Category: SL User Group Meetings

2023 SL SUG meetings week #37 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Shambles, July 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  September 12th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

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

  • On Tuesday, September 12th, SLS Main channel was updated to simulator update 581292, previously on the majority of the RC channels.
  • On Wednesday, September 13th, the “Dog Days” update should be deployed across all RC channels. This update includes:
    • The unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database).
    • A scripted ability to set CLICK_ACTION_IGNORE, allowing an object to be clicked-through to reach an object behind it – a flag supporting this is included in the Maintenance U RC viewer promoted to Release status in week #34.
    • PRIM_CLICK_ACTION is added to llSet/GetPrimParams so you can set the click action on prims in a linkset.
    • It was noted that as LL has “changed some of the tools that we use for simulator builds … the version number is now longer”.

Viewer Updates

No updates to the official SL viewers at the start of the week, leaving the current list as:

  • Release viewer, version 6.6.14.581101, promoted August 23.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance W RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581670, September 11.
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.581684, September 8.
    • Inventory Extensions RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581692, September 8.
    • Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581551, August 31.
    • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581557, August 30.
  • Project viewers:

Note: the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

Potential for Improving Vehicle Control Options

Further to recent meetings, Leviathan Linden gave the following update.

Last week it was suggested (although I missed it, Signal later pointed it out to me) that instead of using a new specific library for detecting devices we should use SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) since it is already used by various 3rd party viewers for Linux support. So, I’ve gone ahead and starting walking that road, FYI. This will bring the official SL viewer closer in compliance to some 3rd party viewers and won’t add a new dependency.

This led to an interim agreement that the API could be analog_control, and a discussion on the control events it should recognise / support, how the data should be transmitted, etc. This conversation commenced during the last 20 minutes of the meeting and continued through until then end.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for:

  • A potential issue with llRezAtRoot generating unexpected results.
  • Rider Linden indicated he’d like to implement an extended rez function similar to BUG-233084 “Rez function with prim properties, primarily for projectiles”, “soon”.
  • a discussion on llkeyframedmotion. and whether or not an object using can reliably differentiate between “I stopped moving because I ran out of keyframes” and “I stopped moving because someone with edit perms selected me”, which broadened into a discussion on kfm objects.

† 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 #36: SL CCUG meeting summary: glTF PBR

Posted on by Inara Pey
Viper Heaven, July 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday,  September 7th, 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.
    • Conducted in a mix of voice and text.
    • Held at 13:00 SLT on their respective days.
    • Are subject to the schedule set within the SL Public Calendar, which includes the location for the meetings.
    • Open to all with an interest in content creation.
  • The notes herein are drawn from a mix of my own chat log and audio recording of the meeting, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

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

General Status

  • An update for the PBR viewer – version 7.0.0.581684 was issued following the meeting, on Friday, September 8th.
  • Work is continuing on the communications bloat issue. This will utilise a new message type – GenericStreamingMessage.
  • Bug fixing continues.

Ambient Lighting / Sky Brightness

  • Also noted in previous summaries, there are some issues around ambient lighting where the PBR viewer is concerned. In particular, it tends to render a lot of EEP settings darker than users are used to (in part because the ambient environment lighting in SL has tended to always be over-saturated and bright), and the PBR viewer effectively reverses this to render environments more realistically.
  • This has been an area of work for some time, with none of the results particularly satisfactory, so there is going to be a further round of changes. with the aim of making existing EEP sky settings render more closely to how the author may have intended, rather than remaining overly dark.
  • In addition, the tone mapper in the PBR renderer is going to be adjusted to help reduce undue darkening of older EEP settings.
  • These changes will not impact EEP settings which are created specifically using the PBR settings and capabilities.
  • This work will mean there will likely be a couple more viewer passes as things are tested and adjusted.

Mirrors

  • Mirrors are a part of the glTF / PBR materials project, but something of a separate tranche of work.
  • The idea is provide the means to have via high resolution reflections (i.e. mirrors) within a scene.
  • Initially only one active mirror surface per scene will be active for any viewer.
  • The process will use the PBR reflection probes mechanism, combined with a automated “Hero Probe” mechanism which with generate high resolution (512×512) “reflections” for the mirror.
  • The system will operate on the basis of avatar / camera proximity to a mirror surface triggering the closest reflection probe to become a “Hero Probe” for that avatar / camera. This means that if there are multiple mirrors placed within an environment, only the one closest to a given avatar / camera will be active and display the “reflections” generated by the reflection probe.
  • Depending on testing and performance, the number of mirrors might be expanded to two – one for mirror surfaces and one for Linden Water to generate high resolution water reflections where appropriate.

Status

  • The promised initial build of a PBR viewer supporting mirrors should be made available in week #37. Caveats for this build include:
    • It is not functionally complete and will not render as fully as LL would like.
    • It is not intended for primary use will likely look like it is breaking things.
    • There are already some known crash issues for Mac OS X which will not be fixed when the viewer is initially made available, but will be fixed in due course.
  • The viewer will be made available via the CCUG Discord Channel, and an LSL script will be provided to allow for easy toggling through mirror options.

In Brief

  • Senra:
    • Requests continue to be made to surface the new web-bases avatar creation / customisation tool through the viewer – even it is is just hooking it to the internal browser and providing an easy and obvious means of accessing it. The major reason this is being requested is to to help new users who may have become “lost” or confused in trying to customise their avatar view the viewer – which is clearly a very different experience to the web capability – to get back to something they understand and can readily re-use.
    • It was pointed out that Senra has yet to be featured in the Choose Your Avatar option in the viewer.
    • It was also pointed out that unlike the older “starter avatars” Sentra does not inherently have any form of outfit structure, so if items are worn directly from the Library, anything worn will be copied to the item type folder (shoes to shoes, hair to hair, etc.), rather than being placed within any form of “outfit folder”, making it harder for new users to understand what is happening with their avatar + the items they are using from the Library may end up getting copied multiple times into various folders in their inventory – potentially leasing to more confusion / frustration down the line.
    • This lead to a lengthy discourse through the greater part of the meeting, further demonstrating the need for a New User Experience User Group (or similar) where those actually responsible for projects like Senra could actually engage with users, address questions, etc., rather than cherry-picking if / what they want to respond to via the forums.
  • The above spun-out into a broader discussion on the development of a Sansar-esque dressing room element in the local viewer of outfit / appearance changes (leaving an “untouched” version of the avatar within a region until the change / update is complete) and the complications of doing so (attachments require simulator rezzing, for example), and an general discussion on outfit changes, etc., without firm conclusions drawn.
  • The question was asked about SL supporting vertex animation textures (VAT). This is seen by the Lab as something that might be investigated further down the glTF implementation road, alongside the likes of blend shapes.

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.

September 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 September 6th, 2023. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

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.
  • 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.

Marketplace Updates

Since the August meeting:

  • Best selling items ordering has been deployed. When used within a specific MP store, this orders items according to how well they have been selling in comparison to the rest of the items in the store over the past 30 days, to better reflect current sales.
    • Within a store on the MP, click on the Sort By drop-down and select Best Selling from near the bottom of the list of items.
  • The Wishlist and Favourite Stores options on user’s Marketplace dashboards have been updated:
    • The Favourite Stores listing can now be set to list the displayed items for store in the list by Newest Listings, so the thumbnails displayed alongside each store will always be for the most recent releases by the store.
    • Wishlists have been updated so that items can be listed with the most recent at the top, proceeding down to those which have been on the list the longest (or vice-versa, if you prefer).
  • Fixes:
    • The MP pagination function has been revised in an attempt to eliminate a range of bugs (e.g. some sort options refusing to paginate beyond a certain point, merchant’s listing views not paginating correctly, etc.
    • A function scoring bug which impacted relevance searches has been fixed, so non-relevant items should no longer be appearing in searches defined by a specific relevance.
    • A bug which slowed the loading of peoples Favourites lists has been addressed.
    • A hotfix was implemented toto address the issue of some MP pages generating 504 errors as the MP appeared to “go down” for around 60 seconds or so when in use.
  • Further updates will be coming out in September, but these were presented as “keep yours eyes out for..”, rather than specifics.

Marketplace Variants / Styles

  • Once again the subject of “variants”  (e.g. different colours of an item in a single listing) was raised. This has been a topic across around three meetings, and seems to entirely miss the point that LL had – according to comments made in meetings during 2022 – actually developed a project – called Styles to address this request to a point where by:
    • August 2022: the back-end work for Styles was said to be complete , and it was being lined-up for deployment.
    • November 2022 and December 2022, the project was being earmarked for deployment in “early 2023” as a result of the project to overhaul MP search to match Web search.
    • January 2023, the project was being “re-prioritised” following the project to overhaul MP Search, and has never since been mentioned.
  • As circumstances (again) prevented me from raising the status of this project at the meeting, I have dropped a note to meeting chair Sntax Linden to enquire after this work, in the hopes of a possible update at the next meeting.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for more on these items, and other points raised in the meeting.

  • There appears to be an issue where items from Marketplace stores which have closed are appearing in Search results (although when clicked on, they result in the Marketplace home page being displayed). This issue was consistent reproduced during the meeting for one brand, and will be investigated.
  • A general discussion on the effectiveness of Wishlists compared to simply piling up items in the shopping cart for a sometimes / maybe later purchase.
  • Repeated requests for the MP to allow broader search capabilities in terms of content age, e.g.
    • Defining a search in terms of excluding content first listed beyond a certain date, or including only content listed after a certain date, etc.
    • Automatically making older (and potentially more outdated as a result) content less relevant in search results – so they appear at the end of search returns, rather than scattered throughout.
    • Including an automated “Last Updated” field for listing, which displays the last time a creator updated the actual item associated with a listing (rather than just revising the listing itself) even though creators can, if they choose, include version nots in the item’s description.
    • Adding a “Date First Listed” field to item listings – seen within the meeting as the most popular request, followed by / along with the automated “Last Updated” field, and then the potential to make the options search filters (e.g. search by date range, 2023-2016).
  • Aligned to, but separate from, the above, were requests for more involved inspection of items on the MP so they can be more completely (and automatically) determined in terms of being full or partial mesh, prim, or sculpty, etc., and then filters added to exclude the unwanted types (e.g. excluding any and all sculpties from a search).
  • Requests for improved editing capabilities when creating listings – to change font size / colour / emphasis, hyperlinks, etc., and for an API so that lists could be created / updated via scripted means (with an option to undo changes / bulk updates).
  • A request has been made to once again increase the frequency of the WUG meetings – possibly back to fortnightly, as was originally the case.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, October 4th, 2023.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #36 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Grauvik, July 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  September 5th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

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

  • There was no deployment to the SLS Main channel on Tuesday September 5th, leaving all simhosts on that channel running on release 581251, although the hosts were all restarted.
  • On Wednesday, September 6th:
    • The “Bugsmash” simulator update 581292 will be extended across the majority of RC channels.
    • The “Dog Days” update may go to a limited RC deployment – possibly Ferrari. This update includes:
      • The unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database).
      • A scripted ability to set CLICK_ACTION_IGNORE, allowing an object to be clicked-through to reach an object behind it – a flag supporting this is included in the Maintenance U RC viewer promoted to Release status in week #34.
      • PRIM_CLICK_ACTION is added to llSet/GetPrimParams so you can set the click action on prims in a linkset.

Viewer Updates

No updates to the official SL viewers at the start of the week, leaving the current list as:

  • Release viewer,  version 6.6.14.581101, promoted August 23.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.581368, August 22.
    • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.14.581315, August 15.
    • Inventory Extensions RC viewer, version 6.6.14.581357, August 14.
  • Project viewers:

Note: the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

Potential for Improving Vehicle Control Options

Further to the last meeting, Leviathan Linden gave the following update.

 I acquired a SpaceNavigator to make sure I don’t break that functionality [but] the SpaceNavigator is not detected by the alternate game controller detection lib I was thinking about using (libstem_gamepad, available on github). So, I’m going to implement a different detection system and not try to modify or recycle the NdofDevice system currently used to detect the SpaceNavigator. However the NdofDevice system does detect a regular XBox controller… well most of the input axes, not all of them, so, I think I’ll first just expose the controller input to LSL and not change how it is currently used for controlling the avatar. Overhaul of that stuff would be a separate delivery later.

This work may also include feature request BUG-234354 “Virtual control device as intermediate layer between the scripts and the controller”, with Leviathan further noting:

I would like to support multiple controllers at once, and I don’t want to paint myself into a corner where I can’t; but will first make sure just one controller works. I believe we’ll need a way for the various buttons/axes of the controllers to be re-mapped via some viewer User Interface, as part of the initial delivery, but not sure how that will work out just yet. I’m going to try to get my hands on some other controllers to test: a flight stick and a few other odd hardware with extra buttons.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for:

  • A general discussion on llVolumeDetect.
  • A general discussion on Experiences.
  • Monty Linden is continuing to look into issues of the simulator / viewer freezing during avatar arrival, although this work may be suspended whilst Monty is out-of-office for a while.
  • A discussion on options to use scripted function to gain information on the inventory contents of rezzed objects, per feature requests BUG-7395, BUG-34184, and BUG-202886.

† 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 #35: SL TPVD meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Natthimmel, July 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my chat log transcript of the  Third Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, September 1st, 2023, together with the video recording of the meeting made by Pantera Północy, and embedded towards the end of this summary. My thanks, as always, to Pantera for making these recordings. 

Meetings Overview

  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development.
  • As a rule, these meetings are:
    • Generally held once a month  the third or fourth Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre. See the SL Public Calendar for specific meeting dates.
    • Open to all with an interest in viewer development.
    • Conducted in a mix of text and voice.
  • The notes herein are drawn from a mix of my own chat log and audio recording of the meeting, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Viewer Updates

[Video: 0:00-3:17]

  • The Inventory Extensions RC viewer updated to version 6.6.15.581538, August 29.
  • The Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581557, was released on August 31.
  • The Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.14.581315, August 30.

These updates comprise a promotion to RC status (Emoji viewer) and merging with the new release viewer code base. The remaining official viewers are unchanged as:

  • Release viewer,  version 6.6.13.580918, formerly the Maintenance U(pdate) RC viewer, version 6.6.14.581101, promoted August 23.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.581126, June 26.
  • Project viewers:

Note that the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

General Viewer Notes:

  • The Emoji viewer does not include the font updates, which have been moved to their own project. This viewer currently does not have sufficient data to determine where it might stand in terms of being promoted to de facto release status. It normally takes a few days for a reasonable cohort of users on the viewer so that stats on crash rates might be more accurately gathered, together with thing like bugs reported.
  • The Inventory Extensions viewer is currently awaiting UI updates, but is otherwise defined as “pretty close” to being ready for promotion once these updates have been implemented.
  • LL is in the process of determining how to standardise the use of whitespace in the viewer code. This is described as “getting around the infinite conflicts problem” in merging code within the viewer where whitespace is defined (e.g. tabs) differently to other / existing code (e.g. spaces – or vice-versa). It is also defined as “not fixing” the issue of coders all having different opinions on what whitespace should be, but while it is acknowledged the solution will not please everyone, LL will be moving forward with it, and will give more details on the direction they are taking in due course.

Multi-Factor Authentication Update

[Video: 3:27-5:50]

  • Multi-factor authentication has been a part of SL for some time (see here for notes on its introduction), and extended to the viewer shortly thereafter.
  • Within the next “week or two” the log-in service will be updated so that users who have opted-in to MFA will only be able to do so on viewers providing the necessary MFA support.
  • This move was first announced in October 2022, but implementation was delayed to allow all TPVs the time to incorporate the viewer-side MFA code – which should now be the case.
  • Notes:
    • This does not mean all users must use the authentication process; MFA as a whole remains optional. It simply means users who have opted in to MFA will only be able to log-in to SL using a viewer supporting MFA.
    • Should users lose there ability to access SL via the authentication process for whatever reason, they should file a support ticket to have their MFA status reset.
    • Brad Linden also indicated that LL does not have “any additional MFA methods in development right now”, and that requests for things like authentication via e-mail should be made via feature request Jiras.

In Brief

Refer to the video for the following:

  • [Video: 6:05-9:38] a general discussion on code-signing – approach, pros and cons (most TPVs have not implemented code signing). In short, LL are looking to leverage the move to Github Actions for the viewer build process / code management to make code signing “more portable” should any TPVs wish to implement it.
  • [Video: 26:06 to practically to the end of the meeting] Extended discussion on the Emoji viewer and use of emojis particularly being given the choice to enable / disable whether emojis are displayed in text within your own viewer, as several other platforms provide.
    • Some of the discussion appeared predicated on the automatic conversion of text to emojis, which is not actually what the Emoji viewer is doing.
    • It was pointed out that disabling emojis might be beneficial as an accessibility option.
    • The option to add a switch to disable rendering of emojis within the viewer was requested as a feature request for consideration.
  • [Video: 46:46 onwards] discussion on ambient lighting within EEP settings, PDR, PBR reflection probes behaviour (much of it is local chat).

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 week #35: SL CCUG meeting summary: glTF PBR

Posted on by Inara Pey
Reality Escape – Books, Coffee & Chairs – Oh My! – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, August 31st, 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.
    • Conducted in a mix of voice and text.
    • Held at 13:00 SLT on their respective days.
    • Are subject to the schedule set within the SL Public Calendar, which includes the location for the meetings.
    • Open to all with an interest in content creation.
  • The notes herein are drawn from a mix of my own chat log and audio recording of the meeting, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

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

General Status

  • Cosmic Linden has been working on some permissions updates to make permissions meaningful when being addressed via LSL. This means that is a materials surface in set to No Modify, a script will not be able to change its tint, for example.
    • Support for this is currently on the glTF / PBR servers on Aditi, where it is being tested (same region names as above, just on Aditi).
    • Changes to reflect these updates will also be made to the viewer so things like the build floater correctly reflect the permissions status.
  • Runitai Linden is continuing to work on the communications bloat issue. This will utilise a new message type – GenericStreamingMessage. This will both make messages passing between the simulator and viewer more compact and also less frequent in order to reduce the load.
  • To help improve people’s awareness / avoid confusion with the updated Build floater, a new pop-up is being implemented that will be displayed and give information on the change when the floater is first opened and used with a PBR material, complete with a link to the PBR wiki page.

Mirrors

  • Mirrors are a part of the glTF / PBR materials project, but something of a separate tranche of work.
  • The idea is provide the means to have via high resolution reflections (i.e. mirrors) within a scene.
  • Initially only one active mirror surface per scene will be active for any viewer.
  • The process will use the PBR reflection probes mechanism, combined with a automated “Hero Probe” mechanism which with generate high resolution (512×512) “reflections” for the mirror.
  • The system will operate on the basis of avatar / camera proximity to a mirror surface triggering the closest reflection probe to become a “Hero Probe” for that avatar / camera. This means that if there are multiple mirrors placed within an environment, only the one closest to a given avatar / camera will be active and display the “reflections” generated by the reflection probe.
  • Depending on testing and performance, the number of mirrors might be expanded to two – one for mirror surfaces and one for Linden Water to generate high resolution water reflections where appropriate.

Summary

  • Geenz Linden hopes to start working on a version of the PBR viewer which supports mirrors very shortly.
  • The final data model for mirrors will not be available on the server end in time for the initial version of a Mirrors viewer, but will be coming later, as it is dependent on dialling-in the parameters required for the mirrors functionality based on testing.
  • Overall, the approach now taken means that mirrors will now not just be limited to planar (flat) surfaces.

Lighting / Ambient Lighting

  • Concerns continue to be raised over colour saturation / ambient colour / light within the PBR viewer within non-PBR regions. People appear to be reporting particular issues with over-saturation and with black surfaces (particularly clothing) looking “flat” or minus any clear definition.
  • It was pointed out that some of the issue may well be down to a combination of running the PBR viewer within regions that do not have the proper PBR environment adjustments, thus leading  – to some degree at least – to tone mapping being overly biased for darker colours + the adjustments made within the PBR viewer to compensate for the lack of reflection probes in non-PBR regions still requiring further tweaking + the PBR viewer generally not rendering the excess ambient light common to existing ambient lighting in non-PBR regions.
  • A lot of this is known to be an issue, and something Runitai Linden has been looking to address, as per my pervious CCUG summaries such as this one.

In Brief

  • Rider Linden noted the following updates will be available in the near future via simulator RC releases:
    • “Dog Days” update, due to go to one or more simulator RC channels during week #36 (commencing Monday, September 4th):
      • The unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database).
      • A scripted ability to set CLICK_ACTION_IGNORE, allowing an object to be clicked-through to reach an object behind it – a flag supporting this is included in the current release viewer.
    • The still in development “Fall Colours” update, which will include:
      • llIsFriend – essentially “Is the avatar touching this object a friend of the object’s owner?”, and then act accordingly.
      • llGetInventoyDesc(ription) – a function to return a list of the contents within an rezzed object.
  • User Animats has been experimenting with a new open-source convex hull algorithm for making physics models, which he describes as probably “not suitable” for the SL mesh uploader, but which “might be useful” when working in Blender. There is a forum thread on this line of investigation got those interested.
  • A suggestion was made that as LL gather stats on the hardware users are employing to access SL, that some measure of this data is made public-facing so that creators might have a better idea of the “typical” hardware environment they need to consider, rather than assuming everyone is either running high-end or low-end systems.
    • This was put in terms of something like a list of the 10 or so most commonly used CPU / GPUs (either individually or in combination); most common RAM amounts used (8GB, 16GB, etc.), with the information made available via a web page or similar.
    • It was pointed out that some of the information might be difficult to put together as it might not be possible to accurately extrapolate or consolidate in a meaningful way.
    • However, Vir Linden thought the idea is worth poking at to see what, if anything might be done towards achieving it.
  • An animated discussion on the permissions system and No Mod objects including:
    • Why people use No Mod (such as the mistaken belief that it “prevents copybotting” + the misunderstanding users might have that while a scripted item may way have No Mod scripts, the item itself can still be modified, etc).
    • A idea for the “reset to defaults” override button for Modify object so that if a user royally messes up an object, they can click the button and restore the original look / texturing, etc., of the object (potentially very hand for Mod / No Copy objects).
    • The addition of a new attribute “Demo” which can be used to both lock an object into No Mod and add some form of “demo” indicator to it for when the user is wearing / examining it.
    • The problem with any changes with the permissions system is that it is a) already extremely complicated in its implementation; b) would require considerable care; c) is liable to be a lengthy, far-reaching project. As such, there may not be the appetite within LL to take on such work.

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.