Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, December 18th, 2022
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 P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.8.576863 Monday, December 12.
Release channel cohorts:
Maintenance Q RC viewer, version 6.6.9.577220, issued on December 16.
Project viewers:
glTF / PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.577157, December 14.
This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
Power up for Charge, October 2022 – blog postThe following notes were taken from:
My audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, December 15th 2022 at 13:00 SLT.
My chat log transcript and video recording by Pantera Północy of the Third-Party Developer Meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, December 16th, 2022 at 13:00 SLT. My thanks to her for the video (embedded towards the end of this article).
These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar; also note that the following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meetings and is not intended to be a full transcript of either meeting.
Performance Floater / Auto-FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576737, November 28.
VS 2022 RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576310, issued November 4 – utilises Visual Studio 2022 in the Windows build tool chain.
Project viewers:
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8.
PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.576966, December 3.
This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
CCUG Specific
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.
To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
The project viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page, but will only work on the following regions on Aditi (the Beta grid): Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
The focus remains on bug and regression issue fixing within the viewer and quality of life improvements.
There has been a discussion on revising the workflow for setting reflection probes & in providing a debug setting to make things easier to see when manipulating reflection probes.
This has been prompted be those testing the PBR viewer setting-up their own reflection probes incorrectly (e.g. by making the probe sphere / cube shiny prior to converting it to a reflection probe – which should NOT be done), failing to achieved the anticipated results and then filing bug reports.
It is possible that some of the required workflow could be factored into the UI itself to off a more intuitive sense as to how reflection probes are supposed to work.
An alternative to this might be to introduce a new “reflection probe” prim type, which includes all the core parameters – however the additional work and messaging required to achieve this would lead to a further lengthening of the project’s development time.
Tutorials to help people get to grips with reflection probes (and, I presume, PBR as a whole are “in the works”).
Screen Space Reflections (SSR): Geenz Linden is working on this within the PBR viewer. Whilst a checkbox for SSR has been added to the viewer, there is further work to be done on the integration and rendering sides (e.g. getting SSR to work on water & transparent surfaces).
Hardware profiling / optimising the viewer is still on-going (although it is likely that whatever is done, SSR will result in a noticeable performance hit if enabled).
[TPV Video: 9:11-10:44] The decision has yet to be made on whether or not to axe the forward rendering (i.e. non-ALM) path from the viewer.
This decision is awaiting more information on hardware performance on lower-spec systems using the updated deferred rendering (i.e. ALM) rendering path.
It is known that Mac rendering performance on the PBR viewer is particularly bad, which may be down to a configuration issue.
In Brief
Mirrors (in some capacity) are described as the “very next thing” the graphics team will commence work on after the PBR / reflection probes work gets to RC status (as Vir Linden pointed out, Mirrors currently require more reflection on how they are to be implemented!).
The meeting in places broadened into general discussion on content breakage (and the need, where possible, to maintain the functionality of content users have purchased in expectation of its longevity; the benefits / disadvantages with morph bones versus blend shapes for customising the avatar shape (and the possible routes to an “avatar 2.0”), the need for a better animation system (or even an actual animation system), etc.
Much of this was more esoteric in nature at this point in time, although the likes of Puppetry is laying the foundations for broader animation work; as does the glTF 2.0 specification, which is the baseline specification for the PBR / reflections probe work, and will be expanded upon in future projects – such as with mesh uploads.
In terms of animation systems, some of the groundwork is already in place inasmuch as SL already effectively treats morph bones and animated bones as individual animation tracks, offering to potential for this to ne “unwrapped” and moved to a glTF approach to animation management.
Some of the above conversation touched on the ideas of market renewal / fragmentation. For example: the introduction of reflection probes offers a degree of market renewal for creators of buildings, skyboxes, etc., through the provisioning of new builds (or new versions of existing builds) leveraging the capability; however, the adoption of an upload schema for fully customised avatar skeletons might lead to greater market fragmentation (how do you ensure, for example, that human animation/pose A will work equally on custom human (style) avatar skeletons W, X, Y and Z, or will they each require custom animations?).
A new project (commencing in 2023) to add thumbnail previews to inventory, allowing users to see a small image of a given object within inventory (thumbnails can be individual items or, if preferred an entire folder).
The first phase of the work is determining how to generate the thumbnail images in the first place on a manual or (preferably) automated basis, and then ensure it maintains an association with the object to which it is related (e.g. so if an item is sold or transferred to another user, the thumbnail goes with it).
Once this has been decided, the next phase will be to build-out the UI so that such thumbnails can be viewed from inventory
It is likely that thumbnails will have a fixed / limited size resolution, and will not be subject to any upload fee.
This work:
Is not an adjunct (or related) to the Outfit previews currently available in the viewer.
Will not prevent creators from including high resolution images with their products if they wish.
Will only apply to inventory objects where it makes sense (e.g. textures and notecards would likely be excluded).
Is seen as a possible foundational piece to adding new fields to the inventory database, which could open the door to further information fields being added to inventory in the future,
Following the switch-over to using Github for viewer code repositories on Monday, November 21st, 2022, work is now progressing on “Phase 2”.
This is remaining TeamCity operations with Github Actions for viewer builds (so those pulling an official viewer repo will be able to build it directly).
This work will also incorporate the rebuilding of those third-party libraries involved in the viewer build process, as and where required.
In Brief
[Video 16:10-18:41] LL has been digging into viewer crash rates by operating system, with the note that the number of crashes on the Mac OS appears to be disproportionately high. It is hoped that if the underlying causes can be readily identified, these issues can be subjected to rapid fixing. It was not clear at the meeting if those TPVs supporting OS X are seeing a similar elevated crash rate.
[Video 20:40-21:35] It is estimated that the split between viewer operating systems for the official viewer is roughly:
1-2% Linux (although this does not include running the Windows viewer under emulation on Linux).
6% Mac.
The rest: Windows.
Firestorm appears to mirror the above.
[Video: 35:08-36:10] It is possible the the work on the viewer library refresh will allow LL to look again at the issue of providing a Linux viewer build.
The meeting has a general discussion on operating systems, & variants (64-bit vs. 32-bit), etc, and the lack of an official Linux build,
A reminder that Microsoft ceases official support for Windows 8 on January 10th, 2023. This means that from that date, Windows 8 will no longer be officially supported by Second Life as a viewer operating system, and LL will not guarantee the viewer will run as expected on Win 8 going forward from that date.
Linden Lab Holiday Closure
A reminder that Linden Lab will be effectively closed (outside of Support cover) from end of business (PST) on Friday, December 23rd, 2022 through until start of business (PST) on Monday, January 2nd, 2023.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, December 11th, 2022
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: version 6.6.8.576863 – Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer – December 12 – NEW (promoted as this summary was being prepped).
Release channel cohorts:
No other changes,
Project viewers:
Puppetry project viewer updated to version 6.6.8.576972, on December 8.
Puppetry demonstration via Linden Lab – see below. Demos video with the LL comment “We have some basic things working with a webcam and Second Life but there’s more to do before it’s as animated as we want.”
The following notes have been taken from chat logs and audio recording of the Thursday, December 8th Puppetry Project meetings held at the Castelet Puppetry Theatre on Aditi. These meetings are generally held on alternate weeks to the Content Creation User Group (CCUG), on same day / time (Thursdays at 13:00 SLT).
Notes in these summaries are not intended to be a full transcript of every meeting, but to highlight project progress / major topics of discussion.
Project Summary
Previously referred to as “avatar expressiveness”, Puppetry is intended to provide a means by which avatars can mimic physical world actions by their owners (e.g. head, hand, arm movements) through tools such as a webcam and using technologies like inverse kinematics (IK) and the LLSD Event API Plug-in (LEAP) system.
Note that facial expressions and finger movements are not currently enabled.
Most movement is in the 2D plain (e.g., hand movements from side-to-side but not forward / back), due to limitations with things like depth of field tracking through a webcam, which has yet to be addressed.
The back-end support for the capability is only available on Aditi (the Beta grid) and within the following regions: Bunraku, Marionette, and Castelet.
Puppetry requires the use of a dedicated viewer, the Project Puppetry viewer, available through the official Second Life Alternate Viewers page.
No other special needs beyond the project viewer are required to “see” Puppetry animations. However, to use the capability to animate your own avatar and broadcast the results, requires additional work – refer to the links below.
There is now a Puppetry Discord channel – those wishing to join it should contact members of LL’s puppetry team, e.g. Aura Linden, Simon Linden, Rider Linden, Leviathan Linden (not a full list of names at this time – my apologies to those involved whom I have missed).
Bugs, Feature Requests and Code Submissions
For those experimenting with Puppetry, Jiras (bug reports / fixes or feature requests) should be filed with “[Puppetry]” at the start of the Jira title.
A new version of the Puppetry project viewer – version 6.6.8.576972 was issued on December 8th, available on the Alternate Viewers page (until a further version is issued).
This version includes an overhaul to the protocol used between LEAP plug-ins and the viewer. For example, Inverse Kinematics calculations are done earlier in the process which will make viewer performance better when more than one avatar is using Puppetry.
Please be certain to use both a new viewer and a new set of plug-ins from https://github.com/secondlife-3p, and update any projects or code you might be working on.
This version may have a crash bug.
Leviathan Linden is still working on updating the wiki documentation to reflect the new API.
Leviathan Linden demonstrating the use of puppetry to move his avatar whilst doing the “pane of glass” mime in front of a suitable capture device. Note that his legs remain static (moving in line with his hips) as puppetry does not (yet) support full body tracking
We changed the way Puppetry expects to get its data for two reasons: 1) we want to only do IK for your own avatar, then just send the joint rotations to everybody else; 2) if someone writes a plug-in that happens to know best what all the joint rotations should be (e.g. it has done its own IK, or is doing full mocap) then it can just specify all parent-frame rotations of the joints. So, now that THAT plug-in mode is unblocked, we can start trying to fix our own IK.
– Leviathan Linden explaining the changes to the way puppetry and managed by the viewer
In Brief
There are currently no updates to the Inverse Kinematics (IK); it is described as being “hard”.
It has been suggested that the viewer could “do more” in respects of IK, etc.
However, this information needs to be transmitted to other viewers able to “see” what is going on, which requires messaging and updates through the simulator, which can lead to the viewer being less than trustworthy in terms of what it is showing and what is going on (due to missed updates, etc due to the bandwidth load).
But, if the simulator is tasked with managing all the computations for IK and sending the results to connected viewers (reducing the amount of traffic and potential loss of messaging), it puts a potentially high compute load on the simulator (imagine the simulator trying to manage the IK for 50+ avatars at an event, tracking the movement, interactions, etc.).
A potential trade off here is to have a viewer run the IK calculations for the avatar it is controlling, and package that information for streaming to other viewers connected to the region’s simulator with minimal sanity checking (e.g. to ensure the avatar’s position in the viewer is properly constrained to within a few metres of its location as calculated by the simulator). On receipt, the sanity-checked data can then be played back without the need for the receiving viewer having to carry out IK calculations for itself on the avatar(s) it is “watching”, and carrying out some minimal sanity checks of its own.
Rider Linden is investigating having the simulator track the motion from a puppetry viewer in a way that does not impact simulator performance “too badly”. The options he’s looking at are:
Having the simulator suck the data out of the puppetry messages as they are sent through it, or
Using a new message the viewer can use to report the locations of it’s attachment points, and the simulator tracks these – which Rider sees as the preferred option.
This later method could – among other things – be expanded to work with animations in general. In addition, if tied tied in to the entire animation system (viewer computes its animation frame puppetry+legacy) to produce results, then the results could be made to scripts.
In regards to interfaces for this, Rider is of the opinion that scripts should reference attachment points since those can act as proxies for bone locations and most general creators, scripters and residents are familiar with them. and it avoids having to introduce a new concept of bones into LSL.
Collisions: the above spawned a related discussion on providing additional data such as geometry information (e.g. spherical bounding radius or a shape approximation) to allow collisions to be enabled from IK, and allowing “snap to” functionality (e.g. you reach for a glass and the avatar hand snaps to it on detecting the collision).
However, rather than allowing allow physics collisions on an attachment points (which might over-complicate the avatar model in the Havok physics engine), Rider suggested having a property (sphere) that could be set on an attachment that enabled it as a physics volume.
My thought is that collision aware attachment points, along with being able to detect and set their positions in space will be enough to get us 90% of the way towards being able to hold hands in world.
– Rider Linden
Leviathan noted there was a bug where an avatar with non-unity scale on its bones would be broken under puppetry (misalignment of bones). This should now be fixed, but it allowed him to add the theoretical ability to modify the scale of a joint in its parent-frame (an example plug-in script to demonstrate ho this works has yet to be written).
Are usually chaired by Reed Linden, who is the Lab’s Product Manager for the Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
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.
The drive to get the MP search updates release is continuing.
It had been hoped that this would be completed by US Thanksgiving, but last minutes issues resulting from the sheer size / volume of the MP (which cannot be replicated in test environments) prevented this from being achieved.
The aim is now as soon as everything is working as anticipated.
Those using the Marketplace recently may have noticed some glitches with search – this has been due to the Search team banging on things under the hood in order to get the updates deployed.
This work is essentially the same kind of back-end update as carried out with Web search a few months ago, with the emphasis on faster, more robust performance, together with new search options, including:
Merchant and store names will no long be searched in product searches.
Wildcard (e.g. using *) will be possible.
Better exact matching against search terms
The back-end supports fuzzy matching to better handle typos when inputting searches.
There should be a noticeable increase in speed of search results being returned.
Once running, these updates will allow LL to add-in the relevance engine AI to the Marketplace search (as a separate API entity to the relevance engine already running on the web search).
Work will resume on Marketplace Styles (allowing multiple colours, etc., for an item to appear within a single listing rather than each requiring its own listing) as soon as the MP Search updates are officially enabled. As such, Styles will not be deployed in 2022, but will be the first MP update for deployment in 2023.
It will obviously be up to merchants as to whether they use it to group variances in a product within a single listing or continue to list them separately – single listings for multiple versions of an item will not be mandatory.
Marketplace Refresh / Rebuild
This is still being looked at as a primary project for development and possible initial deployment in 2023, and as such will likely form a focal point for discussions and feedback through Web User Group meetings in 2023.
The work will at least comprise a refresh of the Marketplace appearance and the addition of further desired functionality; because of this, there is a push within LL to completely rebuild the Marketplace from the ground-up.
[Video 13:54-14:05] Any rebuild of the Marketplace would not require merchants to re-upload there items: a migration of listings from the current MP to any new MP would be provided.
The Plus subscription level was launched on November 18th, 2022 – for details please refer to the official blog post and my own reporting on the release.
Work is continuing to bed this in alongside of the other subscription options.
The Lab is generally pleased that the majority of users appeared to understand what they were trying to achieve within the introduction of Plus.
Plus is the last of the currently-planned subscription options the Lab has on the boards, and there are currently no plans to make further offerings available.
However, consideration is still being given to providing future possible options, such as:
A “Premium A-la Carte” level whereby your subscription fees are based on the options you select from a list.
Subscriptions based on specific interests (such as a “creator subscription”.
BUT these are only in the “Soon™” phase, indicating they are a feature or capability Linden Lab would like to implement, but which is not far enough along in development to determine if or when it might / could / will be implemented.
[Video 21:19-22:42] Will subscriptions ever support payment in Linden Dollars?
This is being considered, although the overall implications, etc., have yet to be fully understood.
In particular, it could have ramifications on the status of the Linden Dollar (which is not at present regarded as a virtual currency, but could be if it were to become a recognised payment system for benefits.
As such this is an idea that is not even in the “Soon™” criteria of thinking; however, there is an internal goal to make it possible to pay for “all things” SL-related in L$ – the questions are really what will this do to the Linden Dollar in making it a virtual currency; how will that effect how the LindeX will function / be regulated, how Tilia can support such a move, etc.
The Lab is working on improving the ability for the Destination Guide to provide a real-time reflection of the number of avatars within a specific in-world location.
Should this be achievable, the capability will be extended into Search so that Places searches will return the number of avatars within the location at the time of the search.
This work might be completed by 2022 year-end.
[Video: 14:20-14:54] Concerns were raised over the use of unregistered bots (i.e. avatars not correctly flagged as Scripted Agents) to game the numbers. LL is aware of the unregistered bot issue across Second Life, but outside of users reporting them on finding them, there is no easy solution to this issue.
[Video: 19:00-19:36] With the acquisition of CasperTech, will Caspertech Drop Boxes and vendors be integrated into the Marketplace? Yes. However, what form this will take and when it might be undertaken has yet to be determined internally at the Lab / with Casper Warden.
[Video: 23:22-29:42 + via text earlier in the meeting] The suggestion was made to make OpenSpace regions (aka Void or Water regions – not to be confused with the 2008 OpenSpace offering which morphed into Homesteads in 2009) as a part of a “Super Premium” offering (+ a nominal tier fee on to of the subscription fee) purely for use as private homes.
These regions have a Land Capacity of 1000, and are limited to 10 concurrent avatars, and are regarded as being for light use and a special purchase via support with the requirement that the purchaser must hold at least one Full private region.
While the idea was taken under advisement, such a offer could still impact the existing private estate market, and so would have to be considered carefully.
The OpenSpace discussion further raised the idea of having these regions potentially on an on-demand basis (e.g. only spun-up when avatars are present within the regions. H
However, it was pointed out that regions, whether “up” or “down” require grid slots, and the infrastructure configurations means that grid slots have underpinning hardware, so there is still a potential hardware cost, regardless of whether a region is spun up for use or not.
As such, this cost impact would have to be resolved in order for regions (or a specific region type) to be made available through an on-demand system.
As noted in previous WUG summaries, this is a complete re-write of every route by which users can obtain and hold land, from Premium (+Plus) Linden Homes, obtaining Mainland (incl. Abandoned Land), and private island regions, and renting from private estates.
A focus at the moment is on defining what “land” and the associated terms around it actually means (e.g. what is “renting land”? Where can land be rented? How is it rented?, etc.) .
The first element that will be surfaced is a new Land Portal, a central hub from which to get to all aspects of land “ownership”.
For all other discussion points, please refer to the video below.
Next Meeting
Wednesday, January 4th, 2023. Venue and time per top of this summary.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, December 6th, 2022 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.
Server Deployments
This week will see all simhosts on all channels restarted, but no deployments.
The hoped-for RC release (which includes a fix for BUG-229301 “Maximum Memory allowable by scripts not being reset until teleport or relog”) has been delayed as a result of a fix being required for an odd crash which could cause some regions to crash on starting. This has now been resolved, but the fix needs to pass through a QA cycle before any release is made, so the deployment should now occur in week #50.
Available Official Viewers
This list reflects those viewers available via Linden Lab.
Release viewer: version 6.6.7.576223 – MFA and TOS hotfix viewer – November 1 – No change.
Performance Floater / Auto-FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576737, November 28.
Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.8.576863 Monday, December 5.
VS 2022 RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576310, issued November 4 – utilises Visual Studio 2022 in the Windows build tool chain.
Project viewers:
PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.576966, December 3 – this viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.575529, issued on October 12.
Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
In Brief
Refer to the video below for more information on the following:
There is a generic Puppetry-related discussion (Kinnect), but as there is a Puppetry meeting due on December 8th, so any updates will be covered in my summary of that meeting.
There is a similar generic discussion on the complexities of the PBR Materials Project, which is covered in my CCUG updates.
A discussion on potential LSD bugs / issues – no specifics from LL’s side, as Rider Linden (who runs the LSD project) was absent the meeting.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 