Category: SL Tech

July 2023 SL Web User Group (WUG) meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023.

WUG meetings:

  • Are held in-world, generally on the first Wednesday of the month – see the SL public calendar.
  • Cover Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
  • They are not intended for the discussion of Governance issues, land fees / issues, content creation & tools, viewer or simulator development / projects. Please refer to the SL calendar for information on available meetings for these topics.

A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.

This was not the “usual” for of meeting – little was said by way of web updates, etc., which have occurred since the last meeting and no updates on upcoming projects.

In Brief

  • A general discussion on how Flickr is used in relation to the Marketplace: creators using it to promote new products and / or encourage interest in their brands / as an alternative to using in-world Groups, etc., through photo competitions, giveaways, etc; fashion bloggers using it as a means to micro-blog about clothing, hair accessories, etc .; users being able to flow merchants and see images / videos of new releases directly on their Flickr feed, etc.
    • Not sure on the purpose of the question (from the Lab), and no-one asked in the meeting.
  • A request for people who would like to see ONE thing WRT SL web properties and services (preferably). Responses include:
    • Allowing multiple versions of items (e.g. different colours) within a single listing (as has been LOOONNG promised with the Marketplace Styles function, but has yet to actually surface); or to have different versions of an item to be individually listed, but have buttons  within their listings so that users can easily toggle between the, a-la Amazon (e.g. so if an item is offered in say, single, twin, triple and quadruple sets, the various sets (and their prices) appear as a button on one another’s listing page so that users can swap back and forth between them).
    • The ability to remove certain stores / items from Search results (e.g. search for “cars” and have an option to select “don’t show me products from this creator again”, and having further results from that creator removed / excluded from search results).
    • The ability to click on reviewers’ names and see a full list of all their reviews (allowing for better judgement of their bias, etc.).
    • The ability to contact sellers directly through the MP.
    • Having fields which state when an item was listed / last updated on the MP.
  • How does Search order results? It varies, but as a rule of thumb:
    • “First time” searches & general searches from the MP home page, should show results by relevance.
    • “First time” searches of stores should list in terms of newest first.
    • If an option to display search results has been previously selected from the drop-down, that is generally the option use to order the results of further searches (until changed).
  • A lot of discussion on the pros and cons of “brand tagging” listings + identifying folders in Inventory.
  • Very much a meeting where it is easiest to watch the video (enable closed caption if required).

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, August 2nd, 2023.

2023 SL viewer release summaries week #26

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, July 2nd, 2023

This summary is generally 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 Current Viewer Releases 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. This page 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.
  • By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
  • Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.

Official LL Viewers

  • Release viewer: Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.12.579987, dated May 11, promoted May 16.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Windows 32 + macOS pre-10.13 RC, version 6.6.13.580794, issued June 30.
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, updated to version 7.0.0.580782 on June 30.
    • Maintenance T RC viewer, updated to version 6.6.13.580700 on June 28.
  • Project viewers:
    • Second Life Project Inventory Extensions viewer, version 6.6.13.580656, June 26.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No update.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2023 week #26: SL CCUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey

Pemberley – May 2023, blog post
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, June 15th, 2023 at 13:00 SLT. 

These meetings are:

  • For discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current work, upcoming work, and requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work.
  • Usually chaired by Vir Linden, and dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.
  • Conducted in mixed voice and text chat. Participants can use either when making comments  or ask or respond to comments, but note that you will need Voice to be enabled to hear responses and comments from the Linden reps and other using it. If you have issues with hearing or following the voice discussions, please inform the Lindens at the meeting.

The following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting, and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Viewer News

  • Maintenance T RC viewer updated to version 6.6.13.580700 on Wednesday, June 28th.
  • The GLTF viewer updated to version 7.0.0.580717 on Tuesday, June 27th.

The rest of the official viewers currently in the pipeline remain as:

  • Release viewer: Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.12.579987, dated May 11, promoted May 16.
  • Project viewers:

In addition:

  • Maintenance T is likely the next RC viewer remains the next in line for promotion to de facto release status.
  • The Emoji project viewer is liable to see further improvements to the Emoji picker in the UI.

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

  • To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
  • There is a general introduction / overview / guide to authoring PBR Materials available via the Second Life Wiki.
  • For a list of tools and libraries that support GLTF, see https://github.khronos.org/glTF-Project-Explorer/
  • Substance Painter is also used as a guiding principal for how PBR materials should look in Second Life.
  • Up to four texture maps are supported for PBR Materials: the base colour (which includes the alpha); normal; metallic / roughness; and emissive, each with independent scaling.
  • Given the additional texture load, work has been put into improving texture handling within the PBR viewer.
  • In the near-term, glTF materials assets are materials scenes that don’t have any nodes / geometry, they only have the materials array, and there is only one material in that array.
  • The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
  • The viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page.
  • Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.

Status

  • The new RC viewer includes the automatic adjustment to make skies “PBR-ified” (so the checkbox in Graphics Preferences to disable automatically apply reflection probe ambience on skies that do not have it set, so they will be set to a default of 1). Probe ambience must now be set to 0 through the sky settings to deactivate HDR rendering (so no dynamic exposure so the sky is not brightened, and objects with PBR materials will appear duller than intended), and tone mapping is turned off.
    • However, there is a recognised bug related to probe ambience (BUG-234060 “[PBR] Simulator Clamping Environment’s Reflection Probe Ambience to 1”, and it is hoped a fix for this will be in the next simulator build – although it may take a while for the build to make its way into a deployment.
  • The-user supplied PBR content created on Aditi is being transferred to the PBR regions on the Main grid in readiness for more widespread viewing / testing.
  • The LDPW will be producing a PBR demonstrator which will be available through the viewer library.
  • The simulator-side support for glTF Materials is due to be expanded with further simulator RC deployments, which will notably include some sandbox environments.
  • However, it should be noted that:
    • Any glTF / PBR materials content created within these environments which is taken and then rezzed in any region that is not Materials-enabled, will become “material-less” in a non-recoverable way, and will need to be recreated.
    • Because of the above point, until the glTF support is fully gird-wide, any attempts to put PBR-enabled goods on the Marketplace will be sanctioned.
  • General bug fixing on both the simulator and the viewer is continuing.

PBR Terrain

Materials applied to Second Life terrains. Credit: Linden Lab
  • Per past meeting notes, Cosmic Linden is prototyping the application of PBR materials on terrain (see this blog post for more).
  • Further work on bug fixing, including correcting an issue with triplanar mapping to the for terrain repeats, particularly on steep elevation changes (so as to avoid the all-too familiar “stretching” seen with textures).
  • Important notes with this work:
    • It is not terrain painting. It is the application of PBR materials – terrain painting is described as “something that’s on the radar” at LL.
    • The work does not include support for displacement maps.
    • The work is currently only viewer-side, with no corresponding server-side support, the idea here being to prototype what might be achieved and testing approaches / results.

Level of Detail (LOD) Discussion

  • Level of detail (LOD) refers to the complexity of a 3D model representation. In short the idea is to reduce the load on the rendering system by reducing the complexity of the 3D object based on various of criteria (e.g. the distance of the object from the viewer / camera) and using various techniques.
  • Second Life uses the approach of Discrete Levels of Detail (DLOD) method – the use of discrete versions of the original with decreased levels of geometric detail to replace the more complex models using an algorithm primarily based on distance. This has both positives and negatives, some rooted in poor modelling practices by some content creators, others are inherent to flaws within SL itself.
  • In looking at glTF and mesh imports in the future,  LL is considering moving towards more automated and better optimised means of creating LODs to try to reduce some of the current issues.
  • One idea under consideration to achieve this is to leverage Simplygon (or see the Wikipedia entry), which although a proprietary tool, is available as a plug-in for a number of 3D modelling towards (including Blender); the idea being the glTF importer consume whatever output is generated by Simplygon at the creator’s end of the workflow (it being noted that “simply” integrating Simplygon into SL isn’t feasible).
    • Such an approach would offer advantages of optimisation whilst leaving the current upload process in place for those wishing to continue to use it, together with the continued ability to manually create LODs.
  • Some concerns over this possible approach raised at the meeting were:
    • It does not address issues of avatar complexity, which is potentially the biggest viewer performance hit – although in fairness, avatar complexity is really an issue requiring its own focus / project.
    • The nature of some of the Simplygon licensing statements (concern about which might be a mix of the genuine and a basic misunderstanding of legal terms used with regards to “how the Internet works”, so to speak; an issue we had back when LL changed some of the terminology within the SL TOS in 2013).
  • While there are other optimisations tools available, given the state of flux with things within the open source environment, and given Simplygon is recognised as an “industry standard”, offering a means to take output from in and bring it into Second Life is currently seen as the best strategy by the Lab, subject to the concerns raised about the licensing requirements.

In Brief

  • There have been reports of Animesh objects changing / becoming stuck in their lowest LOD in various circumstances, including on region crossing (see BUG-233691 “Animesh re-renders at lowest LOD for extended interval after long-range llSetRegionPos” + listed duplicates). This is believed to be a bounding box issue, and a fix is being developed which should hopefully make it into the next update of the Maint T RC viewer.
  • For PBR, the questions was raised about converting older content with the current Blinn-Phong materials to PBR where the base colour map is not available. The recommendation is that the two are kept separate: if the base colour map is not available for conversion, that Blinn-Phong should continue to be used. No attempt on LL’s part will be made to try to combine the two (PBR / Blinn-Phong) through any kind of conversion tools, as the two are currently entirely separate, allowing creators / users to apply PBR to items which may already have Blinn-Phong, and if the results aren’t good, strip the PBR away and immediately revert to the Blinn-Phong materials. Any attempt to allow “blending” between the two approaches will immediately break this.
  • One consideration actively being worked on within the Lab is glTF licenses and Second Life being able to recognise these. Licences tend to be built-in to glTF complaint 3D models, so as the end goal of the glTF project is to effectively be able to take a glTF model from (say) Sketchfab and drop it into SL, this should be done in respect of the object’s licensing (e.g. if it has a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license, it can be imported into SL but not re-sold after the fact or placed on the SL Marketplace).

Next Meeting

  • Thursday, July 6th, 2023.

† 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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #26 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ethereal City Estate – Ethereal City Noir, May 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  June 27th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, June 27th, the simulator release 580543 was deployed to the SLS Main channel, placing all of the simhosts across the grid on the same release. This release includes:
    • PATCH method now enabled through LSL HTTP for both send and receive.
    • HEAD method now allowed through llHTTPRequest.
    • Linkset Size has been increased from 54 to 64m to match maximum prim size.
    • llGetAgentInfo can now detect scripted agent status.
    • See this official blog post for more.
  • On Wednesday, June 28th, the PBR Materials simulator code, currently on a limited Main grid deployment (Preflight channel only, I believe), will be updated. All other RC channels will be restarted without any changes to their simulator versions.

Viewer Updates

The Second Life Project Inventory Extensions viewer, version 6.6.13.580656, was issued on June 26th – see my overview for more.

The remaining viewers in the pipeline are:

Changes to How Asset UUIDs are Assigned

Right now when assets ids are assigned it is simply generated. We’re going changing that a bit. We’re going to start trying to de-dupe new assets. So if you were to upload to identical pictures of Kevin Bacon they would both end up with the same asset ID.

– Rider Linden

  • This is a major change to be deployed in an upcoming simulator release.
  • It will apply to textures, notecards, scripts (possibly gestures).
  • UUIDs for rezzed objects will remain unique.
  • The change also will not affect any UUIDs the viewer makes
  • The reason for this change is the Firestorm Bridge – which saves the same LSL script when it is created.
  • Refer to the latter half of the video below for further details on the discussion.

In Brief

  • Teleports:
    • Some are reporting increases in teleport failures, possibly the result of a failure mode wherein the simulator from which an agent (avatar) is departing closes the connection with the receiving simulator before the teleport has completed.
    • BUG-234022 “Teleport just before to change state will prevent the change state to occur” has also been filed, relating to issues with large scripts within worn attachments failing to correctly update on teleport / logging-in.
  • BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” has seen some work put into it (currently with the Lab’s QA team) which many held ease the problem once it reaches a deployment status.
  • A general discussion on scripting issues – please refer to the video for details.

† 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 rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

Second Life Mobile: Video update from the Lab, with summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
SL Mobile demonstration by Grumpity Linden – a screen capture from the June 2023 development video from Linden Lab
On Tuesday, June 27th, Linden Lab released a new video highlighting the development work for Second Life Mobile App. This video is embedded below, with what follows intended to form a short summary of comments made on the work during the SL20B Lab Gab session with Grumpity and Mojo Linden (and for which I’ll have a text summary available soon.

Key Points

  • Development work is continuing, with an emphasis on performance and rendering (for example: the capabilities of the hardware running SL Mobile is assessed to see if it can render with shadows enabled).
  • The user interface has been revised and improved.
  • The overall aim remains to provide an immersive an experience as possible, and provide users with an many of the capabilities found within the viewer as makes sense to include in a mobile device.
  • As it is, SL Mobile provides:
    • Chats and IM capabilities.
    • Friends on-line information.
    • Destinations / Places.
    • Teleport capabilities.
    • Groups and Group chat functionality.
    • High-quality rendering.
    • Avatar navigation via an on-screen joystick (only visible when in use).
  • Work will continue in adding features and capabilities and refining SL Mobile over the next two quarters.
  • The current time frame for releases is:
    • Limited “private” alpha testing towards the end of 2023.
    • Broader user beta testing in 2024.
  • Further news and updates will be made available as and when there are updates to share.
Rendering in the SL Mobile app / viewer – screencap via the June 2023 development video from Linden Lab

The Video

The new video – embedded below – provides insight into the work carried out since the last update / video released at SL19B, and highlights some of the purposes LL sees SL Mobile being put to. Note that elements such as the UI as seen in the video are subject to possible change as the product develops.

Looking at the Second Life Inventory Extensions Project Viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

Inventory Extensions in the official viewer: Item and folder contents preview images (l) and the Single Folder View (r)

On Monday, June 26th, Linden Lab issued the Inventory Extensions project viewer, offering two new inventory features intended to make browsing inventory and inventory folders and ascertaining what they / their contents are a lot easier. An official blog post accompanied the new viewer, and this post is intended to offer a little meat an bones on that post for the curious.

The new capabilities comprise:

  • Inventory Previews (previously referred to as Inventory Thumbnails):
    • The ability to take images of individual items within inventory (clothing, body parts, accessories, attachments).
    • Have these images persistently linked to the item (unless intentionally deleted or changed) and displayed when the mouse pointer is hovered over the item in question.
    • The ability to use your own images, either from inventory or uploaded through the preview tool, which can be persistently associated with the item when the mouse pointer hover over it.
    • The ability to create and include images for other inventory asset types such as Calling Cards (e.g. a photo of the person to whom the card relates),  EEP Settings, Landmarks (e.g. a photo of a location), Notecards, Gestures, Scripts, etc.
    • The ability to associated images with an entire folder (e.g. a photo of a complete outfit contained in a folder).
    • There is no fee associated with creating such preview images, whether taken using the in-viewer tool or when uploading your own image via the tool (note the fee will be applied still if you use the Build → Upload Image option).
    • Merchants and creators can add previews to their delivery folders and items, and these will be automatically displayed on mouseover with the item / folder.
  • Single Folder view: the ability to see the contents of a single inventory folder in its own window.
  • As far as I’m aware, these previews should not place any overhead on inventory loading.

Please note: at the time of writing, these features are only available via a project viewer available via the Alternate Viewers page, and thus should be regarded as being for testing purposes, and they may be subject to further iterations / changes between now and when they do review a de facto release status. Those trying the viewer are encouraged to file any bugs they may find via the Second Life Jira.

Inventory Previews

Creating a Preview via the Preview Snapshot

  • Select (and wear / display, as applicable) the item for which you wish to create a preview image. In this example, I’m using a hairstyle.
  • If you are creating a preview of an item of clothing or other wearable, you might want to pose your avatar (although this obviously isn’t essential).
  • Position your camera so you are ready to take your preview image.
  • Open your Inventory and locate the item for item for which you wish to create a preview image and right-click on its name to display the Context Menu. Select Image… from the menu.
  • This will open the Change Item Image floater.  To take a preview image directly, click on the Use Snapshot Tool button on the floater (second button from left, with a camera icon).

Creating an Inventory Preview Image of of of my hairstyles

  • When using the Snapshot Tool, clicking the button will open the Item Snapshot floater:
    • Use the Take Photo button to refresh the preview of the image about to be taken, if required.
    • When you are satisfied with the preview image, click Save.
    • The preview image will be generated and automatically associated with the inventory item.

Viewing A Preview Image

  • In Inventory, hover the mouse over an item.
  • If there is a preview image set for it, it will be displayed whilst the mouse remains over the item.

Hovering the mouse pointer over an item in Inventory will display any preview image associated with it

Buttons on the Change Item Image and Item Snapshot Floaters

The image below provides additional descriptions for those buttons on the Change Item Image and Image Snapshot floaters which might not be obvious at first glance.

The buttons on the Change Item Image and Image Snapshot floaters 

Additional Notes

  • When using the Upload From Computer and Use Texture (e.g. a snapshot saved to inventory or other texture in inventory) in the Change Item Image floater, there is no need to take an additional snapshot using the floater – once displayed in the floater, the image will be associated with the item.
  • To create an image for an entire folder in inventory (such as an outfit), follow the steps for Creating a Preview via the Preview Snapshot, but right-click on the folder itself to select Image… from the Context Menu.

Using the Preview option with an outfit (l) and a Landmark (r)

Single Folder View

This option allows you to see the contents of a single inventory folder in its own window.

  • Locate the required folder in inventory.
  • Right-click on it to display the Context Menus and select Open in a New Window.
  • The contents of the folder are displayed in a new floater:
    • Any items with associated preview images have said images displayed in the upper part of the floater.
    • Items without any associated preview image are listed in the lower portion of the floater.

The Single Folder View (aka open folder in a new window)

General Notes

There have been some claims that the Inventory Preview is an attempt by LL to move in on popular products such as CTS Wardrobe; however, these claims are not really accurate. This kind of inventory preview has long been requested for the viewer, whereas CTS and similar are geared towards web-based inventory organisation (and may require the use of RLV), whilst offering a more rounded feature-set in terms of tagging and other capabilities. As such, they are not in any way invalidated by the release of this functionality, and there are those who may find such systems remain more attractive as an option.

That said, the Lab’s inventory preview is a useful feature, and one that will hopefully be used by content creators as well as by users in general. The single folder inventory view is also useful, although I have a minor niggle over consistency of naming (if the capability is called Single Folder View, how about calling it that in the Context Menu?).

Currently, and as noted above, both features are still in development, and hence only available through the Alternate Viewers page at present, and may be subject to change. Depending on what, if any, changes are made, I may revisit this viewer and provide a further piece on it once it reaches de facto release status.