2023 SL SUG meetings week #48 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 28th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this summary, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording the meeting and providing it.

Apologies for the lateness of this summary, RL is not playing nice at the moment.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice)
  • At this location.
• They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• Tuesday, November 28th: support for PBR Materials was deployed to the SLS Main channel, making it grid-wide.
• Wednesday, November 29th: the “Fall Colours” maintenance update should be deployed to the BlueSteel RC. This will include llRezObjectWithParams, llIsFriend, but will not include the game controller updates.
• “Fall Colours” is liable to be the last simulator update for 2023.

Viewer Updates

The glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.1.6894459864, dated November 17th, was promoted to de facto release status on November 28th, in line with the grid-wide deployment of PBR Materials.

Other viewers in the pipe remain as:

• Release channel cohorts:
  • Maintenance X RC, version 6855926535, issued November 21 – usability improvements.
  • Maintenance Y, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
  • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 6.6.17.6935636398, November 21.
  • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.17.6898288582, November 20.
  • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.

Game Controllers

• The code remains under internal review at the Lab, particularly around the UI elements needed to support it in the viewer.
• Runitai Linden has suggested seeing if it is possible to support a system where the scripter can specify custom input names, which show up in the UI with a select-and-toggle method of mapping game device inputs to those channels, as Leviathan Linden explained at the meeting:

Suppose you were making some custom game with very custom input names (e.g. not “Strafe” and “Jump”), like a Twerking game and you wanted “Wiggle”, “Waggle”, and “Bop” to be the names of your inputs. The scripter would be able to call something like… llGameControlMappings([“Wiggle”, GAME_CONTROL_AXIS_0, “Waggle”, GAME_CONTROL_AXIS_3, “Bop”, GAME_CONTROL_BUTTON_2]); The viewer would then get that info and be able to provide custom UI for setting those input names to the various axes or buttons on whatever device you happen to be using.

– Leviathan Linden describing a proposed custom button names for games controllers

• This led to an extended discussion on game controller, mapping buttons, options and approaches.
• Leviathan also noted the current version of the back-end support for games controller will be made available on a simulator channel on Aditi (the Beta grid) later in the week.

In Brief

• The straw man document Rider Linden has been putting together on combat system improvements is now being circulated within the Lab for comments and feedback. Expect more probably in the new year.
• The above, together with BUG-233210 “Third Person View With Mouselook Functionality”, led to a discussion on camera positions, remote vehicle control, etc., which in turn led to a broad conversation on camera placement options and camera control.
• Region Crossings: no major update from Monty, who has been out of the office.
• A mixed discussion on frame rates (including confusion between server-side frame rates and client FPS performance), region crossings co-habiting regions which are adjoining one another as a defined group on the same simhost server, and much else that was mostly user-side in terms of input. Please refer to the video below.

† 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.