Category: SL Tech

Kun-Tei-Ner, May 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on Thursday, June 27th 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 new viewer update is due to go to the Lab’s QA team over the weekend, and should surface at the start of week #27 (commencing Monday, July 1st). This should address a number of issues in the EEP code including
  • Water transparency rendering.
  • The glow seen around facial features (freckles, lips, eyelashes, and around the neck fix for mesh heads should no longer be apparent.
  • The difference in viewing an environment with Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) off and viewing it with ALM enabled is not as drastic.
  • Daytime lighting seen at sunrise, midday and sunset are much closer how they appear in the default viewer.
• The request is for people testing EEP to grab the RC viewer when available and test drive it.

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

• The Bakes on Mesh RC viewer was re-issued on Tuesday, June 25th, in the form of version 6.3.0.528495. This includes:
  • A new inventory icon for the “universal” wearable type.
  • A fix for a serious security issue type of bug.
• It had been indicted at the last meeting that a required appearance service update had been made. However, this deployment did not occur until the afternoon of Thursday, June 27th.

Animesh Follow-On

• Vir now has LSL functions to both set and get the visual parameters of slider-related bones in an Animesh object.
• These should be enough to test the ability, so he is starting the work on getting a project viewer put together that supports the functionality.

Script Processing Issues

As I’ve noted in recent SUG summaries, there have been numerous reports of script run time issues. See  BUG-226851 and BUG-227099 as examples.

• There are simulator updates awaiting deployment that should provide better script performance on the “more expensive [resource-wise] scripts events”, such as sensors.
• Rider Linden has been working to eliminate the overhead of idle scripts, reducing the time they need to simply work out they don’t need to process anything by 20-30%, although actual mileage once the improvements are deployed, may vary.
• Rider is not promising to get script performance up to 100% per cycle (Homestead don’t end to achieve this anyway due to the number per core), but is hoping to see general improvements in processing and around those scripts that can cause unnecessary bogging down (e.g. multiple open listeners, sensors, and similar).
• Viewer-side tools are to be provided (“after July”) viewing statistics on general script usage across a simulator to help diagnose local problems. These might even include / take the form of a visual indicator, such as the visual object update option (CTRL-ALT-Shift-U).

Next Meeting

Due to July 4th being a Thursday, and July 11th the Lab’s monthly All Hands meeting, the next CCUG meeting will be Thursday, July 18th, 2019.

Hors du Temps, May 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on Thursday, June 20th 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

• Graham Linden continues to work on the shader / rendering issues.
• A simulator-side RC update went to the Magnum and LeTigre channels on Tuesday, June 18th, with a number of bug fixes that should hopefully have addressed some of the current rendering issues:
  • BUG-226815: “[EEP] Since the grid was rolled to 19.04.15.526263 yesterday, region windlight is broken for all legacy viewers”.
  • BUG-226252: “[EEP] Please create an internal error code for llReplaceAgentEnvironment() & llSetAgentEnvironment() that distinguishes whether an agent does not have the experience allowed and if the experience is not allowed at their location”.
  • BUG-226917: “EEP Environment, New Sky should default to midday and not 6pm”.

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 summary, the Bakes on Mesh RC viewer has been pulled due to a significant bug surfacing.
  • The viewer remains listed on the various official viewer pages, but cannot actually be downloaded.
  • Anyone attempting to run a previously downloaded version will be forced to update to the current release viewer.
• It is believed the Appearance Service has been fixed for correctly handling alphas on the new “universal” channels.  However, this cannot be tested until the viewer issue noted above has been rectified.

Animesh Follow-On

• Vir believes the basic ability to adjust the visual parameters of an Animesh object via LSL (i.e. changing its height, length of arm, etc.), is now working as expected. However, he’s like to get a little more functionality in to the capability before a project viewer supporting it is provided.
  • The capability allows parameters to be looked up by name or ID, and the command uses ranges from 0 to 1 to make adjustments.
  • It has been suggested many of these values (e.g. head shape and facial parameters – lip size, thickness, angle, etc., – breast size, torso muscles, leg size, butt size) require non-zero values to better define a neutral state for those bones. However, the problem here is that many of the slider values on which bone manipulations are made are entirely arbitrary within individual bones (one might have, day, a range of -1 to +1; another might be 0 to 10m etc)., so defining a value of 0.5 (being the mid-point between 0 and 1) to a bone might not actually correctly map to the “neutral” position of the bone as defined by the slider values.
  • Note that there are obviously sliders that morph the avatar shape rather than directly manipulating bones, and these cannot be manipulated through this LSL mechanism.
• The Bento Skeleton Guide has been further updated and now: with a list of So this page now attempts to:
  • Define all sliders that directly affect bones and which might therefore be manipulated using the new LSL command(s) with Animesh.
  • Define the sliders that affect collision volumes, to help with things like fitted mesh that could potentially be used with Animesh objects.

UI Panel for Manipulating Animesh Object Shapes

• A repeated request has been for the Lab to provide a viewer UI panel for manipulating sliders associated with Animesh objects to allow their shapes to be edited a-la he shape sliders UI for avatars.
• The major issue here is that for such a panel to work, Animesh objects either:
  • Would require an associated body shape, which they currently do not have.  While this has not been ruled out, it is not something the Lab is committing to at this time.
  • Requires an extensive project to not only develop the UI, but to develop a means to represent and manipulate all bones, etc. that someone might want to individually move on an “on the fly” basis, and then present this through a UI element. As such, this approach isn’t being considered at present.
• Instead, it is hoped that the LSL parameter manipulation noted above would perhaps provide the means for Animesh creators to offered their own HUD-based “slider system” that is specific to adjusting the shapes of their Animesh creations, rather than being a generic UI element in which assorted options may not apply to their Animesh.

General Discussion

Rigged Mesh HUDs

• As we’re all aware, HUDs are objects that are taken by the viewer are effectively attached to our screen space without being displayed in-world when attached.
• However, rigged mesh HUDs which have been produced by some behave differently: when attached, these HUDs appear to the person using them as being attached to their avatar (although no-one else can see them as such, as HUD rendering data isn’t sent to other viewers).
  • This has been described as an “unexpected” behaviour, but given such HUDs are – as the “rigged” in their title implies – rigged against the avatar skeleton, it perhaps shouldn’t be that surprising, given the viewer would naturally assume rigged objects to be associated with a skeleton (avatar or Animesh), regardless of the selected attach point.
• The Lab is now looking at some way to warn people when this happens, to help prevent people being caught by surprise (e.g. by having clothing knocked-off by the HUD as it attaches).

In Brief

• Feature request BUG-202864 “Change Mesh Uploader to preserve Scene File object names when a full linkset is uploaded”: viewer-side work has been carried out for this, which should be appearing in a Maintenance RC viewer soon™. However, it is dependent upon some yet-to-be-done back-end work.
• Feature request BUG-227171 “Bring Avatar Cloth to Mesh”:
  • Bento and Animesh have, to a degree, allowed some cloth behaviour to be seen in mesh (e.g. the skirt of a gown moving with an avatars legs, rather than the legs extending through it. However, these solutions can be labour intensive.
  • Currently, LL have no plans to work with cloth-like motion for mesh clothing, but this request has been imported for future reference.
• Project ARCTan: this is the project to re-align the impact of rendering content.
  • It’s still on the back burner at the Lab, although it is hoped focus can be returned to it soon. There are obvious concerns as to how it might affect land impact with in-world objects; given this one suggestion has been to only apply it to new content uploaded to SL, effectively making it something of an “opt-in”, a-la materials.
  • However, there is nothing official to report on how ARCTan will be implemented, as there is still a lot to be done before thing get to that point.
• Script processing issues: the music at the SUG meeting this week meant this didn’t get to be discussed. In short, Rider Linden is leading the investigation into understanding what is going on and possible causes, and what can be done to correct  / mitigate the problem.