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 20th, 2024.
Meeting 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.
- In regards to meetings:
- Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.
- Commence at 13:00 SLT on their respective dates.
- Are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
- Are open to all with an interest in content creation.
- 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: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
- Release channel cohorts:
- Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.9.9469671545, June 14.
- Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.8.9130881608, June 10.
- Project viewers:
- WebRTC Voice project viewer, version 7.1.4.8947030231, May 8.
WebRTC Voice Update
Not strictly a Content Creation tool / subject, but of import to SL as a whole.
Summary
- A project intended to replace the Vivox Voice system with the WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”).
- Will see the removal of the SLplugin.EXE from the viewer, to be replaced with a library wrapper within the viewer.
- Offers much better and more flexible voice support across platforms, with improved capabilities (e.g. automatic echo cancellation, automatic gain control, better noise cancellation) with better audio sampling / quality.
- Also opens the door to adding new features and capabilities to SL Voice, some of which have been long-requested.
- Care is being taking to address potential security issues (e.g. preventing eavesdropping, exposing users’ IP address (by using an internal proxy server), etc.).
- During the transitional period as WebRTC is deployed on the back-end and gradually made available by viewers, support will be provided for both Vivox and WebRTC (i.e. if you are using a viewer using the Vivox plug-in, you will connect to voice via Vivox, and if using a viewer with WebRTC, then that protocol will be used.
- Both Vivox and WebRTC work together, but their may be some initial limitations / issues until the project is fully deployed and the switch made.
- Feature requests for WebRTC made via the WebRTC board on the SL Feedback Portal are being evaluated and some are being actioned, together with issues being investigated.
Status
- There is a Project viewer available on the Alternate Viewers page. Thus is expected to to to Release Candidate status very soon.
- The server support is currently available on the region WebRTC on the main grid.
- The focus is currently on getting the viewer code up to release status so it can be adopted by TPVs, with a gradual deployment of the server code, however, it is unlikely the latter will be widely deployed until after the viewer code has been more fully adopted.
- That said, this is something of a priority project, likely to be fast-tracked as much as possible.
Graphics / glTF
Terrain
- Cosmic Linden is working on PBR terrain custom repat controls allowing for improved Texel densities to help reduce the “stretching” of textures of elevation changes) and better support 2K textures.
- Most of the viewer work for this is now almost complete, but is awaiting simulator-side support on Aditi in order to be offered in a test viewer.
- There is a more general bug where PBR terrain does not render in planar mirrors, and Cosmic is also working on trying to resolve this issue.
- PBR Terrain painting: depending on how the above progress, Cosmic hopes to be able to start looking into the potential for PBR terrain painting in the near future. Currently the tentative plan is:
- To allow land owners to control the mix of the four PBR materials on terrain, rather than the current situation where it’s determined by some elevation weights plus some noise added on top.
- This capability will potentially be allowed for whoever can edit the terrain heights in a given parcel.
glTF Scene Import
- Runitai Linden is continuing to work on glTF scene import. The focus remains on the viewer-side code.
- As previously noted, this allows glTF scenes to be uploaded, tied to an in-world object and previewed in the viewer.
- The support for this is available on the Rumpus Room regions on Aditi (the Beta Grid).
- Actual simulator / back-end support for glTF scene will not start to be implemented until after the viewer side of the code is in better shape.
- The overall goal is to get scene import working with Blender (and in accordance with the glTF specification), and mee the requirements / guidelines outline in the Blender glTF Imort / Export documentation. The plan is to:
- Support all of the animation data defined in the document.
- Support “most” of the materials data in additional to the already supported metallic roughness & emissive unlit.
- As this work is still in the prototype phase no decisions have been made regarding the potential Land Impact for scenes or how LI will be calculated. This will come later in the project, once LL have more of a handle on things (upload, streaming, download, runtime cost, etc.).
- There are also a lot of additional decisions yet to be made regarding this work – the LSL API, avatar limits (which can be attached to an avatar within a scene), all of which mean it will sill be a while before glTF scene imports are ready for any form of testing on the main grid (Agni).
General Notes
- Runitai Linden is looking at the render pipe and possible optimisations and the potential to improve things like rendering objects, etc. Some of this work is likely to find its way back into production viewers in time.
- This work also includes refinements to mirrors (e.g. so they get occluded, improvements to the update rate, etc).
- Geenz Linden continues to work on Transmission and Index of Reflection (IOR), however, as they were out of the office for this meeting, no update was available.
- Proper support for HDRI skies is being increasingly requested as a result of the Graphics Featurette viewer, and this work may be accelerated. However, they will require a new asset type.
Next Meeting
- 13:00 SLT, Thursday, July 18th, 2024, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
† 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 