Category: SL User Group Meetings

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 15th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

There was a lot of general discussion about animation synchronisation, cloud uplift (the majority of which I’ve already reported in my SUG and TPVD meetings of late), etc., none of which should out as really reportable.

SL Viewers

Default Viewer

The Mesh Uploader viewer, version 6.4.10.549686, was promoted to de facto release status on Wednesday, October 14th. This viewer provides additional information on mesh models prior to upload, with contributions from Beq Janus from the Firestorm team and also revisions by the Lab’s viewer team. Cosmetic changes with this viewer include:

• Upgrade to preview resolution to 1024×1024.
• Scalable preview window.
• Fixed display of colours in preview.
• Adjustment of colours to better correlate to in world (yellow frame of mesh, blue tint physics).
• Rearrange UI elements to give more space for the preview even when not scaled up.

Informational changes  in this viewer include two new boxes: cost breakdown and physics breakdown – these provide access to information that has always been available to the viewer form the upload costs update message but were not previously shown to the user.

Legacy Profiles

The Legacy Profiles viewer (version 6.3.2.530836 at the time of writing) has been stuck awaiting a web-side update, but as the web team are all focused on Uplift work, attempts are being made to work around the delay in order to get the viewer moving again.

Graphics

• Work has resumed at looking towards a replacement for OpenGL, particularly as a result of Apple’s plans to deprecate all support for it on their systems.
  • Vulkan had been an option under examination, and additional logging was added to the viewer to help identify how many users are on systems capable of running it.
  • It now turns out that a rather high number of users (up to a 1/3 of all users) are running Second Life systems that do not have support for Vulkan (e.g. those 5+years old, and notably systems with Intel integrated graphics).
  • As a result other options are also being looked at, as is the potential for supporting people on older hardware separately to those using systems capable of running with more recent graphics APIs – although this is an option the Lab would approach with caution, due to the added complexities in maintenance.
• In addition, the graphics team is looking to see if the viewer UI rendering can be divorced from other aspects of viewer rendering to see if any performance improvements can be obtained by keeping the two separate – currently, a lot of cycles are taken up in the drawing of things like UI panels and buttons.

Jellydoll / ARCTan

• Vir has been working on some updates to the Project Jelly viewer (version 6.4.10.549690 at the time of writing).
• This viewer is a series of performance improvements related to Jellydoll avatars, and the additional work should be appearing in an update to the project viewer soon. After that, Vir is hoping to completely re-focus on the ARCTan work, which will eventually fold-in the Jellydoll work as well.
• Should he be able to switch back to ARCTan, the work will remain split between avatar rendering (to be tackled first), and then in-world object rendering to follow along at some point after.
• The work on avatar rendering will initially be focused on the data gathering aspect and better refining the avatar complexity calculations, followed by UI work to deliver more meaningful and consistent information to users about the rendering impact of their own avatar and those around them.

Date of Next Meeting

• Thursday, October 29th, 2020.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 1st 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Content Creation Related SL Viewers

EEP Fixes

As noted in my viewer release summary for the week and my SUG meeting summary, the EEP fixes have been promoted to de facto release status with the issuing and promotion of the Love Me Render (LMR) #4 viewer (version 6.4.9.549455, at the time of writing).

Mesh Uploader

• As a result of the EEP fixes release, the Mesh Uploader was merged to the release code, with version 6.4.10.549686,  issued on Thursday, October 1st.
• If there are no significant problems with this version of the viewer, it is likely to be the next  viewer to be promoted to de facto release status. There is some debate as to whether this will occur in week #41, or if LL will hold off for a week in order to not make three back-to-back promotions in as many weeks.

Jelly Dolls Project Viewer

• The Jellydoll Project viewer also merged up to the current release code, with version 6.4.10.549690 issued on October 1st.

New Maintenance RC Viewer

• A new Maintenance RC viewer, coded named Cachaça, was issued on October 1st. Among other things, version 6.4.10.549752 includes several more EEP fixes and also some fixes for CEF.

Viewer UI Improvements

Steeltoe Linden, who handles most (/all) for the work around the viewer UI attended the meeting in what was billed as potentially the start of a semi-regular appearance in order to discuss viewer UI updates that the Lab is considering.

• For the first session, he raised what was referred to as a “trivial” change: offering a new inventory icon for HUDs.
• Instead of showing HUDs as an object cube, the idea is to show it as a distinct icon type – the example being a cog-like icon, in order to make HUDs more easily recognisable when scanning Inventory folders.
• This icon would also be visible in the Outfit and Received Items panels.

• The viewer would use the HUD attach point (stored with the object data)  to identify HUDs as such, and so display the icon.
• It was noted that this could (allowing for trying to remember all of the icon types) pave the way for items that attach directly to the avatar have a unique icon type.
• One suggestion at the meeting was to also add HUDs as a distinct option when filtering inventory, and Steeltoe indicated he has already ask one of the viewer engineers to look into this.
  • However, he noted that filtering works on object type, rather than attachment location, so it would require an additional layer of code for filters to distinguish attachments like HUDs from other objects.  This might make filtering for things like HUDs too computationally expensive.
• Overall, the response from those at the meeting was positive.

Proposed Bakes on Mesh Improvement: llWearFromInventoryTemp

• This is a proposal by Rider Linden that has been filed as a feature request – BUG-229423 to allow public comment / feedback.
• It is aimed primarily for Bakes on Mesh (BOM), but may have wider applications.
• The basic idea is defined within the feature request:

Mesh bodies used a system of alpha cuts to hide parts of the body that should be obscured by clothing. Alpha cuts were originally controlled through a HUD associated with the body. Clothing creators and body vendors then developed a system to automatically turn some of these alpha cuts on and off through a script in the clothing item.

BOM provides no similar mechanism. In order to hide parts of the body, the users must search through their inventory for an appropriate alpha layer and attach it or add it to the outfit manually.

This function will allow clothing creators to create BoM enabled clothing without forcing their consumers to search for the appropriate alpha layer.

• So essentially, it would be a scripted function clothing makers could use to ensures that when a clothing layer is utilised in BOM, the appropriate alpha is also applied, and similarly, when the item is no longer being worn, the alpha is automatically detached.
• Due to the way SL is configured, this would only apply to the Clothing object type (skin, hair, eyes, and shape would be excluded, as only one of each of these can be worn at any time, so trying to deal with what happens to these wearing / removing, if they were included in the system becomes complicated and potentially conflicting.
  • If you wear clothing that have a shape associated with it, the function could end up removing the clothing *and* the shape, leaving your avatar a cloud, for example.
• Currently, the idea is only under consideration – and if feasible, any work on it would not occur until after the cloud uplift work has been completed.
• This approach would also offer an alternative approach to part of the idea put forward by Cathy Foil at the last CCUG meeting, which would require LL to adopt elements of the RLV / RLVa code base.
• Precisely how the capability would be implemented is still to be determined; there is some antithesis to having a script directly access an agent’s inventory (as RLV / RLVa can do, using the #RLV folder), so the precise functionality might focus more on being driven by script within an attachment (such as a HUD)  or even added to the clothing layer itself (if I am understanding Rider correctly – although I don’t know how this would work in practice).
  • A  negative seen with the RLV / RLVa approach is that it dictates how items that it is to access are organised (through the #RLV folder tree), which in turn places constraints on the freedom users have to organise their inventory as they would prefer.
  • Further, given that people do organise their inventories differently to one another, having a  script that accesses inventory directly means that it must somehow be able to determine where and how within their individual inventories users have organised and placed  clothing layers and alphas.

Main Grid Regions in the Cloud

Publicly-accessible regions on the main grid (Agni) have been quietly appearing. As far as I know, these are predominantly Linden-owned regions – such as Hippotropolis, used for various in-work user group meetings (although I would suspect any private region holders who may have their regions running on AWS to be potentially subject to an NDA  or similar, in order to avoid LL being inundated with requests for regions to be uplifted).

Patch Linden also posted a forum update on a number of topics (the availability of Linden Stilt homes, the work in partnering with various organisations with in-world events, for example), which included a reiteration of the Lab’s view that the Uplift project is proceeding well, and the work should hopefully be completed by the end of the year.

Date of Next Meeting

• Thursday, October 15th, 2020.