On Monday, October 30th, 2017, Jenn from Linden Lab blogged two news items on Sansar.
In the first post, Jenn announced the winners of the two recent Sansar competitions: the Top Props contest and the seasonal Sansar’s Scariest competition for the best Halloween-related experience.
There were four categories in the Top Props contest, with the winner in each category receiving an Oculus Rift + Touch bundle, plus a one year Sansar Super Creator Subscription, while honourable mentions receiving a one year Sansar Creator Subscription. The winners, selected by a panel of Sansar staff and special guest judges are:
Sansar Top Props contest winners
The Sansar’s Scariest contest offered a single Grand Prize of US $10,000 together with an Oculus Rift + Touch bundle and a one year Sansar Super Creator Subscription. In addition, three honourable mentions would each receive a one year Sansar Creator Subscription.
The final selection on winner and honourable mentions was made by journalist and VR consultant Alice Bonasio, who has written extensively on VR for a number of publications, including VRScout, WIRED, Fast Company, and The Next Web. Her selections were:
Having spent time in both of these experiences, I’ll be providing write-ups on them in due course for those who may not have had the opportunity to visit.
In addition, Alice outlined a number of other experiences she enjoyed. For her feedback on those, and her notes for the winning entry and the honourable mention, and for the honourable mentions in the Top Props contest, please refer to Jenn’s blog post.
Image courtesy of Linden Lab
In the second post, Jenn outlined the upcoming Friends and Fashion releases. If all remains on track, the Friends release – focused on social aspects of Sansar – will be deployed on Tuesday, October 31st, and in addition to Jenn’s notes, you can read more about it in my Sansar week #43 update.
The Fashion update, currently scheduled for around mid-December 2017, will allow designers to create and sell avatar outfits, which thanks to the integration of new technology will be able to move and fold naturally. In addition, the update is currently planned to include:
The ability to restricted access to an experience to just those on your Friends list if you want.
More branding options for creators on the Sansar store, and the ability for the Sansar team to present curated collections of selected sellers and items.
Improvements to full-body IK.
Support for importing terrain height maps, and audio materials for terrain.
I’ll have more information on both the Friends and Fashion releases as a part of my weekly Sansar technical updates.
The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Thursday, October 26th, a day early to allow for the 1st Sansar Halloween Blitz Dodge Cannon Ball Tournament, which is being held on Friday, October 27th, 2017 – see here for more.
Product meetings are usually held every Friday at 9:30am PDT and 4:00pm PDT, and are open to all. There is currently no set agenda, and the meetings are a mix of voice and text. The official meeting notes are published in the week following each pair of meetings, while venues change on a weekly basis, and are announced in the Meet-up Announcements.
The October 26th meetings took place at Darkwood Forest by C3rb3rus. Product team members Cara and Carolyn attended the morning and afternoon sessions respectively, together with Torley and Brett, respectively. Jenn, as usual, led proceedings. I did miss a portion of the morning session, as everyone ran away while I had to go AFK (meanies! 😀 ), so the official write-up may cover topics not mentioned here.
The next release, currently targeted for Tuesday, October 31st, starting at around 11:00am SLT. This means that Sansar will be down for around 90 minutes. An outline of some of the features to be included in the release were previewed at the start of October, and further information is given below.
Social Updates
Connecting with people: it will be possible to search for people by name via the client’s People App and send them Friend requests to add them to your Friends list. However, because Avatar Names are not unique, and can only be verified via Avatar ID, searches must be via Avatar ID.
Desktop mode avataridentification: it will be possible to identify people round you in Desktop mode, by clicking on them to display their Avatar Name / Avatar ID. This will also allow you to Friend / audio mute an avatar.
Sort client Atlas entries: the sort options recently added to the web version of the Atlas (e.g. those under the All, Sansar Studios, and creator tabs) will be available in the client Atlas. sorting as a whole is also improved.
Scripting Updates
Trigger collision events on non-dynamic objects: it will be possible to trigger events on non-physical and static objects. This also mean that scripts triggering events can be attached to animated objects.
New scripting APIs: details, however, still TBC.
Other updates
Publish work flow: the experience publish work flow includes additional contextual dialogue designed to make the process more intuitive.
Documentation: Links within the UI (presumably leaning towards the UI’s Edit Mode) to Knowledge Base articles.
Website calendar: to advertise events such as the daily meet-ups and the weekly Product Meetings, with links to the host experience. This will eventually be expanded to the client, and to include creator / community events.
Events Feature
A new feature in the works is for promoting events. This was intended to be part of the Friends release, but at the time of the October 26th Product Meetings, it looked as if it will slip to a separate update, following “soon after” the Friends release. This will:
Initially be a “little section” on the Web Atlas which can be expanded to see more events.
Be expanded in future iterations – although exactly what form it will take (Events tab in the Atlas? A calendar?) is still under discussion at the Lab.
Include a means (most likely an e-mail address) through which event organisers can submit their events for inclusion in the listing.
Darkwood Forest – Torley (l), Jenn (centre left), and Cara (r) from the Lab at the morning Product meeting, with Tyler Scarborough in the spacesuit (centre r)
Fashion Release
The initial Fashion release is currently on-track for around mid-December 2017.
The Lab will be extending invitations to creators to join a beta testing group for the fashion capabilities. This will be a selected group, and subject to NDA due to some proprietary aspects of the fashion capabilities.
Other Items
Audio Discussions and Torley’s Tips
Sounds approaching white noise (e.g. background “swooshing” style noises) can be broken up through camera issues. This is a known issue, and should improve when the Lab has full audio stream integration in the future, which is currently waiting on some third-party fixes.
While it has not been confirmed as something the Lab will implement, there has been discussion around possibly adding controllable fall-off curves for sounds in Sansar in the future. In addition, Torley has been experimenting with how reverb can be used (e.g. for enhancing echoes, etc). Galen has also put forward a suggestion for handling reverb.
Torley also offered some sound design tips:
If using a relatively constant background noise (e.g. a engine rumble), rather than using a single large emitter, or several very large overlapping emitters using the same sound, try using multiple emitters using variations of the sound. This prevents it becoming too homogeneous and can introduce subtle variations that add depth.
Use large audio blocks as a means to initially map the background sounds in a scene, then refine by differentiating the sounds into smaller areas, duplicating and varying as required, then add more focused sounds to build the layering.
Only use point emitters for sounds in very localised situations (e.g. a sound emanating from a specific point). For fall-off, spherical emitters are better than square emitters.
Resources such as audio volumes.etc., have a level of opacity assigned to them, defined by the physics engine. Requests have been made to offer greater variance in the level of opacity / transparent in various resource types, and this is something the Lab is examining, particularly as the layering of resources in a scene is liable to become more complex. Similarly, consideration is being given to changing the colour coding used in the Edit mode, as this can cause issues for people with colour vision issues.
Store Related
Listing / product updates: adding the ability to offer product updates remains a “high priority” for the Lab, although it is seen as having a complex series of interactions (e.g. with licensing / permissions and the proposed supply chain economy), such that implementation isn’t as straightforward as it might appear. However, the increasing need to update “standalone” products and present them to customers (e.g. so that products can keep pace with things like scripting improvements) has been recognised and is also being discussed at the Lab.
Product ratings: one outcome of the recent Store focus groups was a preference to so product ratings removed from listings. Currently, there’s no time frame on if / when this might be done.
In Brief
Web search bar: the placement / visibility of the search bar on Sansar web pages was improved with an update on Wednesday, October 25th.
Collision (?) Crashes: there is a potential client / experience crash which may be related to collisions with physical objects (e.g. get hit by a ball thrown by someone once or a number of times, and the experience may crash). It doesn’t happen with every collision with physical objects, nor is it necessarily related to the volume of collisions occurring within an experience. Galen has identified the crashes may be linked to an experience having a large number of complex surfaces, the speed at which items may be moving – the faster the physical object(s) is/are travelling, the more they might be prone to crashing the experience.
VR Friend Request Issues: some have noticed issues trying to accept / give Friend requests in VR mode. These appear to be related to the accuracy of the gaze pointer and the HTC Vive controllers perhaps more than Oculus Touch controllers. The Lab is aware of the problem and investigating it.
More granular control over animated objects: the Lab is planning to provide better control over animated objects via scripts (start, stop, point from which they animate, point at which they stop animating, etc), in time.
Resource metrics: Galen has requested the addition of a new tab to the Debug dashboard which would allow creators check their resource utilisation (e.g. server CPU and memory use), FPS, etc., in order to better optimise their work (particularly where scripts are concerned) . This has been taken aboard by the Lab as a means to help creators in optimising their experiences.
Revise dynamic object highlighting in Desktop mode for better control: currently, any dynamic object is highlighted in blue in Desktop mode, whether or not it is intended to be held by an avatar. This can lead to people trying to pick up scripted dynamic objects that are not intended to be held, risking them being repositioned or even crashing the experience. SIN has requested that the blue highlighting is updated so it can be toggled on / off by creators according to whether or not an objects can be held, to remove user confusion (as well as requesting the crash issue itself be looked at).
Bug Fix Release: each Sansar release includes bug fixes, as do updates. However, the Lab is considering focusing an early 2018 release on the list of bugs / issues which don’t make it into a release or update as they are not necessarily seen as urgent.
Adult Content in Sansar: allowing adult in Sansar is currently not on the roadmap.
Carolyn (right) addresses the afternoon product meeting, Friday October 20th, 2017
The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Friday, October 20th. These meetings are held every Friday at 9:30am PDT and 4:00pm PDT, and are open to all. There is currently no set agenda, and the meetings are a mix of voice and text. The official meeting notes are published in the week following each pair of meetings, while venues change on a weekly basis, and are announced in the Meet-up Announcements.
The October 6th meetings took place at Witchy’s Upside Down, a Halloween themed experience by Beverly Zauberflote.Product team members Cara and Carolyn attended the morning and afternoon sessions respectively, with Jenn and Brett Linden, the Digital Content Manager at the Lab leading / attending both.
General Announcements
Contest results: both the attachments and the Sansar’s Scariest competitions have now closed and final decisions on winners will be announced via a blog post, potentially in week #43 (commencing Monday, 23rd October).
New contest: the Lab is in discussions with a new contest for Sansar, and details are likely to be announced “soon”.
Spooky Karaoke, Saturday, October 21st at 14:00 PDT: taking place at the Studio Club – Karaoke & Hang Out by SIN. Sansar users are invited along to exercise their vocal talents in a karaoke contest. The catch: as it is Halloween, the tune must be in theme with the season.
Halloween Party, Friday October 27th at 10:00 PDT: taking place at Starry Skies’n’Stuff by Jenn from the Lab.
Sansar Roadmap and Upcoming Releases
Gindipple channels his inner Bruce at the product meeting, Friday October 20th, 2017
A further “roadmap blog post” providing insight into upcoming releases is being drafted, and will cover the next two releases following the upcoming October / November 2017 Friends release.
FRIENDS RELEASE
The roadmap blog post on the Discovery and Friends releases can be found here), in short, the Friends release may include (subject to final confirmation):
Ability to search for people.
Improvements to publishing experiences.
An Events tab in the Atlas to showcase virtual meet-ups and special events to attend.
New guides to Sansar’s controls in desktop and VR mode.
Additional improvements for locating people are also planned, but will probably not be available for the upcoming Friends release. These include:
An Atlas indicator for the number of people in each experience.
The ability to locate where friends are in Sansar (with an option for people to opt-out if they do not wish to reveal where they are).
Store and Fashion Releases
The next two releases are the Store Release, scheduled for November, and the Fashion release, scheduled for December. Details of what will be in each of these releases has yet to be finalised, however:
The Store release will feature a range of updates and fixes for the Sansar Store.
The Fashion release will mark the “first phase” of deployment of clothing and fashion support within Sansar. Bjørn Laurin from the Lab outlined the plans for this in week #38 (meeting notes), and allowing for possible changes to the plans since then, I’m including the audio from that discussion below:
The hope is to have Fashion release available around mid-December (ish), to allow for the Lab’s traditional Christmas / New Year holiday closure, when only essential services are covered.
One point of note is that as Sansar does not as yet have maturity ratings (or similar), this avatars will retain a basic baked layer of underwear to prevent full body nudity. Thought is still being given how to implement this baked layer so that it does not interfere with fashion designs from creators.
Repeat / Stale Notifications and Messages
A recent issue is that of repeated / stale notifications and messages (e.g. direct messages from a previous session being repeated and marked as new; friendship requests previously accepted being repeated, etc). This has yet to be fixed, and in the meantime the planned deployment of a sound being played alongside of received messages / notifications has been delayed until the issue has been fixed. The problem has also led to requests that notifications and direct messages are timestamped.
Avatar Animations
Avatars in Sansar can walk and run as present. In the future the abilities to sit, jump, crouch, and pick objects up will be made available. However, as Bjørn also discussed at the week #38 product meeting (see the link above), not all of this is easy to implement in Sansar, and I’m again including his comments from that meeting for reference:
The improved avatar interactions / animation capabilities are seen as something to be added during 2018, and so will not be a part of the final 2017 releases. As Cara commented in the product meeting, and in addition to the points Bjørn discusses in the audio above, is that Sansar’s ground-up design means that capabilities for animating avatars within in cannot simply be “lifted” from Second Life or a similar-looking game engine. They require building into Sansar’s own avatar rig. Also, as part of the fashion work, the avatar itself is being re-worked to separate out the clothing bakes, and the Lab wants to complete this work before adding additional avatar capabilities.
Account Management
PayPal Support
In September, the Lab announced policy changes relating to the Sansar Store, which, among other things, required creators to file a payment method (credit / debit card) with the Lab. Following concerns raised from those stating they are unable / will not use credit / debit cards and requests for PayPal to be made an option, on October 2nd, the Lab confirmed the credit / debit card requirement would not be enforced.
At the October 20th meeting, Cara confirmed that adding PayPal to Sansar has been moved up on the roadmap, and is now a high priority, although subject to some other back-end work being finished.
The Avatar Name is somewhat analogous to Second Life Display names, inasmuch as it is a name by which someone is known in-world. Multiple people in Sansar can have the same Avatar Name (just is in the physical world there are multiple John Smiths, for example).
The Avatar ID is designed to be a unique identifier for each user / account. No two users can have the same Avatar ID.
Currently, both are fixed (although it may be possible to change an Avatar Name in the future). However, as both are visible to other users (the avatar ID being prefixed by “@”), this has raised a concern over account security. Accounts rely on e-mail addresses for log-in purposes, which again are not hard to discover, potentially meaning two out of three unique account identifiers (e-mail address and Avatar (account) ID) can easily be obtained (the third being the password). That said, the Sansar approach is not too dissimilar to Second Life, in that the user (account) name and user’s e-mail address can be discovered.
In Brief
Wednesday, October 18th Patch: there was a small patch released on Wednesday, October 18th, 2017 to address some crash issues. Release notes for this update are apparently in-hand.
In-Scene Interactions: the ability to interact with scripted objects such as light switches, door handles, etc., in Desktop mode is being worked on, but will not be appearing before 2018. Currently, such interactions will only work through direct collisions with trigger volumes.
Animated Mesh in Sansar: Animated Mesh (Animesh) is now open for testing in Second Life, prompting questions on when similar capabilities will be available in Sansar. Cara confirmed work is continuing on this, and the scripting team will be working on APIs for more granular control of animations, looping, etc. It’s not clear whether this will be available as a part of the upcoming 2017 releases or be targeted for 2018.
Avatar Attachment Size: avatar attachments are currently limited to a size of 1m x 1m x 1m and a tri count limit (15K per attachment). Requests have been made to increase both. Currently, there are no plans to change either in the short-term, but both may be revisited, depending on use cases offered.
Store Related:
Ability to update Store listings: following the Store focus group meetings, this is now “extremely high” on the priority list for updates, although a determination still appears to be required on where it sits in the order of priorities compared to things like licensing / supply chain management.
Ability to group and sell related items: is on the roadmap, but is sitting lower down the list than things like the ability to update listings (above).
Community events: the Lab has put together a series of events for October, but is keen to see experience creators organise and host events. Those who opt to do so are asked to contact Jenn with details, so she can help promote and advertise them through blog posts, etc., in lieu of a more structured means of promoting events.
Dynamic objects:
The Lab is working out how to improve collision handling with dynamic objects in Sansar (e.g. through the use of convex hull collisions) to improve performance.
The ability to teleport onto dynamic objects will be looked at in the future.
LOD (Level of detail) system: again, on the roadmap, but is currently still in the planning stages.
Sansar and Oculus “Dash” and Windows 10 Mixed Reality:
Oculus “Dash” is new user interface designed to let users replace traditional computer monitors with highly customisable, nearly unlimited VR screen space described as being like the virtual screens and information displays seen in the 2002 film Minority Report. It is due to start rolling out in December 2017 as a beta product.
Windows 10 Mixed Reality is currently being deployed, and OEM headsets (currently VR focused) are being made available.
For Sansar, Linden Lab is watching the Oculus Dash development, and currently remains focused on Oculus Rift / HTC Vive support, rather than looking at Window 10 headsets.
The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Friday, October 6th. These meetings are held every Friday at 9:30am PDT and 4:00pm PDT, and are open to all. There is no set agenda (currently), and the meetings are a mix of voice and text. The official meeting notes are published in the week following each pair of meetings, while venues change on a weekly basis, and are announced in the Meet-up Announcements.
The October 6th meetings took place at Spinnervale, a creepy experience for Halloween by Debi Baskerville (and which I’ve reviewed here). Attending the meetings were Bjørn Laurin, the Lab’s VP of Product, and Cara and Boden from the Product team.
Discovery Release Update
The Discovery release was deployed on Wednesday, October 4th – see my overview on the release for core details. However, there were some post-deployment issues which required hot fixes and updates to be deployed as well. These have thus far comprised:
Update 1 – October 5, 2017 – mainly addressing a major crashing issue that would trigger when an avatar enters an experience while other avatars are walking around.
Update 2 – October 6, 2017 – allowing people to add scripts and other components to objects bought from the Sansar Store following issues in the wake of the initial Discovery deployment. However, as a side-effect of the fix, items that were edited between the initial deployment and the update may revert back to their default settings, with items properties that were edited in the time between the Discovery release deployment and the update were lost. This was originally reported as a “known issue” in the October 5th update.
There may be further updates to follow, addressing some remaining issues.
Supply Chain Release Error
The second of the two issues noted above was the result of the premature deployment of code for Sansar’s supply chain economy and permissions system within the Discovery release.
As Bjørn explained at the meeting, the supply chain economy will allow everyone to get properly recompensed for their creations howsoever they are used. However, the first element of the code to support this – designed to protect original content – was deployed with the Discovery release without some key supporting elements, resulting in the issues fixed by the October 6th update.
Deployment of the supply chain capabilities may be around the end of the first quarter / start of the second quarter of 2018.
People gather for the 9:30am PDT Product Meeting at Spinnervale. Jenn is wearing the bat wings in the foreground
Other Noted Issues
Adding a metalness map to an object can cause it to dramatically change colour. This appears to be the unintended consequence of a fix for another issue.
Some people are seeing old messages and notifications re-received, generally during logging-in; friend requests me be repeated multiple times; accepting a friend request can request in the system add you as your own friend – and you can message yourself (!).
Some are seeing massively inflated audio emitters when working in Edit mode.
There are reports that items taken in Desktop mode can be “grabbed” away, either by other avatars – or even other things in a scene.
Some in Desktop mode have also reported that pressing and holding the mouse button to throw things doesn’t always result in a stronger throw; conversely, some in VR now have “superhuman” strength when throwing items.
Camera:
There is a report that going to free camera movement (aka flycam) by pressing F4 when in first-person view can allow the camera to pan when it is moved forwards / backwards. Although like a bug, a request was made for the feature to be retained.
llcameraforward camera vector behaviour is still no longer consistently tracking camera movements in third-person view (although it is still working as expected in first-person). This has been reported previously, but has not been addressed, and appears worse following the Discovery release. This is also affecting projectile behaviours as well.
The issue with objects appearing correctly positioned and aligned when editing a scene, and then appearing misaligned / out-of-place in the run-time experience (see here)may be related to a scaling issue, still to be fully investigated. One suggestion is that scaling using the Gizmo rather than the properties sliders can cause differences between the collision mesh and object mesh, which can cause the latter to be repositioned.
There is an issue with the client Atlas search – it only seems to search based on the first 3 or 4 characters in the search string.
There were some intentional changes with the Discovery release which weren’t as well represented in the release notes as they might have been. Future release notes will drill down more deeply into changes and updates to hopefully avoid this happening again.
Boden Linden (centre right and using a VR headset) talking at the 4:00pm PDT Product Meeting
Rough Time Frame for the Next Releases
The Friends release, focusing on social capabilities for Sansar will form the release following the Discovery release, and will likely be at the end of October / start of November.
According to Bjørn at the morning Product Meeting, the release after that will be the Store release, and Boden indicated that this will likely be in mid-December, as the Lab tends to close for an end-of-year break over Christmas / the New Year period. Subject to confirmation, this release might be the first release of the clothing / fashion updates.
Sansar Camera
Third-person camera orientation doesn’t necessarily match that of the avatar, causing confusion for some. For example, I arrived in this experience with my avatar facing to the right relative to my camera. Pressing “forward” to walk didn’t turn my avatar in the direction my camera was facing (as might be expected), but rather had my avatar walking off the the right, the camera slewing around to take up position behind me
Feedback on the Sansar camera (when in third-person view) has identified points of annoyance, particularly for those used to dealing with Second Life. A couple of these can be summarised:
Lack of orientation relative to the avatar: when a user arrives at a spawn point in an experience, their avatar may be oriented to face a specific direction – but their camera may not be (it can be off to one side, for example. This can cause confusion with the direction the user should be facing, and disorientation when the user walks “forward”, and their avatar move from (say) left-to-right across their screen (the camera eventually swings around behind the avatar), rather than the avatar turning to walk in the direction the camera is facing as some users might expect.
When behind the avatar, the default third-person camera position suffers the Second Life error of being set too high above the avatar, which could potentially lead to issues of scale – again as is the case with Second Life.
Jenn and Bjørn have agreed to get someone who is working on the camera system to come along to a focus group meeting to talk through these kinds of concerns with people and determine what might be done to address them.
The Discovery Release. Credit: Linden Lab. Location; Colossus Rising
On Wednesday, October 4th, Linden Lab updated Sansar with the Discovery release, the September / October end of month / start of month major release for the platform. I’ve had a quick opportunity to try things out, and the majority of this article is intended to provide an overview of the key features of the release.
Sansar Store Policy Update
Before getting down to the details of the update, the release notes came with some announcements and reminders, including a pointer to the recently updated Store Listing Guidelines and policy, which came into effect on Monday, October 2nd.
However, there has been some negative feedback on the policy change around the requirement for creators to have payment information on file with the Lab (e.g. a credit / debit card). As such, the policy announcement was updated on Monday, October 2nd, to read:
Following helpful feedback from Sansar’s creator community, we will not be enforcing the credit card requirement at this time.
Requiring sellers to have payment information on file will help us to combat undesirable behaviour in the Store, but we understand that creators around the world may not have a credit card for a variety of reasons.
We are working to support other payment methods, such as PayPal, and plan to revisit this requirement for sellers once we have more available options.
Atlas Updates
The Atlas in both the client and on the web has been updated.
The Client Atlas now has a new Featured tab, and the ability to search experiences (the latter matching the web Atlas). Search allows users to search by full or partial experience name, creator name, etc. As with the web Atlas, results are ranked in order of closest matching (so for, example, searching “Maxwell Graf” will return a list of Maxwell Graf’s experiences, followed by experiences /creators with partially matching names).
The Client Atlas with the new Featured tab (arrowed) and Search option (circled)
Te Featured tab lists all those experiences selected by the Sansar editorial team, again in the same way as the web Atlas.
The Web Atlas similarly gains a Featured tab, which sits alongside the All and Sansar Studio tabs in the top left corner of the Atlas, which now has a cleaner look and feel.
Desktop Mode Object Interactions
Desktop users can now interact with objects in an experience. Simply move the mouse pointer in an area where there might be objects available for interaction. Any objects you can “pick up”, will be highlighted in blue. Left click on an object you want to “pick up” and it will move to float in front of you.
Desktop Mode object interaction: hover the mouse pointer over objects. Any object highlighted in blue – like the pith helmet here – can be “picked up” with a left mouse button click. The object will jump to float in front of you (shown with the book in the inset image). Left click again to drop the item, or left-click / hold to throw it – the longer you hold, the further you’ll toss it
As you walk and turn, the object will move with you. To stop “holding” the object, LEFT click it again. A quick click will “drop” it, but if you press and hold the left button, you can throw the object – the longer you hold the button, the further you’ll throw the object. See the Sansar Keyboard Shortcuts documentation for more.
There is still some work to be done on this – avatars will eventually be able to hold objects they pick up, so this is only an initial step in interaction. However, I would request the Lab do something about the direction sharp, pointy things float – as shown below, “health and safety” didn’t exactly spring to mind 😉 .
“Is this a machete that floats before me, the sharp bit towards my throat?” The Desktop mode interaction is only in its first iteration, and will have features added. However, it can raise eyebrows over health and safety! 🙂 (With apologies to W. Shakespeare esq, for the misquote.)
The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Friday, September 22nd. These meetings are held every Friday at 9:30am PDT and 4:00pm PDT, and are open to all. There is no set agenda (currently), and the meetings are a mix of voice and text, and the official meeting notes are published in the week following each pair of meetings. Venues change on a weekly basis, and are announced in the Meet-up Announcements.
The September 22nd meeting took place at Starry Stars & Stuff, an experience built by Jenn from the Lab, demonstrating what can be done by someone who does not create original mesh can do in Sansar just through a little terraforming and by buying items through the Store (and with a little scripting help from Gindipple!).
Cara from the Product Team attended the morning meeting, and Carolyn attended the afternoon meeting.
Discovery Release
The Discovery Release is now scheduled for week #40 (commencing Monday, October 2nd). Highlights include:
Client-Side Atlas: ability to search the Atlas, matching the capability already in the web Atlas; a new Featured tab for featured experiences.
Desktop Mode Object Interaction:
This Will allow Desktop users to have a similar level of interaction with in-world objects as those using VR. Desktop user will be able to “pick up” objects, “hold” them, throw them, drop them.
Object selection will be via mouse selection.
Initially this will not include animations: clicking on an object will cause it to float over the avatar’s hand. However, future releases will support “holding” the selected object.
Sansar Store: masthead banners for branding; URLs are being improved to look more “store-like”.
Future Updates
Future improvements for the Atlas will include a Favourites / Bookmarks tab, an Events tab and the ability to sort listed experiences – some of these will be appearing in the Friends Release, due at the end of October / beginning of November.
The client-side Atlas uses a “gaze pointer” in VR mode, requiring people focus their eyes on items in the Atlas – entries, the scroll bar, etc. This is not proving particularly user-friendly for some, particularly with the size of the Atlas, so the plan is to replace this with a means to select, scroll, etc., using the hand controllers.
Work is in progress to improve:
The upload of some file types.
Collision handling within Sansar, including convex hull collision, particularly for multi-part objects.
Performance for full collision meshes
More specific details of some future updates and an overview of the Friends Release (October / November) can be found in these reports here and here.
The requirement that images for scripts listed on the Store “must focus on the script’s capabilities” has caused some concern due to the potential for confusion. How do you represent the sound of a gentle breeze in an image? Does an image of a carousel convey the idea of a rotation script to a consumer, or that the item on sale is a carousel – regardless of any accompanying description?
The Lab is looking at listings for audio and scripts with the idea of providing a set of icons creators can associate with their items when listing them on the store.
An audio preview capability is also being worked on, which will hopefully be available in the next couple of months.
The concerns expressed will be added to the feedback gained from the recent Store focus group meetings and carried forward to similar discussions at the Lab and in future focus group discussions – which Jenn will try to get a notice out about soon.
There is an acknowledgement that the announcement of the policy changes could have been handled better given meetings on the Store had been planned for the same week. Things came down to a matter of bad timing; Jenn has indicated LL will try to be more pre-emptive with meetings and announcements in future.
A suggestion was made about sharing ideas on policy, requirements, etc., via viewable documents and allowing feedback. This has – to a degree – worked with some of the technical work with Second Life (proposals for inventory updates and Windlight Environment Enhancements were made available through Google docs – although the latter was somewhat spoiled by pre-pubescent comments being left on the document).
Account Identification, Security, Etc
There are concerns about account verification, security, etc. Some of this is handled by the Lab’s subsidiary, Tilia Inc (Tilia Branch Ltd., in the UK), particularly with regards to payment information, payment processing, etc. Jenn is going to see if she can get input from the Tilia team on some of the issues.
Edit Mode Issues
The afternoon meeting focused in part on issues and pain points within the Edit mode. Items raised include:
Changing or deleting a script leading to the loss of parameters, etc., associated with another script (not clear is this is a copy of the same script used elsewhere).
The Gizmo used to manipulation objects can be hard to select and use.
The UI itself (issues with reading, etc.).
Lack of ability to:
Manage inventory – even described by the Lab as “desperately needed”. It is being worked on.
Easily return objects to inventory (with metadata for position, etc. saved?).
Customise options (mouse buttons, moving windows around, etc.).
Easily move and focus the camera, including better panning / rotation and flycamming type movements (this is something needed in the runtime mode for things like machinima)
A suggestion was made that it could be beneficial to split the Editor UI between Desktop Mode and VR, rather than trying to combine the two into a single UI, particularly given Desktop offers a full keyboard to use, whereas VR is obviously more limited.
Other Items
Edit Mode: Desktop or VR?
The morning session saw a straw poll taken of those attending on whether they used VR or Desktop mode in Edit mode. Some attending expressed surprise that editing in VR was possible.
Overall the choice appears to be being increasingly task-driven for those with HMDs rather than a clear either / or split. There are some aspects of scene building which are intuitively better in Desktop mode (initial design and placement, scripting, etc), while some are far easier in VR mode (e.g. relocating objects and their associated elements adjusting positions, etc.), and several of the creators at the meeting indicated they are now naturally moving between to the two modes, depending on what they are doing.
Experiences Dropping from the Featured Category When Updated
This is a pain point for both experience creators and the Lab. When an experience tagged as a Featured Experience in the Atlas is updated, the tag denoting it as featured in the Atlas is lost. A fix for this is being looked into. In the interim, those who are updating their experiences and finding they get dropped as Featured in the Atlas can drop a line to Jenn who will pass it on to the Product team.
Experience Loading Information
Suggestions have been made to carry over the experience description from the Atlas to the load screen on an experience, so that users entering the experience can be more informed (where descriptions are provided).
A request was made for some kind of progress bar to be displayed in experience load screens. This has been looked at by the Lab, but because experiences are coming via AWS, it is apparently harder to implement than may appear to be the case. Instead, the Lab is looking at alternative approaches, such as keeping frequently visited experiences cached for faster access and reducing the amount of data requiring download.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 