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.
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 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.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 