaints from among users.

Group Chat Optimisation

Following the last group chat tests on Aditi, Simon Linden reports that the optimised code has been deployed to a production server this week, but it is liable to be a little while longer before it is deployed to all of the chat servers, and time will be taken to see how it behaves with traffic on the server on which it is currently running.

Group Bans

Baker Linden is back on code merges for the viewer. It is thought he may have hit one or two problems, so assuming he makes the Server Beta meeting on Thursday May 1st, we may find out if this is the case and what is happening.

Experience Keys (/Permissions)

Expectations on what these are liable to be, how they will work, what limitations may be placed on them, and so on, is still running high, particularly after Danger Linden (Don Laabs, Linden Lab’s Senior Director of Product) mentioned them recently. As I’ve covered previously, the experience keys are essentially the culmination of a project which was initially prototyped with the Linden Realms game, and which have since been going through continued development, re-definition and enhancement and which should – hopefully – be appearing in the near future.

Other Items

URL Errors When Connecting to a Region

There is a known issue which can cause issues when the viewer is trying to connect to a region. In these circumstances, the viewer receives URLs containing the host name, but not the required “.agni.lindenlab.com” (e.g. to something like “https://sim10586:12043/cap/…” is received, rather than “https://sim10586.agni.lindenlab.com:12043/cap/…”).

This causes the viewer to fail to connect to the various capabilities using the URL calls, which in turn results in things like mesh load failures, inventory load failures,  L$ failures, and so on, as well as having bad URLs shown for http-in. See also BUG-4704.

Should this happen, the advice to region owners is to contact support, indicating the region where the issues are occurring. The problem can be identified in the viewer log file, which will contain entries similar to the following:

2014-04-29T16:44:05Z INFO: LLCurl::completedRaw: Failed to deserialize LLSD. https://sim10586:12043/cap/01a64236-9a2b-4008-bef0-46a0f7afecae [499]: STATUS_ERROR
2014-04-29T16:44:05Z WARNING: BaseCapabilitiesComplete::errorWithContent: [status:499:] {'reason':'STATUS_ERROR'}
2014-04-29T16:44:05Z INFO: failedSeedCapability: posting to seed https://sim10586:12043/cap/01a64236-9a2b-4008-bef0-46a0f7afecae (retry 23)
2014-04-29T16:44:05Z WARNING: LLURLRequest::smileytongue:rocess_impl: URLRequest Error: 6, Couldn't resolve host name, https://sim10586:12043/cap/01a64236-9a2b-4008-bef0-46a0f7afecae

 

Lab updates SL system requirements

Posted on by Inara Pey
(Copyright Linden Lab)
(Copyright Linden Lab)

Update: the requirements for ervice pack installations has been revised following clarification from Tankmaster Finesmith – see comments below.

Linden Lab has updated the Second Life system requirements page to better reflect the current status of the Windows and Mac OSX operating systems.

The new requirements list Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8 as the minimum OS requirements for Windows systems and Mac OS X 10.7 or better for Mac systems.

While there are no moves to actually block older operating systems from accessing Second Life, the Lab notes that assistance will no longer be given to users accessing Second Life on unsupported operating system version. Additionally, the Lab is updating the Windows installer so that it will verify whether the latest Service Packs for Windows XP versions have been installed, otherwise viewer installation on XP will be blocked until such time as the relevant service packs have been installed. This means that the 32-bit Windows XP will be checked for the presence of Service Pack 3, and the 64-bit Windows XP will be checked for the presence of Service Pack 2.

The blog post announcing these changes reads in full:

We have made some changes to the Second Life System Requirements to bring them more up to date, and are making some related changes to the Viewer:

  • We have removed Windows XP and Mac OSX 10.6 from the list of supported operating systems. Microsoft has announced the end of support for XP, and it has been some time since Apple has released updates for 10.6. For some time now, the Viewer has been significantly less stable on these older systems, and the lack of security updates to them make them more hazardous to use. We have no plans to actually block those systems, but problems reported on them that cannot be reproduced on supported systems will not likely be fixed.
  • The Windows installer has been modified to verify that the system has been updated with the most recent Service Packs from Microsoft. While we will not block installation on Windows 8 at this time, we strongly recommend upgrading to 8.1 for greater stability. Our data shows that the Viewer is significantly less stable on systems that have not been kept up to date, so the installer will now block installation until the updates have been applied. This change will be effective in a Viewer version to be released in the next few weeks, so it would be a good idea to get your system up to date before then. You can find information on how to install the latest updates at the Microsoft Windows Update page.

Firestorm implemented a similar policy where windows is concerned with release 4.6.1, and STORM-1966 (from Tankmaster Finesmith of the Firestorm team) has been put forward as a means of enforcing similar controls in the Lab’s Windows installer. This code is due to appear in the upcoming STORM viewer release candidate.

For details on the availability of the STORM RC, please refer to my Current Viewer Releases page, where I list it as it becomes available.

SL projects updates 17/3: TPV developer meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

A TPV developer meeting took place on Friday April 25th. The core items discussed in the meeting are reported below, with timestamps in the relevant paragraphs indicating the point at they are discussed in the video embedded here. My thanks as always to North for the latter.

Release Candidate Status

Interest List, Sunshine and Maintenance RC Viewers

[01:02] All of these RC viewers have been rebuilt during the week to use the current release viewer code base (version 3.7.6.289164, formerly the VoiceMO RC), and all look to be performing reasonably well. However, none have been in the release channel for long enough for significant stats to be gathered.

SL Share 2

[01:26] The SL Share 2 viewer was issued as a release candidate viewer on Friday April 25th, version 3.7.7.289497 (download and release notes). This viewer provides options to upload Tweets and snapshots to Twitter and / or snapshots to Flickr, and includes optional post-process filter capabilities which can be applied to snaps being uploaded to Flickr, Twitter and / or Facebook. See my review of the project viewer for further details.

Snowstorm Viewer

[02:30] The next Snowstorm viewer, featuring third-party code contributions from the open-source community (including Ima Mechanic’s BUG-1831 LSL syntax highlighting work, developed with the help of Cinder Roxley and Oz Linden), is now with LL’s QA team, and it is hoped this will be appearing as a project viewer in week 18 (week commencing Monday April 28th), assuming no issues are uncovered during the QA process.

Oculus Rift Viewer

[04:05] Other than bug fixes, the  current Oculus Rift closed beta viewer is not expected to go through any significant updates for the time being. However, it is anticipated that there will be further work on the viewer once the Lab has access to the new Rift SDK, and that this may well be “very significant”.

Zipper Project Viewer

[04:30] It is anticipated that the faster installation “zipper” viewer (currently version 3.7.5.288507 – download and release notes – dated March 28th) will become a release candidate viewer “very soon”.

Mac / Cocoa Update

[06:48] There is still no single project at the Lab which is focused on Mac Cocoa issues. However, fixes are being developed and are starting to appear as a part of overall viewer development and release process.

The current release viewer (version 3.7.6.289164), includes a Vivox update to the 4.6.x libraries, and so should resolve Mavericks-related voice issues (among other voice issues). Also, the Maintenance RC (version 3.7.7.289405) has a number of Mac / Cocoa fixes, including: MAINT-3135 “Cocoa Viewer: Mac Maximizing the viewer leaves garbage on the screen”; MAINT-3288 “MAC – Fullscreen mode issue in Viewer 3.6.7 (281793)”; MAINT-3506:  “Copy & Paste on mac viewer often generate undesired special characters at the end of the pasted line sometimes leading to crash “; and MAINT-3642 “Mac viewer can no longer export textures to TGA format”. However, as there is no over-arching project for Mac / Cocoa fixes, it is a case of checking the release notes for new RC and project viewers as they appear.

The infamous ALT-camera Cocoa bug (see FIRE-12241 (MAINT-3171) is an issue the lab has been looking at but have so far been unable to work out  why it is happening. Oz Linden invited TPV developers to consider poking at it and contributing code if they felt it is something they might be able to resolve.

Webkit Update

[12:01] Webkit is a third-party library used within the viewer for a number of tasks. For example,  it powers the built-in web browser, and is used to display profiles (unless you’re using a viewer supporting legacy profiles). It is also used with Media on a Prim (MOAP) and many in-world televisions.

There have been an increasing number of issues with webkit. The libraries used within SL are out-of-date, for example, something which has caused the Lab and TPVs a considerable amount of pain (see BUG-4763 and FIRE-12642, and FIRE-11057). Given these problems, Monty Linden has been focusing on trying to improve matters, notably by creating a new lqtwebkit library repo, which he describes as “extremely experimental”.

Firestorm have re-worked webkit for themselves, updating to version 5..2.1 for Windows, which seems to be resolving issues. They’re working to do the same with Linux and Mac, although there is a problem with the latter where buttons embedded in a Flash video will not work.

As reported last time, a further problem here is that the qtwebkit (on which lqtwebkit is based) has been deprecated by QT, so the Lab is faced with a decision as to what to do going forward. One option may be to go with CEF, but which direction the Lab will take has yet to be decided.