Category: SL User Group Meetings

SL project updates 2017-3/2: texture uploads, Content Creation UG

Posted on by Inara Pey

An Uncertain Destiny, Mystic; Inara Pey, January 2017, on FlickrAn Uncertain Destiny – blog post

Server Deployments – Recap

  • The Main (SLS) channel was restarted on Tuesday, 17th January, but there was no associated code deployment
  • A new server maintenance package was deployed to the RC channels on Wednesday, January 18th, comprising a partial fix for (non-public) BUG-3286, “Can’t move object” fail notifications (fixes for regions/objects with longer names are pending) + internal server and logging enhancements

SL Viewer

No further updates to the current viewer pipeline list.

Texture Uploads and First Time Rendering

The Lab has been making some hardware (/communication?) changes to the texture upload / delivery mechanism (e.g. both the handling of texture uploads from the viewer to the asset system, and then from the asset system back out to the viewer via the CDN). When deployed to the main grid, these should see improvements in the uploading of new textures and their appearance on in-world objects, whether uploaded individually or in bulk (e.g. hopefully little / no grey panels in new texture upload previews when viewing them from inventory, and few / no grey object faces when uploading a texture and then immediately applying it to an object face).

Content Creation User Group

Summary of General Points

  • No further movement on the potential “Bento follow-up” project ideas (see my Content Creation UG notes for week #2).
  • The next Avastar release is in advanced testing, with a potential release around late February / March, but will include devkit support and a large number of bug fixes.
  • Appearance sliders:
    • A question was asked whether the slider system could be updated to allow for easier scaling for smaller avatars utilising Bento (as not all Bento bones are linked to sliders). Vir noted this is unlikely, as it would require a change for the base slider scaling which could break existing avatars.
    • However, Vir noted that suggestions to offer new sliders for sizing things like wings and tales have been discussed at the Lab, but nothing has as yet been decided.

Pain Points / Blockers to Bento Content

A general question thrown out by Simon Linden was whether people are experiencing particular “pain points” in producing Bento content: what they might be waiting for tools-wise or in any other way etc. this quickly spilled out into a much broader discussion on various tools and suggested tutorials. However, core points raised were:

  • Available time, learning to use external tools such as Blender,
  • Waiting on Avastar, plus tutorials, both generic and on using specific tools (e.g. Avastar and Mayastar) – which will hopefully come in time
  • Mention was made of making people more aware of SL-specific areas such as level of detail (LOD), managing physics, LI calculation rules, etc.

It was also noted that possibly having idea of having some for of sample content (e.g. wings, hands), which creators could use as an example / baseline for their own creations, together with a broader selection of documentation / tutorials / videos.

Simon pointed out that in terms of Lab developed tutorials and documentation, there are only limited resources. Many third-parties also produce tutorials (Mehdue Simoni, for example is waiting for the new Avastar to reach release before working on his video tutorials for it).

Others have also put together documentation, but are finding it hard to get that documentation seen heard above the broad range of misinformation on content creation which is  in circulation. Vir has suggested that meaningful documentation and tutorials could be linked to through the SL wiki.

In terms of the wiki, there are a range of resources available for content  creation / Bento:

 

SL project updates 2017-3/1: Server, Viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

The Hell's Heaven 2.0, Rainbow Ridge; Inara Pey, January 2017, on FlickrThe Hell’s Heaven 2.0 – blog post

Things are still warming up after the holiday period, so not a lot of fresh news.

Server Deployments

The Main (SLS) channel was restarted on Tuesday, 17th January, although there was no associated deployment. This is in keeping with the Lab’s new policy of restarting the server channels every 2 weeks, whether or not there is an associated code deployment (the RC channels were restarted in week #2).

A new server maintenance package will be deployed to the RC channels on Wednesday, January 18th. This includes a partial fix for (non-public) BUG-3286, “Can’t move object” fail notifications (fixes for regions/objects with longer names are pending), together with enhanced server logging and minor internal server enhancements.

SL Viewer

The viewer pipelines at this point remain unchanged from week #2:

  • Current Release version 5.0.0.321958, dated December 1st, promoted December 5th, 2016 – formerly the Project Bento RC viewer
  • Maintenance RC viewer version 5.0.1.322791, dated January 12th – some 42 fixes and improvements
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Alex Ivy (LXIV), 64-bit project viewer, version 5.1.0.501863 for Windows and Mac, dated January 10th
    • 360-degree snapshot viewer, version 4.1.3.321712, date November 23, 2016 – ability to take 360-degree panoramic images
  • Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

 

SL project updates 2017-2/3: TPV Developer Meeting Jan 13th

Posted on by Inara Pey
Sagan Planetarium
Sagan Planetarium – blog post

The notes in this update are taken from the abbreviated TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January 13th, 2017. The video of that meeting is embedded at the end of this update. My thanks as always to North for recording and providing it.

SL Viewer

The Maintenance RC viewer was updated to version 5.0.1.322791 on Thursday, January 12th. Otherwise the pipeline remains unchanged from part 1 of this week’s update. [34:20] this will likely be the next viewer to be promoted to release status.

64-bit Viewer

[03:07] It is anticipated that the 64-bit official viewer, version 5.1.0.501863 at the time of writing, will remain in the project cycle for some time. An update to it is anticipated in week #3 (week commencing Monday, January 16th, 2017). Currently, the project viewer isn’t being used by many, and the Lab hopes this number will pick up so that a little more feedback can be obtained.

Points of note with the 64-bit viewer and 64-bit plans:

  • The Mac version is currently without Havok support, an it will likely be 2+ weeks before it does.
  • There will also be a number Havok libraries build in support 64-bit, which will be made available to TPV sub-licensees, but this is unlikely to happen until the Lab starts building 64-bit release candidates.
  • KDU within the viewer is being updated to version 7.9.
  • [08:08] New packaging of the media code and a new version of CEF.
  • The viewer update code will be completely revised.
  • The crash reporting code may be updated.

[11:28] Eventually, the Lab plans to have the viewer available in both 32-bit and 64-bit for Windows, and 64-bit only for Mac OSX and Linux.

For more on Linux, see below.

Voice Updates

[07.18] Updates to Voice should be appearing in a viewer in the next 2(ish) weeks. This will include a new SL Voice plug-in from Vivox which includes a new Opus codec, as well and bug and exploit fixes.

360-Snapshot Viewer

[08:33] Work will resume on this project viewer, version 4.1.3.321712 at the time of writing,  once work on the CEF updates (noted above) have been completed.

Linux and the Viewer

[10:08] Currently, the Lab have not carried out any work on a 64-bit version of the viewer on Linux. However, thought is being given on how to move forward with Linux, and it is hoped that the Lab will have some ideas to put to the TPV / open-source community by the next TPV Developer meeting. It is also hoped that by that time, the Lab will have started work on a 64-bit Linux version of the viewer.

Other Items

The following are covered in brief. please fer to the video for specifics.

New Camera Presets Coming?

[09:14] Jonathan Yap, who has worked on various code contributions for the viewer including, most recently, graphics presets, is working on a new project, which appears to be updating the viewer’s camera presets.

Music Stream Autoplay

[16:45-28:09] A lengthy discussion takes place on music autoplay within the official viewer, and whether or not it should be enabled by default.

  • Having it enabled is seen a off-putting to new users, as it means they can be confronted with loud music playing over their system almost from the moment they log-in, with no apparent way to turn it off. This is seen as possibly causing some to log-off in frustration
  • Having it disabled by default is seen as breaking the shared experience in regions where the creator has specifically included music streaming as a part of the environment
  • The compromise is potentially for the default volume on media to be reduced.

(Note, this discussion also drags on between 29:45-33:50, after the above agreement being reached.)

Click-to-Walk

[28:45] In a similar vein, a request was made to disable click-to-walk, as it has been observed that new users get confused when they find their avatar apparently moving when they haven’t touched their keyboard.  A JIRA on this has been requested.

Group Chat Issues and Group Notice Deliveries

[34:59] Group chat lag become more noticeable over the holiday period. However, the Lab ran a restart of the back-end group chat servers, and this appeared to resolve the majority of issues. If specific groups are still experiencing issues, JIRAs are requested.

[36:49] There are reports that the problem of group notices not always getting through is getting worse. So people don’t get the notice, others get them twice, etc. A JIRA, BUG-40824, has been raised on issues with off-line receipts of group notices as well.

As an aside to this, a fix is in progress t ensure that off-line messages, which may not always get delivered at the next log-in, will be delivered.

Environment Maps, Shiny, Projectors and More

[42:29-end-of-meeting] The end of the meeting centres on a convoluted discussion on the environment map used for the sky, shiny / glossiness, etc. In sort, there is a request for region holders / creators to be able to replace the environment map with a texture of their own choosing. On the plus side, among other things, this could allow things like easier simulation of reflections using projectors. on the negative side, again among other things, it could break a lot of existing content.

Changes to the environment map, providing they can be shown to have specific benefits and do not break existing content, have not been ruled out. However, a specific proposal is really required.

SL project updates 2017-2/2: Content Creation User Group with audio

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Content Creation User Group has re-formed out of the Bento User Group, and is held at the Hippotropolis Camp Fire Circle. Imp costumes entirely optional :D .
The Content Creation User Group has re-formed out of the Bento User Group, and is held at the Hippotropolis Campfire Circle. Imp costumes entirely optional 😀 .

The following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group meeting, held on  Thursday January 12th, 2017 at 1:00pm SLT at the the Hippotropolis Campfire Circle. The meeting is chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Core Topics

  • Bento request from Troy Linden.
  • Supplemental animations that run alongside the main animation (e.g., flapping wings while walking).
  • Possible future project – applying baked textures to mesh avatars.

Bento Request From Troy Linden

Troy Linden is preparing a presentation on Project Bento for an upcoming Second Life meeting within Linden Lab in which he plans to review the project, the interactions with content creators, the benefits this brought to the project, etc. In particular, he would like to demonstrate Bento content people are making and impress on LL’s executives how the project has been received, and how things might be followed-up.

To help with this, he is requesting that anyone with glamour shots of Bento avatars, etc., videos of avatars and Bento items  to contact him via IM to discuss and / or send him what they have (troy-at-lindenlab.com).

Supplemental Animations

Introduced in 2013, llSetAnimationOverride() is one of a series of animation commands keyed directly into the server’s animation states, allowing for faster, smoother animation state changes than with AO systems using the older llPlayAnimation() command. However, llSetAnimation() only allows one animation to be played  at a time for any given state, and this can lead to conflicts when trying to run custom animations as well (see BUG-41048 . An example of this is trying to use llSetAnimationOverride() to walk whilst using an animation to flap wings (below), which causes while the walk, set by llSetAnimationOverride(), to freeze in favour of running the wings flapping, as they are also seen as a locomotion animation.

Vir has identified two possible courses of action to deal with this. The first would be to extend llSetAnimationOverride() to allow “supplemental” animations to run alongside the animation states keyed by llSetAnimationOverride(), effectively allowing them to play together. The other would be to provide a means for people to define their own custom animation states (with associated animations) which the simulator would be able to recognise and handle alongside the existing animations states, rather than having the associated animation conflict with the default animation states.

No decision has been made on which route to take, and Vir is putting together a proposal on approaches, which he’ll put forward at a future meeting.

Applying Baked Textures to Mesh Avatars

This would allow the skin and clothing layers (skin, tattoo, under shirt, shirt, etc., “wearables”) to be directly applied to mesh avatars. In theory, this could be done, and could make it easier to do things like match skins between, say a mesh body and a non-mesh head without having to use applier systems. It could in theory even reduce the complexity of mesh avatars, which currently have to be made up of multiple layers (the so-called “onion meshes”).

 

A further benefit would be for non-human avatars a well. Providing the same UV is used across all elements of an avatar, it could allow creators to offer different pelts  / skins for their animal / creature avatars and, if they make their UV maps available to other creators, allow them to produce things like additional skins.

However, there are problems in proceeding this way.The baking service is capped at a limit of 512×512 texture resolution, which would mean a loss of detail trying to “stretch” such textures over a mesh avatar, which would result in the ability potentially being ignored in favour of using the current “onion mesh” and appliers approach.  It might also mean that wearable layers would be used in non-standard ways (e.g. using a “skirt” layer to apply a skin), which could lead to user confusion (“why am I using a skirt to wear a skin?”) – although this could be overcome by adding further wearable types specific for use with avatar meshes to the system.

An alternative would be to increase the texture resolution for the baking service to 1024×1024. While not entirely ruled out, it does carry with it a set of unknowns as well – what would be the back-end resource hit, could it lead to an uptick in texture trashing issues in the viewer, etc.).

Baking Textures on In-World Mesh and prim Surfaces

Part of the above discussion overlapped with the idea of allowing textures to be baked on arbitrary meshes (thus allowing for compositing, etc).

Vir noted that this would be a far more complex project due to the nature of the baking service, and thus would likely not be considered as a part of making changes to how system wearables might be applied to mesh avatars. However, he is interested in seeing feature requests on how this might be done and the benefits it would bring to SL, and a related JIRA – BUG-7486 – is in the process of being re-opened for comments along these lines.

Other Items

The latest version of Avastar is support of Bento is still undergoing testing. Those using it report it is behaving well, so hopefully a realise won’t be too far off.

SL project updates 2017-2/1: 64-bit viewer and Monday Blues

Posted on by Inara Pey

Nagare no Shimajima, Restless Times; Inara Pey, January 2017, on FlickrNagare no Shimajima, Restless Times – blog post

Server Deployments

There are no planned deployments for the week. However, all servers on the three RC regions will be subject to a rolling restart. This is in accordance with the Lab’s new policy of restarting channels every fortnight, whether or not there is an associated deployment. As the Main (SLS) channel underwent a restart on Tuesday, January third, server on this channel were not restarted this week.

SL Viewer

Project Alex Ivy

The 64-bit versions of the official viewer arrived in project viewer form on Tuesday, January 10th, under the code name Project Alex Ivy – which I take to be a reference to 64 (LXIV being 64 in Roman numerals, hence aLeX IVy).

The viewer, version 5.1.0.501863, has been built using the newly updated and upgraded libraries and build process the Lab has been putting together, which will also be used for 32-bit Windows builds. Thus, the project viewer is available in three flavours:

  • 64-bit Mac
  • 64-bit Windows
  • 32-bit Windows.

There is no Linux viewer as yet, but the Lab has indicated it is their intention to provide one, although TPVs and open-source contributors are likely to still be asked to help with its ongoing support.

Additionally, the following points, as specified in the release notes, should be underlined (although please ensure you read the release notes in full if you intend to try this viewer:

  • The Mac build has several known limitations:
    • There is currently no Mac Havok build,so pathfinding paths cannot be visualised, and it may not be possible to upload mesh assets.
    • Video media using QuickTime does not play.
  • The 64-bit version will not run on Windows 10 systems with Intel HD 2000/3000 GPUs and may not run on other systems that do not have GPUs explicitly supporting Windows 10.

These shortfalls will be addressed as the viewer progresses through the project and release candidate phases to release status in the next weeks / months. Once released, it will signal the end of the 32-bit MAC version of the viewer (and possibly the 32-bit Linux version). The Windows version will continue to be available as a 32-bit build as well as having the new 64-build available.

Also, note that this viewer doesn’t include any functional updates / changes to the existing viewer.

Remaining Viewers Pipelines

Outside of the 64-bit project viewer, the various viewer pipelines remain as my last SL project update:

  • Current Release version: 5.0.0.321958, dated December 1st, promoted December 5th – formerly the Project Bento RC viewer
  • Maintenance RC viewer, version 5.0.1.322513, dated December 21st – some 42 fixes and improvements + Bento support
  • 360-degree snapshot project viewer, version 4.1.3.321712, dated November 23rd – ability to take 360-degree panoramic images – hands-on review
  • Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Monday Outage

On Monday, January 9th, many users were hit with significant issues, with many finding themselves unable to log-in, or being disconnected from the simulators and unable to log back in. On Tuesday, January 10th, April Linden from the Ops team posted another of her excellent post-mortem blog posts on what happened, and I recommend it as a worthwhile and informative read.

In essence a failure within a third-party provider used by the Lab failed to trigger the expected automatic switch-over of connections for all users accessing Second Life through that provider. As a result, those users were disconnected from the service, and due to the volume of people trying to re-connect, couple (I assume with those simply trying to log in, unaware of problems) generated a backlog, forcing the Lab to bring additional log-in servers on-line.

Once again, April does an excellent job in explaining things – revealing more of the complexities of SL in the process (which, as I’ve oft said in the past, goes well beyond just the simulator servers), and also offers apologies for the Monday problems.

Behind the scenes with Bento in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Bento: extending the avatar skeleton
Bento: extending the avatar skeleton

Note: this is a compressed version of an article which first appeared in Kultivate Magazine’s January 2017 issue, and which here includes some personal feedback on being peripherally involved in the project.

There can now be few – even among those having only joined Second Life in the last few months – who cannot be aware of project Bento, the work to significantly enhance the Second Life avatar skeleton to better support mesh avatar models, how they are animated and how they might be customised. I was able to observe Bento almost throughout its lifespan. As such, I thought more of a look inside the project might be of interest.

Bento’s heart comes in the form of one person: Vir Linden. Despite the avatar skeleton being one of the most fundamental parts of Second Life which could if interfered with, cause all sorts of issues, Vir was convinced things could be done to make the lot of mesh avatar creators and animators much easier, and without putting additional stress on either the simulator or the viewer. So in early 2015, he started looking at what might be achievable.

Vir Linden, Senior Software Engineer at Linden Lab, and technical project lead for Bento
Vir Linden, Senior Software Engineer at Linden Lab, and technical project lead for Bento

By roughly April 2015 he felt he had enough information to put together a presentation he could put before senior staff at the Lab. Despite the ambitious nature of the project, potentially adding (at that time) 106 new bones to the avatar, the response was enthusiastic and positive. Troy Linden joined Vir from the Product Team, and Bento was born.

Initially, the work was in-house, involving Lab staff and the Moles. However, as the potential  for the project grew, it quickly became apparent that wider expertise would be needed to both give input to the project and help steer the development work. And so it was that a core Bento User Group came together, comprising Lab staff with expertise with the viewer, with the server, and – most significantly – content creators noted for their expertise in developing mesh avatars and avatar accessories (human and non-human), and the people behind the most popular tools for avatar creation and animation: Gaia Clary and Matrice Laville (Avastar) and Cathy Foil (Mayastar).

Like, Vir, Cathy, Gaia and Matrice deserve special recognition for their work on Bento. Not only did they embrace the project and work to update their products to support Bento, they also took on a lot of the grunt work involved in updating essential code used by the viewer to make Bento happen – and they were enthusiastic about doing so. If you make use of a Bento head and are adjusting things using the sliders, offer a word of thanks to the three of them: they’re the people who carefully went through the avatar files in the viewer to get as many of the sliders as possible working with the new facial bones for you to be able to do so.

Vir linden (foreground) and Matrice Laville at a Bento project meeting
Vir Linden (foreground) and Matrice Laville (in the top hat, left) at one of the closed user group Bento project meetings (note the fellow in the top hat to the right of the picture is Rider Linden)

Bento meetings initially took place at a small desert island on Agni, the Main grid. This sat on its own channel to ensure the necessary tweaks to the simulator end of things could be made to try out ideas and options and generally lay the foundations of the project. This work progressed over a period of just over six months until there was a good level of confidence that the project could be taken to the next stage.

This involved moving things to Aditi, the beta grid, and opening things to the public at large. The use of Aditi meant that more extensive testing of simulator and viewer changes could take place, more space could easily be made available for people to experiment, and more people in general could get involved. In time, these meetings would eventually move back to the main grid. It also marked the start of my ability to publicly report Bento progress on an almost weekly basis.

Bento enables much more flexibility when creating and animating human and non-human mesh avatars
Bento enables much more flexibility when creating and animating human and non-human mesh avatars

At the start of the public phase of Bento, the skeleton had stabilised with some 92 additional bones – 60 of which were evenly split between hands and head. However, as the work progressed, this number tended to vary for a time as the need for further bones was identified while some of the new bones were found to be redundant and could be removed. As the same time, additional use cases for Bento were proposed, with every effort being made to incorporate as many as practicable. There were even some fundamental shifts made in how Second Life functions so that more could be achieved through Bento.

An example of this lies with bone translations and rotations. In essence the SL animation system had always worked on the assumption that sliders only affect translation and scale whilst animations only affect rotation, allowing both to work cooperatively.As the animation system was not necessarily seen as an intrinsic part of Bento, little thought was initially given to changing it. However, during the public beta phase of the project, a strong case was made for allowing both translation and rotation through animations – and as a result, the necessary updates were made to the animation system to support this without potential conflicts occurring.

Continue reading “Behind the scenes with Bento in Second Life” →