2023 week #19: SL TPVD meeting summary (PBR terrain)

Posted on by Inara Pey
Dragonfly, March 2023 – blog post
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, May 12th 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

General Viewer Notes

  • Inventory thumbnails viewer: work is progressing and a public-facing viewer should be available in the “not too distant future”.
    • The viewer-side work to support emojis is now more-or-less complete, and release of any project viewer is pending some additional back-end work.
  • There will be changes coming to the Second Life System Requirements, minimum specifications:
    • Mac OSX will be set at version 11.
    • Window 32-bit is liable to be dropped.
  • LL is close to completing the move of viewer builds to Github Actions. This has involved getting many of the 3rd party libraries for the viewer updated and refreshing all build dependencies.
  • This work also means that the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) for media handling is being updated.

Terrain “Mini Project”

  • There is a project underway to provide PDR support for terrain.
  • The overall scope is not clear, but it apparently exploits an asset-checking weakness in the simulator code related to terrain, allowing the use of Materials asset IDs in place of the usual texture  IDs, allowing them to be applied to the ground.
  • This is seen as a means of leveraging PBR Materials to offer some quality improvements to terrain ahead of any longer-term terrain project which might yet be considered / actioned.
  • It is hoped that this work will be available in a project viewer Soon™.

In Brief

  • PBR Materials mini-update:
    • Overall visual quality is pretty much where it will be when the viewer reaches formal release status.
    • There are still issues with rendering the sky – such as alpha glitching on the Sun. This is being worked on, but it is unlikely to see an imminent solution / viewer update.
    • Other known issues are also being worked on and progress is being made in clearing them.
  • A general discussion of the on-line  / off-line friends issues (frequently raised t the Server User Group meetings) – see BUG-232037 “Avatar Online Offline Status Not Correctly Updating”. As per notes from that meeting, the UDP fix does not appear to have had the desired impact in helping to reduce the issue, and LL are looking at the matter again.
  • A lot of general chat on WIP regarding PBR Materials and reflection probes, most of it relating to issues likely to be addressed – please refer to the video.
  • A general discussion on possible standards for avatar “metaverse interoperability” which runs through the latter half of the meeting. As a theoretical discussion rather than something LL is working on, please refer to the video.
  • There is also some further discussion on the Puppetry project, however, this will form an addendum to my recent Puppetry Project meeting summary, as it is more relevant there.

 Next Meeting

  • Friday, June 9th, 2023.

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Published by Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.