Category: Second Life

2023 SL SUG meetings week #25 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Natthimmel – Göbekli Tepe. May 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 20th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They 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.

Server Deployments

  • There was no deployment on the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, June 20th. However, the simhosts were restarted.
  • On Wednesday, June 21st, the RC release deployed to the BlueSteel channel will be deployed to the rest of the RC simhosts. This release includes:
    • The “bot detection” update (i.e. AGENT_AUTOMATED constant for llGetAgentInfo() – so only detects if that flag is set, not if an agent is a bot or not.
    • The second part of the LSD rezzing fix + lLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound, among other things.

Viewer Updates

No changes to the crop of official viewers for the start of the week, leaving the available list as:

In Brief

  • This was a solstice party week, so not a lot of technical discussion.
  • Depending on who was speaking, vehicle-based region crossings either appear to have improved for some reason, or at exactly the same.
  • There is a bug with the automated Map refresh / clearing which can result in regions removed from the grid being removed from the Map. Anyone noticing this is asked to raised a support ticket requesting the Map be updated.
  • The Lab is playing with an experimental capability for adding labelling to the Map – some of this was shown by Alexa Linden some time ago, but the experiments at the Lab are continuing, although it is not clear if any of this work will result in anything user-facing, as currently the overlay is effectively a replacement for the actual Map tile, hence why the examples below are on “empty” parts of the the Map.
The latest in LL’s experiments with Map overlays
  • llLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound are awaiting documentation, but are now integrated into the next maintenance simulator.
  • A semi-entertaining discussion on Babylon 5 and Star Trek – who would’ve said Rider Linden is a B5 fan?! All I’ll say is not Zathras – because no-one ever listens to Zathras. Zathras, however, probably did say so. Even if only to Zathras.‡.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

‡ No, I’m not going to explain that further. Watch Babylon 5 and find out. You won’t regret it 🙂 .

Briarwood Wildlife Refuge in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Briarwood Wildlife Refuge, June 2023 – click any image for full size

Briarwood Estates is an all inclusive, family role-play community and luxury residential estate. The work of Frankie Jade LaFoxx (Frankie Foxpaws) and her team, the estate covers multiple regions and offers a wide range of amenities and facilities for local residents and for visitors. These include a equestrian hub with horseback riding trails, a hotel and spa, farming, games, a marina and boating, shopping, live music, and more.

One of the more public elements within the estate is the Briarwood Wildlife Refuge which has recently been featured in the Destination Guide. Located on a homestead region, the refuge is linking to several of the surrounding regions via footbridges. Perhaps most notable among these for incoming visitors is the main information (and event?) centre, sitting to the east of the refuge. This presents a model of the estate in which available rentals are highlighted, as well as showing the public routes through all of the regions, with the walls presenting event schedule boards and general information for both visitors and residents, and which does much to present a picture of a well-run estate.

Briarwood Wildlife Refuge, June 2023

The refuge proper starts across the bridge from the information centre, and carries the following description:

Briarwood Wildlife Refuge is a wildlife refuge within SL. It is one of the first wildlife refuges operated by Briarwood Estates. The refuge protects more than 14 acres of marshes, grasslands, and woodlands.

Bounded by a sandy-shingle beach and open waters, the refuge is also cut through with watery channels that have the feel of being both human-made and more natural inlets, steams and a large pond. Together, this break up the landscape in such a way to suggest a natural location curated by human hands and eyes in order to offer the best environment for the wildlife and animals within the refuge.

Briarwood Wildlife Refuge, June 2023

The majority of the landscape is low-lying, suggestive of the wetlands of the description, with cart tracks offering various routes through and around the grasses and up into the few hills which also help to break-up the landscape. Most of the refuge is fairly open, the trees numerous enough to line the trails and tracks and provide shade, but not so numerous they overwhelm the park.

Most of this landscape is given over to the local wildlife, although there is also a meadow bounded by dry stone walls to one side, it and the barn within it home to sheep and goats. A second meadow, this one bounded by a fence and water, can be found across the grasslands, the home of a mare and her foal, the stables here suggesting more horses might also call it home – or they might equally be home to the donkeys wandering a little further away, but still within the boundary marked by the white fencing.

Briarwood Wildlife Refuge, June 2023

The local wildlife includes bears, deer, foxes and waterfowl, and is spread fairly broadly across the refuge as one might expect, offering opportunities for photography and discovery. The trails offer an excellent means to explore the setting, but if you have a wearable horse, they also offer the means to enjoy a little riding whilst exploring.

Considerable care has gone into presenting Briarwood Wildlife Refuge as a wholly natural environment, perhaps most notably in the time spent blending the mesh forms of the rutted tracks into the terrain. This is something which if not done properly, can lead to jarring results when gaps or holes are spotted or the texturing of the mesh does not match that of its surrounds. Here, however, the blending is a tour de force in how to do things properly to the point of near-perfection (aided by the inclusion of terrain textures in Alex Bader’s landscaping kits, allowing them to be applied to terrain), and does much to add to the expressive gentleness of the refuge.

Briarwood Wildlife Refuge, June 2023

The main exits from the refuge link to Briarwood Village to the west, which appears to have public access, allowing visitors to extend their explorations, and Briarwood Oaks to the south. The latter link takes the form of a cut stone, paved bridge spanning the water channel between the two regions. However, as this bridge is gated at either end and the gates are apparently locked against public access, I assume Briarwood Oaks is for local residents only, and their privacy should be respected, rather than attempts made to cross the bridge and go a-wandering among the houses.

True, the weather within the refuge is a little rainy – but again, this is in keeping with the overall tone of the setting, and it offers its own opportunities for photography whilst also working across a range of EEP settings for those who would like to de-emphasise the rain – as I hope the images in this article show.

Briarwood Wildlife Refuge, June 2023

Overall, a very engaging and photogenic setting in which to explore and take photos.

SLurl Details

Second Life Hair Fair 2023

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Hair Fair

The 2023 Second Life Hair Fair is currently open, and runs through until Sunday, July 2nd, 2023. As with previous years, is being run to raise money for Wigs for Kids, with every purchase seeing a percentage donated to the cause, with the Bandana booths and Donation kiosks donating 100% of all proceeds received.

As with recent years, the event takes place across six regions, appropriately called Foils, Brunette, Streaks,  Noirette, Redhead and Blonde, laid out in a block of six, with Foils, Brunette and Streaks to the north and Noirette, Redhead and Blonde to the south, separated by an intervening stream. The landing zones for the regions form decks spaced along both banks of the stream, both helping to lighten the load of arriving avatars and providing vantage points from which those (such as myself) who prefer to do so, can cam-shop without necessarily having to wander the stores.

As is usual for Hair Fair, the shopping regions are wisely lightly decorated in order to minimise viewer-side lag that might otherwise be created by having a significant amount of extra object and texture rendering. For those who enjoy perusing stores directly, the broad boardwalks ensure there is little chance of bumping into others, whilst those who might tire of walking can use one of the rezzers located along both boardwalks to rez a sittable “bus” and ride the length of the walkways.

The list of participating merchants can be found on the Hair Fair website, while for those who may not find something they wish to purchase, donation kiosks are available to help support Wigs for Kids, or there are the Bandana Booths, one located in Foils and the other in Blonde. within them, visitors can purchase a bandana or a Hair Fair Hare companion (all proceeds on both to Hair Fair), and learn about the history of the Hair Fair Bandana Day & booths.

Hair Fair 2023

About Wigs for Kids

For more than forty years Wigs for Kids has been providing hair replacement systems and support for children who have lost their hair due to chemotherapy, radiation therapy, Alopecia, Trichotillomania, burns and other medical issues at no cost to children or their families. The effects of hair loss go deeper than just a change in a child’s outward appearance. Hair loss can erode a child’s self-confidence and limit them from experiencing life the way children should. With an injured self-image, a child’s attitude toward treatment and their physical response to it can be negatively affected also.

Wigs for Kids helps children suffering with hair loss look themselves and live their lives. Families are never charged for the hair replacements provided for their children; Wigs for Kids rely completely on both the donation of hair and / or money to help meet their goals.

Read more about Wigs for Kids mission, and discover how hair can be donated.

URLs and SURLs

Cica’s Summer Night in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Cica Ghost: Summer Night, June 2023

Cica carries us to the magic of summertime night skies and coastal retreats with her installation Summer Night, which opened on June 16th, 2023. It’s another happy setting, rich in content and details that is light-hearted and intended to lift the spirit. utilising Cica’s custom textures to paint the terrain, the installation is set out on five landmasses of varying heights, between which, like an inlet or bay, a body of water flows.

The first of these landmasses sits as the landing point and presents itself as a broad deck or boardwalk, trees growing in the corners, and a huge fish spelunking down one hole in the boards and rising from a second, head and tail visible, but body lost to sight. a ladder spans the water horizontally to reach the local lighthouse, whilst a second ladder further to one side rises up to the decking covering the top of a flat-topped mesa and the bridge reaching across the deep chasm below to a little fishing town.

Cica Ghost: Summer Night, June 2023

Perched high above the waters, with nets hanging from walls and draped over red-tiled roofs, this is a place where dancing might enjoyed, where cats roam rooftops or await visitors at the local café and where walls have been used as canvases for painting little vignettes here and there. Down below in the bay proper,  2D waves rise and fall and fish and whales frolic even as a fishing boat sails by, whilst star fish climb the net cast up the side of the remaining headland, perhaps to dance under the beaming Moon floating just overhead.

The magic of this setting is that it it appears to have been drawn, literally and figuratively, from a childhood memory or a remembrance of childhood drawings. It doesn’t matter that fish appear to be floating above the waves alongside octopi, whilst crabs scuttle from side to side with claws raised in a cheer or the landscape appears the creation of pencil and paper rather than Mother Nature. What matters is the way the setting lifts the heart and encourages a smile, drawing visitors into it with a childlike joy, particularly when the more unusual sit points are discovered!

What’s more, all of this is caught under the most fantastic night sky, filled with stars, fish, the smiling faces of cats, starfish and more. It’s a sky guaranteed to capture the eye and heart as much as the rest.

Cica Ghost: Summer Night, June 2023

As is usual for Cica, Summer Night draws its name from a quote. In this case, a Haiku by Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest, Kobayashi Issa (June 15, 1763 – January 5, 1828). Known simply as “Issa”,  a pen name meaning Cup-of-tea, he is referenced as one of the Great Four haiku masters in Japan (along with Bashō, Buson and Shiki). The Haiku Cica has chosen is one of Issa’s most well-known and – for many – most perplexing (how can stars whisper, and to whom are they whispering?).

Summer night—
even the stars
are whispering¹

Kobayashi Issa

Cica Ghost: Summer Night, June 2023

However, there is no need to plumb the depths of Issa’s possible meaning here; it is enough to visit Cica’s Summer Night and enjoy it for all it is beneath its blanket of whispering, playful “stars”.

SLurl Details

  1. Yes, this doesn’t appear to follow the “5-7-5 rule” for a total of 17 phonetic units. However, that’s because it is a translation; the original Japanese version does follow the 17 phonetic “rule”. More particularly, it includes both a kireji (cutting word) and a kigo (seasonal reference), clearly marking it as a haiku, rather than something like a senryū. 

2023 week #24: SL CCUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Last Aokigahara Souls, April 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, June 15th, 2023 at 13:00 SLT. 

These meetings are:

  • For discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current work, upcoming work, and requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work.
  • Usually chaired by Vir Linden, and dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.
  • Conducted in mixed voice and text chat. Participants can use either when making comments  or ask or respond to comments, but note that you will need Voice to be enabled to hear responses and comments from the Linden reps and other using it. If you have issues with hearing or following the voice discussions, please inform the Lindens at the meeting.

The following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting, and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Viewer News

No official viewer updates up until the meeting, leaving the list as:

In addition:

  • Maintenance T is likely the next RC viewer in line for promotion to de facto release status; however, it currently has an elevated crashed rate compared to the current release viewer, so LL is looking to bring that down before any promotion in made.
  • The Emoji project viewer is liable to see further improvements to the Emoji picker in the UI.
  • All of the back-end work (simulator code and the inventory service) seen as necessary to support Inventory Thumbnails is now thought to be in place, opening the door for a Thumbnails project viewer “Soon™”, which is apparently awaiting QA clearance.
    • Apparently this now provides the option of displaying the contents of an inventory folder either as we’re currently familiar with them (icons and text) or in a “thumbnail view” – I’ll review this once the viewer is available.
    • It’s anticipated that as the feature goes mainstream, creators will include thumbnails with their product offerings, as well as users creating their own thumbnails of items already in their inventory.
  • A further Maintenance RC viewer (Maint U) is in development and could be surfacing “Soon™”.

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

  • To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
  • There is a general introduction / overview / guide to authoring PBR Materials available via the Second Life Wiki.
  • Substance Painter is also used as a guiding principal for how PBR materials should look in Second Life.
  • Up to four texture maps are supported for PBR Materials: the base colour (which includes the alpha); normal; metallic / roughness; and emissive, each with independent scaling.
  • Given the additional texture load, work has been put into improving texture handling within the PBR viewer.
  • In the near-term, glTF materials assets are materials scenes that don’t have any nodes / geometry, they only have the materials array, and there is only one material in that array.
  • The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
  • The viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page.
  • Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.

Status

  • There is another viewer RC in the works. This has been delayed whilst a number of bugs were resolved, but it is now with QA and pending their OK, it should be surfacing in the very near future.
  • The water fog density range has been updated in the PBR viewer. It was capable of being set from -10 through to 10, but is now  “almost zero” through to 100, with the higher numbers indicating higher fog density (and lower visibility).
  • Sky settings:
    • As per my notes from the last CCUG, all “legacy” skies which do not have a probe ambience set, will have one automatically applied by the viewer.
    • This has lead to a checkbox being including in the Graphic Preferences to disable the automatic application. However, it is possible / likely the check box will be removed.
    • This will mean the only way to have “legacy” skies render as they did pre-PBR will be to set the probe ambience setting to zero in the sky settings.
    • Setting probe ambience to 0 effectively deactivates HDR rendering and tone mapping etc.
  • The above requirement to set the probe ambience to zero has two further impacts:
    • It will be the only means by which “legacy” materials can be rendered as they did pre-PBR; the viewer “hack” to desaturate and “nudge” the luminance of “legacy” materials to have them render as they did pre-PBR has been removed due to combination of factors, including a noticeable performance hit.
    • The hack that allowed full bright objects to be exempt from dynamic exposure (so they would always stay the same brightness no matter what the exposure) has also had to be removed from the viewer, again as a result of a noticeable performance hit (an extra texture sample for each pixel). So, full bright object will, in future versions of the PBR viewer, be subject to the same exposure rules as everything else in the scene.
      • This means that full bright objects will still appear to be lit by 100% of the light and be unaffected by things like local lights, but the overall dynamic exposure of the scene will also brighten / darken them in keeping with the rest of the scene, and tone mapping will be applied.
      • SL photographers who display their images in-world with full bright are going to need to experiment with using sky settings with tone mapping disabled when taking their shots in order to avoid it being applied twice to images (e.g. once when the snapshot was taken and again when displayed in-world) and having this unduly affect the full bright rendering of the image.
  • Screen Space Reflections (SSR) – (non-SL overview):
    • Glossy support led to performance hits, particularly when there were a lot of alpha objects in the scene being rendered.
    • This has now been mitigated via a number of means; e.g. SSR is not even applied if it exceeds a certain roughness value, nor is it applied to alpha blended objects (the “old fade-out” method is used – that is: the higher the roughness, the weaker the SSR and the greater the reliance on reflection probes).
    • There have also been some general adjustments to SSR to again try to reduce the performance hits, whilst also allowing more distant objects to be reflected off of surfaces – said to be noticeable on water and flat surfaces.
  • The SSR work provoked a reminder that it is important not to abuse the use of alpha surfaces when SSR is used in rendering.
    • For example:
      • If the object is just a single layer users will be looking through to see what lays beyond, than alpha blending “may be the right choice”.
      • However, alphas should not be used to create layered effects (e.g. setting the faces of a surface to transparent for a “window” and then applying a further alpha to give the window a “frosted glass” look, and having the viewer composite them when rendering. Instead, both alphas should be baked down into one material in PhotoShop (or similar) & applied).
    • This sparked a discussion on how general users who dabble in content creation and who may be used to working in certain ways, can be properly educated to understand things like this – which may be known and understood by mainstream content creators, but could easily pass others by, as there is no means within the viewer UI of telling what is “good” or “bad” techniques when banging things together (at least until frame rates disappear through the floor and into the cellar).
    • It was therefore suggested again that documentation on the wiki – “best practices” / a “bible” for PBR Materials creation / use really should accompany the formal release of PBR Materials, and this should be clearly pointed at though blog posts, etc.

PBR Terrain

Materials applied to Second Life terrains. Credit: Linden Lab
  • Per past meeting notes, Cosmic Linden is prototyping the application of PBR materials on terrain (see this blog post for more).
  • The focus currently is on adding triplanar mapping to the for terrain repeats, particularly on steep elevation changes (so as to avoid the all-too familiar “stretching” seen with textures).
  • The above does potentially incur a performance hit, as it is noted as being for “sufficiently capable machines”, so Cosmic has also been working on trying to optimise performance elsewhere in the use of materials on terrain, as well as carrying out some bug fixing.
  • Important notes with this work:
    • It is not terrain painting. It is the application of PBR materials – terrain painting is described as “something that’s on the radar” at LL.
    • The work does not include support for displacement maps.
    • The work is currently only viewer-side, with no corresponding server-side support, the idea here being to prototype what might be achieved and testing approaches / results.

In Brief

  • It was re-iterated that long-term graphics support on the MacOS side will be MoltenVK (with Vulkan the likely route for Windows), with Zink also being looked at.
  • New user retention:
    • It has been suggested that as many in the various SL communities – those running Community Gateways, content creators, etc., – all have a interest in the new-user experience and brining people into SL, that a semi-regular “New User Experience” meeting might be established by LL at which ideas can be more readily discussed, feedback given and communities and creators more directly engaged with LL’s own efforts (e.g. developing an ecosystem of clothing, etc., to support the (still) upcoming new starter avatars. etc.).
    • It was pointed out that one of the best ways to encourage retention is for existing users to be welcoming, polite and supportive of new users (clubs that have scripts auto-ejecting people just because they are only a handful of days old or on the basis that an avatar is not PIOF, for example, aren’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat, for example).
    • The above spun into a general discussion on content, content moderation, and similar.
  • There was a general discussion on Land Impact (LI) and how it is “too high” – although this is highly subjectively, given the diversity of content and its uses in SL (static, animated, Animesh, etc. – how high is “too high”? Is “too high” down to more a lack of understanding of actual rendering + simulator load costs than an objective measurement? etc.). That said, it was acknowledged that more could be done t help “improve” LI in some areas.
  • The above spun into a discussion on physics costs, and how convex hull physics forms are not the most efficient for SL due to the complexity of the tools used to create them, and the ease with which mistakes can be made in creating them, with indications that as the glTF project moves towards support for mesh uploads how physics shapes are used / applied is likely to be be revised.

Next Meeting

  • Thursday, June 29th, 2023.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #24 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Burrow Wood: Road to Nowhere, April 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 13th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They 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.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, June 13th:
    • The SLS Main channel servers were updated with a simulator release providing support for the new inventory thumbnails viewer capability soon to be forthcoming. See my recent TPVD meeting summaries for more on this capability. This project – or at least the simulator element – is apparently known as “Manicure” internally at the Lab!).
    • The Preflight RC channel was updated with simulator support for glTF PBR materials – see below for more on this deployment.
  • One Wednesday June14th, the BlueSteel RC channel will be updated with a maintenance release, which include:
    • The “bot detection” update (i.e. AGENT_AUTOMATED constant for llGetAgentInfo() – so only detects if that flag is set, not if an agent is a bot or not.
    • The second part of the LSD rezzing fix + lLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound, among other things.

glTF PBR Simulator Deployment

  • The Preflight channel is a small channel compromising the following controlled access regions: Preflight 0] though Preflight 8, Rumpus Room 1  through Rumpus Room 5 and Testylvania Sandbox.
  • Access to these regions must be requested – but will remain limited; the purpose of this deployment is for small-scale testing of the PBR materials support on the Main grid.
  • A larger, more public deployment of the simulator PBR support code will be forthcoming, so those who do not have access to the Preflight regions should consider waiting for that deployment.

Viewer Updates

No changes to the crop of official viewers for the start of the week, leaving the available list as:

In Brief

PBR Terrain Work

To re-iterate:

  • This work is in development, but is a follow-on to the current PBR Materials project, not a part of it.
  • It is primarily viewer-side changes, allowing the application of PBR materials instead of the current terrain textures. It is *not* PBR terrain painting.
  • Extensions to the project are being discussed internally at the Lab, but the real focus will be on this initial work for the time being, and further information can be found in this official blog post.
  • Discussions on the work are held at the content Creation User Group meetings – see my  meeting summaries or attend the meetings in person.
The PBR terrain project will allow PBR materials to be used on Second Life terrain in place of textures. Credit: Linden Lab

Inventory Thumbnails

  • This is primarily a viewer-side project which keeps coming up for discussion at the SUG meetings.
  • It will allow persistent thumbnail images with a maximum resolution of 256×256 to be produced, which can be stored within inventory with the items they represent  such that they display an image of an item to be displayed on Mouseover.
  • Testing is currently underway to limit the impact the inclusion of thumbnails may have on inventory load time, texture memory use.
  • The viewer is not yet ready for a project viewer release, but the Lab is working on a blog post to outline more of the intended functionality of this capability.

In General

  • BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” has further fixes in the works. No estimated time for deployment.
  • There is still upset circulating about the reduction in Linden Water reflections as a result of performance optimisations to help offset the impact of PBR rendering in the viewer. Currently, there are no plans to offer higher quality reflections in the future, but it is hoped that evolving work on screen space reflections will offset so of the loss of quality.  For discussions on this, please see my Content Creation User Group (CCUG) summaries or attend the meetings in person.
  • A general discussion on updating Linden trees / plants, re-introducing the “wind” to sway trees, how physics calculations and costs are made / arrived at (with the latter noted as potentially being for a future (e.g. not this year) internal discussion at the Lab, so outside of the scope of comment from the La at present).
  • It was noted that there is a further simulator update in development which is hoped will reduce the hit simulators take when handling avatars arriving in a region (and with a focus on better handling of attachments). No ETA on when this will see the light of day.
  • A further discussion on region crossings and vehicles, which also rolled into vehicles hitting ban walls and avatars being ejected / vehicle returned, and a means of preventing this by forewarning on an impending region / parcel with access control enabled. Please refer to the video for all of this.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.