The following notes were taken from:
- My audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, June 6th, 2024.
- My audio recording + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, June 7th, 2024. My thank to Pantera as always for providing it.
Meetings Purpose
- The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work. This meeting is held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
- 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. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
- For both meetings: dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they re conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
- The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.
Official Viewers Status
- Release viewer: Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.7.8974243247, dated May 8th promoted May 13.
- Release channel cohorts:
- Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.8.9375512768, June 5.
- Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.7.8820704257, May 6.
- Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes), version 7.1.7.8820696922, April 29.
- Project viewers:
- WebRTC Voice project viewer, version 7.1.4.8947030231, May 8.
General Viewer Notes (Both Meetings)
- The latest Graphics Featurettes RC viewer is seen as the last RC update prior to this viewer being promoted, hopefully in week #24 if it passes QA. This will see the official release of Viewer-side setting of PBR materials for terrain; 2K texture upload support; glTF / PBR mirrors.
- A request has been made to fix an alpha asset mode issue prior to release. This is seen as unlikely, unless QA reject the viewer going to release status.
- It is anticipated the WebRTC viewer will move from project viewer status to RC viewer status with its next update.
- The initial RC viewer will support both Vivox Voice and WebRTC, depending on how voice is handled on the back-end for any given region.
- However, there may be issues when trying to use Voice across different regions / in groups where use of WebRTC and Vivox is mixed.
- See here for more on the WebRTC project.
- A planned Maintenance RC viewer (Maint A) is currently pending the resolution of a number of fixes, hence why Maint B and C are currently in the pipeline.
Graphics / glTF
General Notes on glTF / PBR (CCUG Meeting)
- Cosmic Linden is working on custom repeats for PBR terrain, allowing for higher texel densities to help reduce the “stretching” of textures of elevation changes) and better support 2K textures. This work is *not* part of the PBR Terrain updates in the Graphics Featurettes viewer, but will be part of a follow-on set of glTF updates currently contain within a development viewer branch on Github.
- This branch also includes a improvement specifically for Mac performance related to actions such as editing, moving UI elements around, etc.
- It has been noted that the current implementation for reading & writing glTF data has some limitations in terms of SL, so there is some internal work to re-write it to better fit the SL systems / services. Part of this work means Geenz is re-writing some of the work on glTF transmission to better fit the SL asset loader.
- This work will also assist the development work going into the glTF scene import project.
glTF Scene Import (TPVD Meeting)
- Recap:
- Development of the ability to import glTF scenes (objects, materials, animations, etc.), directly from Blender to Second Life. This includes a node hierarchy which will allow some degree of editing / modification of scene elements once imported. There will also be the ability to export scenes back to Blender for more extensive update by the creator. Both of these latter points (editing / export) will be subject to the SL permissions system.
- Scenes are liable to use the MSFT glTF extension for Level of Detail (LOD), as this allows LODs to be set per node within a scene, providing more intuitive / consistent LOD switching management (based on screen coverage).
- There will be constraints placed on scene imports (e.g. will not be able to have a scene which exceeds the capacity of a region; scenes will not be able to span more than one region (so as to avoid issues with physics, etc.); and so on).
- Status:
- Rapid prototyping of the ability to upload and preview glTF scenes is progressing. This can be tested via prototype viewer made available through the Content Creator Discord channel (apologies, but due to a request from Linden Lab I cannot provide details on how to join this channel, outside of contact Vir Linden) and on the glTF development / test regions on Aditi.
- The functionality currently remains that of being able to preview a scene – there is no actual simulator-side representation of the scene (e.g. it is viewer-side only, so only visible in the viewer used for the preview). Obviously, this will change as the work progresses.
- For those wishing to test the capability, note that there is an known issue with large file uploads for glTF scenes failing. This is being investigated by Pepper Linden.
- The work is now within the general development branch of the graphics / glTF work.
- Limits (avatar limits, land impact, number of vertices, faces, etc), will be defined in detail as the project develops, with any defined as a “must” within the glTF specification being a hard line, those defined as a “should” being considered as the baseline.
- [Video: 20:50-21:55] Transitioning to glTF scene support (when it ready for more widespread availability) will be in a manner akin to the introduction of mesh support back in 2011/12: those running viewers that have not updated to the code supporting glTF scene rendering will not see any scenes they enter, but will instead see “something akin to a little chiclet of a sculpt”.
Next Meetings
- CCUG: 13:00 SLT, Thursday, June 20th, 2024, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
- TPVD: 13:00 SLT, Friday, July 5th, 2024 at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
† 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 gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 