Tag: SL Viewer

SL project updates: week 10 (2): server, SSB, materials and SSAO

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Update

All of the deployments planned for week 10 went ahead as scheduled. While further issues related to region crossings have been reported, these are not thought to be related to any of the new code deployments for this week (see below for more).

The one issue that has been noted with the deployments is for VWR-786, which formed a part of the Magnum deployment.

This was supposed to ensure that if a friend does not have ‘See my online status’ permission, they will now see “User is not online ..” message following IM or inventory offer. However, the result has also been that if you IM a non-friend, the server always returns the “User is not online” message. The short-term solution for this is to remove the change from week 11’s releases in the interest of getting the other fixes (BUG-1612 and SVC-8019) across the grid.

The Lab is particularly keen to see SVC-8019 deployed to the entire grid, as this should fix issues of regions not handshaking correctly with one another following a rolling restart. The cause of this is believed to be due to regions looking at stale cached copies of a neighbouring regions’ status. With the update, regions grab more up-to-date copies of the status of their neighbours.

Server-side Baking: Further Pile-on / Load Test

Nyx Linden has announced that there will be a further SSB pile-on / load test on Thursday March 14th, following-on, as with the last test, from the Server Beta meeting on Aditi. The test is liable to be in much the same format as the first test, of which Nyx notes, “It gave us a lot of information and we’ve been working on a number of fixes, both to Aditi inventory, as well as viewer and back-end changes. Given this, the reason for the next test, in Nyx’s words, is because, “We’d like to see how much progress we’re making.”

The first SSB pile-on / load test (image courtesy of Latif Khalifa
The first SSB pile-on / load test (image courtesy of Latif Khalifa

Those wishing to participate will be required to be using the latest version of the Sunshine project viewer (3.4.5.271419), and are advised to attend the Server Beta meeting on Aditi ahead of time (the meeting commences at 15:00 SLT on Thursdays). Addressing those who participated in the first test, Nyx added, “If you had trouble at the last pile-on with outfit switching, feel free to test out the new build in advance – you should be able to comment on the JIRA tasks you filed, or email me directly with any issues.”

Materials Processing

Following-on from his replies to my question at the open-source dev meeting on Monday March 4th, Oz Linden talked some more on the status of the materials processing project at the Wednesday meeting on March 6th, “There’s one build floater bug and one crash that need fixing,” he said in kicking-off the discussion on materials, “I might even be willing to let it out without the crash fix (though it’s pretty bad).”

However, before everyone starts shouting, “Yes, yes!” :), even the release of a crashy version of the project viewer requires the “other” problem to be fixed. This appears to be related to a texture list getting corrupted, and which can manifest in a number of ways, including:

  • The normal map picker reverts to displaying the diffuse (texture) map after a normal map has been selected and the picker closed, with the normal map failing to render on the object / face it has been applied to
  • If deferred rendering is turned off, anything using materials appears black
  • If bump mapping is disabled, objects using materials appear to randomly adopt nearby textures (including skin textures) which can change as the camera is rotated / moved.
Normal map application issue: a normal map is selected and apllied to an object face (l); however, on re-opening the build floater, the map appears to have reverted to the diffuse map (r), and the object face does not render as expected
Normal map application issue: a normal map is selected and applied to an object face (l); however, on re-opening the build floater, the map appears to have reverted to the diffuse map (r), and the object face does not render as expected

Continue reading “SL project updates: week 10 (2): server, SSB, materials and SSAO” →

SL project update: week 9 (2): servers, HTTP, SSB

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments – week 9

Server Life Server (Main) Channel

As noted in part 1 of this report, the Second Life Server (SLS / Main channel) received the server maintenance project which was on all three RC channels in week 8, comprising miscellaneous bug fixes, and the improved region restart notification. Deployed on Tuesday 26th February, the roll-out was followed by a number of issues being reported via the deployment forum thread.

Issues have included:

  • Parcels / regions vanishing from search for a period of time following the restart (an issue WolfBaginski Bearsfoot gave some thought to in commenting on part 1 of this report)
  • Further region crossing issues, with loss of control followed by “broken” camera positioning after recovery. This issue has been reported at some of the Simulator and Server Beta meetings previously, and Eric Gregan has produced a video demonstrating the problem as it occurs on some aircraft, although he’s also come up with a means of avoiding the issue which may or may not work for people.

  • Problems with Dwarfins attachments.

Release Candidate Channels

On Wednesday February 27th, all three Release Candidate channels received a new server maintenance package which includes a fix for a crash mode (see the release notes (BlueSteel)). No significant issues have been reported for this deployment.

SL Viewer

The Communications Hub User Interface finally made its debut in both the SL development and SL beta servers, arriving as release 3.5.1.270826 for the development viewer on Tuesday 26th February, and 3.5.0.270825 for the beta viewer on Wednesday 27th. I’ve provided a brief introduction to CHUI, and there is also a video from Torley Linden.

CHUI is liable to remain in beta for a “Good long run”, to quote Oz Linden. Hopefully, this may mean that materials processing will be the next significant viewer update to arrive as a project viewer.

Interest List

The recent updates to Andrew Linden’s interest list work are apparently won’t reach a RC channel in week 10, but should see deployment in week 11 (week commencing Monday 11th March). This work includes fixing issues with avatar appearance teleporters which use llSetRegionPos(), as well as correcting problems where objects which change appearance behind the camera ‘snapping’ into place when you rotate the camera back.

Server-side Baking

On Friday March 1st, Linden Lab unexpectedly released an updated version of the SSB project viewer (release 3.4.5.271118), which includes their approach to overcoming the problems of the Z-offset capability common to many TPVs being broken as result of the SSB code. The new approach, which I was able to outline when it “launched”, introduces an additional shape slider into the Edit Shape floater; as such, the ease-of-use of the approach, particularly for those who may swap between different avatar shapes (e.g. “normal” and petite) is very questionable.

The new "Hover" option in the Edit Shape panel for adjusting avatar height offsets in the Sunshine project viewer. Not the most elegant solution
The new “Hover” option in the Edit Shape panel for adjusting avatar height offsets in the Sunshine project viewer. Not the most elegant solution

Continue reading “SL project update: week 9 (2): servers, HTTP, SSB” →

Linden Lab offer z-offset fix for Server-side Baking

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update March 4th: The main viewer download links on the Sunshine wiki page now all reference the updated viewer  version (3.4.5.271118).

Update March 2nd: Just as a point of clarification, the update discussed here is not currently linked-to from the Sunshine wiki page. To obtain a version of the viewer with the updates, you will need to download version 3.4.5.271118 of the viewer (link repeated here for ease-of-refernce).

As I recently covered, a problem has emerged with Server-side Baking in that it “breaks” the Z-offset capability found in the majority of third-party viewers.

The Z-offset allows the vertical height of an avatar above the ground to be adjusted, such that sits and kneels don’t leave the avatar apparently floating in the air, and which allow those with very tall / giant avatars or very small / petite avatars and those wearing full body mesh to similarly adjust their vertical placement relative to the ground / floor.

The problem was reported to Nyx in week 8, and SUN-38 was subsequently raised by Henri Beauchamp on February 24th to officially log the matter.

On March 1st, Linden Lab issued an update to the Server-side Baking project viewer (release 3.4.5.271118) which is an attempt to address the issue.

The new capability is referred to as SH-3909 Support avatar height offset and is described as, “Adding a new visual param that allows users to manually adjust an offset for how far off the ground (+ or -) their avatar’s root bone is.Supports the +-2m range people are used to adjusting in their viewers, but new implementation should support server-generated appearances.”

It appears within the viewer as a new slider in the Body section of the Edit Shape floater, called “Hover”.

The new "Hover" floater
The new “Hover” option in the Edit Shape floater’s Body tab

Moving the slider to the right or increasing the displayed value will move your avatar upwards, much as increasing the Z-offset value in a TPV will. Moving the slider to the left or decreasing the displayed value will move your avatar down. As with all the shape sliders, any changes must be saved prior to exiting the editor, in order to be persistent beyond editing.

The slider offers a huge range of height adjustment compared to the z-offset slider in the likes of Firestorm, and is somewhat less accurate – with most TPV Z-offset options, height above ground can be precisely adjusted to 2 decimal points, whereas the Edit Shape floater only allows whole numbers in the range 0-99.

The "Hover" option presents a huge range of vertical motion when adjusting
The “Hover” option presents a huge range of vertical motion when adjusting, which should accommodate the both the tallest avatars …

The vertical range of movement can be considerable, and lead to some interesting results when saved – your avatar can currently disappear entirely underground, for example. Also, adjustment made using the slider are not apparent in viewers which do not have the SSB code – something which shouldn’t be a major problem, given the need for people to be using SSB-enabled viewers once the server-side code starting deploying to the main grid anyway.

What might be of greater concern, however, is the fact that the control has been incorporated into the Edit Shape options means that it cannot be used on No Modify shapes, which could leave those using such shapes still feeling aggrieved if they are impacted by the height offset problems resulting from SSB.

...and the shortest.
…and the shortest.

It’s an interesting approach to solving the problem – and it would appear that LL consider the matter now resolved, Nyx Linden having issued an e-mail to the opensource dev list which reads in part:

Added a new parameter to shapes to replace the viewer-side height offset. Since it is stored in a wearable, the new back-end can read and use the value. Will send an email to third-party devs later today to let them know to pick up the patch.

Marking SUN-38 as resolved.

Given that earlier in the week – at the Content Creation User Group meeting on Monday February 25th, where the subject of SUN-38 was raised, Nyx commented, “It hasn’t escaped our notice. We’re considering a couple different approaches … we’re considering a few different options. Suggestions appreciated, but we haven’t officially settled on an approach we’re going to commit to publicly just yet”, it will be interesting to see the response is to this particular fix.

With thanks to Latif Khalifa, who both provided me with news of the arrival of this update, and provided the necessary links for me to have a play.

CHUI reaches the SL beta viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey


CHUI, the Communications Hub User Interface has taken two major steps towards official release, having been integrated into both the SL development and beta viewers.

The release of the SL development viewer containing CHUI came on February 26th (3.5.1.270826). This was followed 24 hours later with a beta viewer release on the 27th February, again containing the CHUI code (3.5.0.270825). Both of these releases see the SL beta and development viewers move to the 3.5 code base.

As well as CHUI’s new conversational and chat log floaters, which I previewed a while back – although it has had a number of changes since then – the viewer brings a number of changes to the overall way in which user communications are handled by the viewer, including a new set of chat preference options for handling incoming messages and notifications.

The most immediate change with CHUI is the conversations floater, which may open automatically as the viewer is started if you have received offline IM or are receiving incoming messages from HUDs, etc., while logging in.

Conversations Floater

For those who have been using TPVs as their primary viewers, the updated CHUI Conversations floater will appear very familiar, as it gathers IM windows and Local Chat into the same panel. On the left is a vertical tab display which will list all open conversations, whether individual IMs or group chats, and which includes four buttons. On the right is the actual conversation window, which has six buttons associated with it, not all of which many be active at all times (the first three are automatically disabled in local chat, for example).

CHUI Conversations floater
CHUI Conversations floater

These buttons put all of the most common controls required for text / voice conversations within the floater itself, providing it with considerable power and ease-of-use. The chat window display options, of example, allow you to switch quickly between displaying chat headers (the little icon bars within the conversation) or removing them (so that just names and text are displayed) and whether or not to show the time, or even the name of the other person in one-to-one IM conversations.

As noted in my original preview of CHUI, the minimise buttons on the floater are particularly useful, as they offer a number of ways in which the amount of screen space is taken up by the floater. The buttons can be used individually or together, to radically reduce the amount of space the floater takes up.

CHUI: The new conversations floater in three display modes - open, collapsed, & minimised (image uses the CHUI project viewer)
CHUI: The new conversations floater in three display modes – open, collapsed, & minimised (image uses the CHUI project viewer)

Continue reading “CHUI reaches the SL beta viewer” →

SL projects week 8 (3): Viewer, materials and SSB load test

Posted on by Inara Pey

SL Viewer Updates

Release and Beta Viewers

The release and beta version of the viewer are effectively on a par with one another at this point in time, following the roll-out of SL viewer 3.4.5.270263 on February 14th. There is currently nothing “in” beta at the moment in terms of specific SL projects.

Development Viewer and CHUI

The development viewer and the development version of the CHUI (Communications Hub User Interface) project viewer are also pretty much on a par, and it is anticipated that the CHUI code will be merged-up to viewer development “any minute now”, to use LL’s parlance, although a date has not been indicated. The viewer development code branch is pretty much waiting for this to happen, and CHUI remains in pole position as far as LL’s code merge plans are concerned, so potentially there could be more news on this in week 9.

Project Cocoa

Work is progressing on Project Cocoa within LL. This is a rarely talked-about project to update LL’s Mac support to the Mac OSX Cocoa API specifically for OSX 10.8 support, and remove dependencies on old Mac APIs which are not well-supported any more. The overall goal of this project, as commented on by Widely Linden is to, “Get people building cleanly with 10.8,” although OSX 10.6 will continue to be supported, although it will no longer be possible to build a Mac viewer using 10.6 once this project has been deployed. Widely also commented that there is a project viewer and source code for this work, which interested parties “should snag.”.

Vivox Update

Work is underway to update the SLvoice plugin to use the latest release of Vivox. This should bring with it a number of benefits including: security updates, stability improvements (although perhaps not improved connection reliability), better echo cancellation and – anecdotally, at least – better voice quality. There is no ETA on when this project will be deployed.

FMODex

Linden Lab continue to work on utilising FMODex as a replacement for FMOD.

Materials Project

There has been significant progress in fixing the known outstanding issues on the project which are standing in the way of a public project viewer and viewer code appearing. Speaking at the TPV Developer meeting on Friday 22nd February, Oz Linden said, “Our list of things which must be fixed before we can hand it out to people is now down to one.” However, there is still no estimated date as to when a project viewer and source code will actually appear Real Soon NowTM, which appears to put them both closer than Pretty SoonTM and Real SoonTM on the LL scale of things :).

Materials processing: with one remaining issue to fix, a project viewer now really should not be that far away. In the meantime the server code is fully deployed to the main grid
Materials processing: with one remaining issue to fix, a project viewer now really should not be that far away. In the meantime the server code is fully deployed to the main grid

As has been reported in my server-side news for the week, the server code for materials is deployed to the whole of the main grid, and so the system will be usable as soon as project viewer surfaces.

Server-side Baking

What is likely to be the first in a number of Server-side Baking load / pile-on tests took place on Thursday February 21st. Results were, at best, mixed, for a variety of reasons.

The test was held in the Sunshine project test regions on Aditi, immediately following the Server Beta User Group meeting. Those participating were asked to use the latest iteration of the official project viewer, which had been set-up for LL to do a certain amount of data logging. Anyone encountering issues was asked to raise a JIRA under the SUN project, listing issues encountered, with the viewer session log attached.

the test was in two parts:

  • Part one: performed on a region still running on a region using the current baking system, this saw people change between three of four outfits so that some baseline data could be obtained at the LL end of things. As this was using the current baking system, the usual baking issues were apparent
  • Part two: performed on a region running the new baking service, this again saw people changing between a number of outfits, this time monitoring and reporting on their own experiences.

Results were, it is fair to say, mixed. They were also not helped by the fact that Aditi itself has significant issues with inventory, etc., which made the test considerably more complicated than perhaps needed to be the case (for example, people were getting “object failed to rez”-style messages and other errors as items could not be fetched from inventory, etc.).

SSB load test: mixed results (image courtesy of Latif K
SSB load test: mixed results (image courtesy of Latif Khalifa

As an overall load test on the service itself, this should have generated some interesting numbers for LL with at least 40 people participating in the test at its peak. Commenting on the test on Friday 22nd February, Nyx Linden said, “A big thank you to everyone who participated in the pile-on yesterday. We got a lot of data out of it, [and] it looks like the majority of the issues were inventory-related, and we’re going to be digging into those. Anecdotal evidence suggests that when the system worked, it worked pretty darn well; but there were some people who had more trouble than others … We are looking into the remaining issues; we’re going to be fixing them as quickly as possible.”

While Nyx indicated that the majority of problems were inventory-related, he also stated that he and his team were still digging into the data to see if the problems were purely related to the known issues with Aditi’s inventory handling, or whether some of the issues are apparent in the inventory system itself, either on the server-side of things or within the viewer itself.

Continue reading “SL projects week 8 (3): Viewer, materials and SSB load test” →

SL project news – week 8 (1): server releases, viewer, SSB load test, interest lists

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments – week 8

The deployments scheduled for the week commencing Monday 18th February are detailed below. Please note that due to Monday 18th being a holiday in the United States (Presidents Day), the deployments will be taking place one day later than usual.

Main (Second Life Server / SLS) Channel

The Main channel should receive the following two projects:

  • The Interest List Improvement project, which has been on the Magnum RC channel for the past few weeks
  • Server-side support for materials processing.

Note that there is still no publicly available project viewer to take advantage of the materials project code, although there may be news on this later in the week.

This deployment should take place on Wednesday 20th February – release notes.

Bluesteel and LeTigre Release Candidate (RC) Channels

Baker Linden in a change from his usual rooster avatar
Baker Linden in a change from his usual rooster avatar

Bluesteel should receive Baker Linden’s object rezzing code changes, which were reported here in week 1. These updates have nothing to do with the interest list code changes. Baker describes the aim of the work as, “Hopefully significantly decreasing lag spikes when rezzing large, complex objects. Large does not necessarily imply size, but size of the files being read. When an object is rezzing, we have to parse the object / mesh files and create our in-world objects with that data.”

Until now, reading and parsing of any files related to objects which require rezzing has been on the main thread. When several such objects requiring rezzing at the same time, the simulator stalls. Baker has been moving the reading / parsing operation to a background thread in the expectation that rezzing multiple “large” (again, in terms of file size, not the size of the object itself) objects will not choke the simulator, causing performance issues.

These deployments should take place on Thursday 21st February – release notes (Bluesteel).

Magnum Release Candidate (RC) Channel

Magnum should receive the same maintenance server update deployed in week 7 to LeTigre, intended to fix miscellaneous crash modes.This deployment also includes the following:

  • An improvement to the rolling restart notifications so that they appear in an alert format (as with manual region restarts) rather than an easily missed notification. This change will only be apparent in restarts following the code deployment restart (as per JIRA SVC-7759)
  • A fix to an encroachment / return problem:  if you’re banned from the neighbour’s parcel, you couldn’t select  / return items that encroached on your parcel (see JIRA SVC-496)
  • Instant messages are now truncated to 1024 bytes to prevent certain types of delivery failure. Currently, the IM database supports larger messages than the delivery system can handle. This change will enforce a limit of 1024 bytes when processing messages coming into the database as well as those being sent out.

This deployment should take place on Thursday 21st February – release notes.

SL Viewer News

The release version of the SL viewer moved to the 3.4.5 code base on the 14th February, with the release of viewer 3.4.5.270263 (release notes). At the same time, the Server-side Baking project viewer received its second update with the release of version 3.4.5.270409, od which more below.

The CHUI viewer received a further update to the development version, reaching 3.4.6.270520 on February 18th. This project is currently the next in line to merged into the viewer-dev code base (development viewer) and then into the beta code base.

Server-side Baking Load Test

Serer-side baking - load test February
Serer-side baking – load test February 21st

A reminder that if all goes according to plan, there should be a special load test for Server-side Baking on Thursday February 21st, and volunteers are being sought to assist.

This will take place on the SSB test regions on the beta grid (Aditi), immediately following the Server Beta User Group meeting which take place at 15:00 SLT on Thursdays in  Morris, also on Aditi with the aim of placing the SSB code under a stress test representative of the loads it will face when deployed to the main grid, with people routinely changing outfits, updating their appearance, enter / leave regions running the SSB code (given that the grid will, for a time, be running both the current avatar baking service and SSB as the latter is initially deployed), and so on.

Test Requirements

While final details of the test have yet to be confirmed, key requirements for those wishing to participate in the test are as follows:

  • Participants must be able to log-in to Aditi and attend the Sunshine test regions from 16:00 SLT onwards (participants can attend the Server Beta UG meeting ahead of the test if they wish)
  • Participants must be running the latest version Server-side Baking project viewer (version 3.4.5.270409 or later) – this viewer has been specifically configured to report statistics required by LL for the test
  • Participants should have a number of outfits of system clothing, preferably with multiple layers, which they can swap between during the course of the test. Library outfits are acceptable, but LL are keen for people to use their own outfits to add greater weight to the tests
  • Clearing the viewer cache prior to the test is suggested, but not an absolute requirement.

“if you have specific failures we’ll ask for your viewer logs, otherwise just running through the test will help us gather data,” Nyx added when explaining what is required by way of feedback from those opting to take part.

Further details can be found in my SSB Load Test announcement.

Continue reading “SL project news – week 8 (1): server releases, viewer, SSB load test, interest lists” →