Category: SL User Group Meetings

2023 SL SUG meetings week #35 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Briarwood Wildlife Refuge, June 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 29th 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, leaving all simhosts on that channel running on release 581251, although the hosts were all restarted.
  • On Wednesday, August 30th, there will be a further attempt to deploy simulator update 581292 (“Bugsmash”).

Upcoming Release

  • Week #36 should see the RC deployment of the “Dog Days” simulator release. This 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.
  • An upcoming release is “Fall Colours”. Among other elements is a new LSL function, llIsFriend – essentially “Is the avatar touching this object a friend of the object’s owner?”, and then act accordingly. Rider Linden put out a general request for suggestions as to what else should go in this release, which led to an discussion on possible notecard-related functions and options, as per the meeting video.

Viewer Updates

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

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.

Right now I’m looking into exposing game controller buttons directly to LSL. All the other vehicle related ideas will have to wait until after this is done. The work is in progress, but one thing I learned is… our current game controller detection logic can’t capture all of the buttons/axes of a typical Xbox style controller. The logic is limited to 6 axes of motion and the Xbox controller I’m using has 8 axes. So I’m currently trying to hack in a different device detection [cross-platform] lib[rary] to see if I can get it working without breaking the SpaceNavigator support. … My hope is to support variable number of buttons and axes.

As might be expected, this led to a discussion on the potential game controllers offer Second Life.

In Brief

  • There are anecdotal reports that the issue of the Friends on-line list not correctly updating after log-in, etc., is now subsiding.
  • 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 SL SUG meetings week #34 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Orcinus Isle, June 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 22nd 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

  • No deployments for the major simulator channels this week, but all simhosts will be restarted.
  • There may be a small deployment to the Snack channel (Yondercane), to test changes to the way avatar arrivals in a region are handled (see below).

Dog Days Roll-Back

  • On Wednesday, August 16th, the Blueteel RC channel was updated with update 581292 (“Dog Days”).
  • During testing, it was discovered the update was causing some worn attachments were being renamed “Object” when edited whilst attached while retaining the correct name when seen in Inventory / detached to Inventory.
  • However, if such an attachment was dropped in-world, it would be renamed “Object”. As this was deemed to not be optimal, the update was rolled back.
  • If all goes according to plan, an attempt to re-deploy the release will be made in week #35.

Viewer Updates

The glTF / PBR Materials viewer, updated to version 7.0.0.581368, on August 22nd. All other available official viewers remain as follows:

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.

Avatar Arrival Update and Other Simulator Work

This is a first pass at working to improve avatar arrivals (AA) in regions and reduce the amount of “freezing” may occur whilst the arrival is processed, with further work indicated in the future, Monty Linden described this part of the work thus:

AA is the first part of an effort to tune the simulator’s main processing loop. There are *many* causes of very long frames currently. One of the worst offenders is avatar attachment handoff and rezzing at region crossings and teleports. AA attempts to break up and time bound that process, particularly when multiple avatars are involved in a crossing, allowing the frame to complete more closely to the scheduled time. [The] goal is to improve interactivity and responsiveness to those *not* involved in the RC/TP at the expense of those crossing having their glorious collections of stuff attached a bit more slowly. This first pass includes some of that monolithic execution breakup and some tuning.

Monty went on to note that the AA update will only be deployed for testing / data gathering prior to being withdrawn rather than being expanded to additional channels, whilst he continues to work on the matter in the background and possibly expands the scope of the work to include things like better script optimisations and hand-offs during teleports / crossings, etc.

This led to an extended discussion on region crossings / teleports which extended across most of the meeting, with Rider Linden noting he’ll attempt to have a list of regions on the channel for the meeting next week (assuming the deployment goes ahead), so that interested parties can test both teleports into them and regions crossings between them. This in turn entered into better / alternate means of script scheduling / management (and refactoring the former to reduce some of the simulator load), together with options for improved attachment / messaging, etc., handling.

As an aside to this work, Monty indicated he is working on a diagram showing the simulator main processing loop which could be published for public consumption, once it has been cleaned-up.

Potential for Improving Vehicle Control Options

Rider Linden raised this towards the end of the meeting for discussion, thus:

We’ve been having some discussions internally about taking controls and expanding the number of keys available and perhaps even allowing analogue input for movement to the simulator. Leviathan and I would love to get some feedback on how people would use that and how you’d like to see something like that work.

To which Leviathan added:

I’ve solicited for input and have received a bunch of input and ideas. I think the first sub project in that direction will be to try to expose raw game controller input (joysticks and buttons) to LSL. With regards to keyboard controls, if you look at all of the feature requests over the years, ultimately people want access to just about ALL of the keys. I was worried about the ability to make a keylogger in SL, however Signal thinks that wouldn’t really be a problem.

The majority of the feedback was for capabilities to be added to enable a broader range or controllers rather than trying to expand keylogging capabilities exponentially, although keystroke capture and use appears to be more of a focus for Leviathan.

Please refer to the last 10-12 minutes of the video for this discussion.

† 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 #33: SL CCUG meeting summary: glTF PBR; Senra

Posted on by Inara Pey
Chang’an, May 2023 – click any image for full size – 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 17th, 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 locations for both meetings (also included at the end of these reports).
    • Open to all with an interest in content creation.

Additional note: this meeting suffered several drop-outs (for whatever reason) plus my own Internet connection also went out; as such this is not a complete reflection of the meeting and all topics.

Viewer Status

General Viewer Notes

  • There are a couple of issues with the Inventory Extensions RC viewer which need to be addressed before this progresses to being ready for promotion to release status.
  • The internal discussions on font changes in the Emoji viewer (see my last CCUG / TPV meeting summary) will likely be split into a separate project, allowing the Emoji viewer to progress forward as it is.

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 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

  • The communications bloat driven by multiple script-driven glTF materials updates generating multiple connections between the viewer and the simulator (thus impacting performance) continues to be addressed. The outcome of this work is liable to result in protocol changes as and when the work is complete.
  • A number of permission-related fixes have been implemented.

Lighting / Ambient Lighting

  • The issue over the rendering changes the glTF project will bring to Second Life. It has been well-established that the PBR system removes the forward render pipe (aka “non-Advanced Lighting Model (ALM)”) from the viewer’s renderer.
  • Equally, over the last several meetings (and as noted in my CCUG summaries covering PBR) there has been discussion on the fact that PBR utilises HDR + tone mapping with rendering  / lighting. This is a significant change to Second Life, particularly when it comes to the amount of rendered ambient light (until now SL has rendered a lot of additional ambient light), resulting in two related issues:
    • Because it is intended to mimic real-world ambient lighting, environments rendered on the PBR viewer with HDR + tone mapping enabled can look a lot darker than when viewed with a non-PBR viewer, and baked lighting really does not work (and can end up looking very bad) – scripted / direct lighting is required – something for which many store owners and users in general might not be prepared.
    • While disabling the ambient HDR rendering is possible within the PBR viewer (potentially eliminating the above issues), it conversely results in any PBR content within the scene looking “bad” or “broken”, risking content creators trying to find workarounds to the glTF specification in order to make their content “look good” under either lighting condition – something they absolutely should not do.
  • Discussions are still on-going at the Lab on how best to handle this conflict between PBR and non-PBR rendering as the latter is deployed and gradually gains broader use. As a part of this, it has been recognised that one of the most direct means to alert users is via communication.
  • To this end, a form of “best practices” and guidelines for PBR are being developed with the intention to make them available to users in advance of PBR being fully deployed / released. Expect to (hopefully) hear more about this via future CCUG meetings.

Mirrors

  • Geenz Linden is currently refactoring the Hero probes which will be automatically selected for generating higher resolution reflections based on an avatar’s proximity to a planar mirror surface (and initially limited to 1 (or possibly 2 per scene  – the second being for Linden Water reflections, but this has yet to be confirmed).
  •  This work will see the Hero probes treated as their own class of reflection probes with their own filtering, etc., to avoid conflicts (debugging, etc.) with the “general” reflection matte manger. This will also better support the higher resolution of the Hero probes and possibly allow for additional Hero probes to be supported within the viewer in the future.

Building Tools

  • PBR will see a significant change to the Edit / Build floater as the project becomes more widely deployed, and this has started internal discussions at LL about the state of the in-world build tools, and what might be done to improve them for general use. Ideas put forward at the meeting included:
    • More flexible means of cutting holes in prims (e.g. offset from the Z axis of the prim), such as through the introduction of a Boolean support.
    • Making text entry within the floater consistent (e.g. clicking on some fields, the existing content is highlighted for over-writing, in others it isn’t).
    • Inclusion of a prim alignments capability (as found in some TPVs) as a default tool + making the alignment more flexible that just to the sides / edges of the bounding boxes of the objects.
    • A broader range of primitive shapes (e.g. simple step units) and improved tools for torturing prims to produce custom shapes.
    • Better exposure of some of the build options on the official viewer (e.g. making the Local Textures option a radio button option in the Texture tab, rather than hidden in a drop-down) to make them more visible.
    • Also making it clearer that an object includes Local Textures, such as via a pop-up, to remind the creator to apply an actual texture to the affected face(s).
    • Better tools  / support for making clothing.
    • Better UDIM support for UV maps.
  • These idea will be fed back into discussions at LL.

Senra Avatars

[Note: this section is abbreviated as I lost my Internet connection for some 14 minutes of the meeting & this was followed by the meeting being disrupted a further 2 times.]

  • Further discussion over the continued confusion / concern over the Senra avatar system (outside of the ongoing disquiet over the licensing agreement), including:
    • Frustration / confusion over the amount of conflicting information being offered by Linden Lab – e.g. the dev kit application form states applicants “must” own a store but Patch Linden has stated in a forum post that owning a store “is not” a requirement.
    • Negativity on the use of an application requirement at all:
      • Some see it as presenting an unnecessary barrier for some (e.g. users who just want to create Senra-related items for their personal, rather than commercial, use).
      • Concerns over privacy / security with the devkit application form being outside of SL (where it is subject to potential abuse) rather than – as with the Mesh Upload Status form  – being included within the Secondlife.com dashboard,  where it would be both secure and firmly linked to an account.
    • Further questioning as to why AvaStar has been determined to be a core requirement for the devkit, rather than simply relying on Blender.
  • More general frustration was voiced at the idea that the “Senra team” only appear to be willing to engage through the forum threads on the topic, and then only in what is perceived as being a narrow focus of engagement, with no-one appearing willing to attend the CCUG meeting – which given Linden Lab want creators to produce content for Senra would seem to be a pretty good place for them to actively address feedback in real time, at least in lieu of any Senra-focused meeting(s).

In Brief

  • While they are not in anyway directly connected or related, Cosmic Linden noted that her work on enabling PDR materials as terrain textures in the viewer is being used as a testbed for possible approaches to enabling PBR with avatar Bakes on Mesh – although the latter is not currently an active project.

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 #33 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Seogyeo Town, Seogyeoshire, May 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 15th 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, August 15th, all simhosts on the the SLS Main were restarted, but remain on simulator version 581251.
  • On Wednesday, August 16th, the Blueteel RC channel should be updated with simulator update 581292. Included in this release are:
    • The ability to (once more) see channel names via Help → About (and potentially announced via pop-up within TPVs supporting this capability).
    • Objects rezzed by scripts will now be correctly returned by estate managers + the throttle on llReturnObjectsByOwner has been removed.
    • GroupMemberData (used by viewers to return information about the members of a group) has been intermittently returning “well-formed but incorrect data” for several years. With this update, it should return “well-formed and correct data”.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

  • The simulator update “Dog Days” is being packaged for QA. This 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.
    • PRIM_CLICK_ACTION is added to llSet/GetPrimParams so you can set the click action on prims in a linkset.

Viewer Updates

  • Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.14.581315, issued on August 15.
    • Ability to display user-customized keybindings in chat, making it easier to provide key binding instructions to end users for vehicles, HUDs or anything utilising custom keybindings. See URI_Name_Space for more.
  • The Inventory Extensions RC viewer updated to version 6.6.14.581357 on August 14.

The rest of the available official viewers remain as:

  • Release viewer version 6.6.13.580918, formerly the Maintenance T RC viewer, July 14.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.581126, June 26.
    • Maintenance U(pbeat) RC viewer, version, 6.6.14.581101 July 21.
  • 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.

Scripting Discussion

  • LSL contains a number of long-standing code errors / issues / limitations which have been around so long they have either become expected behaviour or have had a number of work-arounds implemented. This makes any attempt to correct the code difficult, as it can result in unintended script breakage, and because of this, LL has tended to take the attitude of, “we aren’t going to fix that because it is too ingrained.”
  • However, one idea now being considered for allowing such script issues to be fixed and hopefully avoid the potential for script breakage in the process, is to introduce a “compatibility” mode to LSL.
  • Such a mode would be set via some form of option (check box or button or something).
    • By default, with would be “off”, for all scripts (existing and new), and they would as they do now (“classic” behaviour), preserving any “incorrect” behaviour.
    • When toggled “on” for a script, the script will run in the “updated” mode, allowing it leverage the corrected LSL code / functions and any future behavioural changes.
  • This led to an extended discussion on the approach – which was broadly favourably viewed – which touched various ideas such as version numbering and other methods of differentiating “versions” of LSL (given it does not itself have any built-in notion of versions), the historical context on the introduction of Mono, the use of compilers

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for the following:

  • There is said to be increasing reports of avatars failing to load correctly following teleporting into a popular location (notably those at altitude) and of inventory attachment queuing and loading taking longer. Some thinking is that this may be interest list related, however, Bug reports have yet to be filed to allow for investigation.
  • Leviathan Linden put out a request for feedback:
I’ve been thinking about how to improve vehicles in SL so I’m soliciting input for the next week or so. You can email me directly (leviathan-at-lindenlab.com) you can IM me, or I’m even willing to schedule a chat/voice session if anyone wants to talk about vehicles: cars, airplanes, boats, motorcycles, etc. What got me on this subject were two things: (1) the idea of giving LSL scripts direct access to game controller inputs (joystick, button state, etc), and also (2) different API for configuring vehicles. For example, maybe airplanes would be better described using a thrust, stall-speed, attack-angle, aileron state model.
  • The above led to some additional discussion on options – as per the last 20 minutes of the meeting.
  • Rider Linden noted that during the LL engineering meeting in week #33, the subject of improved camera controls. Nothing firm on what might be done, but again, this sparked discussion during the last 10 minutes of the 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 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 #31: SL CCUG + TPVD meetings summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Strandhavet Viking Museum, May 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, August 3rd, and the Third Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, August 4th, 2023. 

Meetings Overview

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current work, upcoming work, and requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work.
  • 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 developers to discuss general viewer development.
  • As a rule, both 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 locations for both meetings (also included at the end of these reports).
    • Open to all with an interest in content creation / viewer development.
  • As these meetings occasionally fall “back-to-back” on certain weeks, and often cover some of the same ground, their summaries are sometime combined into a single report (as is the case here). They are drawn from a mix of my own audio recordings of the meeting + chat log (CCUG), and from the video of the TPVD meeting produced by Pantera Północy (which is embedded at the end of the summaries for reference) + chat log. Not that they are summaries, and not intended to be transcripts of everything said during either meeting.

Viewer News

No changes through the week, leaving the current official viewer in the pipeline as:

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 Inventory Extensions viewer has a couple of bugs which are preventing it progressing but are being worked on. There are also some simulator-side issues (inventory thumbnail images being dropped) which are also being addressed. However, this remains the next potential viewer for promotion to de facto release, alongside of the Maintenance U RC viewer.
  • The Maintenance U RC includes an extension to actions available when clicking on in-world objects. CLICK_ACTION_INVISIBLE effectively makes an object “invisible” to mouse clicks, allowing it to be clecked through to whatever might be lying behind it.  This functionality will be supported within the next simulator deployment, due in week #32.
  • The Emoji project viewer may see some font changes prior to progressing further (which may additionally require UI work in general) & is still adding further UI additions.

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 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

  • LL is seeking feedback on how best to handle sky rendering. In short, ambient lighting is handled differently within “non-PBR” viewers and “PBR viewers” (notably, the latter uses HDR + tone mapping where the former does not).
  • As the majority of ambient environments have been designed using the “non-PBR” viewer rendering system, they undergo an auto-adjustment process within the PBR viewer so that that match the glTF specification requirements. Unfortunately, this can leave some skies / ambient lighting looking far too dark – and potentially lead to complaints from users on the PBR viewer (at least until more “PBR compliant” EEP assets make themselves available).
  • To compensate for this, LL included the option to disable the HDR / tone mapping processes in the viewer by setting Probe Ambience to 0 with Graphics preferences. However, doing this makes content specifically designed for PBR environments look muted and much poorer than they should. This brings with it the concern that to try to make their content look good in both “PBR” and “non-PBR” environments, creators will start to go “off-piste” (so to speak) from the glTF specification when making new content, thus defaulting the entire objective in trying to move SL to match recognise content creation standards.
  • There have been two main schools of thought within LL as to how to best handle both situations, these being:
    • Continue to iterate on the auto-adjustment system so it can handle a broader range of sky settings that are in popular use without them going overly dark within the PBR viewer.
    • Initially make HDR / tone mapping opt-in, rather than opt-out (so probe ambience is set to 0 by default, but can be set above zero by users as required) until such time as all viewers are running with PBR, then switch to making it opt-out (so HDR / tone mapping must be manually disabled).
  • General feedback at the meeting was for LL to continue to try to iterate and improve the the automatic adjustment to HDR / tone mapping for skies, so as to avoid the need for content creators to have to start producing “PBR” and “non PBR” versions of their content.
  • Outside of this, it has also been reported that multiple script-driven glTF materials updates (such has those that might be seen with the changing pattens on a disco floor, for example) actually cause multiple network connections, impacting network bandwidth to the viewer, which is hardly ideal.  This is currently being addressed, but until fixed on the simulator side, it will see a pause in glTF simulator updates being released.
  • The work on “hero” reflection probes for planar mirrors is continuing to progress.

Senra Discussions – CCUG and TPVD

Via the Content Creation Meeting:

  • A lengthy discussion on the Senra SDK and the requirement for Avastar with Blender – seen as a paywall block for creators who may not have previously entered the clothing market, but who want to in order to support Senra. Unfortunately, no-one directly involved in the Senra body development was at the meeting to handle questions.
    • Avastar is generally required with Blender as  the latter uses “none-standard” axes orientation compared to other tools, resulting in issues such as armature rotations being incorrect, plus its Collada export doesn’t (I gather, subject to correction here) support volume bones.
    • However, it was noted that other mesh bodies available within SL provide SDKs where these uses are fixed for Blender without the need to reference Avastar – so the questions were raised as to why LL haven’t done the same (or at least looked at those solutions).
    • The discussion broadened into issues with the avatar blend file itself which have long required fixing, with the promise that all comments on the SDK, Blender, and the avatar Blend file will be passed back to the relevant parties at the Lab.
      Those at the meeting from LL noted their hope that  – down the road – the switch from Collada to glTF-compatible formats will help to eliminate many issues related to avatar content creation, and if nothing else, will look to address specific issues . this, and that if nothing else, they will mark the need to fix the armature rotation issue with that work (“glTF Phase 2”) if it is not addressed beforehand.

Via the TPVD Meeting:

  • It was noted that there currently isn’t a formal venue for discussion Senra outside of the current forum threads or the Discord channel (for those able to access it.
  • The suggestion is currently to have a special purpose meeting – possibly under the CCUG banner – where those who developed Senra could respond to questions / concerns. This suggestion is being passed to Patch Linden who is better placed to arrange a meeting, given the Senra project largely falls within his remit.
  • There is a lot of concern / confusion over the SDK licensing (again, please refer to the forum thread on this for details).
  •  It was indicated that the Senra content will soon have inventory thumbnails included, ready for when the Inventory Extension viewer is promoted to release status.
  • Concerns about new users getting confused by wearing Senra items directly from the Library a) do not appear to be highlighted to indicate they have been added to the avatar (this is actually because the process of “wearing” the item has actually generated a copy within the user’s inventory, which *is* highlighted as added / worn); b) individual items added to an avatar in this manner go to the matching object class type system folder, *not* to a dedicated Senra folder (e.g. mesh clothing is copied to the Objects folder; skins go to the Body folder, etc.).

In Brief

Via the TPVD meeting

  • General discussions on:
    • Scalable fonts (as implemented by Genesis viewer).
    • How TPVs block older versions (for releases, the viewer requests a list of blocked versions from the TPV server in question (say, Firestorm, for the sake of argument), and if it finds itself on the list, it terminates trying to log-in to SL).
    • The move to de-dupe some asset types (textures, notecards, scripts  & (possibly) gestures by giving multiple CDN versions the same UUID number, including clarification on the difference between the original asset, the UUIDs for multiple versions and also inventory IDs (which handle permissions, etc.).
    • An extensive discussion on chat bubbles and toasts in the official viewer.
  • Please refer to the TPVD meeting video below for further details on the above discussions.

Next Meetings

† 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.

August 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 August 2nd, 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

Re-Indexing for Listings Issue

  • An issue was discovered with MP product listings not showing up in search results or for store owners using their Manage Listing pages (although the product listing could be reached directly by entering its name).
  • This was traced to the items failing to be indexed correctly by the Marketplace service.
  • As a result, LL initiated a complete re-indexing of the MP at the start of week #31, and while it took time to complete, the issue should now be resolved and all product listing should be showing correctly via search, etc.
  • Those still encountering issues with their products should raise a Jira.

General

  • Best selling items ordering: when used within a specific MP store, this will in the near future order 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.
  • “Do Not Show Limited Quantities” in Search:
    • There have been requests to either have this option (shown in product search results at the foot of the left-side column along with Demos) enabled by default or limited quantity items should not be shown in Search results.
    • This has been requested primarily due to the issue of (new) users buying ex-gacha items without realising that are not buying from the original creator.
    • Given there are legitimate reasons for Limited Quantity items to be listed on the MP, excluding them from Search would be potentially  discriminatory.
    • Preferable solutions suggested were:
      • Retain the option and either reverse it – so it has to be enabled to include limited quantity items OR have whichever way the toggle is set stored within the user’s MP cookies, rather than the check box having to be be set against every search.
      • Add a further checkbox to specifically eliminate (or include, depending on the default setting) Gacha items from / with Search results.
      • LL implement a new product category – Limited Quantity – specifically for such products / items – although how well this would work is open to question, given there is a Gacha category which does not prevent those types of limited quantity items pitching up in Search results.
  • The above spread to a broader discussion on creators using unicode characters and punctuation symbols in their store names which actually makes it harder for them to show up in search results under the Merchants / Stores tab, unless a precise full or partial copy of their brand name is entered.
  • Listing Enhancement metrics: a request was made for those paying for Listing Enhancements to receive metrics (e.g. no. of times displayed, number of click-throughs generated, number of sales from click-throughs).
  • Product reviews:
    • A suggestion that LL should allow reviewers to just leave star ratings against items listed on the MP, as used to be the case with SL Exchange and is the case with Amazon.
    • A request for the MP to be open to reviews by those who have purchased a product in-world (and who may have used the MP as a form of catalogue to seek out items they then purchase in-world).
    • The ability to view an individual’s review history on the MP – allowing their fairness / bias to be better judged.
    • See also feature requests BUG-233138 “Social/Creator Focused Marketplace Feed” and BUG-233139 “A user-run first-line Moderation Tool”.
  • General discussions on:
    • The use of Favourites List and Wishlist options (e.g. Favourites List – as a means of quickly pulling up preferred brands and checking for new releases, requests for multiple Wishlists, etc., making lists more easily shareable other than by direct URL, etc.).
    • Preferred general Search results ordering (e.g. newest first or best selling).

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, September 6th, 2023.