Category: SL Tech

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creators User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 18th, 2024, and the chat log transcript and video of the Third-Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, January 19th, 2024. My thanks as always to Pantera for recording the TPVD meeting and providing the video, which is embedded at the end of this article.

• The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work.
  • This meeting is held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
• The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development.
  • This meeting is held once a month  the third or fourth Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
• In regards to both meetings:
  • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.
  • Commence at 13:00 SLT on their respective dates.
  • Are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • Are open to all with an interest in either content creation or viewer development.
• The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of either meeting.

Please note: my audio recording of the CCUG suffered a glitch in writing to disk. Whilst over an hour of audio was apparently recorded according to Audacity, only 22 minutes was actually saved to disk. As the meeting utilised voice, the loss of around half the audio means that response to questions and generally commentary from the Lab was lost. Therefore, these notes only reflect the section of the meeting which did save for playback.

Official Viewers Status

No updates through the week, leaving the current crop of official viewers as:

• Release viewer: version 7.1.2.7215179142, formerly the glTF PBR Materials Maintenance RC, issued December 15, promoted January 8, 2024 – numerous bug fixes and improvements – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7467259489, issued January 12, 2024.
  • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 7.1.3.7453541295, January 9, 2024 – bug and crash fixes.
  • Maintenance X RC, version 7.1.1.7088410646, December 7 – usability improvements.
  • Maintenance Y RC, version 6.6.17.6935642049, issued November 21 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
  • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.

General Viewer Notes

• The glTF Maintenance 2 viewer includes, among other things, less blue tint to improve the general environment appearance.
• The Emojis viewer is finally on the path towards an RC update, and it is hoped that this will be the finally update for the viewer before it gets promoted to de facto release status.
• There is concern that the viewer crash rate has been higher than usual over the last several releases, so it appears viewer-side engineering effort is to be put towards determining underlying causes and rectifying them in order to bring the rate back down.
• Longer-term there will be further Inventory work, with additional flags being added to the viewer which will enable future additional Inventory-related functionality – but it is too early in the process to go into specifics.

Mac OS Requirements

• The Mac OS requirements for the viewer are changing as a result of Apple ending security updates for OSX 11 and earlier.
• Whilst Mac OS 11 will now be the minimum requirement (up from 10.3), the recommendation to Mac users running Mac OS 11 or earlier is to “explore macOS upgrade options as soon as possible” due to the resultant security concerns (via Soft Linden).

Graphics / glTF and Future Viewer Development Overall

• Following the glTF Maintenance 2 RC, it is likely there will be a further graphics RC viewer which will combine:
  • Geenz Linden’s work on Hero reflection probes and reflections / mirrors.
  • Cosmic Linden’s work on applying glTF materials to terrain.
  • Updates which will allow the glTF / PBR swatch boxes in the Build / Edit floater display previews of the materials being selected, rather than grey boxes.
  • Possibly, the first series of additional glTF extensions – Index of Refraction, and also potentially testing support for 2K textures.
• The idea is to try to move development within the viewer away from huge projects (like PBR Materials), which tend to take a lot of time to develop (1 to 2 years) and suffer a lot of visible feature creep. Instead, the idea is to tackle smaller components and build them out within successive RCs which come together to enable the kind of functionality sought be large scale projects.
• It is hoped that by focusing on “featurettes”, smaller tranches of work can be more easily validated, that workflow with development and bug fixing can become a lot more linear, and individual elements of the work can be enabled as they are ready, or hidden behind debug flags until such time as functionality they are dependent upon is also ready.
• Should this approach work with the next iteration of glTF capabilities as listed above, the approach will likely be applied to other viewer projects.
• BUG-234728 “[PBR] Masked alpha gradient textures change with viewing angle” has been accepted as a known PBR issue, but there is no time frame on a potential fix.

RLV / RLVa Adoption

[TPVD Video 10:16-15:40 and 25:28-28:23]

• Per a previous TPVD meeting summary, LL is interested in the potential to adopt RLV/a functionality into the official viewer.
• Adoption has been a popular request from many users, as RLV is seen to have a lot of beneficial uses well beyond its original scope (as is the case the RLV-driven “Wardrobe” systems which allow outfits to be visually previewed and worn in just a couple of clicks), many of which either cannot be easily achieved in viewers without RLV support, or would require Experience-based scripting, which is not seen as ideal.
• One problem is that RLV/RLVa is for many scripters, an “all or nothing” API, as it can touch on so many areas of the viewer, so that to be of value, the entire protocol would need to be implemented – which would be a major overhaul of the viewer.
• As such, it was noted that RLV/RLVa implementation within the official viewer could be an ideal candidate for the “featurette” approach to viewer development noted above: discrete elements of the code implemented to a point where they can be validated, but placed behind flags so that they are disabled until such time as the overall implementation has reached a point where they can be jointly enabled.
• The option to turn it off completely – as is currently the case in the majority of viewers running the RLV/a protocol – would be retained for those not wishing to use it.

In Brief

CCUG Meeting

• Canny Feedback glTF Materials w/Bake Layers-as-Base Colour Turn White When Editing BOM Layer caused some surprise within the Lab, as applying glTF materials in the manner hadn’t been seen as expected behaviour, as is the fact that the layers display as expected outside of the appearance editor.
  • It was noted that most PBR-related Bakes on Mesh requests have been to allow the Bake Service to composite multiple PBR materials applied to different layers (e.g. being able to apply one materials set to skin, another to (say) shirt layer and another to (say) pants layer).
  • This is something LL would like to tackle, but it is seen as a significant overhaul of the Bake Service, and so is not currently on the roadmap for implementation.
• There is a known issue with screen space reflections (SSR) on Linden Water which can make the latter appear to “glitch”. Brad Linden is still investigating this, but the solution might be tweaking to / replacement of the SSR algorithm so it “plays nicely” with Linden Water.
• Object unpacking: a discussion on the potential to be able to unpack the contents of objects directly from Inventory, rather than having to rez them in-world first or for creators to supply them in a scripted HUD for unpacking.
  • A feature request for the reverse – Right-Click to Box In Inventory – has been accepted (which does not indicate it will be implemented in the immediate future).
  • In terms of unpacking / previewing contents of on item directly from Inventory, this is seen as a harder issue as once items are contained within another, they are effectively in the “inventory” of the containing item, rather than the account inventory, and the container’s inventory is only loaded by the simulator when it (or a copy thereof) is rezzed (or attached as a HUD) in-world.
  • Given the above, a new Inventory behaviour would be required which would simulate the object being rezzed in-world / attached as a HUD in order to trigger the simulator to load its contents. This was noted as something worth consideration even if only as a mental exercise at the moment, in order to determine how it might be handled.
  • This is the point at which my audio recording of the meeting truncated during saving, and so ends the summary notes for the CCUG meeting.

TPVD Meeting

• [Video: 16:02-17:40] Avatar de-clouding: There have been multiple anecdotal reports of avatars taking longer to de-cloud when logging-in. The anecdotal responses at the meeting varied between no real difference and comments that AWS may have had issues over the holiday period resulting in packet loss (and thus longer load times), but this appears to have since been resolved.
• [Video 19:20-25:09] a discussion on TPV development, licensing, open-sourcing code, what is and is not permissible, new viewers, etc. Please refer to the video for more.
• General notes:
  • Planar alignment being broken in the Build / Edit floater is a known issue and due to be addressed.
  • There are no plans for LL to offer various “fallbacks” for PBR to “classic” (Blinn-Phong) materials to account for users currently not running PBR enabled versions of viewers, as PBR will be a part of all viewers as they update and move forward.
  • There are no plans to make SL available through platforms such as Steam (as once was the case), due to issues around content restrictions, monetisation methods, etc.
  • A discussion on Twitch not allowing SL streaming and whether LL should try to engage with them to support it. Given that there are other avenues for streaming, and Twitch is free to stand whatever barrier to use of its platform it likes, this would seem unlikely.

Next Meetings

• CCUG: 13:00 SLT, Thursday, February 1st, 2024, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
• TPVD: 13:00 SLT, Friday February 16th, 2024, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.