2022 TPV Developer meeting summary, week #1

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January 7th, 2022.

These meetings are generally held every other week.  They are recorded by Pantera Północy, and her video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this report – my thanks to her for allowing me to do so – and it is used with the chat log from the meeting and my own audio recording to produce this summary, which focuses on the core topics discussed.

SL Viewer

[Video: 0:00-1:28]

There have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the year, leaving the current crop as:

• Release viewer: version version 6.5.1.566335, formerly the Cache+ 360 Capture viewer, dated December 7, promoted December 15 – 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).
  • The Jenever Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.5.2.566860, issued on December 17.
  • The Koaliang Maintenance 2 RC viewer, version 6.5.2.566879, issued on December 17.
  • The Tracy Integration RC viewer version 6.4.23.563771 (dated Friday, November 5) issued Tuesday, November 9.
• Project viewers:
  • Performance Improvements project viewer version 6.5.2.566967, dated December 17.
  • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
  • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The Performance Improvements project viewer is currently going through a round of bug fixing prior to being promoted to RC status. However, no further additions / changes to the existing feature set beyond the fixes are planned.
• Depending on how things go, it is possible the Performance Improvements viewer may be the next to be promoted to RC status.
• [2:17-2:30] The Legacy Profiles project viewer is awaiting further server-side updates before proceeding.

Upcoming Feature Work

[1:30-1:51]

• At the end of 2021, the Lab issued a blog post reviewing the year and offering an overview of some projects planned for release in 2022.
• Vir indicated that discussion on those projects mentioned in the post (and others?) is still on-going, and that the Lab is not ready to discuss time frames, etc., for any particular feature or release at this point in time.

In Brief

• Mojo Linden arrived after the meeting had ended, and reiterated that:
  • A focus for the year remains on performance improvements.
  • A key aspect of work as a whole remains improving the entire New User Experience (NUE).
  • He also clearly dodged questions on the specifics of the new “avatar expressiveness”.
• [3:20-9:50] A general discussion on building the viewer, of interest to viewer devs and self-compilers.