Day: April 4, 2025

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, April 3rd, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics .

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status and Updates Viewer Status Upcoming Viewers glTF Mesh Upload / Importer Texture Streaming Updates Removing Scale From LI Calculations 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 generally 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 and Updates

Viewer Status

• Default viewer: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th – No change.
• Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2025.03 version 7.1.13.14174767759, April 2nd – New.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.13907344519, April 2nd – New.
  • Will only work on Aditi. Blog post: Lab officially announces Luau Alpha testing.

Upcoming Viewers

• The current version of 2025.03 will remain in soak for the next few days in the hope that it will be ready for promotion to de facto release status “in the very near future”.
• The April release – 2025.04 – is provisionally targeting:
  • The glTF mesh uploader (based on the current .DAE mesh uploader and doing pretty much the same). Again, please note that this is not the full glTF scene importer which has been discussed at previous CCUG meetings; that work is being broken down into smaller, more easily managed projects.
  • Possibly – and subject to confirmation – re-enabling subfolders within the My Outfits folder.
  • Hover height improvements.

glTF Mesh Upload / Importer

• The outline of this work can be found in Add Simple (llmesh) GLTF Model Import.
• In short: it should be taken that whatever can be done within the existing .DAE uploader will remain so for uploading glTF mesh models at the first pass, and enhancements will come later.
  • This means that anything that is compliant with COLLADA which can be currently imported to SL via the uploader will work under glTF.
  • Any “new” capabilities not available to the current uploader will then be duly considered an implemented over time.
  • This is not a replacement for COLLADA format uploads – it is an addition to; uploading of .DAE objects will remain possible unless support for COLLADA becomes untenable.
• The reason for this approach is to avoid having a large-scale glTF import project (variously referred to has “scene import” or the “Post-Materials Features Project” or PMFP), which would take months / years to develop, enhance and ship, and instead be more spritely in development and improvements.
  • This does not mean that everything that had been targeting the scene import / PMFP work will be abandoned.
  • Rather, it means those aspects which could end-up delaying it due to the amount of research, development and testing required to support them (e.g. custom skeletons / rigged meshes) can be put to one side for future development, rather than preventing the foundations to enable them from being laid.
• The back-end format for imported mesh objects (“SL mesh”) will not be changing at this time.  One of the reasons for this is the “SL mesh” format allows for easy upload of selected LODs.
  • However, this does not mean the format will not be improved upon in the future (and even a possible hybrid glTF / SL Mesh format implemented).
• One aspect of the new mesh uploader will be the potential for adding materials-related glTF extensions to the current Khronos glTF specification.
  • These include (but are not limited to) the likes of the glTF specular extension, transmission, IOR, iridescence, emissive strength etc.
  • Geenz Linden is particularly interested in these, as the uploader allows them to be quickly added, and he would like to put together a package of extensions that a) creators can readily use; b) help move things towards being better placed to support other aspects of the PMFP work.
• There was more discussion on support for uploading complete mesh region surrounds – this again was seen as something for consideration after the initial phases for implementing the glTF upload have been completed, and something possibly requiring the implementation of something like a node hierarchy.

Texture “Stutter” Issues

• The recently introduced changes to texture use of VRAM have resulted in some users experiencing “viewer stutter” when the viewer is loading / uploading textures in a scene.
• As a result, the options to define texture VRAM settings have been disabled in the 2025.03 RC.
• Geenz Linden is anticipating being able to work on this issue later in April with a view to determine the cause and hopefully rectifying it.
  • This work will likely also look at texture streaming in general and make adjustments where textures tend to get loaded at resolutions that “don’t make sense” at the time of loading, and so improve that.
• It is not anticipated that this work will start to surface much before the 2025.06 viewer development cycle.

Removing Scale From LI Calculations

• Signal Linden highlighted a Feedback Ticket he has raised, proposing the removal of scale from Land Impact calculations, which has been touched upon at the last couple of SUG meetings.
• However, there are now a few caveats starting to appear possibly impacting “everything from rendering to physics”, which require further internal discussion at LL.
• One of these is the LI goes in both directions – so while removing scale from the calculation may be positive for a net reduction in the LI of objects that have been scaled up in size – it could have a net negative for objects scaled down (e.g. you have a group of objects each with 20 LI, and have scaled them down so each only has 10 LI, removing scale would reset them to 20 LI apiece).

In Brief

• Allowing larger Linksets: raised at recent SUG meetings as well, this has not been ruled out for the future, but has some inherent issues, notably:
  • Limitations within the current physics engine, which would probably have to be updated.
  • Interest List issues – if a scene has a particularly massive linkset within it, it could simply fail to render in a viewer using a limited Draw Distance, simply because the root prim is outside of the viewer’s DD, even if child elements of the object are within range.
• PBR Bakes on Mesh: this is seen as having a minimum of two requirements:
  • Providing PBR specular support.
  • Being able to set blend modes for different layers. This has some added complications in how blend modes should work for different types of maps, and this needs to be worked through in terms of implementation.
• LSL Support for PBR:
  • llSetPrimParamsFast should work with PBR materials.
  • Rider Linden will try to get at least llSetAlpha and llSetColor updated to support PBR (with intelligent switching between the use of linear and RGB colour space depending on whether BP or PBR is being affected) within the next simulator update, which is currently being put together.
  • The bug report PBR Colour data is lost when setting PBR overrides has yet to be further addressed.
• The viewer / graphics roadmap is being reviewed, and it is hoped that and updates / decisions on direction will be available for discussion at the next CCUG meeting.
• The is no time frame on the delivery of “water exclusion volumes” (i.e. the ability to hide Linden Water entirely from the inside volume of an underwater room). Again, it is not because this cannot be done, but rather there is other work deemed as having a higher priority LL wish to address.
• It was found that the water shoreline fade was causing issues with shoreline water effects (e.g. things like mesh shoreline elements using alphas to simulate the ebb and flow of shoreline tide looking broken / patchy / flickering), and so the fading has been disabled until the issue can be corrected.
  • It is possible this might for a wider piece of work to improve water / sky environment assets in general to make the ambient environment rendering less likely to break content.
• Improving light sources (e.g. punctual lights, better point lighting, etc.) is seen as a future issue to be addressed before of current limitations within the current forward rending. Forward+ is one potential way forward, but this would require proper scoping ahead of any attempt to change the current rendering system.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, April 17th, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.