Category: SL User Group Meetings

2023 week #16: SL CCUG meeting summary (abbreviated)

Posted on by Inara Pey
OCWA Experience The Ocean, February 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, April 20th, 2023 at 13:00 SLT. 

These meetings are 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. They are usually chaired by Vir Linden, and dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.

Notes:

  • These meetings are conducted in mixed voice and text chat. Participants can use either to make comments / ask or respond to comments, but note that you will need Voice to be enabled to hear responses and comments from the Linden reps and other using it. If you have issues with hearing or following the voice discussions, please inform the Lindens at the meeting.
  • The following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting, and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Additional note: unfortunately, my audio recording died whilst saving to disk, leaving me with just the first 10 minutes of audio from the meeting available for playback / summary. Given responses to questions in text are supplied in Voice, it is impossible to provide any reasonable summary beyond the point at which the recording save failed, so this is therefore a very foreshortened report, and not representative of the entire meeting.

Official Viewer Status

The Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version  6.6.11.579629 on April 20th.

The rest of the official viewers remain as:

  • Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance T(ranslation) RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
    • Maintenance S, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
  • Project viewers:
    • The PBR Materials / reflection probes project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 10th.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

The Performance Floater / Auto FPS viewer looks set to become the next viewer to be promoted to de facto release status in the coming week.

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.
  • To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
  • The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • 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.
    • It is currently to early to state how this might change when glTF support is expanded to include entire objects.
  • The project viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page, but will only work on the following regions on Aditi (the Beta grid):  Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
  • Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.

Status

  • Viewer:
    • The viewer is now very close to being promoted to Release Candidate status. Issues within the viewer build farm prevented it from getting fully cleared by QA, who are currently taking one more look at it.
    • It is believed that all the significant showstoppers thus far found have been dealt with (although more may show up as a result of it becoming available to a wider audience in RC).
    • The above should include the issue of objects in the camera’s view failing to render unless occlusion culling is disabled and the issues of some mesh items “exploding in the the viewer’s viewer both being fixed.
    • Ton mapping has been updated so there is no longer the ability to change / turn off tone mapping. This has been done in the name of “trying to keep things consistent” with older contents that has tone mapping built-in. This does lead to a few edge cases (such as not being able to get totally pitch black environments), but also fixes some issues around general exposure (e.g. preventing full bright objects changing brightness depending on camera distance).
    • It is likely that the work on exposures will eventually be fed into the snapshot tool, so photographers can adjust the exposure settings for them pictures.
    • There is still a collection of minor issues / bugs still to be resolved – such as getting parity some some of the current sky settings – which will be dealt with in RC as the viewer progresses.
    • Those who do find significant issues in using the viewer in RC are asked to report them via a BUG report ASAP.
  • When the view does go to RC, it is likely the server-side support will be deployed to one (Preflight) or possibly two (Preflight and Snack) small simulator RC channels to allow for testing on Agni (the Main grid). Details of the available regions will be published in my project summaries as and when available.

Future glTF Work

  • There is an internal (to LL) design document in development which is intended to set-out the next steps in the glTF work; however, this is not currently ready for public release.
  • Past indicators have been that it is possible the near-term work for glTF could include planar mirrors (with some controls around their use) and also glTF mesh uploads.

Next Meeting

  • Thursday, May 4th, 2023.

† 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 #16 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Burrow Wood County, February 2023 – blog post† 

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  April 18th 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.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, April 18th, the SLS Main channel servers were updated with simulator release 579248, previously deployed to the RC channels. This means the doubling of linkset data memory (to 128KB) and the three LSL functions for strided list management – llList2ListSlice(), llSortListStrided(), and llListFindListStrided() – are now grid-wide.
  • On Wednesday, April 19th, simhosts on the RC channels will be restarted, but there will not be any new deployments to them.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

  • It is still hoped to get the server-side support for PBR materials to at least one RC channel – Preflight, with the potential it might also go to Snack as well – but there was no ETA on this at the time of the meeting. Currently, it remains with LL’s QA team.

Viewer Updates

No official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
    • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.11.579238, April 4th.
    • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
  • Project viewers:
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 10 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

  • llGetAgentInfo received a new flag – AGENT_AUTOMATED – in week #15, however, the simulator side has et to be released; it is currently in a maintenance simulator support which may go to QA for testing in week #17.
    • This raised concerns of whether or not llGetAgentInfo was the right place for this flag, and whether it could result in the dataserver being spammed with requests from people wanting to know if visitors to their land were avatars or scripted agents. However, as Rider Linden pointed out, the simulator already has information on scripted agent, so there is no requirement for the simulator to query the dataserver.
    • See the video for the broader discussion on when the flag for a scripted agent is propagated across the grid.
  • There was a general discussion on possible LSL enhancements. This included:
    • Possible improvements to notecard handling by LSL (e.g. searching notecards – e.g. BUG-4906 -, faster notecard reading, a safe means of sending back the contents of a notecard so a script doesn’t need to build a web page on the fly / read the entire contents of the notecard into memory).
    • HTTP response expansion.
  • Objects rezzing objects: it has been noted that if an object is set to rez other objects (e.g. say a “crate dispenser” which might be used as a visual enhancement to Get The Freight Out to simulate cargo loading), the rezzing tends to work perfectly when the rezzing object’s owner is present, but can experience issues when the owner is not present.
    • This tends to occur if rezzing within the land is restricted to Group membership, and object owner did not correctly set their active group prior to placing out the rezzing object.
    • As the owner’s group is checked when present, this allows the rezzer to work correctly, hence why the problem only surfaces when they are absent.
  • For all other discussions, please refer to the view below.

† 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 Puppetry project week #15 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Puppetry demonstration via Linden Lab – see below.  Demos video with the LL comment “We have some basic things working with a webcam and Second Life but there’s more to do before it’s as animated as we want.”

The following notes have been taken from chat logs and audio recording of the Thursday, March 23rd, 2023 Puppetry Project meetings held at the Castelet Puppetry Theatre on Aditi. These meetings are generally held on alternate weeks to the Content Creation User Group (CCUG), on same day / time (Thursdays at 13:00 SLT).

Notes in these summaries are not intended to be a full transcript of every meeting, but to highlight project progress / major topics of discussion.

Project Summary

General Project Description as Originally Conceived

LL’s renewed interest in puppetry was primarily instigated by Philip joining LL as official advisor, and so it really was about streaming mocap. That is what Philip was interested in and why we started looking at it again. However since Puppetry’s announcement what I’ve been hearing from many SL Residents is: what they really want from “puppetry” is more physicality of the avatar in-world: picking up objects, holding hands, higher fidelity collisions. 
As a result, that is what I’ve been contemplating: how to improve the control and physicality of the the avatar. Can that be the new improved direction of the Puppetry project? How to do it?

Leviathan Linden

  • Previously referred to as “avatar expressiveness”, Puppetry is intended to provide a means by which avatars can mimic physical world actions by their owners (e.g. head, hand, arm movements) through tools such as a webcam and using technologies like inverse kinematics (IK) and the  LLSD Event API Plug-in (LEAP) system.
    • Note that facial expressions and finger movements are not currently enabled.
    • Most movement is in the 2D plain (e.g., hand movements from side-to-side but not forward / back), due to limitations with things like depth of field tracking through a webcam, which has yet to be addressed.
  • The back-end support for the capability is only available on Aditi (the Beta grid) and within the following regions: Bunraku, Marionette, and Castelet.
  • Puppetry requires the use of a dedicated viewer, the Project Puppetry viewer, available through the official Second Life Alternate Viewers page.
  • No other special needs beyond the project viewer are required to “see” Puppetry animations. However, to use the capability to animate your own avatar and broadcast the results, requires additional work – refer to the links below.
  • There is a Puppetry Discord channel – those wishing to join it should contact members of LL’s puppetry team, e.g. Aura Linden, Simon Linden, Rider Linden, Leviathan Linden (not a full list of names at this time – my apologies to those involved whom I have missed).

Additional Work Not Originally In-Scope

  • Direct avatar / object / avatar-avatar interactions (“picking up” an apple; high-fives. etc.).
  • Animations streaming: allowing one viewer to run animations and have them sent via the simulator to all receiving viewers without any further processing of the animations by those viewers.
  • Enhanced LSL integration for animation control.
  • Adoption of better animation standards – possibly glTF.
  • Given the project is incorporating a lot of additional ideas, it is likely to evolve into a rolling development, with immediate targets for development / implementation decided as they are agreed upon, to be followed by future enhancements. As such, much of what goes into the meetings at present is general discussion and recommendations for consideration, rather than confirmed lines o development.

Bugs, Feature Requests and Code Submissions

  • For those experimenting with Puppetry, Jiras (bug reports / fixes or feature requests) should be filed with “[Puppetry]” at the start of the Jira title.
  • There is also a public facing Kanban board with public issues.
  • Those wishing to submit code (plug-ins or other) or who wish to offer a specific feature that might be used with Puppetry should:

Further Information

Meeting Notes

Viewer Progress

  • An updated version of the project viewer is still “close” – it is currently awaiting clearance by QA.
  • This will include the attachment point tracking discussed in previous meetings (e.g., a step towards being able to “pick things up” in SL. The simulator support for this is already in place on the Aditi Puppetry regions.
  • However when available it will not include:
    • LSL animation control as yet (which has yet to be added to the simulator code anyway. Rider Linden believes he has a good protocol for single avatar animation, but would rather work on it some more.
    • Any IK improvements, as Leviathan Linden is still working on these.
    • Any extended LEAP API functionality (the added features for getting world position/orientation, lookat position/orientation, camera position/orientation/target). This will be coming in a future viewer update.
  • Another thing in this release will be the change to llsd_binary for the LEAP messaging protocol. This will be in the release notes but to use it you will want to update to either 1.3.1 of llbase and/or 1.2.0 of llsd for python scripts. Messages from LEAP scripts to the viewer will still work with the older python libraries, but messages from the viewer to the script will not be parsed correctly.

Server-Side Work

  • The LSL function API has been published to the Content Creation Discord group (sorry, I’ve been asked by LL not to publish details on joining the server – if you are a content creator interested in joining it, please contact Vir Linden or attend a meeting (Content Creation / Puppetry and ask in person).
  • Getting attachment point positions has been given a throttle, in part to not make it trivial to use LSL to rip an animation, and in part to prevent the server doesn’t get overwhelmed. This latter rate of throttling is variable and can change as load increases/decreases. However, as Rider linden noted, there would always be some delay and some disagreement about the actual position of the attachment point between LSL and all the observing viewers. As such, function is not meant for a high-fidelity use. Collision volumes on the attachment points will be a better solution in this respect, but that is functionality which is still down the line.

General Notes

  • Leviathan Linden’s work for streaming the full avatar animation state has stalled, due to it essentially hijacking the main puppetry data channel to send everything, even when not running a puppetry script, through LEAP. As such, Leviathan thinks it needs to be moved to its own experimental viewer.
  • Simon Linden’s work on allowing animation uploads of new/different formats has been decoupled from the Puppetry project’s codebase, and is now being built on the main viewer branch, allowing it to move forward without dependencies on Puppetry.
  • OpenXR support as a LEAP plug-in is still seen as desirable, since it would allow support for a broader range of devices. However, it is seen as a little more “down the road”, as there is some core infrastructure that needs to finish being vetted prior to work starting on this.

My thanks to Jenna Huntsman for the chat transcript from the meeting, and you can see her video recording of the session here.

Date of Next Meeting

  • Thursday, April 27th, 2023, 13:00 SLT.

2023 week #15: SL TPV Developer meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kawaii City, February 2023 – blog post
The following notes were taken from m y audio recording and chat log transcript of the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday,  April 14th 2023 at 13:00 SLT. Meeting 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.

Official Viewers Status

[Video 0:00-2:51]
  • Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
    • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.11.579238, April 4th.
    • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
  • Project viewers:
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 11 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

Future Viewer Notes

  • Inventory thumbnails viewer: work is progressing well, however as well as viewer changes and additions to the inventory database (the latter of which has been completed), it will require updates to the Avatar Inventory System (AIS) and a simulator update, so the will be no project or RC viewer until this back-end work has been done.
  • Work has resumed on providing emoji support in the viewer (Oh, joy.). This work is based on a contribution from the Catznip viewer.

In Brief

  • [Video: 3:04-5:46] PBR Materials mini-update:
    • The viewer has been updated, but is still at Project Viewer status.
    • A new dynamic exposure setting has been added to improve tone mapping.
    • Bug fixing work is continuing, and Brad Linden is working on getting PBR Materials to work more robustly over networks with heavy loads.
    • The hope is that the next viewer update will clear QA for release as an RC viewer, so that it will be available when the back-end / simulator support gets deployed to the Preflight simulator channel which Rider Linden hopes to achieve in week #16.
    • Making the PBR work more widely available by enabled Agni (Main grid) support and moving the viewer to RC status is seen as a key test of how will the Graphics Team has managed to both support the PBR rendering and maintain the broad look and feel of SL as it appears under the current rendering.
  • Genesis is working on an update which will include and expanded Preferences, together with the ability to search Preferences.
  • A general discussion on a third-party viewer (Rust) that is in development, but not ready for prime-time, server-side rendering and a ringing of the memory bell for the Pelican (IIRC streaming viewer LL toyed with back in around 2007). Please refer to the video, below.

 Next Meeting

  • Friday, May 12th, 2023.

2023 SL SUG meetings week #15 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey

Les Salines, February 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 11th 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.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, April 11th, the SLS Main channel servers were re-started without any update.
  • On Wednesday, April 12th the majority of the RC simhosts should be updated with simulator release 579248, matching the release previously deployed to the BlueSteel RC.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

  • As soon as it clears QA, the simulator support for PBR Materials will be deployed to a limited RC channel – most likely Preflight. This will be ahead of the viewer moving to RC status, but will allow users on the PBR project viewer to test content without having to necessarily log onto the Beta grid.
  • An upcoming pair of simulator releases currently going through QA focus on a range of bug fixes, including:
    • Spurious errors  from llSetKeyFrameMotion.
    • Collisions between vehicles and their riders on a region crossing.
    • The bad throttle on llReturnObjectsByOwner (as raised in the previous SUG meeting).
    • Avatar on-line/off-line notification issues (which comprise multiple issues, and LL have attempted to fix as many as possible).
  • A further simulator update focused on region crossing improvements is in development, but as of this meeting, there was no ETA on when it will go to QA or be ready for deployment.

Viewer Updates

  • Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
    • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.11.579238, April 4th.
    • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
  • Project viewers:
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.578921, April 6 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

  • See the video for:
    • A general discussion on region crossing bugs related to region crossings.
    • A discussion on security orbs.
    • A discussion on No-Mod items, the permission system and the pains caused by No Mod, and the potential to tweak No Mod (or offer a “No Mod(ish)” permission, so that users can still make small changes to No Mod objects (e.g. tinting), whilst allowing the creator to still “protect” their product.
  • For region restarts, Linden Lab is considering adding a capability that would automatically teleport avatars to a designated “alternate home” if their home location is unavailable at the time they try to TP out of a restarting region, and if the “alternate” is not available, then move them to a Safe area.

April 2023 SL WUG meeting: MP search changes

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, April 5th, 2023.

WUG meetings:

  • Are held in-world, generally on the first Wednesday of the month – see the SL public calendar.
  • Cover Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
  • They are not intended for the discussion of Governance issues, land fees / issues, content creation & tools, viewer or simulator development / projects. Please refer to the SL calendar for information on available meetings for these topics.

A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.

Marketplace

Recent Updates and General Notes

  • There have been changes made to Marketplace Search. For example:
    • Now, by default (and assuming no search terms have been entered), displaying a merchant’s store page will list their products by newest first).
    • Merchant and Store names are no longer included in the Product search, but are now apply considered when using the dedicated search tab.
  • Some of these updates have caused confusion, so an official blog post has been published to explain them and the reasoning behind them.
  • These changes, and those noted below, are being actively monitored by LL, and further adjustments may be made based on the metrics they are seeing / feedback from Merchants / consumers.
  • In addition:
    • The checkout cart has been updated to allow up to 99 list items to be stored in it (the previous limit was 10).
    • The cap on the total number of search returns, implemented with the last set of Search updates (a total of 50 pages of results) has been rolled back, so that Search will now list all results matching a given search.
  • Unless Boolean, etc., operators are used in entering search terms, Search will now attempt to string together words entered into it and search based on the string (e.g. so whereas entering “blue shirt” would previously have listed items matching “blue” or “shirt”, it will now attempt to limit results to results which have “blue” and “shirt” in their descriptions.

Upcoming Changes

  • “Marketplace spring cleaning” is about to start.
    • This means that if a merchant has not logged-in to the MP for two years, and they have listings which have not seen any sales in the part year, those items will be unlisted.
    • Similarly, if the Merchant has not logged-in in two years and nothing has been sold through their MP store in the past year, the entire store will be unlisted.
    • This work will be blogged about by the Lab as the work starts.
  • E-mail verification: thus far, e-mail verification has not been a requirement for Merchants to use the Marketplace. This will be changing so that e-mail verification will be a requirement. Again, this will be subject to a blog announcement as it comes in.
  • LL is looking at ways to make keywords more effective and reduce the amount of keyword abuse / spamming; however no decisions on direction with this has yet been reached.

In Brief

  • Requests for MP changes:
    • Add a “date listed” field to all MP listings (and possibly a “date updated” field).
    • Put a mechanism in place to prevent people using the Buy Now button when trying to buy an item as a gift for someone else (e.g. a warning that it does not apply to purchasing gifts).
    • Allowing “sub-stores” wherein Merchants who produce products of different types / for different markets can list their products in “sub-stores” under their main brand without the need to create avatar account to run individual stores. This is something that has been requested numerous times, and LL has previously indicated as something that could be considered, although the idea seems to have been lost along the way.
    • As an alternative to this, it was suggested that Merchants should have the means to categories products in their stores (e.g. have a dedicated category for discounts / special offers customers can easily reference without have to search the entire store.
  • BUG-233043 “On the Marketplace Opengraph Metadata tags no longer work” – this prevents the sharing of links to products on various social media platforms from including previews on the item, with only the URL being displayed. It has been a problem since the end of 2022, and was raised again in a request for the Lab to look into it.
  • Those attending the meeting were asked for thoughts on customers being able to leave product reviews without any verification that had actually purchased the product.
    • This was largely seen as a bad idea, due to the potential for malicious comments / griefing.
    • However, there is a possible use-case here in that it allows users purchasing a product in-world to leave a review where otherwise they have no public voice – although with CasperVend now owned by Linden Lab, and the promise of integration between the two, this might offer a path to allow purchases made via CasperVend vendors to be flagged as “verified” and thus allow their review on the MP.
  • The length of MP URLs and difficulty in using them – together with requests for LL to provide a means of shortening them was discussed.
  • The question was raised as to the Destination Guide either being properly curated so that non-existent locations could be removed – or a means provided to allow users report  those locations they find no longer exist in SL (or at least as the given region). This is something that will be passed back to the Destination Guide team.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023. Venue and time per top of this summary.