Day: November 6, 2020

2020 CCUG meeting week #45 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Where Our Journey Begins, September 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, November 5th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

SL Viewer

At the time of writing, the current selection of official viewers (release, RC and projects) was as follows:

  • Current release viewer version 6.4.10.549686, formerly the Mesh Uploader RC promoted on October 14 – No Change.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • Cachaça Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.11.551139, issued October 27.
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.11.551213, November 2.
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.10.549685, November 2.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

ARCTan / Jellydoll / Imposter Avatars

  • Bug fixes for Jellydolls include:
    • Fixing an issue where jellydolled avatars could suddenly vanish with viewed on Mac systems.
    • Ensuring Amimesh attachments on imposter avatars update in sync with the avatar.
    • Impostered avatars and their Animesh attachments are currently rendered entirely separately to one another, so the code might be looked at to unify their rendering.
    • A general clean-up on the imposter code, which has led to the discovery that while code was added to the viewer to check to see if impostered avatars had been updated, it has never been hooked up to updating the imposter avatar as rendered by the viewer, leaving them frozen. This is now being fixed.
  • Once the Mac issue is sorted, the play is to merge the Jellydoll updates back into the ARCTan project (from which they were split earlier in the year).
    • However, the current Jellydoll work will progress as is through the currently project viewer continued through to RC and, ultimately, release.
  • As a reminder:
    • The current ARCTan work is focused on the viewer-side updates to avatar complexity calculations.
    • 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.

Graphics

  • No news on work for replacing OpenGL.
  • Ptolemy Linden from the Graphics team has been working on performance improvements, notably related to Linden Water rendering. This work is currently focused on providing a means for those on low-end systems to completely disable water reflection rendering entirely and / or to make water opaque, both to reduce the rendering load.
  • The entire water rendering issue is complicated for a range of reasons (e.g. the fact the water plane is still drawn at altitude even though its appearance is occluded by the sky sphere, the fact that any changes made for some users could impact the “shared experience” / expected behaviour for others, etc.).
  • Ptolemy also noted that the viewer collects a lot of static rendering information that could potentially be used to assist with better drawing / rendering of scenes, and this could be something that might be looked at in more detail once the Project Uplift work is completed.

Date of Next Meeting

  • Thursday, November 19th.