The following notes were taken from m y audio recording and chat log transcript of the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, March 17th 2023 at 13:00 SLT.
These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar; also note that the following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.
Official Viewers Status
- Release viewer: Maintenance Q(uality) viewer, version 6.6.9.577968 Thursday, February 2.
- Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
- Maintenance R RC viewer, version 6.6.10.578285, February 28 – translation updates and the return of slam bits, together with the Group Chat History functionality.
- Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.10.578270, issued February 24.
- Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.10.578172, February 21, 2023.
- Project viewers:
- PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.578792, March 15 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
- Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.
General Viewer Notes
- The Performance Floater / Auto FPS viewer is still being worked on in the hope that performance can be further improved on lower-end systems.
- Work is also being carried out to have the viewer work with a broader cross-section of translation tools.
Inventory Enhancement Project
- The work to provide thumbnail images of folders and items in Inventory is progressing on the viewer-side, but deployment will be dependent on both viewer availability (project / RC to release) and assorted back-end service and simulator updates to handle the new data.
- Once the thumbnail preview work has been completed, it is possible the Lab will look to further enhancements to inventory management. One future enhancement under consideration is support for folders to be included in the Contents inventory of individual objects.
In Brief
- See also my CCUG meeting summary, as this meeting crosses topics with that.
- Estate Level Scripted Agent Controls (aka “Ban the Bots”): per my SUG meeting notes, there is a new simulator release due to be deployed which will provide estate / region holders and their managers limit access to their regions by scripted agents (bots).
- This work will initially be console-based in the viewer until UI updates can be made and a viewer update with them deployed.
- However, a bug has been found in the simulator code, which is currently being worked upon. The hope is this will be fixed without any delay to the code being rolled-out.
- It was re-iterated that the next major new graphics project following glTF materials is likely to be support for Vulkan / MotenVK as the graphics API of preference (Windows / Mac). No time frame on when this work will commence, tho.
- As I reported in November 2022, Atlassian has announced it will be restructuring how it licenses the Jira bug reporting product from 2024 onwards.
- No decision on the direction LL will take as this change in made has as yet been taken, but there are ongoing internal discussions on options.
- However, at this point it appears as if whatever route LL decides to take, they will need to review how public issues are raised and passed to them, etc.
Next Meeting
- Friday, April 14th, 2023.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 