Category: SL User Group Meetings

Update, September 4th: not long after this article was published, the 360° Snapshot project viewer was updated, so the viewer list here has been updated, and my first impressions of the update viewer can be found here.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, September 2nd 2021 at 13:00 SLT, and the TPV Developer’s meeting of Friday, September 3rd.

With the meetings once again falling on the same week, and with the degree of overlap in content between the two, core discussion points from both have been combined into this one summary. The TPV meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and her video is embedded at the end of this article, for those wishing to refer directly to that meeting.

Meeting Details

• CCUG meetings are held on alternate Thursdays each month (generally the 1st and 3rd Thursday, vagaries of month start / end dates allowing), with dates available via the SL Public Calendar. The venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.
• TPV Developer meetings are generally held on alternate Fridays each month, although dates are not currently listed in the SL Public Calendar. The venue for meetings is at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
• Both meetings are currently chaired by Vir Linden, and are led using Voice, although attendees can use either Voice or text to provide input / feedback (with text generally being the preferred medium).

SL Viewer

MeshOptimiser Project Viewer

The MeshOptimiser project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, was issued on Wednesday, September 1st. This viewer replaces obsolete GLOD mesh simplification in the mesh uploader with a newer Mesh Optimiser library.

About Level of Detail (LOD): as your observation point moves away from mesh objects, so does the need to render them in high / complex detail, as that complexity / detail naturally becomes less visually distinguishable. One of the more effective ways to reduce rendering complexity of a scene is to provide object models with simplified Level of Detail (LOD) that can be displayed at greater distances, reducing the rendering load on the viewer. MeshOptimiser is an improved means of achieving this. It simplifies a mesh to fit specified limits within the mesh uploader, producing models with multiple layers of greater LOD simplicity.

Notes:

• This viewer currently includes an option to continue to use GLOD, if preferred, although this may be removed in the future.
• Currently, MeshOptimiser is only being used in mesh uploader, it is not being employed within the mesh rendering pipe.
• The use of MeshOptimiser does not alter the LOD validation code in the uploader – although this is seen by creators  as something that needs addressing (and is something that Beq Janus of the Firestorm Team, who has been submitting code contributions related to the uploader has been looking at).
• There is some concern that if MeshOptimiser does not support edge protection, it could have a negative impact on mesh clothing, which has been noted by the lab.

Performance Floater Project Viewer

The Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, was issued on Thursday, September 2nd.  This viewer introduces a new floater that pulls together options related to viewer performance under a new toolbar button somewhat confusingly called (in comparison to the viewer’s use of “Performance” in its name) of “Graphics Speed”. See my separate article on this preliminary release of this viewer for more information.

Remaining Viewer Pipeline

• Release viewer: version version 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF Update RC viewer, issued July 24 and promoted August 10  – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Happy Hour Maintenance 2 RC viewer, version 6.4.23.562602, dated August 20.
  • Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.22.561873, dated August 9.
  • Grappa Maintenance RC, version 6.4.22.561850, dated July 29.
• Project viewers:
  • 360° Snapshot project viewer, version 6.4.23.563579, issued September 3.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The 360° Snapshot project viewer should see an update in the next few days.
• A update for the Copy / Paste viewer has an update currently with the viewer QA team, and which should hopefully be appearing “pretty soon”.
• The Muscadine project viewer has been removed from the available project viewers, as there is no simulator side support for it. This does not mean the project has been abandoned – it is just on hold until work can resume and the necessary simulator support implemented.
• As a part of reducing the volume of viewer updates that are being queued either as Alternate Viewers or awaiting entering project or RC status, LL is looking to start combining updates into single releases. As a part of / start to this process the two Maintenance RCs that are currently available (Grappa and Happy Hour) are likely to be merged.

Graphics News

• The work to Integrate the Tracy debugger / system analyser  to allow for better cross-platform profiling of client hardware to help with cross-platform graphics development is now drawing to a close, with an internal test viewer producing worthwhile client analysis data.
• Work is progressing with the next batch of graphics updates that will see light of day in the Love Me Render 6 RC viewer at some point.

Aditi Log-ins

As a result of the move to AWS, logging-in to Aditi, the Beta grid, for testing purposes, etc., has been a issue for some tome, both in terms of being able to log-in and in getting inventory correctly synced with Main grid (Agni) inventory.

• The inventory syncing issues now appear to be resolved, although anyone still encountering problems is asked to file a support ticket.
• There has been some improvement on the ability to log-in to Aditi, although issues with time-outs due to back-end handshaking failures are still apparent. Some have lengthened the timeout set via the LoginSRVTimeout Debug setting to try to overcome this
• Further log-in fixes for Aditi are in progress (including for the time-out issue), but no time frame at present on when they will be deployed.

In Brief

• An invite-only “creators channel” has been started on Discord by a group of users. While not an official LL communications channel, some Lindens have been invited to join it, and have been taking questions.
  • This move is not seen as particularly helpful to content creators in general or those interested in content creation due to its “invite only” status.
  • Some at the CCUG meeting voice the opinion that a better channel for passing question to the Lab ahead of meetings would be via the official forums.
• BUG-227543 “Set ‘Press to talk’ as default mode in Official Viewer” has been on the accepted list for two years, but is coming to the fore again due to new users entering SL being unaware their microphone is live for the moment they enter SL on the official viewer and then accidentally activate Voice. The change is now apparently being tested, and so will hopefully be appearing in a Maintenance RC at some point Soon™.
• Feature request BUG-215951 “Option to allow nearest neighbour on textured faces” currently has a status of Closed, although it is seen as a potentially useful feature. The major issue in trying to implement it is that it would require a new field in the asset database for each face on an object, and there is no easy way for LL to further extend the allowable per object data fields.
  • This formed part of a wider conversation around texture rendering, including the use of texture atlases, changes that might be possible with the eventual shift to a new rendering engine and the potential for procedural based rendering to be implemented for SL.
• Concern continues over the issues many are experiencing with group chat and the manner in which it is giving rise to an “exodus” of people from SL to Discord (at least for group chat purposes).
  • The fear is that as people become more accustomed to Discord and its features and the ease with which they can communicate / share, etc., they’ll have increasingly less reason to log-into Second Life. Given that Discord tends to be used alongside of SL rather than in lieu of it, it’s hard to judge if such fears are valid.
  • One potential source of frustration that does tend to be felt is that when this issue is raised, it can often – if unintentionally – appear to be dismissed with comments akin to “we’re aware of the problems”.
  • That said, feature request BUG-230899 “Split Group Chat from Groups and Extend its Functionality” has been accepted for future consideration.
• Catznip is testing an option to reduce the resolution of the screen buffer(s) in the viewer via slider (e.g. so a 1080p screen can be set to a buffer of 720p or even 540p). This has the benefit of speeding up performance (do to lower-resolution rendering, but it can made the world look blurry as a result. However, LL has expressed an interesting in taking a look at the code if contributed.
• Source Filmmaker is a tool that has been developed for making mini movies using video games, and being able to edit scenes, set poses, etc., in real-time “within the game” (so to speak), essentially by caching assets, etc., locally and then manipulating them. The question was asked whether a similar tool – IF it could be made to work in SL – would violate things like DMCA. Such a tool would require a detailed proposal for LL to pass to their legal team before a considered response could be given.

 

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, August 19th 2021 at 13:00 SLT, and the TPV Developer’s meeting of Friday, August 20th.

With the meetings once again falling on the same week, and with the degree of overlap in content between the two, core discussion points from both have been combined into this one summary. The TPV meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and her video is embedded at the end of this article, for those wishing to refer directly to that meeting.

Meeting Details

• CCUG meetings are held on alternate Thursdays each month (generally the 1st and 3rd Thursday, vagaries of month start / end dates allowing), with dates available via the SL Public Calendar. The venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.
• TPV Developer meetings are generally held on alternate Fridays each month, although dates are not currently listed in the SL Public Calendar. The venue for meetings is at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
• Both meetings are currently chaired by Vir Linden, and are led using Voice, although attendees can use either Voice or text to provide input / feedback (with text generally being the preferred medium).

SL Viewer

There have been no official viewer updates during the week, leaving the current crop of available versions as follows:

• Release viewer: version version 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF Update RC viewer, issued July 24 and promoted August 10  – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.22.561873, issued August 9.
  • Grappa Maintenance RC, version 6.4.22.561850, issued July 29.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
  • 360° Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The next viewer that might go directly to de facto release status could be the Mac Notifications fix viewer (which has yet to even appear in RC).
• However, depending on how QA work goes with that viewer, it is possible the Grappa Maintenance RC viewer might be promoted to release status.
• As a result of recent internal testing (see my week #33 Simulator User Group summary), the 360° Snapshot viewer is having some further massaging of the the UI, but is expected to be passed to the QA team for checking / testing in the coming week, so may not be that far from being issued as an updated project viewer.
  • As a result of recent feedback from users, the Lab is now considering updating various web properties such as the Marketplace to make use of  360° images (Place Pages used to be able to use them, but may also require update to work with the newer viewer). If this work goes ahead, it will not be tied directly to the the release of the viewer.
  • Output from the internal testing can be found on Alexa Linden’s Flickr stream – be sure to click on images to activate them.
• The Legacy Profiles viewer is still awaiting some back-end work, which has yet to be scoped / scheduled, so an update is unlikely to be appearing in the short-term.

Upcoming Viewers

• There is currently an internal bottleneck at the Lab which is slowing the issuing of viewer updates / viewer versions. This is in the process of being addressed.
• The viewer with the updates for presenting performance-related information is “close” to being  ready for issue as a project viewer.
• Tracy Debugger / System Analyser:
  • Integrating the Tracy debugger / system analyser to allow for better cross-platform profiling of client hardware to help with cross-platform graphics development has been a focus for the Graphics team of late.
  • This is nearing a point where a viewer with Tracy will be ready to be made public. However, the library will be off by default, as a) it has a performance overhead when running in the viewer; b) it requires a server running Tracy for the data produce to be analysed. Developers / viewer compilers who have the necessary environment for analysing the data should be able to enable it prior to viewer compiling, if they wish to use it.
• Mobile Client:
  • The new features for the iOS version mentioned during the August Web User Group meeting appear to be the addition of push notification support and some  additional UI work.
  • The Android version remains on hold pending the focus shifting from the iOS version.
  • As noted above, the core environment for getting updates on the Mobile client is via the Web User Group (as Keira Linden, who is leading the Product side of Mobile also chairs that meeting), and as a result, I provide monthly updates on Mobile through my WUG meeting summaries.

LOD Generation Viewer

• A new project viewer using the mesh optimiser library for automatic LOD model generation for mesh uploads is getting close to being available for public use. This reportedly works better than the GLOD code that is currently in use.
• For the initial project viewer version(s), once available, creators will have a choice of using either GLOD or the optimiser at upload. Longer-term and depending on internal discussions / the results of actual use of the optimiser library, GLOD may be removed (or at the least, made a non-default option).
• If the use of the library proves sufficiently beneficial, LL might also opt to enable it in real-time against mesh objects that do not have any defined LODs. Doing so could potentially be beneficial for those on lower-end systems (e.g. by reducing the number of draw call being made , etc., as they no longer have to render the “full” model all the time).

Future Work – Avatar Usability

[via the CCUG meeting]

Following the arrival of the new VP of Engineering, Mojo Linden (see: Say Hello to Linden Lab’s New VP of Engineering, Mojo Linden,  aka Andrew Kertesz), there are ongoing discussions at the Lab related to future work.

While there is nothing official to report on this at present, a focus of these discussions is very much on the question of avatar usability. While this was already a focus for the Lab prior to Mojo arriving, it now seems “likely” that this work may be stepped up, with changes appearing “over the coming months” – and will probably include viewer UI updates and well as other yet-to-be-publicly-defined changes.

The mention of this again raised the question of allowing completely custom skeletons into SL / rebuilding the entire avatar skeleton/rig. Both have technical issues associated with them (e.g. backward compatibility issues in the case of the latter), and also non-technical issues (e.g. the risk of further marketplace fragmentation / user confusion over what is supposed to work with which avatar types in the case of both), so the Lab is not currently looking at either option.

In terms of market fragmentation, it was suggested that some mitigation might be provided by LL producing some form of standard “developer kit”, rather than creators relying on third party tools.  The problem here being that a) LL does not have the resources to devote to doing so, and users are potentially fair more aware of the internals of applications such as Blender, Maya, etc., to be able to provide and maintain such tools far more effectively.

User Suggestion: Pro-Active Complexity Monitoring

[via the CCUG meeting]

User Lucia Nightfire has proposed the Lab consider a means by which avatar complexity values can be stored on the back-end and made available to simulators as avatars move between regions, such that it can be polled by (or supplied to) viewers within the region a user is entering.

The idea here is that by pro-actively supplying complexity information to viewers in a region and allowing them to compare it to the Maximum Complexity value set within them, they can make a simple determination of whether to fully render the incoming avatar or go directly to “Jellydolling” it without having to download all the associated geometry and attachment data, etc., in order to locally calculate how the incoming avatar should be rendered (as is currently the case).

This approach would be beneficial to the user experience, simply be reducing the amount of work the viewer has to carry out calculating avatar complexity. While this particular idea hasn’t been directly considered by the Lab, the idea of greater automation in general (where applicable –  see the notes on mesh optimisation above) could well help improve people’s Second Life experience, particularly those on lower-end systems. However, implementing such capabilities will require a degree of back-end work, and as such are not on the the immediate road map at this point in time.

In Brief

• Issues arising from viewer changes made to accommodate the custom key mappings capability – LL are aware of a number of issues relating to the introduction of the custom key mappings viewer. Fixes are in the works, but no dates on when they might be made available or in which Maintenance viewer. These issues include the following reported bugs:
  • BUG-231083 “Rapidly left clicking objects or attachments while the Edit menu is open triggers a double-click teleport”.
  • BUG-230983 “Holding of modifier keys ALT and CTRL ignored when occurring in combination with double-click teleporting” (Kokua has already implemented their own fix for BUG-230983, which has also been offered available to LL..
  • BUG-230922 “Right Alt + Right Shift + H shortcut to show/hide HUDs no longer works when a floater is in focus”.
• The announcement that the use of Gacha systems is to be discontinued in Second Life from the end of September has raised questions concerning the exploit by which some individuals have been able to use an exploit to crash a region in such a way that No Copy items would be duplicated on a restart (thus allowing them to make multiple copies of Gacha items). This issue is now being looked at again by the Lab.
• The HTTP2 update work is awaiting the CDN(s) used by LL to implement HTTP2 support. This is becoming something of an internal hot topic, as the lack of HTTP2 progress is also hampering cURL advancement on the back-end.
• Viewer stats: TPVs wishing to obtain stats on use, etc., from the Lab should e-mail Vir Linden to request a report.

CCUG Specific Questions / Items

• Is there potential for increasing the number of allowed face/material slots for mesh objects (8 per single object)? – This is actually a limit that was pre-dates the arrival of mesh, which “inherited” it. As such, any change to this would be fairly substantive in nature, and thus is not something the Lab is currently considering.
  • Some at the meeting also felt any such change could have a noticeable negative impact without a “proper” mesh accounting system being put in place, or SL moves away from the current drawcall overhead.
• Could a forum thread be opened to allow content creation questions to be asked in advance of meeting, particularly those that might require referencing to over teams within LL (e.g. the simulator engineers) in order to gain feedback input? – This is seen as a potentially good idea, and will be looked into, along with having a member of the simulator engineering team attend CCUG meetings more regularly.
• Requests are again being made for LL to revisit Animesh to provide support for body shapes, attachments, Bakes on Mesh, re-evaluation of the Land Impact associated with Animesh objects, etc.
  • Some of this work require extension to viewer capabilities and back-end services (e.g. Outfit support for BoM + processing via the Bake Service), and are thus more long-term.
  • Others aspects (e.g. re-evaluating Animesh LI) could be said to be dependent upon other projects (e.g. ARCTan, and re-evaluating the impact of in-world objects), and thus are awaiting work to resume on these projects – and it is hoped the ARCTan work will resume sooner rather than later.