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
Alpha Testing Update
An update to the Alpha version of Mobile was pushed out on March 27th for those in the Mobile Alpha program.
- New ‘touch timer’ to make interaction much more obvious.
- New forward/backwards buttons for navigating to different locations.
- Location bar new accepts input.
- You can now:
- Create Favourites by tapping on the heart icon in the parcel tray.
- Share your location via other apps.
- View and visit your Landmarks and Favourites
- Performance and rendering improvements (incl. defaulting to new bone attachment handling functions – see the February meeting summary) + fixes for duplicated IMs.
- New Developer settings:
Lobby Update
As regular users of SL Mobile are aware, Lobby is a feature designed to put key information before a user when logging-in to SL Mobile and while the world is still being loaded in the background. This information includes:
- A world loading bar with your avatar’s current location.
- Menu access.
- Details of friends in-world.
- Messages received whilst off-line.
- Suggested places to visit.
- Event listings.
- Access to official blog posts.
- relevant links to expand any of the above.
The following points should be noted:
- The lobby will only be displayed when you actually log-in to a new session of the app – that is, you actually use the menu option to log-out between sessions. It will not be displayed if you close the app without logging-off and then re-open it.
- Currently, your avatar will still be in-world when using the Lobby and will show to all those you have allowed to see your on-line status as being in-world.
Future Plans / Feedback
- There are plans to have the lobby be accessible without an avatar requiring an in-world presence. However, this is going to take time to implement, and so should not be expected as an update in the short-term.
- At present, there is no means to “return” to the Lobby once a user has switched to using the in-world view. However, the option to return to it is being considered – and this gained some support from those at the meeting, so is likely to be implemented.
- I’ve provided feedback (with screenshots about the app at times loading the in-world view fully / partially and then loading the lobby, which has apparently been experienced by others.
PBR Support
- As has been previously stated, SL Mobile has to work within extremely tight memory constraints – 500-800MB – in order to do everything required of it (including the app itself, rendering all in-world objects, avatars and surfaces, etc.).
- This obviously impacts the amount of content the app can have loaded at any given time – and PBR has a much higher memory footprint than textures on their own (as much as 3x the memory use).
- While high-end mobile devices may have increased RAM support (e.g. 8-12GB), supporting PBR could run the risk of impacting lower-to-mid-range ‘phones of the types perhaps most commonly in use.
- Therefore, the focus at the moment is not directly on PBR rendering in the app, but rather on reducing the app’s overall memory footprint, notably with regards to textures through a mechanism the Lab calls “variable textures”.
- This amounts to a more intelligent loading of textures based (IIUC) on what can currently be seen within a given scene, rather than loading all the textures for a scene, regardless as to whether or not they are visible.
- The hope is that this work will reduce the overall memory used by the app, and thus pave the way for PBR support. However, it is in the R&D phase, so not something that currently has any kind of potential ETA.
Animesh Support
- Animesh creations come with their own skeletons / bones, which in turn come with all the required computational needs – joint placement, rotation, etc., which tend to make Animesh resource-heavy for SL Mobile, both in terms of memory use and in terms of CPU use + power requirements – particularly when it comes to Animesh avatar attachments working in concert with the avatar.
- The decision thus far, therefore, has been to simply ignore Animesh objects, whether in-world or attached to avatars.
- However, the data for in-world Animesh objects is available to the Mobile app, so there is the potential for that data to be used and in-world Animesh objects rendered in the future.
- That said, any decision to do so would only be made after there has been extensive testing on Animesh behaviour and hardware resource use.
In Brief
Please refer to the video for details on the following.
- [Video: 7:24-9:02] Rewards, etc.:
- A recap on the March Mobile Millions L$ spin to win challenges.
- LL “sort-of want to give more people more chances to actually get Linden Dollars”, so the next “thing” (/challenge?) “to give nearly every person practically a chance every day to do the thing and get the cash”.
- [Video: 21:02-22:44] Beanies tips’n-tricks – a re-cap on friending people / offering teleports through Mobile:
- With the avatar to be friended in-scene: long-press on the avatar Context Menu → Send Friend Request or Offer Teleport.
- Via People → Nearby → avatar profile → long press the Context Menu → Send Friend Request or Offer Teleport.
- Via Chat → click the three dots next to the avatar name for the Context Menu → Send Friend Request or Offer Teleport.
- [Video: 23:46-23:29] Mentors and helpers: the Second Life Mobile – Welcome group is available to provide help and support to new users / those new to the SL Mobile app, and mentors and those willing to offer support to other Mobil users are welcome to join it.
- [Video: 24:39-end] Q&A:
- Object chat – coming “in about a month”.
- Gestures: no current plans for implementing either in-scene or voice-activated gestures.
- Ability to close an IM session and clear it from the list on the app – “on the list” of things to be done.
- Messages Getting Stuck – seems to be a mixed issue as to whether people experience it or not, but it is under investigation, with a request that if anyone experiences any issues in sending / receiving messages to file feedback / a bug report on it before logging-out of the session in which it occurs.
- I can’t teleport anywhere – same as above. This may be account related, and logged out of the app and then back in is reported as helping to clear it.
- A reported issue of avatars getting getting stuck jumping nonstop – this has been noted by LL but “not seen in a while”. Reports again, please, if encountered.
- A request for documentation on the Developer Settings to help users set their devices. Short answer to this was “no”, as the settings are not intended for general use, but are rather for internal testing purposes. As a result, they can give differing results depending on hardware, and documenting them as options perhaps not a good idea.
- That said, anyone who does adjust a developer setting and finds it improves their experience is asked to report what they’ve done and how it improves things on their hardware.
- Anyone who does want to start an SL Wiki page on the topic (subject tot edit rights) is welcome to do so, but please inform Adam Sinewave so he can sanity check to ensure the information is correct.
Date of Next Meeting
- 12:00 SLT, Thursday, April 24th, 2025, at Campwich Forest.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 