Tag: TPVD meetings 2015

SL project updates week 5/2: TPV Dev meeting, group chat, VMM

Posted on by Inara Pey
Winter Wonderland - race track, rinks and Ferris Wheel
Linden Lab’s new Winter Wonderland: race track, rinks and Ferris Wheel – blog post

The following notes are taken from the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 28th, 2015, and the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January  30th. A video of the latter is included at the end of the article (my thanks as always to North for recording it and providing it for embedding), and any time stamps contained within the following text refer to both it and the TPV Developer meeting.

Server Deployments Week 5 – Recap

  • On Tuesday, January 27th, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to Magnum and LeTigre
  • On Wednesday, January 27th, the RC channels should all receive a new server maintenance package comprising an Experience Keys / Tools related fix, and internal Experience Keys / Tools improvements.

It was stated during the TPV Developer meeting that this update saw the support for the Avatar hover Height (AHH) capability extend to all three RC channels, although no mention of it was made in the release notes.

SL Viewer

Tool Chain Project viewer

The Lab issued a new Tools Update project viewer, version 3.7.25.298587, on Wednesday January 28th. This viewer has been built using the new viewer tool chain for Windows and Mac builds (which includes the upgrade to Visual Studio 2013 for Windows and, Xcode (5 or 6) for Mac, and the use of the  autobuild 1.0 process).

Wiki notes for using the new build tools are in the process of being written / enhanced for self-compilers – please note these are a work in progress. Notes on the new autobuild process can also be found on the wiki.

[06:42] It is anticipated that this viewer will progress through to release candidate status, quite probably in week #6 (week commencing Monday, February 2nd).

Maintenance RC Viewer Issues

Users receiving the Maintentance RC, version 3.7.25.298030, released on Tuesday, January 27th, have reported a series of irritating bugs with the viewer:

  • BUG-8324 (and duplicate BUG-8333) reports the appearance of the term “nolink>” in numerous places within the viewer – such as  toasts and notifications – this issue has been imported by the Lab and a fix is apparently in development
  • BUG-8331 – some links containing the text secondlife or lindenlab incorrectly open a Place Profile in the Places panel when clicked
  • BUG-8328 – very jagged pictures created by the snapshot floater
  • BUG-1028 – the fix for MAINT-2056 “Lots of CURL GET FAILED spam in logs when browsing World Map – Beta viewer only” appears not to have fixed the problem, but rather replaced it with an equally spammy message.

Issues with this viewer can be tracked on the JIRA using this filter.

 Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM)

[00:12] Brooke Linden was at the TPV Developer meeting to provide an update on the state of play with the Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM) work, which has been undergoing some beta testing with the project viewer on Aditi.

As a result of this testing, the Lab has been re-visiting the project viewer and incorporating feedback and observations for improvements into it, and are “really close” to having an updated version of the viewer available. When the appears depends on whether the Lab opt to release the updated viewer for limited beta testing on Aditi, or to wait until they’re ready to go with beta testing on the main grid, which is also not too far over the horizon.

The current plan is for more widespread beta testing to commence some time after February 14th (so as not to clash with any Valentines Day sales and promotions merchants may be running between now and Feb 14th), then run the beta for around a month, possibly longer, depending on feedback / issues. After this, VMM support will be deployed as a production tool, and things will move to a migration period which will also last around a month.

All this is still TBC, but a schedule will be posted (presumably via the Commerce / Merchant’s forum) once the Lab has worked through dates and requirements.

Experience Keys / Tools

[03:50] The Experience Keys / Tools project is currently awaiting some final server-side updates to be fully deployed (see the server release notes above). It is not anticipated that the Experience Tools viewer which is currently in the viewer release channel (version 3.8.0.298001) will require any further significant updates, so its promotion to the de facto release viewer is pending the server-side updates.

In the meantime, the Lab has already commenced work on a set of enhancement to the Experience Keys / Tools which will further extend capabilities once they are ready to be deployed.

Avatar Hover Height Project

As noted above, server-side support for the Avatar Hover Height project (see my overview for details) is now on all three RC channels, and the plan is to deploy the server code to the Main channel in week #6 (week commencing Monday, February 2nd). Because of this, the current project viewer (currently version 3.7.25.298129) is liable to be superseded by a release candidate viewer following the server-side deployments for that week.

Now in a project viewer (and soon to be a release candidate: Avatar Hover Height provides a means of adjusting your avatar's graphical height above the ground / floor / objects, as seen by yourself and others
Now in a project viewer (and soon to be a release candidate: Avatar Hover Height provides a means of adjusting your avatar’s graphical height above the ground / floor / objects, as seen by yourself and others

[18:00] A couple of small issues have been noted with AHH, and which only occur is very specific instances. One is that if an adjustment leaves your avatar floating more than around 1/2 a metre above the ground, an attempt to sit down can result in your avatar going up. In the other, standing on a prim and lowering your hover height into the prim can result in your avatar’s legs buckling as you slide into the prim. On terrain, where there can be limited physical penetration, this can be expected behaviour; but when occurring on a prim, it is suspected that the system may not be accurately assessing your avatar’s position.

[19:38] There have been one or two points of concern raised about the similarity in the name of this function – Avatar Hover Height – causing people to confuse it with the existing avatar hover slider (which will not be retired or removed from the viewer once AHH is fully deployed, as the two capabilities provide different use case solutions). The concerns are being fed back internally at the Lab, and if a name change is thought to be required, it may be slipped into the upcoming RC rebuild for the viewer, or the Lab may opt to wait and see if any confusion does arise.

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SL project updates 2015 week 3/2: SBUG and TPV; texture thrashing

Posted on by Inara Pey

Salt Water; Inara Pey, December 2014, on FlickrWith Love in Her Heart, Sounds of Silence (Flickr) – blog post

The following notes are taken from the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 15th, 2015, and the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January  16th. A video of the latter is included at the end of the article (my thanks as always to North for recording it and providing it for embedding), and any time stamp contained within the following text refer to both it and the TPV Developer meeting.

Server Deployments – Week 3 Recap

  • There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday, January 13th.
  • On Wednesday, January 14th, all three RC channels received the same server maintenance package comprising: a fix for BUG-8002 “Experience Tools Allowed & Blocked experiences are lost with parcel subdivision”; crash mode fixes and avatar-related region crossing code clean-up related to “clean-up and polishing” rather than to performance improvements.

SL Viewer

The Experience Tools RC viewer was updated to version 3.8.0.298091 on January 15th, bringing it up to parity with the current release viewer (the HTTP pipelining release).

[00:15] There is a new maintenance release candidate viewer that is being queued-up for the viewer release channel.

Otherwise, LL viewers remain as per the download and Alternate Viewer wiki pages, and my Current Viewer Releases page.

Tool Chain

[09:52] The Lab now has both Windows and Mac versions of the viewer building successfully using the new tool chain (which among other things, used Visual Studio 2013 for Windows and xcode 6 for Mac), and may be “pretty close” to achieving the same with Linux, although that is still to be determined.

It is anticipated that project viewers using the new build process will start to appear soon, and the process gradually be applied to RC releases and the viewer release itself, but only after full regression testing has been undertaken to try to ensure there are no hidden issues remaining.

This work does potentially make it easier for the Lab to start producing 64-bit versions of the viewer, but there are currently no detailed plans for them to start doing so at this point in time.

Experience Key Tools

[01:20] The initial release of the Experience Tools is still on the horizon, with the release candidate viewer currently the only RC in the pipeline, and which has no further viewer-side changes waiting to be implemented (which doesn’t automatically mean it will be promoted to release status next). However, the Lab is still working on some back-end issues which must be fixed before the key can be turned and the capabilities formally released.

Group Chat

[01:24] The lab is continuing to push out changes intended to make group chat more robust. While happy with the overall improvements that have been made to performance in terms of reducing the noticeable amounts of group chat lag, the problems to the chat servers locking-up every so often and requiring a restart are still being worked on. Additional testing is continuing, and Oz linden indicates that the Lab aren’t about to give up on getting to the bottom of things.

Z-offset Height Adjustment

Vir Linden
Vir Linden: working on the z-offset height solution

[02:52] This is intended to provide a means of on-the-fly adjustments to be made to an avatars height above the ground / objects and which can be used whether the avatar is standing or sitting, without the need to use the current Appearance hover slider. It will work in a manner similar to the old z-offset height adjustment found in some TPVs, and will likely comprise a slider access through the avatar right-click context menu. As well as working for individual avatars, it is thought the capability will also work against thinks like couples poseballs for dancing, although this has yet to be tested.

Vir Linden, who has been working on the project reports that the capability is now to be persistent across logins on a per-account basis (so you will be able to set it for each of your accounts, and have the viewer remember the setting for those accounts, rather than having a global setting in the viewer applicable to all accounts using that viewer).

The viewer code is about to go through internal QA testing with the Lab, and the hope is that it will appear as a project viewer during week 4 (week commencing Monday 19th January). This will be available for testing the capability on Aditi (the beta grid), where a number of regions have been set-up on channel DRTSIM-274 (notably regions Hover1 and Hover2). The project viewer will be released with notes on how to use it, and people will be invited to tes it both on these regions with the necessary server-side support and on regions without the server support (and when moving between the two), with a request that any issues found are reported via the JIRA.

Assuming no major issues are found, the server-side changes are already in the queue for release onto Agni (the main grid), and the viewer code will hopefully rapidly progress to RC status as well.

[05:21] A further server-side update which is forthcoming and will assist with this testing is the avatar attribute testing fix, about which I reported in part 1 of this update.

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