The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, May 21st 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.
SL Viewer
The CEF Special viewer has been withdrawn from downloads, pending the release of a more rounded CEF RC viewer containing broader support for more options for streaming into SL + more codecs.
The FMOD Studio RC viewer updated to version 6.4.3.542486 on May 19th.
The remainder of the current official viewer pipelines are as follows:
- Current Release viewer version 6.4.2.541639, dated May 11th, promoted May 19th, formerly the Camera Presets RC viewer – see my Camera Presets tutorial.
- Release channel cohorts:
- FMOD Studio RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542486, May 21st.
- Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542484, May 19th.
- Project viewers:
- Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.2.541645, issued May 15th.
- Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
- Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
- Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
- 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.
General Viewer Notes
- The exact streaming services that will be supported by the next CEF update have yet to be confirmed.
- The Love Me Render viewer is still being re-worked as a result of being “clobbered” by the EEP updates (presumably during the merge process). It is hoped this will be back on track soon.
- The first viewer to be built entirely using the new build process using a recent version of Xcode (OS X) or Visual Studio 2017 (Windows) is still waiting to see the light of day.
Graphics / ALM / Code paths
- The previous CCUG meeting raised the topic of possibly removing the ability to disable the viewer’s Advanced Lighting Model (ALM).
- Vir emphasised that the idea is just a point of discussion, and not indicative of any decision having been made.
Graphics support is a whole lot of different possible code paths, which means there are tons and tons of options, [so] you can slice it and dice it lots and lots of different ways which makes it into a maintenance and update nightmare. So the more we can streamline it and say stuff works in particular ways, makes it easier to keep it working and to fix things when they go wrong. So, we don’t have any immediate plans to change Advanced Lighting, it’s just something we raised to gauge what usage patterns there might be.
– Vir Linden
Jelly Dolls / Avatar Rendering
- Vir’s idea to render jelly dolled avatars as basic human form, sans attachments, is apparently proving more complicated a move than at first thought.
- He’s not entirely surprised by this, considering all that an avatar made include: animations, shape deformations, etc.
- Animations can particularly problematic when they are being used to deform the skeleton into a non-human form, and the system wants to render the avatar in a human form.
- Allowing the animations to run means allowing them to deform the avatar shape.
- Turning the animations off means leaving the avatar shape in a human form but stuck in the T-pose position.
- The solution to the above issue would appear to be setting a stand animation that runs locally (i.e. in any viewer that is set to render the avatar as a jelly doll). However, this can require additional adjustments to be rendered correctly in a viewer.
- Further local animations may be required to cover situation when a jellied avatar uses things like default sits, adding further complexity to the work.
In brief
- There has been at least one report of the EEP viewer causing periodic freezes as if the texture cache being purged. While EEP should not have altered how the texture cache works, and as no bug reports have been filed on the issue as yet, LL ask that those have similar issues regularly / semi-regularly report them.
- Some have noticed that EEP has altered how specularity is rendered where materials have been used. This is a known issue LL are investigating, as per BUG-228781 and BUG-228581.
- The idea of an inventory tagging system was raised (e.g. to easy inventory sorting / searching, etc). Sort form answer: while there are benefits for some form of limited tagging, there are no plans to implement anything in the foreseeable future.
- The question was asked on why Twitch allows VR Chat streaming but not Second Life. Short form answer: because that is what Twitch has decided (at least at present).
- Next meeting: Thursday, June 4th, 13:00 SLT.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 