Day: February 8, 2025

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, February 6th, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics. .

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status 2K Bakes on Mesh Linden Water Updates – Geenz Linden “Hide Water”- Water Exclusion Surfaces In Brief Next 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.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status

• Default viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, 2024, promoted December 20, 2024 – No Change.
• Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12999043440, February 4, 2025.
  • Numerous crash and performance fixes.

2K Bakes on Mesh

• 2K Bakes on Mesh now live across the grid – see:
  • 2K BOM is LIVE! Let the Baking Begin! (LL).
  • Lab officially announces 2K Bakes on Mesh is live for Second Life (this blog).

Linden Water Updates – Geenz Linden

• The “not so great news”: it is not possible to get Linden Water to look exactly as it did “pre-PBR”.
• The “great news” is that LL can get very close in terms of overall look.
  • Most of the old Fresnel reflection/refraction, together with some of the underwater fogging has been restored.
  • Some of the fixes for water are currently in the very latest Firestorm Beta (and will presumably be going into the official ForeverFPS RC, if not there already).
  • Feedback on the changes  – with the caveat things cannot (per above) ever be 1:1 with “pre-PBR” water appearance – is regarded as very important in order for the Lab to judge how well the changes are working.
•  This work is not the end of water tweaks; Geenz is looking at restoring real-time water reflections once the performance impacts of doing so can be assessed.
  • This will involve the use class of Hero reflection probe (like mirrors), which means the mirror capability as a whole will need additional optimisation work, as any frame rate drops it might incur are currently deemed as “not acceptable” by the team.
  • In addition, Geenz is looking at improving reflections more generally via the automatic reflection probes, such as reducing the moiré effect of Screen Space Reflections (SSR) on water.
  • The above will hopefully be released either in a dedicated viewer to follow ForeverFPS, or rolled into the viewer(s) directly following ForeverFPS.

“Hide Water” – Water Exclusion Surfaces

• Geenz Linden has been working to provide a means of excluding Linden Water from internal volumes such as boat hulls, and has arrived at a solution with the technical name Water Exclusion Surfaces (WES).
• The capability will hopefully be surfacing in an update to the ForeverFPS RC viewer. When it does:
  • It will likely be an option setting within the Texture tab of the Build / Edit floater, the name of which is still TBD, but is currently being referred to as “Hide Water”, and will work with most prim and mesh shapes to which it is applied (see the limitations notes, below).
• When used with boats and similar:
  • It will cull Linden Water and the associated subsurface fogging when looking down on the hull / surface from above.
  • If looked at from directly below, it will only cull the underwater plane, the fogging will be intact.
• Water exclusion surfaces should work as well as / better than invisiprims (e.g. they won’t clash with worn alphas or cause shader issues, occlusion culling will work correctly, etc.
• Limitations:
  • The capability will not provide volumetric water exclusion (e.g. “hiding” water from the inside of underwater buildings) –  This is a “future looking thing”, which might be addressed in the future. It is intended for use in boats and similar.
  • It is not intended to replace all use cases associated with invisiprims, and should not be taken to be a “replacement” for the latter.
  • The capability will not work when incorporated in an attachment (the attachment will render, but the exclusion surface will be ignored and will not hide Water)  or rigged mesh (the rigged mesh will likely be rendered black). This is by intent, to limit performance impacts. Also do not work on the system avatars.
  • There are some additional limits to ease performance impact (e.g. fogging will not get really dense when looking up through the water plane).

In Brief

• Placing Linden Water on prims or mesh: not a capability currently being developed, but one that is subject to internal discussions at times.
• It was again noted that many creators are still awaiting scripted support for PBR (e.g. PBR specific texture offset / UV coordinate manipulation).
  • This support is described as “still on the roadmap”, but may have had other priorities push it down the list of priorities.
  • The fact that creators are waiting on them will be taken back from the meeting for internal discussion.
• Cosmic Linden’s PBR terrain painting work remains on hold due to her being engaged in other work.  Work on glTF  mesh import is much the same.
• Geenz noted that following ForeverFPS there is a lot of additional render maintenance and similar work required on the viewer as well as additional  / in progress feature sets, and all of this work needs to be prioritised.
• Maxwell Graf recently posted a request to increase the polygon resolution for terrain  – and asked about the potential technical / performance issue this might cause (if any), and whether it is something that might be selectable (e.g. if you want the higher polygon resolution then enable it on your region(s), if you don’t – then don’t!).
  • The short answer to this, there is no technical reasons as to why not – beyond testing and assessment for unforeseen impacts; although a) the request itself has yet to be officially responded to; b) the above doesn’t necessarily mean it will be acted upon.
  • However, it did led to LL requesting people with ideas for SL terrain to file feature requests for future consideration.
• A further request was made for scenic backdrops to be available for regions (e.g. rendered options that can be rendered in place of the water and taking the form of a range of in-viewer selectable options – cityscape, forest, hills, mountains, etc., – so that actual mesh / sculpty based region surrounds do not have to be used.
  • This is something Sansar did reasonably well – including custom surrounds.
  • Feature requests via the feedback portal were asked for on this.
• It was noted that SL lighting still needs to be updated – again not on the immediate roadmap, but under consideration; however, the hoped-for punctual lighting has been pushed back.
  • An issue with updating lighting (and things related, like how shadows function), is that the lighting system was developed at a time (early 2000s) where it had to be constrained. While things have developed to a point where those constraints may no longer be applicable, they are nevertheless heavily baked-in to SL, and will require considerable effect to unpick and replace.
  • Feedback through the feedback portal on what people would like to see with lighting / shadows was requested, in order to help the Lab further understand expectations, determine options and factor feedback into a more holistic approach to lighting in SL at some point in the future.
• Screen Space Reflections (SSR): this is again something Geenz would like to get back to, but (again) would like feedback via the feedback portal on issues people have why they do / do not use SSR  –  particularly issues they have with SSR that are not related to Linden Water (e.g. on glossy surfaces), what they feel is needed, etc.
  • The general feedback on this was that SRR on other surfaces works reasonably well (if with random noise in places – which Geenz believes he has a handle on fixing in the future), and possibly increasing the angle at which it can be seen to take effect).

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, March 6th, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.