The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 20th, 2022 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.
On Tuesday, September 20th, the simhosts on the Main SLS channel were updated with simulator release 574921, comprising the fixes from release 574611 + BUG-232593 “Mesh physics shapes changing unexpectedly when rezzed on a 574611 sim”, introduced with that update.
On Wednesday, September 21st, the simhosts on the RC channels will be restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 574921.
Available Official Viewers
On Monday, September 19th, Maintenance P RC viewer updated to version 6.6.5.575055.
The rest of the current official viewers remain as:
Release viewer: version 6.6.4.575022 – hotfix for Crash at ~LLModalDialog() – promoted September 15.
Release channel cohorts:
Maintenance 3 RC viewer, version 6.6.4.574727, September 1.
Project viewers:
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.574545, issued on August 30.
Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.571296, May 10.
In Brief
The next simulator maintenance release will have two new functions llGetObjectLinkKey (specified under llGetLinkKey) and llSHA256String. These should be available for testing on “a few regions” (no names specified) on Aditi by Thursday, September 23rd.
There are two further feature requests for an llHash function – BUG229023 and BUG-41440.
A further dicussion on region crossings, initially focused on BUG-230934.
The recent Mediaon a Prim (MOAP) exposures were raised at the meeting, together with the general prboem of MoAP vulnerabilities – but given media handling is viewer-centric, there was little to be said from the Lab’s side in terms of addressing problems (although the upcming tool chain upates for the viewer should at least allow LL to adopt more recent and better secured Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) versions).
Update, September 19th, 2022: in response to the discussion concerning the upcoming mesh new starter avatars and encouraging creators to help develop an ecosystem of clothing and accessories for them (see In Brief, below), Alexa Linden forwarded the following comment to me:
Linden Lab plans to release devkits for our new Default Avatars after we’ve gone live with them. We’re waiting to make sure everything goes smoothly and no tweaks are needed. Once we’re happy with the results we’ll work on the documentation and devkits to make them available for ALL creators interested in supporting these avatars.
Alexa Linden, Septmber 19th, 2022
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, September 15th 2022 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.
This is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript.
Official Viewers Status
Release viewer: version 6.6.4.575022 – hotfix for Crash at ~LLModalDialog() – promoted September 15 – NEW.
The glTF 2.0 standards are very specific about where tangent spaces are expected to be and behave. To this end, Second Life will use mikkTSpace tangents at least for PBR support.
There are internal discussions going on at the Lab as to whether this should be retroactively applied to existing meshes. If this is the case, meshes will have to be re-uploaded in order to have the correct tangents, do to the way bounding boxes are currently handled (the DA upload changes the coordinate frame of the original mesh, resulting in tangents being generated which do not match the normal map).
As it is, use of mikkTSpace tangents does increase Land Impact (LI), as the tangents are being stored inside the mesh alongside the normal information. However, LL are currently running experiments to see if the tangents can be generated and stored without altering LI.
Until it is shown whether or not these experiments work, LL is requesting holding off on discussions about possible LI increases until they know what the likely scenarios is.
Alongside of mikkTSpace, this project will use per pixel binormal generation.
There is a mismatch between the colour space handling swatch in the viewer’s material’s editor and the glTF specification; the latter all calls for these colours to be in liner space, and in the viewer they are in SRGB space. This means that the values displayed by the swatch does not match the values which would be typed into a tool like substance Painter. It’s not currently clear how this mis-match will be handled.
Viewer:
Transparency and double-sided materials are now supported in the PBR development viewer.
To maintain commonality with the glTF specification, albedo in the PBR viewer is now called base colour.
Access to the PBR development server is via the Content Creation Discord channel, and requests to join that channel should be made in person at CCUG meetings. I am no longer able (at LL’s request) to furnish such information.
Again, this project is only focused on the materials elements of the glTF 2.0 specification, it does not including glTF mesh model import – although there is potential traction for this be a follow-on project, with the goal of eventually replacing COLLADA support for mesh uploads.
Ideally the Graphics team would like to structure work such that elements of the glTF 2.0 specification can be selected and then implemented within Second Life, thus presenting an “extensible” means of support the standard.
Jiras from the Lab and users will now be available in the public Jira for ease of reference.
Meetings are held on Aditi (the beta grid) at the Castalet region Puppetry Theatre on alternate Thursdays at 13:00 SLT. The next meeting will be on Thursday, September 22nd, 2022.
Some users have been looking at using OpenXR for Puppetry and enjoying some success.
In Brief
The New Linden Lab mesh New Starter avatar (see here for more): the project has reached the stage of the Lab (through the LDPW) generating a fixed set of content to support the avatar, which will be made available through the Library.
There is – as Patch Linden has indicated – the potential for content creators to be encouraged to support this new body and potentially provide a support ecosystem of clothing and accessories – although this will require a dev kit.
It’s been suggested that some existing clothing / accessory creators be invited to help test the new avatar.
Mention of the new mesh avatar triggered an extended discussion on the current state (and, for creators) pitfalls of the current multi-body / head marketplace and providing content, content efficiency, etc. As a more philosophical discussion (at this point in time) than a clear set of opportunities for improvements, the discussion largely falls outside of this summary.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 13th, 2022 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.
On Tuesday, September 13th, the simhosts on the Main SLS channel were re-started without any deployment, leaving them on simulator version 574550.
On Wednesday, September 14th, all simhosts on the RC channels will receive a fix for BUG-232593 “Mesh physics shapes changing unexpectedly when rezzed on a 574611 sim”. This fix should not involve any other changes to the simulator version.
In short, there was a change that attempted to correct some bounding box calculations and in a couple cases it would wildly change the mass and centre of gravity.
Available Official Viewers
On Tuesday, September 13th, the Izarra Maintenance RC, version 6.6.4.574885 (dated September 9th) was promoted to de facto release status.
The rest of the current official viewers remain as:
Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.4.574750, issued September 6.
Maintenance 3 RC viewer, version 6.6.4.574727, September 1.
Project viewers:
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.574545, issued on August 30.
Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.571296, May 10.
In Brief
Display names not updating correctly (see this grid status update): this may be related to a back-end server issue, rather than a table update issue, but is apparently still under investigation.
A general discussion on scripted access to block lists – although the use case wasn’t clearly explained (e.g. scripted access to one’s own block list – or others of others (and if so why & what about the potential for breach of privacy?)). This is now pending a feature request to clarify.
BUG-231802 “Prevent vehicles from entering parcels their riders cannot access”, together with providing a means for a viewer to request all active ban lines within a region – work still pending, and Leviathan Linden (the Linden Formerly Known As Andrew) offer some insights into the complexities of managing parcel ban collisions, which leads to further discussion wound into other topics.
BUG-232468 “[Feature Request] llGetObjectLinkKey() – A remote equivalent of llGetLinkKey()” – may well by in the next-but one (or two) simulator maintenance update.
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, September 7th, 2022.
These meetings are generally held in-world on the first Wednesday of the month, with dates and venue details available via the SL public calendar. They are usually chaired by Reed Linden, who is the Lab’s Product Manager for the Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
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.
A complete re-write of every route by which users can obtain and hold land, from Premium (+Plus) Linden Homes, obtaining Mainland (incl. Abandoned Land), and private island regions, and renting from private estates.
This involves not only a re-write of existing land-related web pages (again, as examples, the Premium Linden Homes selection page, the Mainland auction page, the region purchase pages (which date from 2005!), etc.), and the development of completely new pages related to land “ownership”.
The work is being carried out using technology that is “new to Linden Lab”.
Initially, this work will not involve any changes to Land tools within the viewer UI. However as the project progresses, it will see changes being made to the viewer’s land management tools, etc., as well.
The first element of the land work to be user-facing will be the new Land Portal, which is expected to be made available in the next few weeks.
This will provide access to land.secondlife.com and offer a “preview” of what form the new “land journey” will take.
[Video: 15:36-17:15] Following the work on the Land Portal, the focus will likely either be on updating the Linden Homes pages OR the price region purchase pages.
Once the Portal is up and running, the Lab will be monitoring where people go on accessing it, which may influence the order in which the land-related web properties are updated.
Secondlife.com Beyond Land
The “land journey” work is the first phase in a larger project to completely update all of the secondlife.com web pages and portals, and which will also eventually encompass Marketplace as well.
Some of the thematic elements of this work can already be seen in places such as join.secondlife.com.
The overall aim of this work is to offer a modern look and feel to the Second Life web presence which is both easier to maintain / update and allows for new capabilities / functionality to be more easily added.
Marketplace Search
This work is to leverage all of the recent work put into “regular” such (e.g. the relevance engine, etc.) for Marketplace Search.
The current focus is on importing all the infrastructure work carried out for Search into the Marketplace search capability, including the framework for the relevance engine.
However, rather than using the current relevance engine, a version specific to Marketplace searches will be built for better optimisation.
The updated Search will likely include additional search options.
The overhaul of the search tools is seen as a further step that will better enable the use of Styles (i.e. single listings with multiple variances (e.g. colours) of the same product), although the first element of this work is liable to be the “next” significant release for the MP.
All of this work is being seen as a lead-in to the potential complete ground-up build and phased implementation of a completely new Marketplace, with 2023 being designated “the year of Marketplace”.
The New User eXperience (NUX) has been identified by the lab’s Executive Team as a major area of focus for the at least next 12 months.
Some of the Lab’s work in this are has been previewed in terms of the upcoming “all mesh” New Starter Avatars (see here and here), but LL recognises more work needs to be done within the NUX as a while.
Questions asked at the meeting (from a Web Team perspective) were:
Are there “silver bullets” existing users think might improve the overall NUX from sign-up to engagement?
Is there something that could be implemented that would immediately change the NUX to improve retention?
What specifically could be done on the web side of things to present a more engaging NUX to incoming users?
Have people specific feedback from recent new users (e.g. those whom they may have asked to come try out SL) which might feed into thinking about improving the NUX (e.g. worries users have expressed in having to download and install the viewer as an “unknown” piece of software, issues of people being pressured into believing they are using the “wrong” viewer in favour of another, etc?
This is liable to be a major topic of conversation at the next WUG, so those with constructive ideas, particularly (but not exclusively) on the web side of NUX, are invited to attend.
Premium Subscriptions – Looking Beyond Premium Plus
Premium Plus take-up is still viewed as being “very successful” to the point the Lab is now considering ideas for other possible Premium subscription options, which may include things like:
“Premium Lite” – which might offer some of the options available in Premium, but not all of them, and at a lower price.
“Premium a-la Carte” – which might offer users the ability to pick and chose at least some of the options available to the current Premium / Plus offerings, each with its own fee, and thus pay a subscription based on the options selected.
No timeline on if / when any new subscription options might arise, what they might comprise or the pricing involved, as this is only in the “discussion” phase within the Lab, but feedback is being taken through the WUG meetings.
In Brief
Multi-factor authentication: moving beyond just the use of a third-party authentication tool (Google Authenticator / Microsoft Authenticator) to offer additional means to complete the MFA process is unlikely to come before 2023.
A further request was made to de-couple Homestead “ownership” from having to hold at least one Full region. While not entirely ruled out for future consideration, there are some very practical considerations around this idea that need to be considered:
One of these is the heavy use of Homesteads by private estates and the potential of severely damaging the market if Homesteads were to be de-coupled from Full region holding at the same price.
Another is the question of whether, if offered at a higher tier than when coupled to Full region holdings ($109 a month), what that tier would be in order to avoid too severe a disruption to the current land market.
Lower mesh upload fees for Premium Plus: this has been indicated as a future Premium Plus benefit. However, it is proving difficult to implement because unlike the other fees for uploads, etc., mesh does not have a “one fee fits all” structure – the cost varies in accordance with things like model complexity, LODs, etc., and injecting a fee reduction based on a percentage calculation into the process is proving to be a more complex task than imagined.
Eliminating store names appearing in Marketplace searches using item names: this is a fix currently being worked on as a part of weighting changes to search (e.g. store names and user names will not carry as much weight as item names).
Conversely, when searching for store names, these should have a higher weighting as the initial MP search updates are deployed.
SL Wiki: it was restated that, outside of various “official” pages, the SL wiki is no longer “officially” supported or subject to updated for a number of reasons.
Feature requests:
BUG-232355 “Group Name Change” given the desire to reduce the proliferation of Groups in SL and the load they can place on various back-end services, this has been a long-running request, now accepted by the Lab.
BUG230941 “Add a store blocklist to the Marketplace” – will possibly be amongst the “Soon ™” Marketplace updates.
BUG-231257 “Incorporate 360 Snapshots in to the Destination Guide” – is viewed as a more nuanced request requiring interaction across different services which may make implementation difficult, but the request has not been ruled out.
Next Meeting
Wednesday, October 5th, 2022. Venue and time per top of this summary.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 6th, 2022 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.
On Tuesday, September 6th, the simhosts on the Main SLS channel were re-started without any deployment, leaving them on simulator version 574550.
On Wednesday, September 7th, all simhosts on the RC channels will likewise be restarted without any deployment, leaving them on simulator release 574611.
Available Official Viewers
On Tuesday, September 6th, the Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer updated to version 6.6.4.574750.
The rest of the current official viewers remain as:
Release viewer: version 6.6.3.574158 – formerly the Profiles RC viewer, dated August 18, promoted August 30 – NEW.
My audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, September 1st 2022 at 13:00 SLT.
My notes and the video from the Third-Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, September 2nd, 2002 at 13:00 SLT. The video is provided by Pantera – my thanks to her for recording it, and can be found at the end of this article. Times stamps to the video are included where relevant in the following notes.
Both meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.
This is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript.
Overall, the work on the viewer side of things – rendering in support of glTF 2.0 standards (and consistency of results when going from a tool like Substance Painter trough the uploader to displaying in SL) is now “near complete”.
It is hoped that it will “not be long” now before a project viewer is more generally available, although there is still additional back-end work to be completed, together with adding support for things like transparency support, ensuring PDR rendering works under linden Water, and similar.
Again, the focus of this work for the first pass is “core” glTF 2,0 support.
Ratified (under ISO) extensions may be up for inclusion in future enhancements to the capability.
Non-ratified extensions will not be up for inclusion in future updates.
In order for to be compliant with glTF, tangents are going to have to be generated in mikkTSpace, where normal maps are applied. This means that existing normal maps within Second Life / normal maps generated without using MikkTSpace may not look correct when rendered via the PBR pipe.
Runitai Linden noted that this project has been a valuable experiment in real-time collaboration between the LL dev and members of the community through the Discord server.
He expressed thanks to the TPV developers and the creators who have assisted the graphic team both in the development of the PBR rendering path and in helping with the reflections probe development, both in terms of code contributions and in helping to identify and address edge-case issues.
He further noted It is hoped more projects might by run this way.
Also pulled into this work are improvements to the texture handling (previously DRTVWR-559), This involves better core utilisation and VRAM usage.
For Windows, this work includes an API which:
More accurately track texture memory use in the viewer and report it back to the client operating system.
Should ensure all available video memory (i.e. that not being used by other applications) on Windows systems is used by the viewer prior to any texture paging occurring.
Works with both Intel and AMD hardware (the latter is important that the OpenGL extensions commonly used by TPVs to achieve a more efficient use of VRAM apparently no longer work correctly on AMD hardware).
For Mac OSX, the new method is to use internal accounting to attempt to track how much video memory is free and then estimate a value of available memory for textures from that.
This is because the operating will not simply report the amount of free video memory (only how much is installed), ruling out the use of a more scientific approach.
Once available in production viewers, these changes should mean those running systems with more recent video cards with decent amounts of free video memory should see much improved texture fetching and loading and see a reduction of textures being paged out to cache (the blurring / sharpening / blurring of textures) seen when the viewer thinks it is using all available / allowed video memory.
A further change is to specify the maximum amount of system memory the viewer can use for textures (16 GB, if available on 64-bit systems; 4GB on 32-bit systems).
The discussion on puppetry mentioned in the above articles will be the first such meeting, and if there is demand for it, there will be a similar meeting on Aditi on alternate Thursdays from September 8th onwards, to be held in the theatre on Aditi Castelet region.
These meetings will (initially) be very development focused rather than creator / user focused, given the overall status of the project.
It is advisable that attendees use the Puppetry project viewer when attending these meetings (available from the Alternate Viewers page), so that they might see any demonstration which may take place during meetings.
It’s important to notice that what has been made available is a very early stage “alpha” release.
The choice of the LLSD Event API Plug-in (LEAP) system means that it should be fairly easy to write third-party code to support capture devices (e.g. from Leap Motion through to (potentially) full body trackers – something Vru Linden is already tinkering with).
The Thursday meetings are being established to discuss precisely these kinds of opportunities and the potential for things like multi camera support, etc.
[TPV video: 31:09-33:24] Given the success of the real-tome collaboration with PBR / Reflection Probes, it is likely the Puppetry project will also follow a similar approach and utilise a Discord channel for discussion and contributions, etc., over and above the fortnightly meetings on Aditi.
This is something the Lab is considering, and has been looking for feedback from users on possible approaches. – see also the previous CCUG / TPVD meetings summary.
If / when this work goes ahead, it will also involve some general code and other technical tidying-up, including:
Reducing the number of different AIS APIs currently in use.
Removing deprecating (and eventually removing) UDP messaging paths for inventory, together with outdates inventory caps (particularly as the latter are superseded.
