Category: SL Tech

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 9th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will now likely not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• The EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.534193 on Thursday, January 9th.
• Bug fixing continues, notably around alpha rendering issues.
• It is believed there are about a dozen remaining issues to be dealt with before EEP may be ready for formal release.

Pathfinding

First introduced in 2012 (and developed over the following year), Pathfinding was intended to provide a means for more interactive non-player characters (NPCs) in Second Life. Unfortunately, the implementation of the system proved to be so cumbersome (and leaving aside some of the incorrect perceptions about Pathfinding on the part of land holders), the it has never really seen that much use in Second Life.

With the arrival of Animesh, there has been renewed interest in using Pathfinding in conjunction with Animesh characters, but again, the current implementation is proving a bottleneck (e.g. highlighting / indicating “walkable” areas in the viewer; whether the navmesh is actually visible; the effort required to Pathfinding, etc.).

• A forum thread highlights the issue, and it has been suggested that if a Jira can be raised highlighting the specific problems, it might be something the Lab could take a look at to try to improve some of the visualisation issues within the viewer (Navmesh visibility, etc.).
• However, a broader pass at improving / overhauling Pathfinding is not on the Lab’s current road map for SL.

Pathfinding Resources

• SL wiki Pathfinding Introduction.
• SL wiki Pathfinding Tool in the Viewer.
• SL wiki Pathfinding LSL functions.
• SL wiki Pathfinding Quck Start Guide.
• This blog: Pathfinding overview (2012).
• This blog: Pathfinding – Playing Inside Buildings (2012).

In Brief

IP rights, UV Maps and “working copies”: there has been recent discussion on the forums, through various user groups (notably Governance, which I’ve been unable to attend for the last couple of months due to RL) concerning IP rights and things like mesh VW maps, compatibility, weight painting etc. The questions have arisen of late due to a mesh appearing on the Marketplace that achieves compatibility with all the other meshes of the same nature by providing amazingly close replicas of them.

Currently, the primary course of response to concerns over potential infringement – imperfect is it may appear to be where this issue may be more esoteric in nature, given that the meshes in question all tend to use things like UV maps derived from originals supplied by Linden Lab – is for a creator with concerns over infringement to file an DMCA complaint with LL.

BOM take-up: Bakes On Mesh take-up is seen as being a little slow. Some mesh body / head makers have yet to fully adopt BOM flagging on their products for example (so while Maitreya support BOM on their current body via a HUD, the body still has some 800 individual mesh elements that the viewer needs to handle, compared to the (roughly) less-than-fifty used by the Slink Redux (BOM) body). Also, there are continued concerns about BOM’s ease-of-use when compared with the use of HUD-based applier systems. While the latter can be more resource-intensive, the form is seen as requiring better scripted tools and / or better inventory visualisation mechanisms (even better base alpha support) in order to be more attractive to users.

Next CCUG meeting: Thursday, January 23rd.

 

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, December 19th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

The majority of this meeting was a generic conversation of ideas such as moving Second Life to support PBR, what might be done to improve Pathfinding, etc., none of which are on the road map for Second Life at present; as such these notes keep the the current projects that are in progress at the Lab.

SL Viewer

A new Maintenance viewer, code named Xanté, was released on Thursday, December 19th. Version 6.3.6.533748 contains around 30 fixes for reported issues and bugs. All other viewer remain as per my Current Viewer Release List.

With regards to viewers:

• The Lab’s focus has been on transitioning their Bitbucket viewer build repositories from Mercurial to Git – see my week #50 TPVD meeting notes for more.
• As well as the current pipelines of viewers, work is also in hand to ensure the viewer is ready to manage Name Changes when that capability is deployed in early 2020.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will now likely not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• Bug fixing continues, notably around alpha rendering issues.
• The hope is that of the remaining issues, some my be related, and so solving one will help to solve others of a similar nature.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

Current Status

• Vir is working on getting things to a state where he can do so practical testing over the holiday period to ensure the relevant data is being collected. This is dependent on whether he has the time to confirm the internal version of the viewer is logging everything it needs to be logging.
• The work is still very much focused on the data collection aspect, rather than doing anything with the data that is gathered.
  • The kind of data being gathered includes: what are the graphics and geometric properties of the objects in a scene, what rendering settings are being used, poly count for different LODs with a model, what are the graphics properties in use (materials, texture + texture size, etc.), plus the time required to generate a frame successfully given the work required to render the scene.
• Once the data has been gathered, the idea is to run the viewer on multiple hardware configurations (GPU, CPU, etc.), and gather data on the the impacts of changes those various properties.
• The aim is to get a more accurate feel for how performance is impacted, and how significantly changes impact performance (e.g. what’s the impact of enabling Full Bright compared to enabling materials? Which is genuinely better: properly optimised mesh or plain faces with materials or a combination of low-resolution mesh + materials?
• As well as allowing the complexity calculations for avatar attachments and in-world objects to be better refined, the data gathered might, further down the line in the project, enable LL to make plausible forecasts of what might be seen by way of performance improvements in relation to suggested constraints being put on objects as a part of the creation process.
• Textures are still proving a problem in terms of measuring impact (e.g. is it more a total threshold limit being hit, rather than the number of textures used within an individual object?).
• Anther limiting aspect is the number of different bottlenecks users can experience quite outside of the Lab’s control (e.g. their network connection, what else is going on across that connection at the same time, etc)., and bottlenecks within individual systems that can vary.
• One attempt to improve things that has been made in Firestorm is for the matrix calculations for worn mesh to be cached the the bones to which the mesh has been rigged hasn’t moved between frames. This can save up to 7 sets of calculations for a mesh with 8 faces that the viewer may not actually need to make. This may be contributed to LL for evaluation.

** The next Content Creation User Group Meeting should be on Thursday, January 9th, 2020, but check the wiki page for confirmation **