SL projects update 24 (1): Viewer news – materials, SSB/A, deformer, snapshots

Update: In further tests of the FIRE-9097 “fix” at lower resolutions (e.g. 2650 pixels across), I found it can re-introduce the tiling artefacts in snapshots.

General Viewer News

Materials Processing

The release of an update to the materials beta viewer on Wednesday June 5th (3.6.0.276961) was followed at the weekend by the arrival of a further beta version – 3.6.0.277049 – with accompanying release notes. Commenting on the rapid-fire releases, Oz linden said at the Content Creation User Group meeting on Monday June 10th, “We’re getting close to the end of its beta cycle (or put another way… report your bugs now).”

Snapshot Issues

We’re all aware of the snapshot tiling issue which plagued SL photographers for a good while, which would leave “tiling” artefacts on images taken at higher resolutions than the user’s monitor resolution when running in deferred mode (now known as Advanced Lighting Model). A fix for this issue (MAINT-628) finally reached the public in late 2012, but brought with it some additional issues. On of the most notable of these was the appearance of black rectangles in very high resolution images.

Very high-resolution “black rectangle” issue common to snapshots taken with viewers utilsing the MAIN-628 “tiling” fix (image courtesy of Dil Spitz)

This latter problem most recently caused an additional outcry when the LL “tiling” fix was finally incorporated in Firestorm viewer earlier in 2013, with many users incorrectly blaming the Firestorm team for the problem.

Well, for all and sundry, Firestorm users or otherwise, there is some potentially good news on the horizon.

Firestorm image artefact fix: image at 6000 pixels across, saved as JPG (click to enlarge)

Commenting on the broader issues reported with snapshots duing the Open-source Dev meeting on Monday June 10th, Oz Linden said:

It looks like there are fixes in the MAINT pipeline for those. I don’t know how soon those will be out… I can try to find out if they have a project build ready.

Additionally, there is further news specifically for Firestosm users. While it is somewhat outside the scope of “SL project news”, it is neverthless reporting here.

Nicky Dasmijn has been working on the problem, and has implemented a fix for the issue (see Firestorm JIRA FIRE-9097), which should correct matters for snaps of up to 4096×4096 pixels without any “rectangle” artefacts appearing or with any regression to issues of tiling, and which may work at high resolutions than that for some.

Firestorm image artefact fix: image at 6000 pixels across, saved as PNG – note rectangle artefact (click to enlarge)

I tried a very rough-and-ready test of the fix. I found that capturing images up to 5,000-5,600 pixels across with the aspect ratio maintained worked OK for me. Anything around 6,000 pixels across saw JPG images save OK, but rectangle artefacts begin to appear when saving in PNG (see both images on the right)

However, as I’ve recently been experiencing other GPU issues, I’ve been unable to ascertain if the rectangles are down to an issue with the code or simply a matter of my GPU running out of resources when processing PNG images above 5600 pixels across.

The fix is currently in a recent Firestorm pre-release, and will hopefully make the cut for the next formal release. It is currently unclear whether the code has been / will be contributed to LL, and if so, whether they will adopt it or opt to go with their own forthcoming updates (as indicated by Oz in his statement above) or opt to combine it with their own fixes (depending on the nature & scope of the latter).

Future “STORM Project Viewer” Release

There are a number of code contributions which have come via the Snowstorm route which have been queued awaiting a suitable release. These cover a range of additions to the viewer, and example of which is STORM-68 (As a Builder, I want that ability to set default permissions on creation of objects, clothing, scripts, notecards, etc.).

Commenting on STORM contributions in general, and in light of the forthcoming changes to the viewer release process, Oz said, “I’m trying to get all the storm issues merged up so that I can be ready to put out a project viewer as soon as the new viewer version manager is deployed.” Whether STORM-68 (which is apparently seen as “largely good to go”, although it may also require a server-side change), or the fixes for snapshot issues mentioned above will be among them remains to be seen. However, a “STORM” project viewer could well be adding even more features to the SL viewer in the near future.

SL project news week 5 (2): servers, issues, viewer, SSB, deformer

Server Deployments week 5

On Tuesday 29th January, the Main channel received the threaded region crossing code previously deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre in week 4 – release notes.

On Wednesday 29th January, the following updates were deployed to the Release Candidate channels:

• BlueSteel received the server-side materials processing code – release notes
• LeTigre received the maint-server project originally deployed to Magnum in week 3. This deployment includes the bug fix for the places / search indexing issue which occurred following the original deployment of the code to Magnum – release notes
• Magnum received a further update to the interest list code deployed in week 4, with fixes intended to deal with issues of high packet loss – release notes.

Reported Issues

Main Channel

A number of initial problems were reported  in the forum discussion thread, Several of which  appeared to be related to initial region caching / capabilities problems which lead to some strange initial experiences for users, ranging from teleport failures / potential viewer crashes on region crossings (physical or teleport) and  out-of-range controlled flight (i.e. avatars could continue to fly under full control when apparently at coordinates well outside the region (e.g. 320, 128, 75). These issues seem to cease once regions were correctly caching following a (protracted) restart period.

There were also some reports in the forum discussion thread that use of the estate tools to eject / teleport home / ban an avatar can lead to a region cross. However, as the reports appear to be the same / similar to previously filed SEC JIRA (SEC-1215 and SEC-1204, neither of which are open to public viewing), and may be an isolated series of incidents (others are not reporting the same problems, so they have not been repro’d outside of the affected region), there is a reluctance within LL to attribute them directly to the region crossing code.

Magnum RC (Interest List Code)

The Interest List Code problem relates to the use of bots. Originally, it had been hoped that one of the fixes deployed this week would correct the issue; however this has not entirely been the case.

Following further investigation by Latif Khalifa and Andrew Linden, an explanation of the problem is provided in the deployment forum thread. The issue has its routes in the fact that the Second Life UDP protocol requires an acknowledgement (or “ACK”) for all messages sent to the viewer. However, rather than sending a distinct “message received” back to the server for each packet received, certain types of bot append the acknowledgement to other outgoing messages. A bug in the interest list code means these appended ACKs aren’t read. This results in original data been regarded as a packet loss, so it is repeatedly re-sent to the viewer controlling the bot, leading to the huge increases of bandwidth which have been witnessed. Andrew is currently working on a fix for this issue.

Deployments for Week 6

There is currently no clear news on deployment plans for the week commencing Monday 4th February. Currently, it appears that the main-server release re-deployed to LeTigre will most likely be promoted to the Main channel.

SL Viewer Updates

Issues relating to the beta viewer 3.4.5 code have been resolved, and an updated beta viewer (3.4.5.269698), was released on Thursday January 31st – see the release notes for updates. Also released on the 31st was a new version of the CHUI development viewer, 2.4.6.269797. The SL development viewer rolled to 3.4.6.703 on Wednesday January 30th.

An interesting issue has been noted recently by those using multiple versions of the SL viewer. When swapping between more recent versions of the SL development viewer and older versions of the code base, toolbar buttons can vanish from the viewer’s UI. The exact cause is unclear, and the problem appears intermittent (I’ve personally only encountered it once jumping between project and release versions of the viewer).

Mesh Deformer Project Viewer

Sovereign Engineer assisted with code merges for the parametric deformer project viewer with the result that the code is now merged-up to the 3.4.4 codebase with the latest release of the mesh project viewer (3.4.4.269558) on January 29th. There are apparently no functional changes to the deformer itself.

The mesh deformer project viewer has now been merged-up to the 3.4.4 viewer codebase. There are apparently no updates to the deformer itself with this release

This removes one of the three bottlenecks to the project as noted in the first part of this week’s reports. However, the issue of internal resources at the Lab remains a problem, although Oz Linden is attempting to address this and there may be further news in week 6.

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SL project news: week 5 (1): servers, viewer, deformer

Server Deployments Week 5

There are a full set of deployments this week, Main channel and RCs.

On Tuesday 29th January, the Main channel received the threaded region crossing code deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre in week 4. This project makes sim performance smoother when objects and avatars cross between regions. Please refer to the release notes for further information.

On Wednesday 29th January, the Release Candidate channels should receive the following deployments:

• BlueSteel should receive the server-side materials processing code. This code will require a a project viewer in order to be used, As reported in week 4, there is no definitive timeframe as to when a viewer is liable to be available, but it would be reasonable to expect something in the next few weeks (possibly sooner) – release notes
• LeTigre should receive the maint-server project originally deployed to Magnum in week 3. This deployment includes the bug fix for the places / search indexing issue which occurred following the original deployment of the code to Magnum – release notes
• Magnum will receive a further update to the interest list code deployed in week 4. This update addresses high packet loss problems, leading to issues such as not seeing avatars or objects in-world, specifically:
  • A fix for bots which do not specify a valid draw distance in order to prevent them downloading huge amounts of unwanted data
    
  • A fix to keep ObjectUpdate packets within an ethernet MTU of 1500
  • Release notes.

Please check with the forum discussion thread for these deployments to keep abreast of updates / changes / issues.

Materials processing: server-side code to go to BlueSteel on Wednesday 30th January – but no project viewer yet

SL Viewer News

Problems remain with the beta viewer code, but it is hoped a new beta will be appearing shortly. In te meantime, Kelly Linden has committed the viewer-side code for extending the maximum avatar animation length from 30 seconds to 60 seconds (MAINT-1492). This should be appearing in the 3.4.5 beta viewer, and should also be appearing in TPVs in the near future.

Mesh Deformer

Delays continue with the mesh deformer, which can be summarised as:

• The Lab has limited internal resources for testing it – although attempts are being made to address this
• There is concern that there is no clear way for a designer and a user to be sure that they are using the same avatar base model – and if they are not, then the deformer will very likely make things worse. While there are some provisions within the current deformer for the base model to be taken into consideration, there is apparently concern that it may not be sufficient
• The project veiewer code is now significantly behind the current viewer release, although work is underway to merge it up (and I received a report that this has been done while preparing this update).

A further potential issue in progressing the deformer  – as Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz), who wrote the original code points out – is there are a lot of expectations that the deformer will do a lot of things which were not in the original specification (or indeed, the code as originally written). Some of this scope creep has resulted in further updates to the code from other contributors. However, there appear to be concerns that if the Lab prematurely release if, there will be a risk that a) it breaks existing content, b) it is viewed as not addressing problems correctly.

This latter aspect was also commented upon by Oz Linden, when speaking Open-source Development meeting on Monday 28th January. He said, “We are often (and frequently with justification) accused of throwing things out that are not really finished enough… indeed, the lack of some solution for the problem the deformer is trying to solve is one of the more prominent recent examples, but I don’t want to make the situation even worse by putting out a ‘solution’ that turns out not to solve enough of the problem and/or creates bigger ones down the road.”

Avatar Baking (SSB)

A set of code updates for the viewer are in progress. However, an issue with the Mac build means they have not been pushed as an update to the project viewer as yet. It is hoped that the updates will reach all three versions of the viewer (Windows, Linux and Mac) once the Mac build problem has been resolved.

Related Links

• SL project reports in this blog

SL project news: week 2 (3): server, mesh and materials

Server Deployments – week 2

As noted in the update to part 2 of this week’s report, the planned deployment of two new releases to the RC channels didn’t go as anticipated. Originally, it had been intended that BlueSteel and LeTigre would received the new threaded region crossing code while Magnum would receive Andrew Linden’s interest list code improvements.

Interest List Deployment Cancellation

The interest list deployment was cancelled after the 11th hour discovery of some bugs with the code. Speaking at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday 10th January, Maestro Linden described the main issues as – ironically – being connected with region crossings, and with object updates.

In the first, anyone crossing between regions several times in a vehicle would experience all of their non-rigged attachments disappearing from their world view, with the viewer itself eventually physically detaching them. Not only did this cause confusion as to what was happening with attachments for those experiencing the issue, it also resulted in some avatars ending up naked following a relog.

Interest list code: bugs led to deployment cancellation on Wednesday 9th January

The second problem was slightly more complicated, if potentially more rare. In it, if User A had an object on the ground and User B looked at then turned their camera away such that the object was no longer on their screen, User A could then wear the object as an attachment and teleport away; however, when User B subsequently turned their camera back to where the object had been, they would still see it on the ground despite the fact it had been taken away. What happened if User A (now wearing the object) teleported back to User B wasn’t actually tested.

As a result of both of these issues and the cancellation of the interest list deployment, Magnum received the same region crossing package as intended for BlueSteel and LeTigre.

Region Crossing Code Issues

However, the bad news did not end there, as Maestro Linden explained, “After a few hours, we saw that the [region/sim] crash rate was way too high.” As a result, the threaded region crossing code was disabled via a configuration change to the servers without the need to rollback the release. Once this had happened, region crash rates returned to “normal” levels. In all the new region crossing code was active for around five hours before being disabled once more.

Analysis of the crash rate revealed it to be linked to avatars crossing to / from heavily scripted regions. While the new code was extensively tested on Aditi, the regions there were not excessively loaded with scripts during testing, and so the problem did not manifest. However, subsequent testing with the test regions running heavy script loads did result in them also crashing, confirming the problem.

At the time of writing, Kelly Linden believes he has a fix for the issue; if so, it should hopefully find its way to the RC channels in week 3, commencing Monday 14th January.

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