Author: Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

2021 CCUG meeting week #26 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Butterfly Conservatory, April 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, July 1st, 2021. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar and the venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates for the any of the official viewer versions, leaving the pipelines as follows:

General Viewer Notes

  • The Fernet Maintenance RC viewer is next in line for promotion.
  • LMR-6 continues to be developed.
  • Voice update: this wasn’t an update the SLplugin.exe API, but was a change to the automatic voice level detector. This was causing a lot of the cut-out issues with voice, as it is overly sensitive to voice cadence when speaking, causing the temporary drop-outs, so by default the viewer no longer uses it at all.

ARCTan

Summary: An attempt to re-evaluate both avatar rendering costs and the cost of in-world scene rendering, with the current focus on avatar rendering cost / impact, and in-world scene rendering / LI to be tackled at some point in the future.

  • Work is continuing on the new performance floater. This pulls together information from various menus / debugs to display useable information on avatars / attachments that are heavy in rendering cost, and what can be done.
  • This work is currently separate to the work on revising that actual formulas used for calculating avatar complexity. As the viewer has yet to appear, it’s not clear if the updated avatar complexity calculations will be folded-in to the viewer before it reaches eventual release status, or if they will follow after. Currently, Vir hopes to get back to working on the calculations “some time in the new few weeks”.

Graphics Update Discussion

  • There have been numerous questions about LL switching the viewer’s renderer to a commercial engine such as Unreal Engine or Unity.
  • As Grumpity Linden indicated during her SL18B Meet the Lindens session, there are currently no plans to do so. This is not to say it would never happen – although doing so would be a very significant project.
  • One major argument against turning to a commercial engine is that users have very strong views on existing content and how it should be rendered, and can get very upset when things change – and they would change significantly were the viewer to be re-built around a new rendering engine.
  • Other factors weighing against commercial engines include:
    • They are not currently considered as being particularly good at dealing with dynamic content.
    • They could be restrictive in terms of the hardware people can use to access SL.
    • The basic work to make a switch-over would likely require around 18-24 months of development, which would curtail other viewer work, simply because it would be a significant viewer re-build.
  • Currently, the major areas of performance impact are said to be:
    • The sheer volume of draw calls the viewer has to make under OpenGL, which have a large processing overhead.
    • Avatar rendering, due to that volume of unoptimised content avatars can be loaded with – hi-poly meshes, excessively heavy unique texture use, etc.
    • Poorly considered in-world content (undue reliance on high LOD models, texture use, etc.).
    • The processing required for rendering shadow, etc, (when people run them).
  • The draw calls issue could be largely significantly reduced via a switch to more recent graphics APIs – such as Vulkan (PC) and Metal (Apple), which process things differently. Such a switch also yields benefits in other areas – such as the potential to use graphics libraries based on the capability of the user’s computer.
  • As such, the preferred route is to make incremental changes, such as a switch to a more modern set of APIs and libraries, rather than a total replacement of the rendering engine, simply because this will yield some degree of benefit and improvement without a substantial impact on the Lab / SL / users.
  • Another aspect of performance improvement (which has also been subject to recent questions) is improving the viewer code to better leverage multi-core processors.

General Improvements / Education

  • It’s acknowledged that better LOD models for objects would help improve performance where “new” content is concerned, and work is being put into a mesh optimiser,, although more could be done.
  • The Lab also acknowledges that much of the documentation produced through the wiki for content creation is increasingly out-of-date. There is also much that simply isn’t documented.
  • A problem with a lack of proper documentation / education is that creators  – especially those new to the platform – can pick up incorrect ideas / approaches, and end up contributing to  issues such as poor performance (e.g. the idea that everything must be high poly in order to be high quality).
  • However, the flip side of the argument is, even if effort is put into better documentation, etc., there  is a) no guarantee it would be read be newer creators; b) it is unlikely that those already set in their ways (bad habits and all) will actually decide to take notes and change their ways
  • While somewhat valid this above point doesn’t excuse ensuring the information that is provided is at least relevant / accurate and again becoming a resource that can be actively used / pointed to.

In Brief

  • A clarification was given on the upcoming resumption of work on the 360º Snapshot viewer (see: 2021 TPV Developer Meeting Week #25 Summary), stating that this viewer remains for snapshots only – there are no plans at present to extend it to 360º video capture.
  • There are still no plans to re-implement official support for VR headsets at this time, as it is generally felt at LL that while it would be nice to offer it, overall viewer frame rates cannot be maintained (e.g. at least 60 fps per eye) to make for a comfortable experience.
  • BUG-229908 “[EEP] Build floater shows incorrect light colour values/incorrect colour set for light” (also BUG-230549 “Colour picker for Light (PRIM_POINT_LIGHT) shows and sets incorrect values”, noted as a duplicate to BUG-229908), has been accepted by the Lab, but no ETA on any possible fix – and it is not currently being looked at as a part of the LMR-6 work.

Akim’s Anima in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kondor Main Gallery: Akim Alonzo

Akim Alonzo, owner and creator of The Itakos Project, is also an excellent photographer artist in his own right, as I’ve noted in a number of pieces in this blog where I’ve covered his exhibitions (see Water and a Matrix: Reflections on Life by Akim Alonzo, for example).

The latest selection of Akim’s work is now on display at the Main Gallery of the Kondor Art Centre, curated by Hermes Kondor. It presents a mix of works that offer a choice of themes within it, and which also echo past exhibition themes Akim has produced, making for another eye-catching and thought-provoking display of art from a man who is a master of frame, tone and composition.

Kondor Main Gallery: Akim Alonzo

The images presented are offered under the title of Anima and comprise 27 individual images and 2 slide shows. One of the latter pages through a selection of the images on display, the other displays a collection of additional portraits. Between them, these two slide shows present the core themes to be found within this collection – both of which intertwine into a single, larger perspective.

One of these themes is that of the avatar-as-a-person. Avatar studies are a common theme with Second Life art – although more often than not, such studies tend to focus on presenting an emotional story / emotive response utilising the entire image – expression, pose, surroundings, etc., – that together form a single frame narrative. Akim, however, is one of the few Second Life artists who takes a very deliberate path in his studies: one that focuses on the emotions that may exist within an avatar.

Kondor Main Gallery: Akim Alonzo

Whether these emotions are real, or a projection of our own, or a reflection of the emotions Akim felt in composing each image, really doesn’t matter; although I would suggest that there is combination of all of these aspects involved. What is important is that each piece is a marvellously layered composition, the focus always on the subject, the  background and lighting a means to project / capture the emotions that we see as coming from within the avatar. This are pieces that make extraordinary use of chiaroscuro to imbue the subject of each image with a depth of life and feeling that is bewitching.

The second theme to be found within this collection is that of life itself – real or virtual – and the questions we can harbour about it; in this, some of the pieces are drawn from or reflect his 2019 exhibition The Matrix. There is a wealth of metaphor within these particular pieces – the majority of which can be found on the gallery’s upper floor – and also question: what is real? Is the digital realm any less “real” than the physical? Might we all in fact be unwittingly operating within a virtual realm, our need to project ourselves into a digital realm a reflection of this?

Kondor Main Gallery: Akim Alonzo

Both of these thematic strands come together to offer a broader set of ideas / questions related to the identity, self and who we are as individuals;  to questions of – dare I say it – soul.

Beautifully composed, perfectly executed and presented, Anima is an extraordinary exhibition by an extraordinary artist.

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Kokua updates to revised viewer UI

Posted on by Inara Pey

Kokua released version 6.4.20 of their viewer on Tuesday, June 29th, which sees all three versions include the Lab’s Project UI viewer updates (see: Lab issues Project UI viewer aimed at new users and The Project UI viewer: a look at the new user Guidebook); however it does so with a couple of twists. The release also includes a number of bug fixes.

As noted in the two blog posts linked to above, and via the Lab’s official blog post via Alexa Linden (see: Viewer UI enhancements), the UI changes are the first in an on-going series of updates designed to improve the viewer and – with these in particular – help new users get to grips with the viewer more easily, including during their initial orientation as a part of the on-boarding New User Experience.

In all, the changes comprise:

  • A new menu option called Avatar, and streamlined / revised right-click avatar context menus intended to make it easier for new users to get to grips with basic avatar-related functions.
  • Improvements to the Inventory panel.
  • An updated Places floater design to make getting around SL easier.
  • A new Guidebook, intended to help new users gain a familiarity with basic functionality in the viewer – walking, talking, finding places and people, etc.

Kodua 6.4.20 includes all of these changes, most of which I’m not going to go into great detail here, as they have been covered in the blog posts linked to above. However, it should be noted:

  • If you are using Kokua with the classic menu layout enabled (Advanced check → Classic Kokua Menu + viewer restart), then the Avatar menu will not be displayed.
  • The right-click context menus retain some of the original options found within these menus (both from the official viewer and from previous versions of Kokua).
The revised right-click context menus (l) the official Avatar menu and the Kokua implementation (purple menu option highlight); (r) the official attachment menu & the Kokua implementation

Kokua Changes

Several of the Kokua updates are bug fixes for issues with the Bugsplat crash reporting code, and address issues with the Kokua viewer.

Most notable among the latter is a fix for issue KKA-866 “Double-click to TP bug”. In short, prior to the arrival of the custom key mappings ability (SL viewer version  6.4.17.557391 / Kokua version 6.4.17), double-click teleports would be ignored if any one of ALT, CTRL or SHIFT was also pressed. Following the introduction of custom key mappings, an accidental double-click whilst using one of these keys (e.g. when ALT-camming) will trigger a teleport.

To avoid confusion, Kokua has added a new Preferences option: Preferences → Move & View →  Mouse →  Do not treat ALT/SHIFT/CTRL modified mouse clicks as unmodified mouse clicks when no specific ALT/SHIFT/CTRL modified binding exists.

  • When enabled (as it is by default), this option will not trigger a teleport when double-clicking in combination with pressing ALT, CTRL or SHIFT (e.g. pre-custom key mapping behaviour).
  • When disabled (unchecked), this option will trigger a teleport when double-clicking in combination with pressing ALT, CTRL or SHIFT (e.g. post-custom key mapping behaviour).

For the remaining Kokua updates, please refer to the Kokua 6.4.20 release notes.

Summary

A further incremental update from Kokua that allows it to maintain pace with the official viewer, and also become the first of the popular v6 viewers to incorporate the UI updates from Linden Lab.

The decision to include the additional options in the right-click avatar and attachment  context menus tends to make these menus more involved than their LL equivalents, which might be argued as making them more confusing to new users. BUT, the options that have been retained by Kokua can useful for established users, and so are worth the effort of inclusion.

LINKS

A Sun Island in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ilha Do Sol, June 2021 – click any image for full size

Update: Syx contacted me to assure me the villa in the north region is indeed open to the public, and encourages people to pop in to witness Bryn’s interior design!  

Ilha do Sol (literally “Sun Island”) is an estate comprising three regions designed by Syx Toshi and with touches by his SL partner Bryn Toshi (Bryn Bulloch), that between them offer a touch of Mediterranean sunshine and Californian surf in a contiguous setting that runs south-to-north through the estate.

While teleporting is open, perhaps the best place to start explorations is the middle region, the home of the little town of Ilha Do Sol itself. This huddles itself around a small bay and climbs the shoulders of the hills that cup the bay’s waters. Here, visitors are placed down within the small praça that sits on the landward side of the bay, separated from the water by a narrow ribbon of grass and sand on to which have been drawn a number of rowing boats, while a couple more sit out on the water.

Ilha Do Sol, June 2021

Featuring a traditional fishing boat of times past, the praça is home to a  modest open market that is proving popular with tourists and locals alike (the familiar static NPCs that are to be increasingly found across many public regions). The majority of the buildings bordering the square and climbing into the hills of the bay are façades, although a couple do have interior décor for those who wander the waterfront.

A tunnel sits to the rear of the praça, providing a subterranean route to the southern region, of which more anon. Passing over this tunnel is the main north-south road, which ends in a small car park overlooking the south region whilst also running north into the open country beyond the town.

Ilha Do Sol, June 2021

The north side of the town sits back from this main road, and offers more to see with little houses sitting along narrow streets, one of which forms a little cycle shop where bicycles can be rezzed and used by visitors. The local church can also be found here as well, tall and slim and with it doors open to visitors. Beyond it, the paved road twists around an upland shoulder of rock and quickly turns to a dusty track that winds into the northern region of the estate. Here, just across the region boundary is a small stable and field where visitors can rez a horse and go for a ride.

This northern region is largely open – there’s the sables, a small orchard and, climbing further into the hills, the steps of a vineyard, each held in place by a tile-topped wall, the vines fed water from sprinklers also mounted atop the walls. Having petered out prior to reaching these terraces, the track resumes to curl around them and climb up to pass close to the wall of a large villa before continuing on to the edge eastern cliffs that drop away to the sea.

Ilha Do Sol, June 2021

The villa sits within its own parcel, and while there is no sign or other indication this is the case, it gives the impression of perhaps being a private residence. As such, I didn’t pass through the gates as I didn’t want to invade privacy.

Returning to the southernmost region of the estate, this takes the form of a sweeping sandy bay facing open waters where whitecaps periodically roll into the shallows, offering the opportunity for surfing and swimming. The beach itself is home to a surf school that has its own lounge and swimming pool, while on its eastern side the sand runs between the blue waters and a number of private residences in the form of RVs, trailers and tents that sit along the edge of the region.

Ilha Do Sol, June 2021

Rezzing here is open, allowing people to use their own surfing and swimming gear, while for those who don’t have any surfing kit, board rezzers are also available. I confess that I didn’t ride the waves during my visit – but I did use the open sands to take my horse for a good gallop around the bay! Those who enjoy their surfing experiences might like to climb the sandy slope at the back of the beach to Syx’s shop as it sits with a commanding view over the bay and connects back to the town’s car park via a board walk.

There are many attractions to be found around Ilha Do Sol, and it lends itself well to photography, particularly if you take the time to try different EEP settings. However, for me, what really makes this as a setting is the time Syx has taken in order to blend traversable region with off-region surrounds to create a natural landscape. This rises from the sea to slow hills and scrubby plains and then to grass-topped foothills that join with the surrounding mountains that gives the setting a depth of design that is eye-catching.

Ilha Do Sol, June 2021

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2021 SUG meeting week #26 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Riding Zany Zen’s Railway, April 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 29th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and is embedded at the end of this summary.

Server Deployments

See the server deployment thread for any most recent updates / changes.

  • There was no deployment to the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, June 29th. At the time of writing, an investigation was underway to determine why some of those simulators on the SLS Main channel due an automatic re-started hadn’t received it.
  • Wednesday, June 30th should see the RC channels updated with simulator release 560819. This includes internal fixes, a fix for BUG-202864, an a further fix for BUG230881 – “llHttpRequest(): HTTP_CUSTOM_HEADER flag is ignored”, which caused an attempt to deploy the internal fixes + BUG-202864 in week #25 to be rolled back.

SL Viewer

There have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the official pipelines as follows:

  • Release viewer: Project UI RC viewer, version 6.4.20.560520, dated June 14, promoted June 23 – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

In Brief

  • The issue of scripted objects rezzed by other scripted object experiencing a 2-3 second delay in start-up is still being felt, and the Lab continues to investigate the problem. Commenting on the situation, Rider Linden stated:
It is frustrating, and we are looking at a few things that we hope will make the issue better. But no ETA on when to see the changes. I have a test object that has been running for quite some time to try and catch that problem. It’s gone through roughly 3M rezzes at this point and seen one failure (which I was able to correlate with a region crash). 

It has been noted that if the parent object is *not* in the land group, it will work so long as the owner is nearby and wearing the group tag, but will stop working in the owner leaves the region / parcel.

  • Region crossings: LL plan to carry out a “re-evaluation” of region crossing, but this may not happen until 2022.
  • The engineering team was asked what is being worked on (a common question at SUG meetings), and Mazidox Linden (QA lead for the simulator / servers) replied thus:
Plenty is in the works right now.. Most of it is still under wraps, and a fair bit of it is on backend services that you’ll never notice, except for “Oh, I don’t crash as much” or “Oh, my inventory fetches faster/more reliably” (just as random examples of backend work that we don’t generally broadcast).

In addition, Rider Linden re-iterated that a major area of work is upgrading all of the back-end tools the Lab have at their disposal for system management / monitoring (and presumably better leveraging the additional tools / monitoring AWS offers).

  • Some people still seem to be under the impression that texture and object data is passed to the viewer via the simulator. This actually hasn’t been the case since the Lab introduced asset data handling via CDNs in 2014 and later expanded to include all asset types, as Simon Linden noted:
The server doesn’t really do much with texture [or other asset] transfers It sends the IDs and lets the viewer decide what to download or read into the texture pipeline
  • Responding to a question, “Do server still host multiple regions in the same fashion as before uplift? One CPU for full regions, 4 for homesteads?” Simon Linden responded:
I’m going to be really vague to answer that, but it’s both mostly the same thing and also totally new. Comparing a CPU from our old servers to what’s in AWS … from the start, it’s hardware CPUs vs their  [AWS}‘virtual CPU [vCPU].

While Rider Linden added:

That is mostly unchanged… but we’re not looking at the same kind of CPU so it is a bit like comparing apples and oranges.

The use of vCPUs, coupled with Amazon’s overall approach to billing for services, is a big part of why *it’s complex” is a general reply to question on how things operate and are billed within the AWS environment.

  • There have been requests for larger script sizes to be allowed in Second Life. While this hasn’t been entirely ruled out (although there are currently no plans to introduce anything), Mazidox Linden noted:
Larger scripts would probably come with trade offs that would make them unpalatable, like a small limit on the number you could have in a linkset or only region owners being allowed to use them, just as examples off the top of my head.

Symmetry in art in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kultivate Signature Gallery: JudiLynn India

Recently opened at the Kultivate Signature Gallery, curated by Johannes and Trempest Huntsman is Symmetry, an exhibition by physical world artist JudiLynn India.

With a lean towards abstract art, JudiLynn has been drawing and painting for as long as she can remember, and studied art at high school before moving to graphic design at Tyler School of Art/Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Since the turn of the century she has focused on working in acrylics and digital painting, joining Second Life in 2009 and embracing the platform as a means to reach a broader audience with her work.

Spread across the three floors of the gallery is a series of paintings by JudiLynn that speak directly to the title of the exhibition through their use of symmetry as well as her trademark depth of colour, a factor that always gives her work a vibrant sense of life.

Kultivate Signature Gallery: JudiLynn India

Abstract they may be, but there are strong subliminal elements to be found in these paintings, some suggested by the titles of individual pieces, others by the titles placed around the walls of the gallery and which echo the essence of symmetry: balance, harmony, equilibrium. Some of these may help the eye and the mind to construct a frame of narrative in each piece, while the others, the flow of colour and shape might suggest a tale that sits quite aside from any given title.

Viewing the pieces in turn, I was particularly struck by the manner in which several suggested to me they could so easily have had a fractal origin, rather than being traditional paintings. These pieces (Dark Web, Emperor, Colour of Life and Confetti Fun as examples) give an additional twist to this collection: whilst fractal art is created mathematically as an intersection between generative art and computer art, JudiLynn’s pieces present a sense of generative art that has entirely natural origin. Thus, these pieces might be said to offer a unique statement on the fusion between human and digital art forms.

Kultivate Signature Gallery: JudiLynn India

Enticing, attractive, and rich in colour, Symmetry is another engaging exhibition by someone I regard as one of Second Life’s foremost abstract artists.

SLURL DETAILS