Obscure question: when does the simulator send EstablishAgentCommunication to the viewer?

[Monty Linden]

There is a possible fix for late EAC taking shape in one of the active projects.  It might over-generate messages but a change is coming.  Schedule unknown as yet.

[animats]

8 minutes ago, Monty Linden said:

There is a possible fix for late EAC taking shape in one of the active projects.  It might over-generate messages but a change is coming.  Schedule unknown as yet.

Good.

[animats]

More and more I think that the EstablishAgentCommunications problem causes some region crossing failures. I've been testing with Sharpview. Here's a video:

https://video.hardlimit.com/w/ceXf7Xr1b8f29VvyV4zqEF

This is a video of driving around Circuit de Corse, which is a pretty drive, using Sharpview. Regions for which EstablishAgentCommunication was sent late show as empty space for one minute, and I waited out the one minute delay whenever that happened before entering the next region. There were no region crossing problems in an hour of driving.

If I try this without waiting, using Sharpview, and just go plowing ahead into regions that are not showing yet, I get a region crossing failure, a classic half-unsit, where the vehicle crosses but the avatar gets left behind, in about 10-15 minutes. When you use the C++ viewers, you plow into regions that are not fully up at many region crossings, but you don't see it. The C++ viewers have a workaround to cover up that problem. Mostly, that works. Mostly.

So this test adds evidence to the theory that the EstablishAgentCommunication bug is the cause of some region crossing failures. I'll keep driving around to see if I get a failure. If I can accumulate a few more hours of driving time without a fail, that's a strong sign this really is the problem. Monty Linden is working on the EstablishAgentCommunication bug, and that may have a big payoff.

There's a full hour of driving video. I'd suggest watching a minute or two. Nothing exciting happens. Which is the point.

(Notes on this version of Sharpview: This version isn't out yet. Working through a long list of problems. The previous version had higher frame rates but showed only one region. This one shows multiple regions but has some frame rate problems. Working on optimizations. There's a serious bug with arrow key delay, which is why the driving is so bad. That's a bug in Rust's window interface crate, "winit". The camera is first person view, the avatar is on a motorcycle, and there is no camera motion smoothing at all. So it's a rough ride, especially on the road section with cobblestones, where you feel every bump.)

[animats]

Now that I have Sharpview to the point that I can ride a motorcycle around, I can hit more bugs faster. Easier to test region crossings.

How a region crossing works at the viewer message level. This is the happy case for a simple single-avatar non-corner region crossing.

(More later. Forum editor being difficult.)

Edited February 26 by animats

[animats]

Notes on the above, with Sharpview results:

• On rare occasions, EnableAgentCommunication doesn't arrive at all, and the neighboring region does not come up properly. Not even after the one minute delay. I waited five minutes once. Lost event?
• Other than the EAC problem, not much goes wrong with ordinary avatar crossings, even at corners.
• Single avatar on vehicle mostly works, if I don't try to enter regions stuck waiting for EAC.
• Multiple avatars on vehicle needs testing. I need another alt or two.
• CompleteAgentMovement, viewer to sim, is important in region crossing progress. Region crossings stall if that is not sent. The avatar is stuck. Problems with region crossings over long-lag network connections probably involve that message.

[Aethelwine]

The technical stuff here is really over my head, but is this why after the cloud started delivering the servers the Loonetta and other boats stopped working reliably? The Loonetta for me every 20 minutes stops after a region crossing like the avatar has stood up even though they haven't. With Mesh Shop and Bandit boats the Avsit fix made them useable again (eg HVW ones). My understanding of these fixes is that they introduce a delay into a timing in the script to give more time for the regions to report the transfer. These problems affect people a little differently but they are very widely reported, the Loonetta in particular is rarely used any more because of the problem.

If so then the problem might be related to a change that happened around the time of the move to the cloud.

I did try to introduce it into a Jira, but don't really understand them. The Jira got closed as accepted and then couldn't see what was being done with it if anything.

Edited February 29 by Aethelwine

[Monty Linden]

I created an explicit Canny issue for the missing EAC messages so that it can be tracked and possibly fixed separately from the EventQueue problems. 

https://feedback.secondlife.com/server-bugs/p/simulator-http-setup-missing-establishagentcommunication-messages