Sansar Product Meeting 2017 week #50

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Friday, December 15th. These meetings are usually held every Friday at 9:30am PST and 4:00pm PST, and are open to all. There is currently no set agenda, and the meetings are a mix of voice and text. The official meeting notes are published in the week following each pair of meetings, while venues change each week, and are listed in the Meet-up Announcements. and the Sansar Atlas events section.

Nyx Linden attended the morning session; a former member of the engineering team for Second Life, Nyx is perhaps best known for his appearances in-world as the Tiny Robot, and leading the “old” Content Creation User Group meetings which used to take place in-world on Mondays. Nowadays, Nyx is a member of the Sansar product team, working on the planning / road mapping side of the platform’s development and coordinating the various development teams.

Fashion Release

Again, please refer to my week #49 and week #48 updates for notes on known elements in the upcoming release.

• The Fashion release should be deployed during the week commencing Monday, December 18th.
• This initial release will not include cloth physics within the run-time mode (although they may be available in the Avatar App). Instead the baking service will continue to handle clothing as is currently the case.
• The avatar mesh models will be provided via the Knowledge base when the release is deployed. These will most likely be supplied as .FBX files, rather than a blend file – but this is still TBC.
• It will be possible to upload hair attachments, but the recommendation appears to be for creators to initially keep to shorter hair styles to avoid hair cutting into the avatar bodies at this point in time
• On the non-Fashion side, the release will include a number of script updates including keyboard commands for scripts and updates to object APIs.

Modifying Materials on In-World Objects

There is still considerable upset over the decision to allow experience creators to modify / change the materials of in-scene items. This change is due to be deployed with the Fashion update, but does not extend to avatar clothing or attachments and any changes made to an object last only as long as the object is within a scene – they cannot be saved back to inventory when the object is removed.

• Some creators see this as a reason not to upload their items until such time as the permissions / licensing system is deployed.
• Some want to see a guarantee from the Lab that the change will not be extending to include accessories / clothing in a future release, ahead of the licensing / permissions system deployment. This is to be escalated to senior management for feedback.

Character Creation Flow

A point to note with the Fashion release is that users logging-in to Sansar the first time after the release has been deployed will have to go through the character creation flow.

• This is because existing clothing will no longer work with the update.
• It will mean that any custom work done to the avatar’s face will have to be re-done as well.
• It should not break existing attachments.

In Brief

• Sansar Store: Product Updates: Nyx indicated that there are still complexities around licensing / pricing which need to be resolved. As such, the Lab is considering possibly going with a basic system to allow for updates through the store, and then enhancing it as other elements of work fall into place.  However, there is no time line as yet on when something might appear, but it is on the road map.
• Permissions / Licensing System: the Lab is actively working on a permissions / licensing system, however, there is still no time frame as to when it might start to be deployed.
• Dynamic mirrors and using in-scene cameras to record and project the scenes onto a surface: neither are on the road map as present. Dynamic mirrors can be rendering-heavy, and are not something the Lab is currently looking at.