2023 week 13: SL CCUG meeting summary

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, March 30th, 2023 at 13:00 SLT. 

These meetings are for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current work, upcoming work, and requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work. They are chaired by Vir Linden, and dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.

Notes:

• These meetings are conducted in mixed voice and text chat. Participants can use either to make comments / ask or respond to comments, but note that you will need Voice to be enabled to hear responses and comments from the Linden reps and other using it. If you have issues with hearing or following the voice discussions, please inform the Lindens at the meeting.
• 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.

Additional note: unfortunately, physical world matters meant I missed the initial part of the meeting, and as it is held in voice, there is little by way of chat transcript to reflect initial discussions prior to my arrival.

Official Viewer Status

• On March 30th, the Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, was promoted to de facto release status.
• On March 31st, the  Maintenance S RC viewer updated to version 6.6.11.579153, bringing it to parity with the above release viewer.

The rest of the current official viewers remain as:

• Release channel cohorts:
  • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.10.578172, February 21, 2023.
• Project viewers:
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.578921, March 23 – 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.

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

• To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
• To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
• The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
• In the near-term, glTF materials assets are materials scenes that don’t have any nodes / geometry, they only have the materials array, and there is only one material in that array.
  • It is currently to early to state how this might change when glTF support is expanded to include entire objects.
• The project viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page, but will only work on the following regions on Aditi (the Beta grid):  Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
• Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.

Status

• The viewer is still being progressed, and will likely update to keep in line with the current release viewer.
  • There is still a bug with glow which needs to be addressed, but this is not seen as a significant issue in terms of fixing.
• Information in support of PBR materials and reflection probes is in development. This includes new wiki pages and – at least for reflection probes, if not both, new tutorial videos.
  • A very much Work In Progress version of the wiki information can be found in: PBR Materials.
• The methodology for modifying PBR materials via script is to have the materials contained within glTF assets which can be stored in inventory (containing an LLSD header and glTF JSON, with the texture / material UUID stored in the image URI field), with LSL APIs used to modify the parameters within the glTF file.
  • Manual modification of the parameters can be done via the viewer UI in a similar manner to manipulating textures, etc., currently offered by the viewer.
  • The LSL APIs will work in a similar manner to functions such as llSetPrimPratams, etc. The only thing that cannot be changed in is actual image data.
• For testing, it was noted the “local materials” should allow Materials to be tested directly from a user’s computer in a similar manner to local textures (and only visible in that user’s world view), which dynamic updating of the materials in the session as they are locally modified.

In Brief

• Requests have been made for a more visual coding capability in SL to help those who are not programmers  / scripters, with the likes of capabilities similar to Blueprints in Unreal Engine. While such tools as the latter are acknowledged as being useful for putting snippets of code together, the notion of a visual coding system is seen by LL as potentially cumbersome for the results they would garner.
• A very general discussion on games in SL.

Next Meeting

• Thursday, April 6th, 2023.