Meeting Purpose
- The Mobile User Group provides a platform to share insights on recent mobile updates and upcoming features, and to receive feedback directly from users.
- These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
- The last Thursday of every month at 12:00 noon SLT.
- In Voice and text.
- At Campwich Forest.
- Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
- Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.
Resources
- Second Life Mobile Beta website.
- Second Life Mobile on the Feedback Portal:
Release Updates and “Coming Soon”
Version: 2025.3.548 (Android); 0.5.534 (iOS)
- Issue: Not receiving items! – inventory offers received when using Mobile failing to appear in Inventory once logged-in on the Desktop viewer. This has now been fixed.
- Dash for Cash has proven popular, and has seen a small update in that it now references avatars by name.
“Coming Soon”
- If you teleport whilst in the Lobby, a teleport pop-up will be displayed in addition to the teleport progress bar at the top of the Lobby screen.
- Settings clean-up:
- The Max Avatars drop-down is due to move from the Developer tools list (Menu → Settings → </> Developer Tools) up to the main Settings menu.
- Group notifications are to become more granular, allowing notifications for specific groups to be turned on / off.
- Initial groundwork so that people can access the Lobby feature without their avatars having to be physically in-world:
- This will see the the Sign Out button move from the Menu up to the Profile bar, and a new button introduced to the Menu: Return to Lobby.
- When implemented, avatars will still be rendered in-world and seen as on-line, as this is only the groundwork. However, it is hoped that things will progress over the next few months to reach a point where using the Lobby, as noted, does not require the avatar to be present in-world.
- Additional quality of life updates are also targeting the May update, but the meeting was considered “a little too early” to discuss them.
Avatar Update
- The core of the meeting was a presentation from Adam Sinewave on some of the challenges involved in rendering avatars on SL Mobile, the approach taken, status to date and work that should be appearing in upcoming releases.
- This presentation took the form of a slide show with comments from Adam, and I’ve embedded a video of it below, with a concatenated summary of Adam’s comments. to see the latter in full, please watch the video directly in You Tube and click the transcript button in the video’s description area.
- SL Mobile is a fully ground-up rebuild of Second Life for Mobile devices (utilising the Unity engine), utilising a very different architecture compared to the Desktop Viewer and with no common code, in order to work within the constraints of most Mobile devices.
- This is particularly evident in the case of avatar rendering, where the different approaches to avatar skeletons as substantial:
- The SL system is largely “monolithic” (for want of a better term): a single skeleton per avatar containing multiple bone sets, all capable of being positioned be shape, deformer animation, with no deterministic (or even an entirely random) approach to the ordering / priority of such changes.
- The Unity system is more flexible and robust, but as a result can bring rendering quirks and issues hidden by the SL system into sharp relief.
- Testing such avatar for issues and the effectiveness of fixes applied (regression testing) has until recently been manually-intensive requiring eye-on testing for each an every issue / fix. However, time has been spent building an in-house testing / regression system to automate a lot of this work, greatly speeding the process of issue identification, fixing and testing.
- Outside of the above, there are still areas of work associated with avatars (some of which impact in-world objects as well) still to be address, and doing so will take time. These include at the time of the video:
- “Not Working”: Animesh; avatar lighting; transparency on avatars (alpha layers); PBR materials rendering. All of these will be addressed, but the time frame is liable to be longer-term and the priority of work subject to change.
- Partially working: Flexi wearables (partially supported, but in need of improvement); system eyes (positioned based on a “average” placement within the skull and which requires further improvement).
- Silhouetting (avatars appearing transparent in the Mobile app): this is viewed as overly-aggressive, but has been necessary to ensure avatars only render when “complete”, so as to avoid any nudity that might collide with Apple’s rules on such. Unfortunately, this exposes a number of areas where avatar loading can fail and the avatar becoming such as a silhouette. Work is progressing on addressing these issues, but it will require a cycle of multiple updates.
- A look at (at the time of the meeting) some of of the upcoming avatar fixes improvements – including expanding the avatar test suite and, for users: improvements to resource loading and texture handling, allowing more to be seen and enabling avatars to be loaded / unloaded as they enter / leave view.
- It was noted that much of this work has yet to reach the Mobile app (Alpha or Beta), be will be doing so in upcoming releases.
In Brief
Please refer to the video for details on the following and other questions which may have had a simple “yes” or “in progress” reply.
- [Video: 45:56-47:10] A question on whether mesh creators simply using the default right-hand attachment point of avatar items can cause issues with losing items or how alpha blends work when compared to Desktop.
- In terms of alpha blends, Mobile uses a different approach to layering (order-independent transparency using Z-depth rather than attachment order), such issues of layer ordering doesn’t apply.
- It’s acknowledged that this might not quite match what creators are expecting, but it allow for a more efficient use of resources.
- [Video: 47:38-48:48] SL and Unity handle rotation differently.
- SL’s coordinates are based on right-handed rotation with the Z axis as up; Unity uses left-handed rotation with the Y axis as Up. Thus, a translation system between the two is required, which can lead to issues.
- Further complications can be introduced as a result of animations using rotation.
- Fixes have been developed to address the more noticeable issues, which will be appearing in the next “update or two”.
- [Video: 49:37-50:44] Inventory access through Mobile is on the roadmap. However, it is a very large, resource-intensive project with a lot of impact.
- As such, as, when and how it is tackled is a matter of strategic consideration alongside other priorities.
- Currently, it is not something that has seen any “substantial” work carried out.
- [Video: 50:52-50:54 (text] Mobile app hanging with “Not Responding” and the options to Close App or Wait:
- The workaround for this at present is to go to the Developer Tools (Menu → Settings → </> Developer Tools), locate the Max Memory Limit drop-down and reduce the amount of memory (e.g. to 30% or 25%).
- Further work has been made to general performance, which should be going into upcoming releases. As such, reports on the issue would be appreciated if it continues to manifest after these are available.
- [Video: 51:01-52:53] Has anything been learnt from Mobile (thus far) that can be used to improve the Desktop experience?
- Suggestions have been passed to the Desktop viewer team from Mobile.
- There is a desire to unify experiences between the viewer and Mobile where possible (e.g. such as unifying chat history) and which may require changes to the viewer as well as updates to Mobile. However when such work will be carried out was unclear at the time of the meeting.
- Outside of user-facing work, the avatar testing tool is something potentially of interest to the Desktop team as well.
- There is an issue with certain fonts in name tags not displaying correctly on Mobile. This is known and will be investigated.
Date of Next Meeting
- 12:00 SLT, Thursday, May 29th, 2025, at Campwich Forest.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 