2021 CCUG meeting week #22 summary

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, June 3rd, 2021. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar and the venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates for the viewer for the week, leaving the pipelines as follows:

• Release viewer: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23, promoted April 29 – 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):
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.19.560171, dated May 27.
  • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.19.559726, dated May 19.
  • Project UI viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559612, May 14.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The current version of LMR 5, 6.4.19.560171 is set for promotion to de facto release status at the start of week #23 (commencing Monday, June 7th).
  • This viewer includes a fix for BUG-230789 “[MAINT-E] Alpha failures with Release 6.4.18.558266 (64bit)”.
• The New User Experience project viewer will follow LMR 5 as the next viewer on the runway for promotion to de facto relapses.
• There is to be a “general push to improve graphics performance over the next few months”.
• BUG-5975 “Normal map rendering issue when UV island tangent basis has angular difference and mesh is smooth shaded” is an issue that should be fixed with LMR6. This may cause some content breakage, but will do more to fix an unwanted edge case that can affect content.’
  • The majority of the meeting focused on a discussion of this issue, which is more fully explained in this document, with Ptolemy Linden from the graphics team noting that investigations in to how best to resolve the problem and those related to it for SL are still on-going,

ARCTan

Summary: An attempt to re-evaluate avatar rendering costs and the cost of in-world scene rendering, with the current focus on avatar rendering cost / impact, with the in-world scene rendering / LI to be tackled at some point in the future.

• Work has finally started on the UI refactoring to present people with a “one stop shop” for displaying surrounding avatar complexity information and action upon it.
• This work is currently separate to the work on revising that actual formulas used for calculating avatar complexity, but the new UI should work with the existing calculations / values. The idea is to make the UI elements for ARCTan visible in a project / RC viewer whilst work continued on the new calculation formulas, then merging the new formulae into the viewer down the road.
• It is currently anticipated that the viewer with the UI work will appear some time in the “next several weeks”.