The following notes were taken from 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, January 17th, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.
Meeting Purpose
- 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.
- 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
[Video: 1:13-2:17 and [4:07-4:45]
- Release viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20 – No Change.
- Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12793544240, January 17, 2025.
- Numerous crash and performance fixes.
Upcoming Viewers
- ForeverFPS surfaced somewhat faster as an RC viewer than had been anticipated at the CCUG meeting.
- Other plans for viewer updates are under review; there a numerous code commits in the Develop branch awaiting a viewer, but collectively, they are regarded as to many to all go into a single viewer update, so the order of release over several viewer updates needs to be determined.
WebRTC / Updating to Viewers with WebRTC Support / Rendering Holdbacks
- Further re-iteration of the desire to see as many users as possible to move from viewers which lack WebRTC support (e.g. Firestorm 6.6.17) to those (predominantly PBR-based) viewers with the WebRTC support, so that the Vivox service can be turned off across the grid.
- A further request was made as to why people are resistant.
- Once again, the response was largely around the quality of the reflections / general look of the Linden Water plane on PBR viewers, lack of exclusion volumes for water; darker ambient tones to natural lighting.
- Ambient issues, particularly with legacy EEP skies should have been largely corrected in ExtraFPS.
- It was also pointed out that there are cohorts of users who are happy with what works for them, even if half their in-world view seems to be “broken” in some manner, and simply will not update as long as the viewer they use can still access SL.
- A particular issue here with regards to WebRTC, is that while a high percentage of users are not updating to viewers with PBR + WebRTC support, it is not clear how many would be adversely affected by the loss of Vivox voice, given that many in SL rarely, if ever use Voice. If the number is small, turning off Vivox might not be an issue; if the number is large, it could cause people to abandon SL.
- It was also suggested that wider communications from LL (and TPVs) on the nature of upcoming changes like WebRTC might help to make users more aware of what is going on.
- In response to exclusion volumes and water quality / reflections, Geenz Linden noted:
- There might be a way to provide exclusion volumes for water (e.g. to prevent water rendering inside boat hulls, etc.), but the issue is complicated.
- There has been a regression in the way water appears and generates reflections; part of this was the result of the “pre-PBR” means of rendering water required multiple passes, which became a performance issue. However, improving water is on his list of things to do, and he hopes that some of the ideas he has will also help improve screen space reflections (SSR) .
- However, he also indicated that bring back “full real-time reflections” on water is a not insignificant ask, and will likely only be possible after the moiré system has been further optimised, as reflection generation will likely piggyback off of that. As such, the work to recover water reflections will take time and will be iterative in nature, and there may be impacts on the general appearance of water.
- Commenting on SSR, Geenz also noted that while improvements can be made, it will be “really hard” to return SSR quality to pre-PBR – but then, pre-PBR SSR had its own performance issues. As such, work in this area requires careful consideration on how to make improvements without impacting performance.
In Brief
- [Video: 2:17-4:07] A further announcement on the departure of Runitai Linden (see: Runitai Linden departs LL for public service).
- [Video: 24:14-29:30] General discussion / opinions on how and where to present assorted graphical settings and options within the Preferences / debugs, and how users understand / learn about the viewer’s internals.
- [Video 30:16-32:25] Discussion on graphics and lighting – improving HDRi rendering, ambient like, introducing punctual lighting, using physical units for lighting.
- [Video: 37:14-43:40] EventQueueGet is a simulator Capability that delivers messages from a simulator to viewers over HTTP using a long-poll scheme. It is core functionality without which viewer/simulator coordination is impossible. However, a number of defects in the design and maintenance of this capability have been found (see here for both defects and proposals to resolve).
- Monty Linden has implemented a “phase 1” project to address some of these issues, and has set-up a channel of several regions on Aditi (the Beta grid) for public testing of the changes to validate that they do not in fact break anything. He has also published information on how users can help with the test and what is involved in the “phase 1” work.
- During the meeting, he requested that people take the time to visit the test regions, carry out TPs and physical crossing between regions, leaving suitably scripted objects running on the regions, etc., per the testing information forum topic and report back via the topic or via the Feedback Portal.
- This work may become part of the Banana Bread simulator release (still in the process of being defined), and further references to the work will most likely be via the Simulator User Group meetings.
- User groups for discussing Project Zero / SL Mobile:
- The Project Zero viewer-in-a-browser project is open for discussion at the Web User Group (as Sntax Linden leads both the WUG group and Project Zero); and it has been indicated it might spin-up its own user group in time.
- There are internal discussions going on in the Lab about starting a SL Mobile User Group. More to follow on this.
Next Meeting
- Friday, February 14th, 2025 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 