The Lab’s Fitted Mesh project viewer has been out for a month, and has seen some good feedback from those who have been trying it out.
Already one update to the viewer has been released, correcting a number of problems, and the Lab has been working with content creators and users who have been providing feedback through the FITMESH project reporting on the JIRA.
However, Lab is keen to start progressing the project in the New Year, and so a “last call” for issues has gone out.
“If you’ve been seeing any issues with the current fitted mesh project implementation, or anything that needs to be added/changed, please make sure that the issues are filed by now, or as soon as possible,” Nyx Linden said at the Content Creation User Group meeting on Monday 16th December.
For those who missed the original announcement, Fitted Mesh is a means by which mesh garments are rigged to the collision bones of the avatar skeleton, allowing them the be resized as the avatar’s shape is changed using the Edit Shape sliders. In essence, it is the same approach as has been seen within Second Life and variously referred to as the “RedPoly method” or “Liquid Mesh”.
The technique uses both the existing bones in the SL avatar and an additional set of bones in order to work, and you can read more on it in my original preview article, if you’re not already familiar with the approach.
Oz Linden, also at the meeting, underscored the “last call”, saying, “To emphasise what Nyx said earlier … get your comments and issues in on Fitted Mesh ASAP so that we can do a release candidate after the holiday break.”
Quite when that release candidate will appear is unclear; there is a lot going on at the Lab, and several projects are likely to be vying for room in the release channel (although some will hopefully go to project viewer status first and give the rest some elbow room).
However, if you have been looking at the current Fitted Mesh viewer and wish to have input to the project, now is very much the time to do so. Similarly, if it is something which has been on your “to do” list, now is the time to move it to the top, or risking seeing your chance ot have input to the project, and influence on the Lab, vanish.
This summary is published every Monday and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Viewer Round-up Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware) and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy
By its nature, this summary will always be in arrears
The Viewer Round-up Page is updated as soon as I’m aware of any releases / changes to viewers & clients, and should be referred to for more up-to-date information
The Viewer Round-up Page also includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
Updates for the week ending: December 15th, 2013
Official LL Viewers
Current Release version updated on December 10 to 3.6.12.284506 (dated December 4) – formerly the NameUpdater RC (download page, release notes)
“Project Interesting” RC updated on December 12 to version 3.6.13.284757 – more viewer-side control of which objects are loaded in memory at any given time; more aggressive scene caching; faster scene load when visiting a region never previously visited; expanded performance metrics (download and release notes)
Google Breakpad RC updated on December 13 to version 3.6.13.284710 – contains an update to Google Breakpad and restructures the crash reporting mechanism to support out of process crash reporting; no functional changes to the viewer (download and release notes)
Kokua updates on December 12th to version 3.6.12.30743 – core updates: parity with LL 3.11 and 3.12 codebase; tweaks and updates from the Kokua team – release notes
Release notes (all) In general: GPU tables additions, assorted bug fixes and optimisations; Experimental branch: port of further fixes from viewer-interesting and from Fitted Mesh project.
On Saturday December 14th 2013, the Firestorm team hosted another informal question-and-answer session. While the meeting was recorded, the Firestorm team are aware that many of their users have hearing difficulties, and / or prefer to read text. It is because of this that this transcript has been provided.
When reading it, please remember:
This is not a word-for-word transcript of the entire meeting. While all quotes given are as they are spoken in the video, to assist in readability and maintain the flow of conversation, not all asides, jokes, interruptions, etc., have been included in the text presented here
If there are any sizeable gaps in comments from a speaker which resulted from asides, repetition, questions to others etc,, these are indicated by the use of “…”
Timestamps are provided as guidance should anyone wish to hear the comments in full from any speaker on the video
Questions /comments were made in chat while speakers were talking. This inevitably meant that replies to questions would lag well behind when they were originally asked. To provide context between questions and answers, questions in the transcript are given (in italics) at the point at which each is addressed by a member of the Firestorm team, either in voice or via chat.
Please note: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. As such, questions on technical issues relating to Firestorm and / or project-specific questions cannot be answered here unless one of the Firestorm team drops by.
The TL;DR Summary
The numbers in braces are timestamps which refer to the section of this transcript where more details can be read, and to the section of the video recording where the relevant comments can be heard.
Main Discussion:
The next release: will most likely be a stabilisation of the code currently in 4.5.1 rather than introducing major updates, although this is still to be determined. LL have a lot coming down the pipe, which Jessica was hoping would be ready for inclusion in the next release, but that is looking unlikely unless something significant happens to change things [0:00:25-0:02:48]
Response to the beta has been good, around 120,000 downloads, of which around 6,000 are for the Windows 64-bit version. A number of people have subsequently reverted back to the 4.4.2 release due to issues. There are significant issues with voice, Mac users have encountered issues arising from Cococa (Mac and Voice issues covered later as well).[0:02:48-0:06:03]
Reference is often made to “Linden Bugs”. This does not necessarily mean they are the Lab’s fault; it simply means that the SL viewer has the same issues [0:06:03-0:06:53]
Firestorm releases are currently roughly four months apart. Ideally this should be two months, which is a target, but needs to be balanced with the risk of overwhelming the support volunteers (who need to both learn and support new releases). Therefore, it might mean a compromise of a release every quarter [0:06:53-0:09:40]
Voice issues: Vivox problem, LL have it as well. Firestorm have a series of videos demonstrating the problem. If a user on FS 4.5.1 beta has the issue, the recommendation is to revert to the 4.4.2 release [0:09:53-0:10:46]
The FS Windows 64-bit has been well received and feedback has been positive. Most people are reporting imporved stability rather than improved performance compared to the 32-bit version [0:11:10-0:12:56]
Oculus Rift is coming to Second Life [0:13:10-0:15:27]
Leap Motion is coming to Second Life – and the Firestorm Team have taken a lead in the integration work with the viewer [0:15:27-0:22:49]
Firestorm 4.5.1 beta and Firestorm release numbering explained [0:23:02-0:26:35]
Why Firestorm block versions and why Phoenix isn’t currently blocked [0:52:02-0:58:41; 1::0036-1:02:56]
Firestorm Q&As qill be monthly from January, alternating between 08:00 SLT and 16:00 SLT month-by–month [1:12:03]
Q&A Session:
Would it be an option to have different branches for people to download …? – includes discussion on why FS does not have nightly builds and on joining the FS beta testers [0:27:56-0:37:32]
Can we hope for more tattoo layers? [0:37:35-0:39:19] – reply includes reference to Linden Lab User Group meetings, the forums in which such questions can be asked
Will the new version [of Firestorm] be in 64-bit, and is Fitted Mesh coming? [0:40:00-0:47:40]
Why is IM and local chat so laggy in the beta version of Firestorm? (Mac build) – known issue, with both Firestorm (FIRE-12172) and LL JIRAs raised against it [0:47:40-0:49:47]
Why will music streaming not work on 4.4.2 with the new Mac OS upgrade? – Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks issue reported under FIRE-10630 There is also a list of Cocoa bugs specific to the Mac build [0:49:47-0:52:02]
Dealing with inventory “jump” issues and bug regressions [0:52:02-1:00:36]
Are older versions of Firestorm also blocked from OpenSim when they are blocked from SL? – any version prior to 4.4.2 will unfortunately be blocked from OpenSim when blocked from SL. All versions of FS from 4.4.2 onwards can be individually blocked from grids [1:02:56-1:04:13]
Has the FS team ever considered working on a mobile Firestorm product? – includes the FS April Fools from 2013, and accessing Firestorm remotely [1:04:16-1:10:17]
Has the FS team considered “drawing a line” on how far they’re veer from the LL codebase (e.g. additional feature input, etc.), in order to improve the release cycle and lessen the maintenance overheads? [1:13:20-1:21:01]
What drives the FS team to do what they do? [1:21:40]
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for the latest news and updates.
Tuesday December 10th, 2013 saw the main channel updated with the server maintenance project that was on the RC channels in week 49. This project includes a few miscellaneous bug fixes
Wednesday December 11th, 2013 saw the three RC channels updated with a new server maintenance project containing a single bug fix.
The RC channel bug fix is related to vehicles getting into a “bad” state where they appear sat upon / selected even if they have lost their passengers as a result of a region crossing. When in this state, they defeat the parcel / region auto return.
As the fix for this issue is currently only on the three RC channels and will not be promoted to the main channel until 2014 due to the code freeze / no change window, and because this issue may lead to vehicles accumulating in regions where there is a lot of traffic, Maestro Linden has requested that support move any main channel regions which are affected to an RC channel.
2014
These deployments were the last scheduled deployments for 2013. They also mark the last scheduled rolling restarts for the year as well, as there are no plans to restart any channels in either week 51 or week 52. The only exception to this will be if any major issue / fault occurs within the grid which necessitates a restart.
The next scheduled server-side deployments will take place in week 2 of 2014, the week commencing Monday January 6th, 2014.
Some information on updates which will be forthcoming in 2014 were given during the final Server Beta meeting of 2013. These include:
Andrew Linden’s work on “Uniform Scaling” LSL Functions for linksets (see part 1 of this week’s report). There are a couple of basic rules with the new functions: no prim in the linsket can be smaller than 1 cm or larger than 64m, and all prim centres must be within 54m of one another in order to be linkable. There will be two new functions as a part of this work:
integer llScaleByFactor(float factor): uniformly scale a linkset by the specified factor (e.g. 2.0 to double the scale). Returns TRUE if successful, FALSE otherwise
float llGetMaxScaleFactor(), float llGetMinScaleFactor(): return the maximum / minimum scale factors that will work in llScaleByFactor due to limits in place by prim scale and linkability distance restrictions
An update to llLoadURL, so it will have a 0.1s delay instead of 10s (although there is still a throttle in place to prevent someone from spamming somebody else in order to crash their viewer)
llGetObjectDetails() & OBJECT_STREAMING_COST will be amended to return data when targeting an agent. Currently, OBJECT_STREAMING_COST doesn’t give you much of anything when targeting an agent; once this change is in place, it will return the sum of the streaming costs of all worn attachments (excluding HUDs)
SL Viewer
The “Project Interesting” (viewer-interesting) RC viewer updated on Thursday December 12th to version 3.6.13.284757, which includes a number of fixes from the initial release:
BUG-4675 Viewer crashes while reading chat history
SH-4606 Interesting: Small objects do not load until they are very close.
SH-4627 [INTERESTING RC] “Object out of range” is not detected on teleport.
SH-4631 [INTERESTING RC] Parts of linked objects are not shown in new release Second Life 3.6.11
SH-4641 Interesting: Incorrect amount of system memory detected on Mac
This may be the last RC update for 2013, unless something like the Google Breakpad RC is slipped out for another round of testing on Friday December 13th.
STORM-68
As noted in part 2 of this week’s report, STORM-68 is a third-party contribution which will allow a builder / creator to specify the default permissions applied to a new prim object (cube, cylinder, torus, etc.) on creation. Further testing has been taking place since my last update, and a number of issues and bugs have been resolved as a result. The test plan for the changes is complete and the viewer-side changes now look ready to go to LL’s internal QA. Again, this change requires server-side updates, so it is unlikely to appear in an RC viewer until the server updates are reasonably available on the grid, although this will hopefully happen in the early part of 2014.
Thursday December 12th saw the Kokua team release version 3.6.12.30743 of the viewer. This appears to be a fairly contained update, focused on updating the viewer with the recent SL viewer 3.6.11 GPU Table updates and the 3.6.12 NameUpdater changes. Neither of these involved functional changes to the viewer from LL’s side, but do bring Kokua to parity with the current SL 3.6.12 code base.
UK-english dictionary added to the spelling checker
Removal of packaged PCRE libraries from Linux 64-bit builds as they caused web kit to fail to load on newer Debian based distributions.
The release notes also point out that when the viewer is started for the first time following installation, there will be a notice and link to check graphics drive availability. The Kokua team urge caution if the option is taken to update drivers, as system breakages have resulted in the past. They also point out that the notice is a recommendation to check for updated drivers, not a requirement to update.
The CtrlAltStudio and UKanDo TPVs have both undergone self-certification and have been added to the Third-party Viewer Directory (TPVD).
The associated wiki page for CtrlAltStudio describes the viewer as :
The CtrlAltStudio Viewer has been set up in order to try out and share a number of ideas, the first being stereoscopic 3D display and some initial Oculus Rift support . It is based on the Firestorm Viewer which it tracks closely while adding particular features.
The associated wiki page for UKanDo describes the viewer as:
UKanDo gives a whole new perspective in Second life by using a camera placement adopted by the vast majority of third person video games.
Also includes RLV along with plenty of other useful tools. It won’t have all the gadgets/gizmos a lot of the bigger viewers have, the aim is to keep it as lite as possible with only the fixes, gadgets and gizmos we need to keep the Viewer stable and up-to-date! The Avatar happy! And to aid with building!
(Please note that descriptions are supplied by the viewer developers, not Linden Lab.)
Congratulations to both viewers, both of which I’ve been following in these pages. You can catch-up with them as follows:
The future of mesh garments / wearables created using the now SL-defunct mesh deformer was the subject of some discussion at the Open-source Contributions meeting on Wednesday 11th December. While the deformer was never officially adopted by the Lab for use within Second Life, it was available in various test and experimental viewers, and the code could also be included in self-compiled viewers if people knew how.
Fitted mesh is coming….what of the future for garments made for / via the deformer?
This means that there are garments within Second Life that were created and uploaded for / with the deformer code, and which can resize with viewers using that code. However, as is the case with Fitted Mesh, the clothing would not deform when using a viewer without the requisite code. The same will be true once the Fitted Mesh updates reach a release candidate status and start to be more widely adopted: while Fitted Mesh (and Liquid Mesh) garments, etc. will deform to an avatar’s shape, items created using the mesh deformer will not; they will continue to behave like any other rigged mesh item.
This likely means that as the Fitted Mesh code does become more widely adopted, people will stop using any garments / attachables created using the deformer code, and the availability of such items in SL and on the SL marketplace will decline over time.
Whether or not this means deformer-based items will vanish from people’s inventories is something only time will tell. From the Lab’s perspective, the work involved in trying to pro-actively determine a method of identifying assets using the deformer code and removing them from the asset servers / inventories isn’t likely to be worth the end result. Therefore anyone with “old” mesh deformer garments and attachables will probably retain them until they opt to delete them from their inventory.
It appears unlikely that viewers using the deformer code will be pro-actively blocked from SL. What is likely to happen is that the code simply will not be formally adopted by those variants of TPVs which do not connect to any other grid than Second Life. However, this does leave a further interesting question as to the future of the mesh deformer, which has potentially seen far wider use in OpenSim communities than Second Life. While it would seem likely OpenSim will adopt the viewer-side changes required to enable Fitted Mesh (at least in the majority of cases), at this point in time, it is not clear whether the mesh deformer will be entirely abandoned. Whether there will be sufficient pressure within OpenSim for the deformer code to remain in use, and whether TPVs will feel obliged to incorporate the deformer into their viewers / OpenSim variants of their viewers as a result, remains to be seen. Currently, the only grid which has any kind of significant investment in the deformer is InWorldz, which provided funds for the code to be further enhanced and adopted it into their dedicated viewer in July 2013.
Materials and Numbers
Statistics are always a hard thing to determine. Back in the day, there was much controversy over figures released as to the adoption of mesh within SL following its deployment. The figures offered-up by the Lab at the time were vague enough that they could be taken to mean that mesh was either being rapidly adopted, or was seeing very slow growth (with the reality lying somewhere in between). This was not an attempt by the Lab to fudge issues at the time; it simply underlined the fact that numbers aren’t always the best means of trying to quantify something, so it’s perhaps better to allow the passage of time to speak for itself.
The most recent figures for materials suggest that over half of the regions in SL now have at least one materials-enabled item within them, and around 10% of avatars apparently utilise at least one materials-enabled item. Again, these are figures that are likely to be interpreted either way, depending on how people look upon materials as a whole. Certainly, the term “object” is sufficiently vague so as to be pretty worthless as am objective yardstick, as it likely covers everything from an individual prim through to entire linksets, which leads to a huge variance in the visibility of objects using materials. On a personal note, I can only say I’ve made extensive use of materials in my house, and am more than pleased with the results.
I’ve used materials on my house; particularly on the stonework and stucco textures to provide added depth. Materials on the whole appears to be slowly gaining momentum
Upcoming Code Contributions
There are a number of third-party code contributions in development for the SL viewer, some of which I’ve previously reported upon, and which are now progressing towards a point where they may well have public visibility through the likes of a release candidate in the new year.
STORM-1981 and STORM-1831
STORM-1981, contributed by Jonathan Yap, is intended to change the behaviour of tracking beacons to help make locating items in a region somewhat easier (e.g. locating lost items or scripted objects which are causing issues, etc.). Under these changes:
Beacons would begin at a height of 0 metres and extend up to the maximum unassisted flight ceiling (5,020 metres)
The beacon colour will be blue from 0 metres to the base height of the object being tracked, and red from 5,020 metres down to the height of the object being tracked
Users can optionally set the beacon to pulse towards the target object using the CheesyBeacon debug setting (Advanced->Highlighting). The blue beacon will pulse up towards the object, the red beacon will pulse down towards the object.
Tracking beacons will be changing under STORM-1981, making it easier to locate objects, etc.
STORM-1831 covers the work being undertaken by Ima Mechanic, with assistance from Oz Linden, to improve syntax highlighting in the viewer’s LSL editor by allowing the viewer to obtain the information required for syntax highlighting directly from the simulator the viewer is connected to. This should eliminate issues with the current manually updated files used to manage syntax highlighting falling out-of-synch with new LSL syntax as new functions and parameters, etc., are added. Folded-in to this work should also be a change to the source code text allowance in the viewer’s LSL editor, increasing it from the current 65,000 characters to around 256,000.
The server-side cap updates required for both STORM-68 and STORM-1831 have been combined and passed into the simulator release stream, and while it is unclear as to when the cap updates will reach a server-side release candidate package, their progress is being tracked. Obviously, both STORM-1981 and STORM-1831 require viewer-side updates as well, and these will hopefully appear in viewer release candidate form once the server-side updates are sufficiently deployed.
STORM-68
A number of TPVs include the ability to specify the default permissions applied to a new prim object (cube, cylinder, torus, etc.) on creation. STORM-68 aims to add a similar capability to the LL viewer (and which will quite possibly supersede the capability in TPVs once implemented). This work is again coming from Jonathan Yap, although it requires server-side updates, which Andrew Linden has been taking care of. However, this work has hit some problems in viewer / server interactions, which may be down to timing issues between requests and acknowledgements being sent between the viewer and the simulator and vice-versa. As such, further testing is required, so it’s possible this work might take a little longer to appear in the new year.
The Lab’s Fitted Mesh project viewer has been out for a month, and has seen some good feedback from those who have been trying it out.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 