The following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on Thursday, June 13th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.
Environment Enhancement Project
Project Summary
A set of environmental enhancements allowing the environment (sky, sun, moon, clouds, 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 not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).
Resources
- Project definition document.
- Project summary (this blog).
- Full EEP Documentation.
Current Status
- A further EEP RC viewer is in the works, but no current ETA.
- The most recent EEP RC viewer (version 6.4.0.527723, dated June 6th. 2019), has not received a lot of feedback. It’s not clear if this is because issues aren’t being noted or if people aren’t filing them. If you’re using the viewer and see a problem, please raise a bug report, even if you think it may have been raised before.
- Graham Linden continues to work on the shader / rendering issues.
- A simulator-side RC update is anticipated for week #25, which will hopefully address some of the region windlight rendering issues currently being seen.
- Rider has been away from EEP, looking into the issues of simulator / script performance (again, please refer to my recent Simulator User Group notes).
Bakes On Mesh
Project Summary
Extending the current avatar baking service to allow wearable textures (skins, tattoos, clothing) to be applied directly to mesh bodies as well as system avatars. This involves viewer and server-side changes, including updating the baking service to support 1024×1024 textures, but does not include normal or specular map support, as these are not part of the existing Bake Service, nor are they recognised as system wearables. Adding materials support may be considered in the future.
Resources
- Bakes on Mesh knowledge base article.
- Bakes on Mesh forum thread.
- Bakes on Mesh JIRA filter (courtesy of Whirly Fizzle).
Current Status
- As noted in my Simulator User Group update, there was a new BOM RC viewer update on Monday, June 10th, with the release of version 6.3.0.527701.
- A potential issue has arisen around the new “universal” texture channels (e.g. Left Arm) and how people want them to work. The expectation from the Lab has been that while these might be transparent, there will always be an opaque texture “under” them. However, there have been attempts to either use them with a transparent underlying texture or have them partially transparent (currently, the “universal” channels aren’t recognised / masked by an alpha wearable), and this has led to errors in how the Appearance Service is handling them when compositing / baking (unfortunately, no bug report was reference so I cannot verify the exact issue). It’s currently not clear how this might be resolved if it is an issue.
Animesh Follow-On
- Vir has been carrying out further investigation into the mechanism for adding new attributes to objects with a view to trying to make it easier to do so. This might, as an example, make it easier to add new body sliders to the avatar (although there are currently no plans to add sliders to the avatar – this is purely investigative work).
- In terms of the visual parameters work to allow Animesh objects to be resized:
- Originally there was going to be the one command to set visual parameters (llSetObjectVisualParams). This was to work on a list basis that alternates between slider ID (or name) and parameter value (e.g. Slider ID A, value for Slider ID A; Slider ID B, value for slider ID B, etc).
- However, a request has been made to be able to query a set of visual parameters (e.g. llGetObjectVisualParameters), and the logical format for this is for a list of parameter IDs to be supplied, and the corresponding list of values to be returned.
- This prompts the question of whether llSetObjectVisualParams should use this latter approach.
- The consensus is to use an approach consistent with the rest of LSL parameter setting.
- As a side note, it is unlikely manipulating slider values via LSL would be extended for use with avatars, as this could potentially conflict with the back-end system that currently manages the slider mechanism as it affects the avatar.
- There are a large number (200+) sliders, not all of which affect bone position / scale, which can make it potentially confusing when trying to set values against Animesh objects. To this end, Vir has updated the Bento Skeleton Guide with a list of slider names that actually affect bone position / scale.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 