The following notes were taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, February 6th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.
Note: this meeting was called at short order after the the usual start-of-month Linden Lab internal All Hands meeting was delayed a week. This means that a) the meeting was slightly shorter than usual; b) there will not be a CCUG meeting on Thursday, February 13th.
Environment Enhancement Project
Project Summary
A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.
Resources
- Project definition document.
- Project summary (this blog).
- Full EEP Documentation.
Current Status
- EEP is now in burn-down mode – which means more bugs are being fixed than are being reported.
- Again, as this project is drawing ever closer to a possible full deployment, now is the time for those who use windlights for photography or within their regions to test the EEP RC viewer and see if they can identify any potential issues / bugs.
ARCTan
Project Summary
An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).
As of January 2020 ARCTan has effectively been split:
- Immediate viewer-side changes, primarily focused on revising the Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) calculations and providing additional viewer UI so that people can better visibility and control to seeing complexity. This work can essentially be broken down as:
- Collect data.
- Update ARC function.
- Design and provide tool within the viewer UI (i.e. not a pop-up) that presents ARC information in a usable manner and lets users make decisions about rendering / performance.
- Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.
- The belief is that “good” avatar ARC values can likely be used as a computational base for these rendering calculations.
Current Status
- Vir has been working on the apparent Bake service issue noted in my last CCUG summary. Unfortunately, while he has ascertained it is something that can occur, it seems to do so entirely randomly and with no real consistency, making reproducing the issue in order to track down probable causes very difficult.
In Brief
- BUG-228153, “FAO Vir: Possible cause of greyness in bakes” reports a Bake Service issue, which is due to be looked at by the Lab. This is probably not related to the issue Vir has been seeing with complex attachments.
- A side on on the Bake Service: it is not only responsible for handling appearance bakes (textures), but also include calculations on shape, vertical positioning, etc., some of which must be calculated regardless of whether or not wearables are being used, and which can be affected by attachments containing position offsets.
- There have been a number of feature requests for follow-up Bakes on Mesh work. Some of these have been accepted. However, there are no plans to re-open BoM for further work in the immediate future.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 