Month: May 2014

SL projects updates 21/1: server, viewer, LSL and materials

Posted on by Inara Pey

Server Deployments Week 21

Main (SL) Channel

On Tuesday May 20th, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package deployed to Magnum in week 20.This includes a bug fix for a networking-related issue that sometimes affects busy sims.

Issues encountered on the grid, but unrelated to the new code deployment, interrupted the latter. Commenting on the situation at the (late-starting) Simulator User Group meeting, Simon Linden said, “I believe the rollout stopped in the middle, and things will get patched up tomorrow morning. We’re still picking up the grid pieces and will sort out the clean up plan later in the day.”

BlueSteel and LeTigre RCs

On Wednesday May 21st, the BlueSteel and LeTigre RCs remain on the Sunshine / AIS v3 server-side code, and receive the networking-related bug fix deployed to the Magnum RC in week 20 and to the Main channel on Tuesday May 20th – see here for details.

Magnum RC

On Wednesday May 21st, the Magnum RC should receive a new project, which includes changes related to the ‘Experience Tools’ project.

SL Viewer

The de facto release viewer updated on Monday May 19th to version 3.7.8.289922, formerly the Maintenance RC comprising fixes in Recent tab, Chat, LSL editor, land management, etc; GPU table updates; crash fixes & performance improvements – release notes here.

Also on Monday May 19th, the following RC viewer updates occurred:

  • The Sunshine / AIS v3 RC was temporarily removed from the Alternate Viewer page, but is expected to return soon
  • A new Memplug RC viewer, version 3.7.8.289942 was released, containing a number of fixes for memory leaks which are expected to result in improved viewer performance and a reduction in crash rates.

LSL Functions for Materials

Materials processing: LSL capabilities for materials
Materials processing: LSL capabilities for materials now being looked at

Further to discussions in week 20, Simon Linden had some news on the much-requested LSL functions for materials processing, saying, “I can say I was trying to grief myself with materials LSL functions the other day. I hope we can talk more about that on Thursday at the beta user group.” He went on to outline some of the functions for manipulating materials that he’s been playing with:

Get functions:
[PRIM_SPECULAR, integer face] returns [string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians, vector color, integer glossy, integer environment]
[PRIM_NORMAL, integer face] returns [string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians]
[PRIM_ALPHA, integer face] returns [integer alpha_mode, integer alpha_cutoff]

Set functions:
[PRIM_SPECULAR, integer face, string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians, vector color, integer glossy, integer environment]
[PRIM_NORMAL, integer face, string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians]
[PRIM_ALPHA, integer face, integer alpha_mode, integer alpha_cutoff]

He went on, “There is a magic default value using NULL ids that represents “no material” … so it can be removed.”

Simon also indicated that at some point soon (no date as yet), there will a few regions (most likely on Aditi, the beta grid) to try-out the new functions with the aim of seeing how the capabilities are used, how they get abused and then how SL behaves, so that some appropriate limits can be imposed to prevent deliberate or accidental abuse.

Other Items

New Mesh Avatars and the AMD/ATi Issue

On Thursday May 15th, Linden Lab launched their line of new mesh avatars to something of a mixed response. Unfortunately, said avatars may have fallen a-foul of a long-standing  rigged / fitted mesh rendering issue affecting people used AMD / ATi graphics systems with recent Catalyst drivers, and which sees rigged / fitted mesh stretching to the 0,0,0 coordinate of a region – see BUG-6065, which offers advice on circumventing the issue.

Kitely goes Hyper(grid)

Posted on by Inara Pey

kitely-logoOn Monday May 19th, Kitely, the on-demand virtual worlds provider, announced it now supports the Hypergrid, and provides strong content support in doing so.

The ability to teleport between Kitely worlds and other Hypergrid enabled OpenSim grids was actually enabled on Sunday 18th, ahead of the official announcement, and saw a number of Kitely / OpenSim users putting the capability through its paces.

Announcing the move in an extensive blog post, Oren Hurvitz, Kitely co-founder and Vice President of R&D (and who is also an OpenSim core developer), said:

We have an important announcement: Kitely now supports the Hypergrid! Kitely users can visit other grids, and users from other grids can visit Kitely worlds. Kitely is the only OpenSim grid that supports the Hypergrid and also has strong content protections that prevent unauthorized items from leaving the grid.

 The blog post itself explains how Kitely users can teleport from Kitely to other grids, how they can – if they wish – enable their Kitely worlds for Hypergrid access, and how other OpenSim users on hypergrid enabled grids can teleport to Kitely worlds.

Kitely users can select whether or not they want their worlds open to hypergrid connectivity - although those with
Kitely users can select whether or not they want their worlds open to Hypergrid connectivity – although those with Metered Worlds need to remember that they will be charged for the time Hypergrid users spend in those worlds if they are opened to Hypergrid access

Considerable length is given to the important matter of content protection and export permissions. This includes information on how items defined as No Export are protected from being physically removed from Kitely worlds either by Kitely users or those visiting from other Hypergrid enabled grids. To ensure content is fully protected, Kitely have also implemented changes to their Export World capability.

Given the in-depth extent of the Kitely announcement, I refer readers to that post for further details.

Overall, a long-waited move by Kitely, and congratulations to the team for achieving this milestone.

Related Links

Oculus open-source competitor on the horizon, with multi-function controller

Posted on by Inara Pey

With the SVVR Conference and Expo underway in California, now is perhaps a timely opportunity to take a peek at what is being billed as an open-source competitor to the Oculus Rift.

Techcrunch, along with several other technology blogs / websites, covered the news a few days ago that a Chinese start-up, ANTVR Technology, is developing an open-source, cross-platform virtual reality gaming set, called the ANTVR kit.

The kit is said to be compatible with games designed for the Oculus Rift and with most PC and console platforms. It can connect to any device offering direct HDMI output, or via an HDMI adapter if no direct HDMI output is available. Supported systems include computers, games consoles, iOs devices, Android devices, and even Blu-ray players.

The ANTVR kit headset design (images courtesy of ANTVR)
The ANTVR kit headset design (image courtesy of ANTVR Technology)

The new headset is currently a part of a Kickstarter campaign, which despite the backlash over the eventual acquisition of Oculus VR by Facebook, has already seen 450 people commit (at the time of writing) almost $170,000 of the $200,000 goal in just seven days, suggesting that if the rate of pledges is maintained, the ANTVR Kit could end-up going that same way as both Oculus VR and Technical Illusion’s castAR, and exceeding its modest target by a good margin.

The headset unit has a 1920 x 1080 high definition, 1.03 megapixel per eye, display with a 4:3 ratio offering a 100-degree diagonal field-of-view. A dual aspherical lens arrangement is apparently included to help eliminate image distortion when projecting standard ratio images. Like the Oculus Rift, it has an internal 9-axis Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for head rotation and movement tracking, and it can be worn with prescription lens glasses.

Comparing the ANTVR with Oculus SDK2 and Sony's Morpheus
Comparing the ANTVR with Oculus SDK2 (which actually has a 5-inch screen) and Sony’s Morpheus (credit: TechInAsia)

A novel aspect of the headset is the inclusion of a “glance window”, a slide-up port on the front of the unit which can be pushed up to allow the wearer to re-orient themselves in the real world or their keyboard. While still not a real solution for those needing to use the keyboard and can’t re-orient finger positions easily (no tactile indicators on F, J, and numeric pad 5, for example), it at least means the headset itself doesn’t need to be pushed up to the forehead to see things.

Is it a Controller? Is it a Joystick? Is it a Gun? It’s all Three – and more

A further interesting feature of the kit is the inclusion of the multi-function handset controller. When completely assembled, this forms a gun which can be used in first-person shooter games and the like. However, the “barrel” of the gun can be detached, and the “pistol grip” becomes a joystick, suitable for use with flight simulators, etc., or as a Wii-style controller. This further opens-out into a game controller handset.

The three-part handset
The three-part handset (image courtesy of ANTVR Technology)

A further unique aspect of the handset unit is that it also includes a 9-axis IMU, which tracks body movement and actions, allowing the wearer to control a degree of on-screen character movement via both head and body movement, and to simulate a range of actions (crouching, jumping, throwing a grenade…).

The dual 9-axis IMUs translate body movements into on-screen character movements
The dual 9-axis IMUs translate body movements into on-screen character movements (stills via ANTVR promotional video, YouTube)

An additional WHDI unit can be added to the assembled handset (and is shown in the image above), allowing for a reported low-lag (less than 1ms) fully wireless gaming experience. The WHDI unit is not supplied as standard, but the company states it will offer it for $200.

As with the Oculus Rift, a software development kit (SDK) is to be made available with the ANTVR kit. The open-source nature of the kit means that there is potential for it to be used with a range of systems beyond those for which it initially supports.

“We wanted to make a gaming system that is universal, but it’s very difficult to make your product compatible with every kind of gaming platform,” Qin Zheng, ANTVR Technology’s founder, said in the Techcrunch report. “We’ve worked on making it compatible with Xbox, PC, and PlayStation, but there are many other gaming systems. If there are developers with other gaming systems or just device developers, they can choose to modify the firmware inside our hardware.”

Qin Zheng, ANTVR Technology's founder
Qin Zheng, ANTVR Technology’s founder (image credit: TechInAsia)

The Kickstarter campaign is being run along very similar lines to the Oculus VR, up to and including an opportunity to visit the ANTVR Technology studios in Beijing for those willing to pay-out $5,000 (plus meeting their own airfares, etc.), which will also include guided tours of China’s capital. For $270-$300, supporters get the ANTVR kit and other goodies, while for $470-$500, supporters get the kit with a WHDI wireless unit as well.Those offering less that $270 get to choose from other reward options. Qin hopes that following the kickstarter campaign, ANTVR Technology will be able to start shipping kits in September 2014.

The following promotional video examines the ANTVR kit, and shows it in use with the additional  WHDI wireless adapter.

Related Links

 

 

 

May 17th Firestorm meeting: audio and transcript

Posted on by Inara Pey

firestorm-logoOn Saturday May 17th 2014, the Firestorm team hosted another of their Q and A sessions to discuss Firestorm and Second Life, and to address users’ questions. Unfortunately, no public video for the meeting is available. The following transcript is therefore provided from a personal audio recording made by myself.

For those who wish to listen to the audio, and for ease of reference, it has been broken down into a number of files, each of which precedes the text to which it relates

When reading, please remember:

  • This is not a word-for-word transcript of the entire meeting. While all quotes given are as they are spoken in the audio, to assist in readability and maintain the flow of conversation, not all asides, jokes, interruptions, etc., have been included in the text presented here
  • If there are any sizeable gaps in comments from a speaker which resulted from asides, repetition, questions to others etc,, these are indicated by the use of “…”
  • Questions / comments were made in chat while speakers were talking. This inevitably meant that replies to questions would lag well behind when they were originally asked. To provide context between questions and answers, questions in the transcript are given (in italics) at the point at which each is addressed by a member of the Firestorm team, either in voice or via chat
  • This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. I am not an official member of the Firestorm team, and technical or support issues relating to Firestorm cannot be addressed through these pages. Such requests for assistance should be made through the in-world Firestorm Support groups or at the Firestorm support region.
Firestormers Assemble: Takoda, Tonya, Jessica and Ed settle-in for another Firestorm Q&A session
Firestormers Assemble: Takoda, Tonya, Jessica and Ed settle-in for another Firestorm Q&A session

Firestorm 4.6.5 and the Release Cycle

 

00:00 Jessica Lyon (JL): So we released 4.6.5 two months early – surprise! It’s been a more-or-less, pretty much across-the-board, a really good release for folks, with few problems and lots of improvements, although it is primarily just bug fixes which are in it anyways. So that was sort-of to be expected and hoped.

00:25 JL: It was a bit of an experiment, because we’ve had a lot of people complain about how long our releases take, including some of our own developers and even some support people. So it was a bit of an experiment in some ways just to see what happens if we do a release in half the time. And the results are interesting.

00:48 JL: Adoption – the rate at which people upgrade from whatever older version they’re on, has been very slow compared to other releases; although that’s not to say it’s non-existent. We have … 85,000 people on 4.6.5 now, and that’s not quite in a full week [since release]. So that’s no slouchy number; but in a typical release, we’re usually up around 140,000, so almost twice that.

01:28 JL: It’s easier for support, certainly, because fewer people are updating all at the same time, so I guess that stretches out the support load. [It’s] easer for QA, that’s good to know. But that doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do releases in that two-month time frame all the time.

01:56 JL: For example, our next task is going to be project interesting, which I’m sure most of you are aware of, Linden Lab just finally released it, and it’s apparently really, really good. Things rez much faster, and we can’t wait to get … to the point after we’ve merged it … [there’s a description of the interest list work, as per the blog post linked to above].

The interest list updates provide more predictable and faster scene rendering, such as large objects and those closest to you appearing first, rather than at random. more use is also made of the viewer's cache (so the warning for not clearing cache as a first action in "fixing" issues becomes even more important
The interest list updates provide more predictable and faster scene rendering, such as large objects and those closest to you appearing first, rather than at random. More use is also made of the viewer’s cache (so the warning for not clearing cache as a first action in “fixing” issues becomes even more important)

Continue reading “May 17th Firestorm meeting: audio and transcript” →

Viewer release summaries 2014: week 20

Posted on by Inara Pey

Updates for the week ending: Sunday May 18th, 2014

This summary is published every Monday and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:

  • It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog
  • By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information

Official LL Viewers

  • Current viewer release: update to version 3.7.7.289461- No change
  • Release channel cohorts (See my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 3.7.8.289922 on May 12th – core updates: multiple fixes to Mac viewer; fixes in Recent tab, Chat, LSL editor, land management, etc; GPU table updates; crash fixes & performance improvements (download and release notes)
  • Project viewers:
    • No Updates

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V3-style

  • Black Dragon updated to version 2.3.9.8 on  May 16th – core updates: major UI changes; SL Share 2; new Snapshot floater design; Motion Blur is enabled by default (release notes)
  • CtrlAltStudio updated to version 1.2.1.41167 on May 12th – core updates: Xbox 360 controller support (release notes) – review

V1-style

  • Cool VL viewer updated on May 17th, as follows: Stable: version 1.26.12.1; Legacy: version 1.26.8.59 – core updates: please refer to the release notes (downloads)

Mobile / Other Clients

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

Upcoming SVVR conference to be streamed in-world in SL

Posted on by Inara Pey

SVVR

Update: The LEA blog post has been revised since this article was posted, and the following has been revised to suit.

The first Silicon Valley VR (SVVR) Conference and Expo will take place on Monday 19th May and Tuesday 20th May 2014, at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

The Computer history museum, CA (via the LEA blog)
The Computer history museum, CA (via the LEA blog)

The conference will bring together a host of experts in the VR and in virtual environments, including the likes of Palmer Luckey (Oculus VR), Philip Rosedale, Ebbe Altberg, David Holtz (Leap Motion), Ben Lang (Road to VR), Jan Goetgeluk (Virtuix) and many more – see the list of speakers and panelists on the conference website – as well as including exhibits and demos from some of the top names in the field.

For those unable to attend the event in person, the Linden Endowment for the Arts has announced that sessions will be streamed to the LEA Theatre, starting at 14:00 on Monday May 19th with Philip Rosedale’s presentation, and the Creating the VR Metaverse Panel also being streamed (see below).

Creating the VR Metaverse Panel

(l to r): Ebbe Altberg, Philip Rosedale, Stefano Corazza and Tony Parisi. Ready to answer questions on “Creating the VR Metaverse”.
(l to r): Ebbe Altberg, Philip Rosedale, Stefano Corazza and Tony Parisi. Ready to answer questions on “Creating the VR Metaverse”.

Tuesday May 20th will see a panel discussion take place on the topic of creating the VR metaverse. Occurring at 15:00 on the 20th, the discussion will feature Ebbe Altberg (Linden Lab), Philip Rosedale (High Fidelity), Stefano Corazza (Mixamo), Tony Parisi (Vizi), and will be moderated by Draxtor Despres. Together, the panel will be considering topics such as:

  • One global metaverse or many?
  • Identity and privacy
  • Virtual World Governance: democracies, the greek god model, or benevolent dictators
  • Intellectual property and legal jurisdictions
  • Avatar portability and standards

There will also be an opportunity for the audience to put questions to the panel on these and other metaverse / VR-related subjects, and you can also potentially have your own question put to the panel. Simply add your question to the comments following THIS article (link), and if selected, Drax will put it forward during the course of the discussion.