Category: SL User Group Meetings

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, May 21st 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

SL Viewer

The CEF Special viewer has been withdrawn from downloads, pending the release of a more rounded CEF RC viewer containing broader support for more options for streaming into SL + more codecs.

The FMOD Studio RC viewer updated to version 6.4.3.542486 on May 19th.

The remainder of the current official viewer pipelines are as follows:

• Current Release viewer version 6.4.2.541639, dated May 11th, promoted May 19th, formerly the Camera Presets RC viewer – see my Camera Presets tutorial.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • FMOD Studio RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542486, May 21st.
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542484, May 19th.
• Project viewers:
  • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.2.541645, issued May 15th.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The exact streaming services that will be supported by the next CEF update have yet to be confirmed.
• The Love Me Render viewer is still being re-worked as a result of being “clobbered” by the EEP updates (presumably during the merge process). It is hoped this will be back on track soon.
• The first viewer to be built entirely using the new build process using a recent version of Xcode (OS X) or Visual Studio 2017 (Windows) is still waiting to see the light of day.

Graphics / ALM / Code paths

• The previous CCUG meeting raised the topic of possibly removing the ability to disable the viewer’s Advanced Lighting Model (ALM).
• Vir emphasised that the idea is just a point of discussion, and not indicative of any decision having been made.

Graphics support is a whole lot of different possible code paths, which means there are tons and tons of options, [so] you can slice it and dice it lots and lots of different ways which makes it into a maintenance and update nightmare. So the more we can streamline it and say stuff works in particular ways, makes it easier to keep it working and to fix things when they go wrong. So, we don’t have any immediate plans to change Advanced Lighting, it’s just something we raised to gauge what usage patterns there might be.

– Vir Linden

Jelly Dolls / Avatar Rendering

• Vir’s idea to render jelly dolled avatars as basic human form, sans attachments, is apparently proving more complicated a move than at first thought.
• He’s not entirely surprised by this, considering all that an avatar made include: animations, shape deformations, etc.
• Animations can particularly problematic when they are being used to deform the skeleton into a non-human form, and the system wants to render the avatar in a human form.
  • Allowing the animations to run means allowing them to deform the avatar shape.
  • Turning the animations off means leaving the avatar shape in a human form but stuck in the T-pose position.
• The solution to the above issue would appear to be setting a stand animation that runs locally (i.e. in any viewer that is set to render the avatar as a jelly doll). However, this can require additional adjustments to be rendered correctly in a viewer.
• Further local animations may be required to cover situation when a jellied avatar uses things like default sits, adding further complexity to the work.

In brief

• There has been at least one report of the EEP viewer causing periodic freezes as if the texture cache being purged. While EEP should not have altered how the texture cache works, and as no bug reports have been filed on the issue as yet, LL ask that those have similar issues regularly / semi-regularly report them.
• Some have noticed that EEP has altered how specularity is rendered where materials have been used. This is a known issue LL are investigating, as per BUG-228781 and BUG-228581.
• The idea of an inventory tagging system was raised (e.g. to easy inventory sorting / searching, etc). Sort form answer: while there are benefits for some form of limited tagging, there are no plans to implement anything in the foreseeable future.
• The question was asked on why Twitch allows VR Chat streaming but not Second Life. Short form answer: because that is what Twitch has decided (at least at present).
• Next meeting: Thursday, June 4th, 13:00 SLT.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, May 7th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

SL Viewer

No further updates this week, leaving the current crop of in-flight viewers as:

• Current Release version  version 6.4.1.540593, dated April 27th, promoted May 4th. Formerly the Zirbenz Maintenance RC viewer – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • CEF Special RC viewer, version 6.4.1.541204, April 30.
  • Camera Presets RC viewer, version 6.3.9.538729 March 25.
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.9.538760, March 25.
• Project viewers:
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

CEF Viewer

The “special release” CEF RC viewer, version 6.4.1.541204, does contain the anticipated codec, etc., updates. However, it is classified as a “special” release at this point in time, as it includes some “short cuts” taken in the build process in order to get it out as a proof-of-concept for the Adult Swim event.

The recommendation is that TPVs should not adopt the code from this particular build, but to wait until a more formalised RC release of the CEF updates is made.

See: Exclusive Adult Swim Second Life Event: Introducing Live Video Streaming in SL (Linden Lab) and Adult Swim special streaming event in Second Life (this blog).

OpenGL Replacement

As has been noted in this blog and elsewhere, Apple is deprecating OpenGL. This has raised questions over the last several months about the future of graphic support in SL for OS X.

Currently, one of the routes under consideration is to undertake a complete switch-over (Windows and OS X) from OpenGL to using Vulkan.

• This is not a final decision, it is just one option under consideration, albeit one that is getting a good degree of thought.
• Numerous pros and cons have been identified with such a switch. However, more analysis is required before a decision is made – e.g. overall impact on shaders, etc.
• Even with any shift there are crucial questions to be asked, including how might it impact users on older, lower-spec systems. To help determine this, an upcoming RC viewer from the Lab will have some additional data collection code that will check to see if systems have / can support Vulkan.
• Vulkan could potentially streamline some of the alpha sorting issues seen with OpenGL, and might also provide some general performance improvements.
• There is a temptation when running a major graphics overhaul to try to include additional work as well, leading to drawn-out projects (a-la EEP). To avoid this, were a move to Vulkan to be made, LL will likely go for a focused implementation of Vulkan support, with broader graphics / shader work positioned as future follow-on work.

Advanced Lighting Model

With regards to any graphics system update, it is possible that the requirement to run with the viewer’s Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) always enabled might become universal. LL are aware that many people run the viewer with ALM disabled, and so are curious as to how much impact any decision to make it universal might have.

Part of the problem here is that people disable ALM for a variety of reasons. For example:

• Those on metered / slow connections may disable it, to avoid having the additional load of downloading materials information (normal and specular maps).
• Some disable ALM in the (not always accurate) belief that it carries a heavy performance hit, which is not necessarily true (e.g. enabling ALM on its own generally doesn’t place too much overhead on a system, but enabling ALM and shadows rendering does – so the trick is to turn of shadows via their own drop-down, rather than disabling ALM entirely).

In brief

• The viewer’s bandwidth usage was raised  – notably the 3000 Kbps upper limit, and whether this was still valid in the era of fast connections people can access. Whether the limit is still valid or not is unclear (particularly how higher limits might stress the servers in terms of requests for information), however, it is seen as something the Lab could potentially look at.
• Caching viewer: the upcoming viewer with updates to the cache is primarily focused on the VFS cache. If this is successful, it is possible the texture cache may be folded into the same structure.
• Official Linux viewer: not news. The idea of the Lab providing (with third-party contribution support) a core Debian package & leaving the libraries to TPVs / self-compilers to determine based on the flavour of Linux they want to use is essentially at a standstill due to lack of resources.
• Next meeting: Thursday, May 21, 13:00 SLT.