Day: April 14, 2023

The following notes were taken from m y audio recording and chat log transcript of the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday,  April 14th 2023 at 13:00 SLT. Meeting Overview

• The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development.
• As a rule, these meetings are:
  • Generally held once a month  the third or fourth Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre. See the SL Public Calendar for specific meeting dates.
  • Open to all with an interest in viewer development.
  • Conducted in a mix of text and voice.
• The notes herein are drawn from a mix of my own chat log and audio recording of the meeting, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Official Viewers Status

[Video 0:00-2:51]

• Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
  • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.11.579238, April 4th.
  • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
• Project viewers:
  • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 11 – 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.

Future Viewer Notes

• Inventory thumbnails viewer: work is progressing well, however as well as viewer changes and additions to the inventory database (the latter of which has been completed), it will require updates to the Avatar Inventory System (AIS) and a simulator update, so the will be no project or RC viewer until this back-end work has been done.
• Work has resumed on providing emoji support in the viewer (Oh, joy.). This work is based on a contribution from the Catznip viewer.

In Brief

• [Video: 3:04-5:46] PBR Materials mini-update:
  • The viewer has been updated, but is still at Project Viewer status.
  • A new dynamic exposure setting has been added to improve tone mapping.
  • Bug fixing work is continuing, and Brad Linden is working on getting PBR Materials to work more robustly over networks with heavy loads.
  • The hope is that the next viewer update will clear QA for release as an RC viewer, so that it will be available when the back-end / simulator support gets deployed to the Preflight simulator channel which Rider Linden hopes to achieve in week #16.
  • Making the PBR work more widely available by enabled Agni (Main grid) support and moving the viewer to RC status is seen as a key test of how will the Graphics Team has managed to both support the PBR rendering and maintain the broad look and feel of SL as it appears under the current rendering.
• Genesis is working on an update which will include and expanded Preferences, together with the ability to search Preferences.
• A general discussion on a third-party viewer (Rust) that is in development, but not ready for prime-time, server-side rendering and a ringing of the memory bell for the Pelican (IIRC streaming viewer LL toyed with back in around 2007). Please refer to the video, below.

 Next Meeting

• Friday, May 12th, 2023.