Day: June 10, 2023

2023 week #23: SL TPVD meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Nederlanse Bergee, April 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, June 9th 2023 at 13:00 SLT. These notes are via a combination of my own chat log transcript of each meeting, and / or the video recording made of each meeting by Pantera Północy and embedded at the end of this article. My thanks, as always, to her for recording these meetings.  Note that the following is a summary of the meeting as a whole, and not a transcript of everything discussed.

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

  • The Maintenance T RC viewer updated to version 6.6.13.580419 on June 7th.

The remaining official viewers currently in the pipeline remain unchanged through the week:

General Viewer Notes

  • The glTF / PBR material viewer (and project) are in bug fixing mode, specifically with some QA questions / concerns on the server side of things.
  • Inventory thumbnails viewer: work is progressing, and the simulator support code has been deployed to the simulator RC channels and is expected to go to the SLS Main channel in week #24.This will potentially allow the first release of an Inventory Thumbnails project viewer.
  • LL has completed the move of viewer builds to Github Actions, and has now successfully completed the first viewer builds along this new process. Th next step is to move all viewer-related work away from Team City completely.
  • This work also means that the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) for media handling is being updated.

In Brief

  • Prototyping is underway for the support of planar mirrors in SL and for the application of PBR materials on terrain (note, again, this is not PBR terrain painting, it is using PBR materials in place of the default terrain textures – see this blog post for more).
    • A test build of a viewer supporting the application of PBR materials for terrain has been made available through the Content Creation Discord server for limited testing, and feedback is being taken on this.
    • Work is underway to allow triplanar mapping for terrain repeats.
  • BUG-232037 “Avatar Online Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” was raised again, although more strictly a simulator issue. The precise cause(s) of the problem are still being investigated. Anecdotal evidence from some quarters claims the issue is getting worse, but whether this is objectively the case is questionable.

 Next Meeting

  • Friday, July 7th, 2023.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.