Category: SL User Group Meetings

2023 SL SUG meetings week #47 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Spark Project: Olympus, September 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 21st 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 meeting is embedded at the end of this summary, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording the meeting and providing it.

Apologies for the lateness of this summary, RL is not playing nice at the moment.

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.

Simulator Deployments

  • No scheduled deployments for the week, due to this being Thanksgiving week in the US, and so a No Change window is in force. Simhosts are being restarted, however.

Upcoming Simulator Deployments

  • The simulator support for glTF PBR Materials is expected to be deployed to the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, November 28th, making it grid-wide. Promotion of the glTF viewer is liable to occur in that week as well.
  • The “Fall Colours” maintenance update will likely go to RC on Wednesday, December 6th, so it can be grid-wide by Christmas. This update will not include Leviathan Linden’s work on game controller support.
  • The game controller work will now likely be included in the simulator update to follow “Fall Colours”, and which has been code-named “Gingerbread”. This will most likely be deployed in the first working week of January 2024, and will likely included the recent Feature Request to increase the available sensor counts (see: BUG-234648).

Viewer Updates

Four viewer updates at the start of the week:

  • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), updated to version 6855926535, November 21.
  • Maintenance Y RC (My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from Landmark history), updated to version 6.6.17.6935642049, November 21.
  • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 6.6.17.6935636398, November 21.
  • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, updated to version 6.6.17.6898288582, November 20.

Other viewers in the pipe remain as:

  • Release viewer: Github Actions (GHA) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.6566955269, issued October 20 (with major CEF update and number version numbering) and promoted on October 25.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

Game Controllers

  • Note the changes to code deployment changes outlined above. The work was pulled from “Fall Colours” to allow for further internal review of the code by the Lab.
  • Because of the need for further review, the code is not currently available on Aditi (the Beta grid). It is hoped the code will be re-deployed to some regions on Aditi in the week after US Thanksgiving.
  • It was noted by Signal Linden that it would be nice to have an official project viewer available when the code starts being deployed to the Main grid.

In Brief

  • Region Crossings:
    • Monty Linden is continuing to work on the updates for physical and TP region crossings, but was not available to respond to questions at this meeting.
    • However, it was suggested that, subject to his input, the update to the simulator code handling income teleports / regions crossings to a region might form a part of the “Gingerbread” simulator update.
  • A discussion on support for expanding regex support with Linkset Data keys to support case insensitive searches (see : BUG-233678) and for case insensitive regex support in general. This is being actively pondered upon within the Lab.
  • A further discussion on sensors and their potential uses, which also touched on the need for an “official” Area Search capability.
  • Please refer to the video for these, and other sundry mentions / discussions.

† 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.

2023 week #46: SL CCUG meeting summary: PBR status & current release plan

Posted on by Inara Pey
Le’eaf Forest Retreat, September 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creators User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, November 16th, 2023.

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work.
  • As a rule, these meetings are:
    • Held in-world and chaired by Vir Linden, in accordance with the dates and times given in the the SL Public Calendar, which also includes the location for the meetings.
    • Conducted in a mix of voice and text..
    • Open to all with an interest in content creation.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Official Viewers Status

No updates for the latter part of the week, with the current crop of official viewers being:

  • Github Actions (GHA) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.6566955269, issued October 20 (with major CEF update and number version numbering) and promoted on October 25.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance X RC, version 6855926535, issued November 14 – usability improvements.
    • Maintenance Y, version 6.6.17.6855930358, issued November 14 – My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history.
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.1.6750600769, November 11.
    • Maintenance-W RC viewer, version 6.6.17.6709258523, November 9.
    • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.582201, October 16.
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
  • Project viewers:

General Notes

  • The PBR viewer now appears to be the no 1 on the runway for promotion to release status – see the notes below for more.
  • The next viewer LL is hoping to promote after PBR is the Emoji RC viewer.
  • As there are now four Maintenance RC viewer in the pipeline (V, W, X, and Y), it is likely some of them will be merged together to reduce the load on the release schedule.

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.
  • The overall goal for glTF as a whole is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • As a part of this work, PBR Materials will see the introduction of reflection probes which can be used to generate reflections (via cubemaps) on in-world surfaces. These will be a mix of automatically-place and manually place probes (with the ability to move either).
  • The viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page.

Further Resources

Grid-Wide Deployment and Viewer Release

  • Following a meeting this week, the current plan from the Lab is to deploy PBR Materials grid-wide on the simhosts during the first week after US Thanksgiving (so week commencing Monday, November 27th, 2023).
  • Currently, all RC simhost have been updated to the PBR simulator code which leaves only the SLS Main channel to go.
  • The plan is also to promote the PBR RC viewer to de facto release status that same week.
  • Note that these plans are subject to late-breaking issues or other requirements not getting in the way of things.

Recent Work

  • Fixes are progress for what are seen as to remaining notable issues:
    • One to correct the issue with normal maps uploaded via the glTF uploader always coming out square post-upload  and with lossy compression.
    • One to correct the issue of not being able to revert an Alpha mode from blend or mask to opaque without having to save the material back to inventory after making the change in order for it to apply properly.
  • There are some additional bugs within the system, some of which do have fixes in the works, but these aren’t seen as having significant impact, and will be subject to release with the first maintenance update to PBR Materials.
  • That said, there some issues which have been identified, but will not be addressed until the first PBR maintenance viewer is issued. These include:
    • A “slim minority” of users with very, very large inventories and Friends lists may find some objects in a scene do not render when logging-in. Currently, the steps for correcting this are to a) re-log, and if that fails to resolve the problem, b) clear cache.
    • Some users on Macbooks and / or Apple Silicon systems may experience poor performance on the PBR viewer.
  • For those interested – this is the list of currently open issues for PBR.

General PBR Discussion

  • BUG-234235 “[PBR] alpha blend on water is acting a bit like invisiprim” – this is being worked on, and is seen as somewhat related to another change under consideration: environmental haze.
    • Currently, local lights are not affected by environmental haze. Runitai Linden is working on a change that will make local lights responsive to haze (e.g. if you are in a foggy environment, lights at an increasing distance from your camera position will appear fainter and fainter due to the influence of the fog).
    • This work will likely be surfaced in the first PBR viewer maintenance release.
    • The reason this is related to BUG-234235 is that it will also require an adjustment to water haze as well, and this should resolve the issue reported in the bug (haze will essentially get its own render pass, with a single shader being used for both atmospheric and water haze, rather than them requiring separate render passes).
  • Future work on glTF will allow for more greater control of lighting sources, such as lamps, etc., and provide for luminosity to be defined in terms such as lumens. However, this work will depend on glTF scene import, which will be worked on in the next tranche of work, together with HDRI import / export (which is not as yet on the glTF implementation roadmap).
  • A Materials folder is to be added to the system library and available through the Library section of inventory.

In Brief

  • A Feature Request has been filed to allow system-generated sounds to be overridden by Experiences to provide more immersive sounds (e.g. on entering a door and being teleported, the sound heard might be the creaking of the door opening, rather than the ding-sing-whoosh of the default teleport sound – which can only currently be disabled on a per viewer basis by the user). See (and Watch) BUG-234682 “Override UI sounds within the scope of experience keys” for more.

Next Meeting

† 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 #46 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
 Triple Sweet Café, September 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 14th 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 meeting is embedded at the end of this summary, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording the meeting and providing it.

Apologies for the lateness of this summary, RL is not playing nice at the moment.

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

  • No deployments for SLS Main channel, but the simhosts were restarted.
  • Wednesday, November 15th should have seen the deployment of the PBR Material simulator support to all RC channels.
    • Please remember: if you have anything that uses PBR materials and you rez that object (or wear it) on a non-PBR simulator,  the PBR Materials will be stripped from the object and forgotten.
  • There are currently internal discussions on whether or not to deploy the simulator support for PBR before or after US Thanksgiving.

Viewer Updates

Two new Maintenance viewers were issued on Tuesday, November 14th:

  • Maintenance X, version 6855926535, comprising viewer usability improvements.
  • Maintenance Y, version 6.6.17.6855930358, comprising improvements to the My Outfits folder (display thumbnails on hover) and to remove entries from landmark history

The rest of the official remain unchanged at the start of the week:

  • Github Actions (GHA) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.6566955269, issued October 20 (with major CEF update and number version numbering) and promoted on October 25.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

Game Controllers

  • The simulator code for the game controller support is now in the “Fall Colours” simulator RC update, which is currently scheduled as the first simulator RC deployment in December.
  • The viewer code needs further work, including:  keyboard mapping to controller input channels; the ability to set the dead zone of various axes; support for “less common” controllers; additional UI to work alongside existing support options (e.g. SpaceNavigator).
    • In terms of the SpaceNavigator, the project will not include an update to support the latest 3dconnexion drivers, as it is felt this will break expected behaviour for the SpaceNav mouse in SL – the aim is to continue to support SpaceNav as is.
  • This work does not, as yet, include the ability to control avatar motion, although there was additional discussion around this.
  • Expansions to inputs have been filed in Feature Request BUG-234678.
  • There was also significant discussion on game controller / LSL interactions.
  • When available via the Alternate Viewers pages, the viewer will has a MacOS build as well. Meanwhile, documentation on the game controller work can be found on the SL wiki, and this includes Github link for downloading a pre-release version of the Windows viewer.

SL Combat

  • A further general discussion on updating SL’s support for combat gaming, most of which has been covered in recent SUG summaries here (e.g. adjusting the avatar bounding box and hit box when crouching  / seating (so the form allows for crawling under object, for example, and the latter makes for a small target).
  • Camera control options:
    • A new request was for a native means to set the camera to follow remote objects (e.g. RC vehicles) rather than having to relay on “janky” scripts to achieve the capability.
    • There were also requests for offsetting mouselook view (see VWR-28745 for an example of such a request).
    • Rider suggested updates to the camera control mechanism and positioning might be better suited to an update to scripted camera capabilities he is considering (but not anywhere close to being in a position to discuss in terms of what might / can / cannot be done).

In Brief

  • A lot of requests for updates to SL terrain, including updating the textures and improving the resolution (which should hopefully be covered by the PBR terrain support Cosmic Linden is developing, which should also reduce texture stretching as the heightmap is morphed); full terrain painting (not currently on the books); a general smoothing terrain deformations to make movement, etc., smoother.
  • Region Crossing: following the most recent pile-on tests, Monty Linden is working on some updated code, which he is trying to get onto Aditi (the Beta grid) on server channel DRTSIM-565, however there is a bug he needs to hammer on first.
  • Monty is also working on “an EventQueueGet thing”, which he hopes to get on to Aditi on DRTSIM-577.
  • Further requests for a means of masking Linden Water from the interiors of object – see BUG-227965 as a reference for this.
  • There was a request to be able to adjust the centre of mass for a linkset (e.g. a vehicle). While this can be done to some degree via prim cutting, it is not so possible with mesh; how it would be handled is unclear, but Leviathan Linden indicated he would kick some ideas around.
  • somewhat/ sort-of related to the above, a Feature Request has been filed to allow control of where a vehicle rotates from without having to do prim hackery – see BUG-234649, an update to SVC-6619). It was noted this could be useful for objects other than vehicles alone.

† 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.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #45 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Tilheyra, September 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, November 7th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and is not intended to be a full transcript.

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

  • No deployments for SLS Main channel, but the simhosts were restarted.
  • The planned Wednesday, November 8th deployment of the PBR Material simulator support to all RC channels has been put on hold pending the resolution of a late-breaking issue.
    • At the time of the meeting, the proposal was to restart simhosts on the Ferrari and Magnum RC channels, whilst BlueSteel and LeTigre (the two currently with the PBR support) to receive updated code before the end of the week.
    • Please remember: if you have anything that uses PBR materials and you rez that object (or wear it) on a non-PBR simulator,  the PBR Materials will be stripped from the object and forgotten.
As it turns out the new message introduced by Materials was generating unacked packets back to the simulator. In groups of one or to agents this isn’t a big deal… but add a user here and a user there and pretty soon you’re talking about real data, and this extra overhead was causing some performance issues on our end that would eat into script time. We have a solution to it and we are just trying to reach a consensus on how best to roll that onto the grid.

– Rider Linden, describing the issue which prevented the simulator-side PBR code deploying to all RC channels

Viewer Updates

No updates to viewers for the start of the week, leaving the official viewer pipelines as:

  • Github Actions (GHA) RC viewer, version 6.6.16.6566955269, issued October 20 (with major CEF update and number version numbering) and promoted on October 25.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

SL Combat

  • Regarding the “Combat Committee” and requests for capabilities for combat in Second Life, Rider Linden stated:
I don’t have news on any sort of when for that. I am actively working on a proposal that I’m going to float around the lab and then bring to the community. That may end up involving creating what I’ve been calling a “Combat Committee”… because I love alliteration. I don’t think I’m going to have anything useful to report on that though until January next year. I would really like to get some tools in that would allow people to create some interesting combat systems.

– Rider Linden

In Brief

  • Requests from users:
    • An update on the recent region crossing tests (see October’s SUG summaries). Monty Linden is working on this, but has been out-of-office, so a further update may be forthcoming at an upcoming meeting once he is back.
    • Custom pivot points – a capability being considered as a further part of the glTF project, as this will enable hierarches that will make arbitrary pivots a lot easier.
    • Animation priority updates: these was going to be looked at as a part of the on-hold Puppetry project. However, any such work is unlikely to include things like changing priorities by script, as these are seen as problematic.
    • A request for new sensor functions which could better enable RP functions (e.g. detacting NPC, casting speeling), together with further requests for Feature Requests such as BUG-4329 “Feature Request: New sensor functions that are not bound to a prim’s position & rotation plus inclusion of an Owner filter” and BUG-233784 “Add sensor type LOW_SCRIPTED as an option”, and also increasing the number of objects a sensor can report on from 16 to 32.
  • Rider Linden is developing ideas for possible scripted camera control updates, and is adding BUG-6325 “More Flag parameters for llSetCameraParams()” to the list.
  • Requests are being made for those with games controller to try the pre-release Game Controller viewer and offer feedback. This is still currently Windows only, but a MacOS version is coming Soon™.

† 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.

2023 week #44: SL CCUG meeting summary: PBR

Posted on by Inara Pey
Shades of Autumn, September 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creators User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, November 2nd, 2023.

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work.
  • As a rule, these meetings are:
    • Held in-world and chaired by Vir Linden, in accordance with the dates and times given in the the SL Public Calendar, which also includes the location for the meetings.
    • Conducted in a mix of voice and text..
    • Open to all with an interest in content creation.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Viewer Updates

The glTF / PBR RC viewer updated to version 7.0.1.6658224456 on November 2nd, bringing it into parity with the current release viewer and built via Github Actions.

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

  • Release viewer, version 6.6.16.6566955269, promoted October 25 (formerly the GHA RC viewer).
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

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.
  • The overall goal for glTF as a whole is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • As a part of this work, PBR Materials will see the introduction of reflection probes which can be used to generate reflections (via cubemaps) on in-world surfaces. These will be a mix of automatically-place and manually place probes (with the ability to move either).
  • The viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page.

Further Resources

Status Update

Server-side deployment

  • The simulator code supporting PBR Materials was deployed to the BlueSteel and LeTigre simulator RC channels, making it “live” across some 3,000 simulators.
  • This has seen a number of additional bug reports filed, but currently nothing which has been seen as constituting a major blocker to further deployment.
  • At the time of the meeting, it was hoped that the PBR code could be deployed to all of the RC channels simhosts on Wednesday, November 8th, 2023. This is seen as the best way to test for additional cases of non-PBR content suffering breakage which may have thus far slipped through the net.
  • If things continue as planned, the aim is to have PBR support on the simhosts fully deployed “by Thanksgiving”.

Viewer Updates

  • The PBR viewer has been updated to build via the new Github Action process, marking it as up-to-date with the current release viewer (version 6.6.16.6566955269, October 25th, at the time of writing).
  • It is possible that one of the Maintenance RC viewers may be pushed to de facto release ahead of the PBR viewer in order to correct a statistics reporting issue.
    • At the time of the meeting, a final decision on this has yet to be made. However, if this proves to be the case, and if LL decide to maintain the 2-week minimum period between viewer promotions, this could mean the PBR viewer might not be released until after the simulator code is grid-wide.
  • The PBR viewer release is also dependent upon whether or not any remaining reported / open issues are considered serious enough to require fixing ahead of any promotion.
    • Currently, there is one blocker which is under investigation: if the PBR viewer is used, and then a swap is made to using a non-PBR viewer, then it is possible some objects may not show-up on logging in, and will never show up until object cache is cleared.
  • For those interested – this is the list of currently open issues for PBR.
  • The current PBR RC viewer replaces the term “Materials” in the Build / Edit floater Texture tab with Blinn-Phong. Whilst this is the technically correct term for the current implementation of materials support in SL and was seen as a means of differentiating between the current materials support and PBR, the switch to the term has been raised as potentially confusing to users not deeply versed in graphics  / rendering but who are familiar with using and applying current materials maps. As such, the use of an alternate term has been requested.

Tone Mapping and Full Bright Issues

  • A recently-reported issue is with tone mapping not applying correctly to Full Bright objects, resulting in darker colours / blacks being crushed and white highlights being blown out.
  • This has been highlighted in BUG-234506 and this forum thread, where it is reported as an issue facing content creators trying to produce advertising images for their products for use on in-world vendor boards, etc. However, the issue has the potential to affect SL photography in general, where snapshots are taken to be uploaded for display in-world as textures (e.g. as art, “family” snapshots, etc.).
  • The problem is the result of tone mapping being applied to such textures twice:
    • The first time as a result of tone mapping being enabled (and captured) when the snapshot is taken.
    • The second time as a result of the uploaded texture being rendered with tone mapping active in the viewer.
  • This is seen as “expected behaviour”, and the lighting model will not be changed for dealing with Full Bright (e.g. by making it a straight pixel pass-through).
  • This means the current work-around is to use the No Post Build menu option, thus:
    • Edit the object using Full Bright to open the Build  / Edit floater.
    • Go to menu bar → Build → Options and enable No Post – this will try off tone mapping and exposure, and will remain active as long as the Build / Edit floater is open.
    • Take the snapshot.
    • Close the Build / Edit floater.
  • As this workaround is seen as heavy-handed (and also not helpful to those taking photos who may need to disable tone mapping at times, but who are unfamiliar with the Build / Edit floater and Build menu), it has been requested to incorporate a toggle checkbox for No Post directly into the snapshot floater.
  • Runitai Linden has also proposed the addition of a HDRI export to the 360º Snapshot floater.

General Notes

  • The viewer performance issue on older versions of MacOS has been addressed, but it is not clear if the fixes work with Apple silicon SoC, pending further tests.
  • It is acknowledged that there will be a learning curve among all users where PBR is concerned due to the level of changes involved in the lighting model (e.g. objects with a specular map – even indoors – having a blue sheen to them, due to reflecting the ambient environment; an issue which can be fixed through the correct placement of reflection probes indoors).
    • Efforts are being made to ensure cases like this are being covered in the PBR documentation being put together by LL.
  • It was re-iterated that there will be follow-on glTF work following PBR materials (see the general roadmap, below), with it being noted that some would allow the implementation of hierarchical structures which could allow for options such as arbitrary pivot points in meshes, whilst adoption of the glTF specifications for animations could result expanded animation capabilities, etc.
  • A number of requests for new features (e.g. the ability to be able to simulate Linden water on surfaces via materials). These were noted as all having pre-requisites and potential limiters on them, so while they are not refused, mention of them here will be held over until LL have determined if and how they (and their pre-requisites) might fit into the overall roadmap.
  • Whilst concerns remain about Apple simply ceasing to support OpenGL, thus driving a potential need to switch the viewer away from using OpenGL to using Vulkan / MoltenVK, this is not seen as an immediate priority compared to moving ahead with further glTF work. Which is not to say LL won’t move the viewer to alternate graphics API as the glTF work progresses beyond scene import work (see below).

Likely Roadmap for glTF

  • Complete and deploy the current PBR materials work.
  • Resume work on real-time mirrors and terrain support for glTF materials. In brief, these comprise:
    • Mirrors: providing the means to have mirrors within scenes to reflect their immediate surroundings. These will leverage a “hero” reflection probe concept (512×512 resolution), with one such probe per scene being active for any given avatar, based on the avatar / camera distance from the mirror.
    • Terrain support: providing the means to apply glTF materials to terrain as a viewer-side effect to improve the appearance of the SL terrain. Note that this is not PBR terrain painting.
  • Alongside the mirrors / terrain work will be a period of PBR Materials maintenance work to fix reported bugs / those issues still open at the time of release.
  • Also start to develop a prototype for glTF scene import – with no overall time frame for the latter being indicated.
  • Once there is an initial prototype for glTF scene import, he Lab will proceed in much the same was as for PBR materials: an iterative development cycle which fully engages the user community / content creators.

Next Meeting

† 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.

November 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 November 1st, 2023. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript.

No video this time, Pantera was unavailable, and the meeting was exclusively text chat.

Meeting Overview

  • The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), the forums.
  • As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
    • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
    • In both Voice and text.
    • At this location.
  • Meetings 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.

Updates Since the Last Meeting

  • Linden Homes Store:
    • There has been a high degree of feedback on the Linden Homes store since its launch (see: Looking at the New Linden Homes Store).
    • As a result of this, improvements and updates are being made to the store, and feedback is continuing to be reviewed.
  • Marketplace:
    • The Marketplace team have been looking into the case of some merchants changing their store name to include 5 stars to seem like their store rating is 5 stars. This is an ongoing investigation, but preliminary results indicate it is a small percentage of merchants, and a course of action has yet to be determined.
    • Marketplace search relevance is again being worked upon, primarily in response to feedback received, and updates will be forthcoming once they are ready.

Caspervend and the Marketplace

  • In September 2022, Linden Lab acquired CasperTech (see the official blog post and my own article, which includes a Lab Gab interview with Casper Warden for more), a family which includes the popular Caspervend system.
  • This meeting saw questions taken on how merchants use Caspervend, and capabilities within Caspervend they’d like to see incorporated in the MP. This drew a breadth of feedback including:
    • Caspervend’s use of graphs to present data relating to sales, deliveries, etc., being carried over to the MP and broadened.
    • A general expansion of MP stats (e.g. top selling products and sales over time).
    • Integration of Caspervend’s in-world selling tools with the MP to allow items viewed on Caspervend sales kiosks to be delivered via the MP.
  • This discussion broadened into more general requests for capabilities related to both Caspervend and the Marketplace both together and individually. These included:
    • Having items purchased via the MP or via dedicated Caspervend in-world servers (and other third-party vending solutions?) to be delivered to a folder within Inventory called “Purchased Items”, rather than “Received Items” or “Objects” – as *everything* users receive might be regarded as a “received item”.
    • Having the means to report broken links within MP so they might be fixed (e.g. by a store owner where the links in their MP listings refer to the former location of any in-world store they own, as they’ve forgotten to update following a move).

Dynamic Landmarks

  • Part of the discussion on Caspervend / the Marketplace raised the matter of dynamic landmarks.
  • This is a subject raised numerous times in the past – most notably by Toysoldier Thor under the term Virtual Landmarks (VLM), see:
    • Feature request SVC-8082 “Proposed Global Service for SL: VIRTUAL LANDMARKS & VLM Mapping Services”
    • The Virtual Landmarks forum thread.
    • My own article on the VLM concept.
    • The third-party attempt to address VLMs, developed by Darius Gothly (but now discontinued – illustrating the need for centralised support of such a system by LL).
  • The general idea for “dynamic landmarks” was referenced by Sytax Linden as a good idea, and the above points are being passed to him for reference (assuming they might be of interest).

In Brief

  • Holding the Web User Group more frequently is still being looked into.
  • Requests were made for the following:
    • Make the *entire* Destination Guide (+ things like the SL public calendar) directly viewable through the viewer(!).
    • Support for 360 snapshots within the Destination Guide.
    • Utilising different colours  counts on DG entries to denote scripted agents rather than active avatars.
    • Expanding parcel Search categories to match those in the Destination Guide in order to make public parcels more discoverable.
    • A public-facing document outlining what is being worked on, what feedback has been taken on-board, etc.,  so people are more generally aware of what is happening with web properties + updates.
    • More Search categories / filtering (web / viewer search) – e.g. “clothing”, “landscaping”, “Building”, etc.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, December 6th, 2023.