Day: October 18, 2024

2024 week #42: SL CCUG summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Mad Hatter’s Tea Room, September 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 17th, 2024. There was no livestream or video for this meeting

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.
  • Meeting 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 Update

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10800445603, formerly the DeltaFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, etc), dated September 11th, promoted September 17th.
  • Release Candidate: ExtraFPS RC, version 7.1.11.11074622243, September 30.
    • Performance improvements: enhanced texture memory tracking, broader hardware compatibility and higher FPS gain.
    • Aesthetics improvements: new Antialiasing setting – SMAA; Contrast Adaptive Sharpening; Khronos Neutral Tone Mapping (can be changed to ACES via the RenderTonemapType Debug setting).

Near-Term Viewer Release Roadmap

  • ExtraFPS work remains focused on bug fixes.
  • The first maintenance RC to follow ExtraFPS will be the Maint B viewer, which will include updates put on hold during the focus on performance issues plus additional updates, some of which may be further “post-PBR” performance / aesthetic improvements.
    • Maint B, as noted previously in these summaries, will have updates to help with Linux support / builds.
  • Maintenance C is also being put together, but updates changes have not yet be specified, outside of a desire to keep the changes separate to Maint B in the interests of keeping updates easier to manage.

Avatar LookAt /  Eye Tracking in the Viewer

  • A conversation relating to avatar eye movement / use of Look At cross hairs (& the resultant drama it can cause (“Stop perving me!”), and whether because of the latter, the capability should be removed completely from the viewer.
    • The core problem is, even though the option for a user to see their own LookAts in the Official viewer is disabled by default, the data (cross hairs and avatar name) is broadcast to surrounding viewers, resulting in unwarranted drama (“Stop perving me!” or “You’re on the wrong viewer!”).
    • Various viewers handle this situation in different ways; some follow the SL viewer, other’s provide means to see the LookAt crosshairs from others whilst supressing their own LookAt data (e.g. so I can see your LookAt crosshairs (if not supressed), but you cannot see mine – possibly leading to more drama).
    • Given this, LL sought the best way to reduce the level of upset: remove the LookAt broadcast altogether, or limit it / make it subject to having be physically turned on through a debug. The consensus of replies appeared to be to limit it / disable it behind a setting.
  • This conversation also crossed-over into avatar head movement tracking the movements of the mouse (e.g. you move the mouse up to the menu bar and your avatars head tracks upwards, then you move to a toolbar to the side or bottom of the window, and your avatar’s head again tracks).
    • This is perhaps more immersion-breaking that Look Ats (drama on the latter notwithstanding) and as  some TPVs allowing such head movement to be disabled, there was a consensus that this should be disabled / removed from the viewer.

Graphics Team Work

PBR Terrain Transforms and PBR Terrain Painting

  • PBR terrain transforms: As per my week #38 update, PBR terrain Texture transforms for applying scale, offset and rotation to any one of the four PBR terrain materials, have been developed for use in the viewer.
    • The capability is a subset of the KHR texture transform.
    • Currently the viewer-side options are setting behind debug flags.
    • The simulator support for this work is currently targeting the Barbeque simulator update, which is due to start deployment after the  WebRTC simulator deployments.
  • PBR Terrain Painting: the work on PBR terrain painting (see my week #31 update for a summary and previous status) has been “shelved” for the foreseeable future.
    • While no specific reason for this was given at the meeting, it seemed implied that this work has been superseded by the need to focus on other work for the time being.

General glTF / Graphics Comments

  • In response to a question about additional  glTF work, Runitai Linden confirmed that user-made shaders will not be supported, but blend shapes and (possibly) animation of texture coordinate transforms from Blender.
  • Displacement maps won’t be supported for the time being as their is no available glTF specification for them.
  • Given the percentage of people not using PBR enabled viewers, LL is considering adding a simulator-side update that can detect a non-PBR viewer, and then take the base colour and Normal layer from the PBR material and move them to the Blinn-Phong parameter, so users on those viewers will at least see some surface detail on PBR objects rather than only seeing then a flat grey surfaces or untextured prims.

In Brief

  • A fair portion of the meeting was taken up with issues pertaining to the New User Experience / Marketplace issues – both of which those Lindens (Engineers) at the meeting were unable to directly address as these areas are outside of their remit.

Next Meeting

† 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.