Category: Sansar Updates

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meeting held on Thursday, October 11th. These Product Meetings are open to anyone to attend, are a mix of voice (primarily) and text chat. Dates and times are currently floating, so check the Sansar Atlas events sections each week. The meeting was hosted by Eliot, and well attended by members of the Sansar product team, with Ebbe also dropping in.

Release Process Flow: Overview

The various teams working on Sansar are developing and refining multiple features and aspects of the platform, and periodically, a feature freeze is called.

• This occurs roughly 2-weeks from the planned deployment date for the next release.
• At this point the decision is made on which features are developed and stable enough to include in that release, and no additional features tend to be added to the release after the feature freeze.
• Those features assigned to the release then go through extensive testing and bug squashing.
• The amount of bug fixing, etc, required determines whether the release ships on the target date or slips.

While dates are not set in stone, this cycle means that for the next release, R27, the feature freeze date in October 17th, 2018, and the planned release date in October 31st, 2018.

Release 26: Thumbs Up

General Points

• New VR hand gestures: the current Vive controller will support the hand clenching gesture; however, as noted in the release notes and my R26 overview, full Vive support for all of the new hand gestures will likely come with support for the new Vive hand controllers.
• Galen has developed two scripted elements to support the new broadcast capability:
  • The first is a simple trigger volume that can be used for things like stage settings, etc. An avatar standing in the trigger volume will have their voice automatically broadcast throughout the experience.
  • The second is a broadcast script that can be configured to work as required within a scene.
  • Linden lab will be providing simple scripts to support broadcasting as well.
• Panel readability in VR: there have been requests that the various client panels now visible in VR (e.g. chat, settings) be given a transparent background so they don’t block the world view so much.  However, these requests are countered by those who felt that having the chat panel fairly transparent (as it was during the initial release) made reading text difficult. For their part, the Lab believe what they have with the panels may be the best solution.
• There appears to be a bug in the scene object drop-down that can lead to something other than the desired object being selected. This has been noted by the Lab, but at the time of the meeting the status of any fix was unknown.
• A major under-the-hood change made in R26 is to the way the camera’s focus is handled. While this is now much improved, there are edge-cases that need to be tweaked. Examples of this:
  • If an avatar’s name tag is displayed by hovering over it, and an attempt is made to right-click and drag the camera around when the mouse pointer is over the name tag, the camera may not actually move.
  • When selecting objects in the scene-object drop-down, it can be possible to point to one object, but actually select another on clicking.
  • When renaming an object, clicking the anchor the cursor in the text entry field may result in the rename dialogue vanishing.
  • As there is no mechanism to push updates to customers, items updated in this way must be re-purchased at present.
• Chat copy / paste has been lost in both VR and Desktop mode, this should be corrected in the next release.

Permissions Licensing

• Materials editing: the decisions to disable in-scene materials editing on purchased legacy objects and the need to make new objects full perm in order to allow in-scene materials editing have both been criticised. Both decisions may yet be subject to revision.
• Some creators have already started re-listed their items on the store to enable the save to inventory capability introduced with R26.
  • Only re-listing is required to enable this; items do not have to be completely re-uploaded and listing.
  • The process is put the item into a scene, take in to inventory, set the permissions against it, then upload it to the store.
• It been requested that the Lab provide a means of flagging or tagging items on the Store (and in inventory – which might be harder) to indicate they are legacy (and therefore outside of the new permissions / licensing system). For example, a tag on Store listings to say “legacy Content” or similar, and / or legacy items in inventory appearing in a different colour – e.g. red.

R27 Release (October)

Not many details as yet, as the freeze features date hasn’t been reached. However, the release will hopefully include:

• Sprint set via settings button.
• Custom animations upload.

Other Items

• A point release is being worked on. This may include a fix for an issue whereby assets added to a legacy scene can inherit legacy permissions (those enforced prior to the R26 release).  This release may also include fixes related to the use of folders in scene editing and  other fixes.
• Twitch channels: when watching a Twitch channel from within Sansar, all avatars watching the stream count as individuals on the stream count.
• IK issues in VR: when using VR it is still possible to end up with an avatar looking like it is a professional contortionist (or trying to impersonate a pretzel). The Lab is still working on the IK system to prevent this.
• Setting avatar height / reach arm length: a recent change was to introduce an “arm stretch” movement that is tied to the scaling of an avatar. The result is intended to have the avatar’s height, reach, arm length more close match the user’s actual height, reach and arm length.
  • This help ensures a naturally sense of proportion between user and avatar, for comfort of movement, etc.
  • It has specifically been done to allow avatar scaling in the future – so movements will continue to feel natural in whatever size of avatar is being used, and arm reach will appear correctly proportioned to body size, etc.
  • It does mean there will be a difference in perspective: when inside an experience with a small avatar, the space will appear to be much larger than when using a big avatar.
  • A side issue with this is that the stretch movement has to be performed whenever a headset is worn.The Lab is looking to improve on this, so the movement only has to be performed once, or in specific situation (e.g. when seated or standing).
• Private messaging. Currently, to find out who is sending a private message, all private messages must be opened. This has been reported and a fix is in the works.
• Exporting own models: currently, it is not possible to export models from Sansar. With the introduction of the licensing system with R26, it may in the future be possible for creators to export their own models they’ve uploaded to Sansar to help deal with issues of local loss of creations, etc. This currently isn’t a priority for the Lab to develop.
• Materials editing on uploaded clothing: this has been requested so as to avoid the need to repeatedly upload an item when making adjustments to it. The request will be looked into.
• The desktop throw animation has been tweaked, and now makes it difficult to simply drop an object after picking it up, and is proving somewhat unpopular.
• Combining multiple objects into a single unit for resale: how this will work is still under consideration at the Lab. The idea currently being considered is to utilise a folders based approach: saving multiple items (complete with all the local transforms and scripts and associations they have) and extract that back to inventory, then offer the folder on for sale through the Store. People buying the folder would then be able to place it in their scene and see the objects exactly as they were when “packaged”.

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meeting held on Thursday, August 28th. These Product Meetings are open to anyone to attend, are a mix of voice (primarily) and text chat. Dates and times are currently floating, so check the Sansar Atlas events sections each week.

Attending this meeting were  Nyx, Derrick, Aleks, Torley and Ebbe. Unfortunately, I was AFK for part of the meeting, and while I was gone, my client disconnected from the meeting location, so I missed some 25 minutes of discussion.

Next Release

At the meeting, Cara confirmed that Permissions / Licensing will not be part of the next release (R25), due to some last-minute issues that need to be addressed. However, items slated to appear include (note this is a limited list, due to my being disconnected from the meeting whilst AFK):

Commerce

• The initial release of the Sansar Store within the client.
  • The Client version of the store will allow items to be browsed. However, for purchasing, the user will be transferred from the client version of the Store to the web version in their browser.
  • The ability to purchase goods from within the client will be added in a future update.
• A shopping cart capability in the Sansar Store on the web.
• The gifting of Sansar Dollars to another avatar will be possible with the next release, although it is be subject to the 15% commission payment to LL – so a gift of S$100 from one avatar to another will in fact be S$115 for the avatar making the gift. The 15% commission charge serves a dual purpose:
  • It is in line with the Lab generating revenue through transactions.
  • More importantly, it prevents users avoiding paying any commission to the Lab by paying one another directly for goods and services.
  • Gifting of goods will be possible in a future release.

Events

• The next release will allow custom images to be added to people’s events, rather than having to use the experience image.

General

• A teleport sound will be added, allowing those within an experience to hear when someone has teleported.
• Avatar-to-avatar collisions will be turned off. This should hopefully prevent narrow passages, doorways, etc., from being blocked by an avatar standing in / in front of a confined space.

Permissions / Licensing

Although it will not be part of the next release, Nyx provided more insight into the permissions that will be available when the system is deployed. These will comprise:

• Permission for content to be resold, including how much money should be earned by the creator, whether the item is directly re-sold or used as a component within another creator’s item.
  • Included in this is the ability to specify what properties within an object can be further modified by a purchaser. This will allow purchasers to set properties within an object without the creator having to give up the right to earn from any re-sale of the object.
• Full permissions on an item – essentially an open-source licence for the object and its contents to by used howsoever a buyer wishes, including claiming it as their own, so that no further income is earned by the original creator.
• There is apparently one further permissions category to be added, and may follow the initial deployment of the permissions system when it happens. However, Nyx did not go into specifics on this.

CDN Asset Distribution

It is hoped that asset delivery for experiences will be moving to CDN (Content Delivery Network) distribution / delivery will be happening in the very near future. This means that rather than having all the data for an experience being delivered from the Amazon services, content assets could be delivered from a “local” CDN cache. It is the approach currently used for asset delivery within Second Life. It is hoped that this move will reduce the load times for those experiences that have had their assets previously cached within a “local” CDN node.

General Discussion

Store

• There have been further requests for additional store categories (e.g. “Trees and plants”), with ideas being requested. The Lab fully intends to keep adding to the categories list as it become clear what is needed.
• It has been requested that sub-categories are better surfaced. For example, being able to mouse over the Avatar category, and have the category list expand to show all of the avatar sub-categories, rather than have to go to the Avatar category list, then click for a drop-down of sub-categories. The Lab had been working on something similar to this, but the work was sidelined; it may be resumed.
• Work is proceeding on making notifications visible to VR users, although this will not be in a forthcoming release.

Edit Server Issues

Some issues have arisen with the move to the Edit Server infrastructure. These include scene settings failing to persist, and scenes reporting as being saved when they have not. One issue with settings failing to persist is the sky being set to 0 – so everything is black when entering the scene in Edit mode. The way to fix this is to go to the scene settings and adjust the sky distance. The Lab has been trying to reproduce the issue with scene settings failing to persist, but so far have not been able to do so.

People having specific, repeated issues with scene settings can made a copy of the scene and contact the Lab, who will take the copy and run it on their test environment for further investigation.

In Brief

• Support for Nvidia RTX: not currently being planned.
• Improvements are being made to the Chat App, including quality of life improvements for viewing chat, and (hopefully) timestamps again chat items.
• Support for custom avatar animations, including the ability to sell them, is planned for the R26 release.
• Work is progressing on customisable controller options for VR handset – no release date as yet.
• A virtual keyboard for VR users is also being developed, but not details on how it will work as yet.
• Disabling capabilities in run-time: this has come up on a few occasions. There is concerns that if there is not a simple, direct way to inform users as to what is / is not permitted in an experience (e.g. having teleports allowed in one experience, but disabled in another), they could become confused when hopping between different experiences.
• Cancelling an experience load: an option will be coming to allow users to abort loading an experience which is taking – for them – too long.
• Consideration is being given to changing the Atlas in terms of how experiences are listed (is concurrency the best approach?). This may include providing categories under which experiences can be listed (e.e. Games, Educational, etc.), to make searching and listing experiences easier.

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meeting held on Thursday, August 9th. These Product Meetings are open to anyone to attend, are a mix of voice (primarily) and text chat. Dates and times are currently floating, so check the Sansar Atlas events sections each week.

The primary topic of the meeting was Sansar’s Edit mode, with Regomatic, who is a part of the Edit Mode development team talking about what has recently been released for Edit Mode, future plans, and taking a Q&A.

Date of Next Release

The planned release date for the next Sansar update is Thursday, August 16th, 2018. However, it is entirely dependent upon Sansar’s schedule of public events for August – see below for more on this – which my cause the update deployment pushed back until later in the month.

Promoting Sansar

Not strictly a technical aspect of Sansar, however, the platform is spending time “on the road” and also raising its visibility among different global audiences.

• On August 1st through 5th Sansar was at the Star Trek Las Vegas convention, where the Roddenberry Nexus was unveiled – see More Star Trek in Sansar: the Roddenberry Nexus for more.
• On August 10th through 12th Sansar is at the Los Angeles edition of KCON, with the promise of “more exclusives” with regards to that.
• A further e-sports “thing” is also in the offing for later in August. An earlier attempt at an e-sports link was pulled shortly after being announced. It’s not clear if this is a further attempt, or something else entirely.
• A the same time, Sansar and Twitch are hosting “Twitch Streamer” days throughout August, with Twitch users being encouraged to drop into Sansar and explore.

Express Yourself Release Edit Mode Updates

The July Express Yourself update included a number of Edit mode updates:

• Multiple Object Select / property application: The properties panel now works when multiple objects are selected, allowing the value of a property to be changed and applied across all selected objects.
• Animated materials update: it is now possible to specify which textures in a material will be subject to the scrolling effect. This affects the following shaders:
  • Standard + Emissive + UV animation.
  • Standard + Alpha Mask – UV animation.
• Standardise geometry option: by default, all objects uploaded into Sansar will go through an optimisation process that makes objects more efficient, foregoing the upload window optimisation process.
  • This can be disabled via a drop-down panel option.
  • The auto decimation will not apply to clothing or avatar attachments.
• Object total triangle count: view the total triangle count of objects.
• Real-time Gizmo updates: Position/rotation values update in real-time as the Gizmo is manipulated.
• Fixes:
  • Rotation values no longer flip 180 degrees as you enter values
  • Scene settings no longer close the properties panel and vice versa; both can be displayed at the same time.

In addition to the above, the focus mode has been improved. Rather than just centring on an object when pressing F, it will now zoom the camera to the object. If two objects are selected and focus is used, the system will find a balance so that both are visible after zooming.

Upcoming Edit Mode Updates

August Update

• Per-object settings: this should be a part of the August release, this will allow visibility to be toggled on individual objects within a specified type. So, rather than only being able to toggle visible for all audio materials, it will be possible to toggle it for an individual audio object. The state set for each object will persist between sessions. States will be indicated by “eyeball” icons.
• Improved selectability of objects: it is currently different to select an object in Edit mode when it is “stacked” with others. The August release should improve this be adding a “selectability” icon / option. When set, it will make objects either selectable or cause them to be ignored when attempting to select others groups with them. Again, the individual states of objects will be indicated by a cursor icon, and will persist between sessions.
• Container naming and renaming objects: the August release will include friendlier names for container, and the ability to rename anything in the scene objects list, rather than having to go through the Properties panel. Names can be up to 64 characters.
• Analytics improvements:
  • The diagnostics ribbon in Edit mode is to be enhanced to include number of textures and the estimated download size, as well as the number of triangles.
  • There will be a new report option that will give a breakdown of all object in a scene and the amount of space they take up.
  • In addition, it has been requested that the analytics include the number of draws it takes to render an object, as high draw counts can often be a performance issue.

September Update

• Folder support for scene objects: allowing objects to be placed together in folder, and allow entire folders to be selected and pulled into a scene, the ability to see the combined properties, etc.
  • Once scene object folders have been deployed, inventory folders will be coming as a future update.
  • Folder names will have a maximum length of 64 characters.

Still to be Prioritised for Future Release

• Arrays for scripts: ability to use arrays rather than hard-coded parameters (e.g. an array to allow a user to pick a sound, rather than having to hard-code “sound 1”, “sound 2”, “sound 3”, etc.).
• Locking improvements: currently, locking a container does not necessarily lock all of its children. In a future release  this will be revised such that it does.
• Inventory folders: these are being worked on, and discussion are being had on the use of folders and the possible use of saving search categories / grouping by category to go with folders.

General Q&A

Scene / Experience Management Requests

• Disabling capabilities in run-time: there are so types of experience that would benefit from having some run-time capabilities such as free camera movement or teleporting disabled in the Runtime mode (e.g. blocking the ability for someone to avoid traps in a game by teleporting past them, or using the free cam to cheat their way around a maze). These could be done via the scene settings, and Regomatic is going to look into it.
  • It was noted that if abilities to disable user-facing options are added to Sansar. then the ability to inform users as to what has been disabled (voice, teleport, freecamming, etc.), either before or when they enter the experience.
• Search capabilities for scene objects: name, object type, etc. Possibly inclusion of thumbnail images of objects within the scene list to allow for visual recognition of objects, particular where multiple objects might have similar names (“Rock A”, “Rock B”, etc.).
• Image size standardisation: currently, multiple image sizes and formats are required for items – one size saved within inventory, a different image size for the store, etc., requiring multiple image uploads. Automatic re-use of a single uploaded image would be preferable, and the Lab is looking into this.

Continue reading “2018 Sansar Product Meetings week #32: Edit mode” →