Category: SL User Group Meetings

Bento project reaches RC status in Second Life

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

OK, I admit I wasn’t expect this until next week, but on Wednesday, September 14th, the Lab  announced that Project Bento is now officially available as a release candidate viewer – version 5.0.0.319688 – which can be obtained through the Alternate Viewers wiki page.

And just in case anyone has missed all the Project Bento news, the best way is to catch-up through the official video. In short, Bento adds a wealth of new bones to the basic avatar skeleton (30+ to heads / faces and to hands alone!), making a wealth of new avatars (humans and non-human) and mesh wearables possible.

The reason I wasn’t expecting the viewer to get promoted just year is that the Lab also has a proof-of-concept viewer being tested, so I assumed any push to RC would come after a decision had been made on incorporating those changes (if they are to be adopted). So, not for the first time, I’m been wrong 🙂 .

The move to release candidate status doesn’t mean the project is at an end. There is still further work to be done as remaining bugs are fixed, etc  (so updates such as the slider locking in the proof-of-concept might yet arrive in the viewer). What it does do is three things:

  • Makes the viewer available to a wider audience through the Lab’s RC distribution mechanism, thus allowing any unforeseen issues in merging the Bento code into the current release viewer code (and which may be outside of direct Bento testing) to be identified and fixed
  • Potentially makes the viewer more widely available to content creators who may not have so far tried the viewer
  • Means that TPVs can now officially start incorporating the Bento code into their viewers (in fact, Cool VL Viewer has had Bento in its Experimental branch from some time, and Firestorm have also been working to merge the Bento code as well – but this shouldn’t be taken to mean there will be a new release of the latter in  the near future).

In keeping with the status of the Bento code, the Lab do ask people – particularly avatar content creators – to give the viewer a go,  and to file a JIRA against any issues found.

As noted above, Bento offers a range of opportunities for mesh wearable and avatar creators – you can see a couple of video exploring the AK and Catwa preview Bento mesh heads in my SL project update. Also, back in August, Vista Animations produced a video illustrating the potential of finger animations:

Then, of course, there is a huge range of non-human avatars: centaurs, “rideables”, winged creatures – all of which can be achieved a lot more efficiently through Bento than has previously been the case.

Teager's Bento Raptor using Bento bones
Teager’s Bento Raptor using Bento bones

So – get ready for the Bento Revolution!

Additional Links

2016 SL project updates 37 (1): server, Bento preview head videos

Posted on by Inara Pey

Vintage Romance; Inara Pey, September 2016, on Flickr Vintage Romance – blog post

Server Deployment: Week 37

On Tuesday, September 13th, the Main (SLS) channel received the same server maintenance package previously deployed on the RC channel in week #36. This comprises “minor internal logging changes” which may help with some of the problems occasionally seen with estate bans; at a minimum the Lab will be able to gather more information on them.

There iss no planned deployment or restart set for the three RC channels during the week. RC deployments will resume in week #38. This may involve further serve-side updates to reduce certain griefing vectors.

SL Viewer

The VLC Media Plugin viewer updated in September 13th to version 4.1.1.319583. This viewer replaces the QuickTime media plugin for the Windows viewer with one based on LibVLC.

In addition, and as indicated in my TPVD meeting notes, this version should include changes for exception handling in the viewer intended to ensure exceptions are better handled and recorded. These may not prevent crashes occurring, but should provide the Lab with better data on the exception throws and catches. Overall, they are describes as “fairly small, widespread changes” to the viewer code.

The remaining viewers in the various pipelines remain as per the end of week #36:

  • Current Release version: 4.0.7.318301 (dated August 8), promoted August 11 – formerly the Maintenance RC viewer download page, release notes
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • Visual Outfit Browser viewer,  version 4.0.8.319143, dated August 30 – ability to preview images of outfits in the Appearance floater
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions), version 5.0.0.318969, dated August 25 – avatar vertical position update; SLM files are by default not created or used; show bones display uses colours differently; animation of collision volumes fixed
  • 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.

Project Bento

Following my last Bento update, Matrice and Gaia have been working on Avastar 2, which has now reached Alpha 10, supporting the current version of the project viewer (5.0.0.318969).

Demo Heads

In that update, I also blogged about the AK Bento preview head. On September 13th, Catwa offered some bloggers a preview look at an upcoming Catwa head, as  well as a preview video. – Doubtless, more heads will be appearing in the near future.

An important point to note with Bento heads is that while they will offer considerably more options for customising your look that “conventional” mesh head, it won’t simply be a case of buying Bento head, wearing it, and having it conform to your existing facial features – you will obviously need to adjust many of the head / facial sliders to get a close / approximate look, and even then, just how close a look you can achieve will depend a lot upon the base mesh of the head itself. So careful testing of Bento heads to find one which bears some initial resemblance to your desired look is likely to be required, and it may be that multiple heads are still required to achieve all of your desired looks.

Strawberry Singh has produced a video based on the AK Bento preview head, demonstrating how it currently works with the sliders.

As Whirly Fizzle pointed out to me, on the day Catwa issued preview copies of her Bento head work, fashion blogger Daeberethwen Arbenlow also put a video together running through the capabilities on that head as well

A further point of note with Bento mesh heads is that the degree of customisation available will depend on which bones of the face and head a model is rigged to, and the weighting assigned to it. An example of this is the nose division, mentioned in both videos. This can potentially be  more prominent, providing the head is rigged to the mFaceNoseBase bone and has a suitable weighting applied.

As Cathy Foil, developer of MayaStar, and one of the core members of the Bento development team points out:

Each mesh head designer will have to decide what sliders they want and will have to experiment with different weighting. It will be very exciting to see how face weights will evolve over the next few months and years.

Which again underline the need for careful comparisons when selected Bento heads as they become more and more available once Bento moves past RC status, and more Bento products start to appear.

SL Wiki

The Wiki remains locked to the majority of users for editing, no news on when it may be unlocked, or what might be done to address the current issues.

2016 SL project updates 36 (2): TPV Developer meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey

Yasminia; Inara Pey, September 2016, on Flickr Yasminia – blog post

The majority of the notes in this update are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, September 9th. The video of that meeting is embedded at the end of this update, and references to it are indicated through the use of time stamps in the paragraphs below. My thanks as always to North for recording and providing it.

This is not intended to be a transcript of the entire meeting, which featured discussions of some situations specific to individual region rather than SL as a whole. However, key discussion points have hopefully been highlighted.

Server Deployments

There was no main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday, September 6th.  On Wednesday, September 7th, all three RCs received the same new server maintenance package, defined as containing “minor internal logging changes” which may help with some of the problems occasionally seen with estate bans; at a minimum the Lab will be able to gather more information on them.

SL Viewer

VLC Media Plugin RC

[00:12] It is anticipated that this viewer (version 4.1.1.318504, dated August 15th at the time of writing) will be updated in the early part of week #37. The update had been expected in week #36, but bug fixing slowed progress. In addition, the new version of the viewer will include changes for exception handling in the viewer intended to ensure exceptions are better handled and recorded. These may not prevent crashes occurring, but should provide the Lab with better data on the exception throws and catches. Overall, they are describes as “fairly small, widespread changes” to the viewer code.

Visual Outfits Browser

[01:26]  The Visual Outfits Browser release candidate was further updated on Friday, September 9th, to version 4.0.8.319463,which should address some bugs, and the crash rate will be under observation with this update.

64-Bit Viewers

[03:08] Progressing continuing on the 64-bit Mac and Windows viewers, and the hope is that a project viewer will be arriving “soon”.

Project Bento

[01:26] My update on the most recent user group meeting is available, in which the viewer’s progress to RC in discussed. At the TPVD meeting, Oz indicated a hope the RC version of the viewer will be appearing some time in the next fortnight. This means that the Bento code will then be officially available for TPVs to adopt.

Windows 10 OpenGL Issue

[03:48] On September 6th, and following Whirly Fizzle’s pointer, I blogged about the Windows 10 / OpenGL issue which is affecting some Second Life users (as well as affecting a number of OpenGL games) – see also BUG-37795. Commenting on this at the TPVD meeting, Oz Linden said:

We are trying to work with Microsoft to find out what the genesis of that problem is … we didn’t do anything, so I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to fix it without help. The fact that it’s not just us that’s affected, is our best hope for getting a fix.

Voice Fixes

[04:50] The Voice changes mentioned in recent TPV Development meetings are not yet ready for release. There is at least one bug in handling Voice fade with distance which needs to be addressed by Vivox, which may take time for them to do. There is also no immediate push to deploy the new server-side Voice code currently on Aditi to the main grid. These changes don’t add any new features, being geared more for future changes to Voice than dealing with current problems, and as such may not be deployed until there is need for them.

New Family of LSL Functions

[07:27] A new family of LSL functions which it is hoped will please scripters. No details on what these are has been provided, pending final QA and testing via Aditi, so they may be appearing “real soon now”.  It is anticipated that an official blog post will mark the availability of the functions.

Other Items

  • [13:10] Alpha Masking Issues: This is a long-standing issue whereby alpha masking “fails” when ALM isn’t enabled in the viewer, leading to unattractive visual issues – see BUG-4357 for details.  This is something which fell off of the Lab’s radar, but they will now see if they can assign someone to look at the problem.
Alpha masking failure on attachments under ALM
Alpha masking failure on attachments under ALM. Credit: Whirly Fizzle
  • [14:44] Increasing the number of allowed attachments: project Bento sees an increase in the number of allowed attachment points on the avatar skeleton. However, the maximum number of attachments which can be worn at any one time remains 38, as any higher number starts to impact performance and stability, particularly with region crossings
  • [20:34] Ghosted attachments on region crossings: there are a number of bug reports on this (e.g. BUG-7761), and more than one bug may be at work (one causing items to become ghosted another causing them to revert, etc) on a region crossing (physical or teleport), which may or may not be linked to wearing multiple individual attachments at the same attach point. The Lab will be making further efforts to investigate issues
  • [27:00] E-mail changes: the Lab is making a series of change to improve the handling of outgoing e-mails from their systems (e.g. off-line e-mails for IMs, etc). The first of this is improving how users verify their e-mail address, which will be followed by further improvements, including only sending e-mails to addresses which have been verified. These changes will again be blogged about when implemented
  • Suppressing Avatar Complexity Notifications: the Lab may be looking at an easier way to suppress the avatar complexity notifications displayed in the top right corner of the viewer window than by using a debug option.

Project Bento User Group update 25 with audio

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

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, September 8th at 13:00 SLT at the the Hippotropolis Campfire Circle. For details on the meeting agenda, please refer to the Bento User Group wiki page.

Note that this update is not intended to offer a full transcript of the meeting, nor does it present the discussion points in chronological order. Rather, it represents the core points of discussion, grouped together by subject matter were relevant / possible, whilst maintaining the overall context of the meeting.

RC Viewer Release

It is still hoped the Bento viewer will move to RC status soon. The main reluctance with pushing it further is to give people enough time for final testing with the majority of Avastar issues now hopefully resolved (see below). There are currently no major changes to the viewer being planned by the Lab, with the possible exception of the proof-of-concept idea for locking a mesh against slider changes.

Proof of Concept: Locking a Mesh Against Slider Changes

There have been discussions about possibly adding the ability to override the scale as well as position for joints in uploaded mesh models. A joint with both position and scale overrides would be effectively “slider-proof” – no sliders that affect the joint would have any effect on the model. This may be useful for content creators who want to control their avatar mesh shape exactly, without being affected by the standard customization options.

The Lab has now issued a proof-of-concept version of the Bento viewer for testing.  Depending on feedback it may or may not make it into the final version of the viewer. In releasing the proof-of-concept. there are also some notes on the forum from Vir on using this version of the viewer.

Note that this option doesn’t include the ability to enable / disable things on a per joint basis, which is unlikely to happen within the remaining Bento time frame. The idea is to try to provide something that s useful, but doesn’t involve a lot of changes to the UI. The Lab is interested in any feedback on this approach (via the Bento forum thread).

Collision Volumes

Vir presented a forum post on collision volumes and the operations supported for them (contrary to the name, collision volumes are not related to the physics of avatars – all such calculations are carried out on the back-end using a simplified representation of the avatar and do not include the avatar skeleton). Vir indicates that support for animating collision volumes is available on all versions of the viewer, including Bento, but whether or not it is a good idea to do so depends on what is trying to be achieved, noting the following use-cases:

  • Raycasting: collision volumes are used to detect an avatar under the mouse pointer. You can see this in drag-and-drop – try dragging a folder of clothing onto yourself. The drag will succeed if the spot you drag to is occupied by a collision volume
  • Animations with constraints: animations can include constraint information that causes the animation to respond to the location of body parts (hands on hips, resting hand on legs when sitting, etc). The collision volumes are used to determine these constraint locations.
  • Fitted mesh: suitably rigged meshes can use the collision volumes to scale with the avatar shape.

He also offered some guidelines for using collision volumes both in the post and during the meeting, including using them in the creating animations with constraints. Matrice requested anyone doing the latter if they could pass information to him on how they are doing this, as documentation is lacking.

Avastar 2 Updates

Avastar 2 Alpha 7 is available, which should resolve major issues with joint positions. The core updates in this version are:

  • All the related Appearance sliders, for human characters as well as for non human characters. Avastar now behaves just like any Second Life viewer, giving true “what you see is what you get character editing in Blender
  • Mesh eyes now behave exactly in the same way as the system eyes, including scaling with the eye size slider.

Medhue Simoni has produced an instructional video on updating from the “old” Bento rig version to the new rig version in Avastar.

Matrice Laville offered some feedback on the video, concerning some upcoming changes to Avastar.

Matrice also noted that there are a couple of issues which either have a fix awaiting release, or being investigated, which are related to jaw issues and scaling (below).

Jaw Issues And Scaling

Teager reports continued problems with her horse avatar, specifically with the teeth showing as a result of the lower lip not aligning correctly with the upper lip. Testing had led her to believe the problem might be related to scale on one of the bones. Matrice confirmed that there is a scaling issue, together with a peculiarity  in the way Blender works and applying scale within Avastar and issues of parenting / unparenting meshes which can lead to problems. He therefore recommends the best option at present is to ensuring the scaling on a bone in a mesh is always 1 while the problem is investigated.

In addition, Matrice indicated that he has added an option to Avastar to allow the export of all parent bones of each weighted bone, rather than just relying on the Avastar optimising which exported only weighted bones and ignoring any intervening bones. This option will be appearing in the next release of Avastar 2.

Continue reading “Project Bento User Group update 25 with audio” →

2016 SL project updates 36 (1): server, viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey
Little Yoshiwara
Little Yoshiwara – blog post

Server Deployments

There was no main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday, September 6th.  On Wednesday, September 7th, all three RCs received the same new server maintenance package, defined as containing “minor internal logging changes”.

Commenting on the update at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, September 6th, Simon Linden indicated the updates might help with some of the problems occasionally seen with estate bans; at a minimum the Lab will be able to gather more information on them.

SL Viewer

There have been no significant changes to the SL viewer channels since the end of week #35. A further RC update to the VLC viewer had been expected following comments at the August 27th TPV Developer meeting, but has yet to materialise. As such, this leasing the viewer channels as follows:

  • Current Release version: 4.0.7.318301 (dated August 8), promoted August 11 – formerly the Maintenance RC viewer download page, release notes
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • Visual Outfit Browser viewer,  version 4.0.8.319143, dated August 30 – ability to preview images of outfits in the Appearance floater
    • VLC Media Plugin Viewer RC, version 4.1.1.318504, dated August 15 – replaces the QuickTime media plugin for the Windows viewer with one based on LibVLC
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions), version 5.0.0.318969, dated August 25 – avatar vertical position update; SLM files are by default not created or used; show bones display uses colours differently; animation of collision volumes fixed
  • 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.

Other Items

Windows 10 Performance Issues Due to KB3176938

As noted in BUG-37795 and my related article, some windows 10 users are experiencing issues after installing the Microsoft Windows 10 Cumulative Update KB3176938, with reduced FPS after tabbing between other applications they may be running and a Second Life viewer. The issue appears to be related to how Windows 10 handles OpenGL. Linden Lab are apparently going to (/already have) contact(ed) Microsoft on the problem, which also affects a number of PC games. Please refer to the JIRA for further information.

SL Wiki

The SL wiki remains closed for user editing.

2016 SL project updates 35 (1): server, viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

Crystal Gardens; Inara Pey, August 2016, on Flickr Crystal Gardens – blog post

Server Deployments

There are no scheduled deployment for week #35. If you have a region you believe is experiencing issues, the advice is to contact support and request a restart or, for specific issues, file a bug report.

It is expected that the current dearth of simulator deployments will be coming to an end in the near future, as the current round of infrastructure / operating system updates comes to an end and the summer vacation season winds down.

SL Viewer

As expected, the Visual Outfits browser RC viewer was updated to version 4.0.8.319143 on Tuesday, August 30th, largely to correct an elevated crashed rate, as reported in my last TPV Developer meeting update. The VLC Media plugin view is also expected to receive a further RC update for the same reason. Until it does, the current list of the remaining official viewers remains as:

  • Current Release version 4.0.7.318301, dated August 8th promoted August 11th – formerly the Maintenance RC viewer
  • Release Candidate viewers (refer to my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • VLC Media Plugin RC viewer, version 4.1.1.318504, dated August 15th – replaces the QuickTime media plugin for the Windows version of the viewer with one based on LibVLC
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions), version 5.0.0.318969, dated August 25th – final updates and tweaks prior to a move to RC status
  • 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 Wiki

As noted under a separate article, the SL wiki remains locked for general editing by users.