Crestwick Island (Flickr) – blog post



The following notes are primarily taken from the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, June 5th. A video of the TPVD meeting is included below, with any time stamps in the following text referring to it. My thanks as always to North for the recording and providing it for embedding.

Server Deployments Week 23 – Recap

There was no deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, June 2nd, due to the week #22 RC deployment being rolled-back.

On Wednesday, June 3rd, all thee RCs received the same server maintenance package, which was the same update which had been attempted in week #22, but with additional back-end fixes to prevent a repeat of the earlier problems. The update comprises:

A change logic on accessing group member lists for large groups

Internal server logging changes.

SL Viewer

On Thursday, May 3rd, the attachment fixes RC viewer (Project Big Bird) updated to version 3.7.30.302190. Presumably, this update is to bring the viewer up to parity with the current release viewer (formerly the avatar layers update), and so will hopefully clear the way for it to be promoted to the de facto release viewer in the near future.

[02:40] A new maintenance fixes RC viewer should be appearing in the release channel soon, the should also be an update to the Mesh Importer project viewer (currently version 3.7.28.300878) appearing soon; and work is progressing on updating the Oculus Rift project viewer.

Experience Keys (/ Tools)

[03:35] Work is continuing on the back-end of the Experience Keys systems prior to the capabilities being formally released across the grid as a whole.

“We are making progress on the back-end issues that have been delaying that,” Oz Linden informed the TPV Developer meeting. “But as far as I’m aware, we have not yet … uncovered a viewer-related problem with that. so far these are all back-end related issues.” He went on:

To be a little bit more transparent, it’s really scaling issues. Experience actually work just fine at the scale we’re using them right now … but what we’re concerned about is what will happen when we turn them loose on a much, much larger population and there are lots more experiences running and there are a lot more simulators with experiences running on them.

So what we’ve doing … is fairly intensive scaling and performance testing and we’re solving the problems that the testing uncovers. So, we’re making progress on it, and we’re fairly confident the problems are solvable, but we have run into a whole host of assorted issues with that.

In the meantime, it is expected that the current RC release of the Experiences viewer (currently version 3.8.0.300963) will be brought up to parity with the release viewer during week #24.

Viewer-Managed Marketplace

[05:53] For ease of reference, please refer to my update on VMM, available here.

Land Bans

[17:58] Oz Linden has issues an invitation to open-source contributors to assist the Lab in trying to improve the management of land ban lists. Again, for ease of reference, please refer to my separate report on this, available here.

Group Membership Changes

[22:15] The update to the server RC channels referred to as “a change logic on accessing group member lists for large groups”, as noted in the server deployments recap at the top of this article, refers to a new way in which the members lists for larger groups (5,000 members and over) are handled.

In brief, the members lists for such groups will no longer load in the group floater in the viewer, unless the person attempting to see the list is in a role which requires they need to be able to do so. While this change is discussed within the meeting, I have been specifically asked not to blog on the change until it is deployed to the Main (SLS) simulator channel on Tuesday, June 9th, when I’ll have the details in full.

Unified Snapshot Floater

[33:12] As I’ve recently reviewed, NiranV Dean has updated the unified snapshot floater in his Black Dragon viewer. As he originally contributed the code for this floater to the Lab, he has also raised a JIRA (see BUG-9325) listing improvements and fixes and has contributed his updated code. This has been under review at the Lab, and commenting at the TPV Developer meeting, Oz indicated that the Lab are “fine” with the majority of Niran’s suggestions, although there are a couple that appear to be subject to further consideration, which might take a little while to sort through.

Group Notices and Failures

[41:20] There have been many reports of group notices failing to work as expected, such as failing to be received unless the group is refreshed, etc. The Lab isn’t currently working on group notice management on the back end, be will soon be issuing a set of fixes aimed at how the viewer handles groups notices. The suggestion, therefore, is that when a viewer with these updates is available, it is used to test whether problems are still occurring, and to collect logs of specific issues which are still occurring, which can be forwards to the Lab (JIRA) for further investigation into possible causes.

Chromium Embedded Framework / Webkit

[46:15] The Lab is making significant progress on replacing Webkit as the main media library tool in the viewer with Google’s Chromium Embedded Framework, and may even have a project viewer “soon”. However, when this does emerge, it will be one of the first viewer updates for which the Lab will be relying on the TPV / open-source community to add to the Linux flavours of the viewer and support.

Calling Cards

[52:30] Calling Cards are an old aspect of Second Life which perhaps does see as much use now as might once have been the case. However, they are still a part of SL’s functionality (they are automatically exchanged whenever you friend someone, for example), although there are a number of problems associated with them. For example, they can be randomly duplicated, often many times over within your inventory, under the Calling Cards system folder; the hierarchy for saving them within that folder isn’t properly followed by the software; and they can generate extra load during the log-in by causing the viewer to request unnecessary presence look-ups as you log-in.

The Lab is now starting to address these issues within the viewer, and first updates should hopefully be entirely transparent to users, and will be aimed at preventing the unnecessary presence look-ups mentioned above. These changes may also be accompanied by an automated inventory transform to removed all duplicate versions of Calling Cards from people’s inventory. TPVs are being encouraged to pick these changes up as soon as they can after the updates become available.