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, November 5th 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.

SL Viewer

At the time of writing, the current selection of official viewers (release, RC and projects) was as follows:

• Current release viewer version 6.4.10.549686, formerly the Mesh Uploader RC promoted on October 14 – No Change.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • Cachaça Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.11.551139, issued October 27.
• Project viewers:
  • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.11.551213, November 2.
  • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.10.549685, November 2.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

ARCTan / Jellydoll / Imposter Avatars

• Bug fixes for Jellydolls include:
  • Fixing an issue where jellydolled avatars could suddenly vanish with viewed on Mac systems.
  • Ensuring Amimesh attachments on imposter avatars update in sync with the avatar.
  • Impostered avatars and their Animesh attachments are currently rendered entirely separately to one another, so the code might be looked at to unify their rendering.
  • A general clean-up on the imposter code, which has led to the discovery that while code was added to the viewer to check to see if impostered avatars had been updated, it has never been hooked up to updating the imposter avatar as rendered by the viewer, leaving them frozen. This is now being fixed.
• Once the Mac issue is sorted, the play is to merge the Jellydoll updates back into the ARCTan project (from which they were split earlier in the year).
  • However, the current Jellydoll work will progress as is through the currently project viewer continued through to RC and, ultimately, release.
• As a reminder:
  • The current ARCTan work is focused on the viewer-side updates to avatar complexity calculations.
  • Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.

Graphics

• No news on work for replacing OpenGL.
• Ptolemy Linden from the Graphics team has been working on performance improvements, notably related to Linden Water rendering. This work is currently focused on providing a means for those on low-end systems to completely disable water reflection rendering entirely and / or to make water opaque, both to reduce the rendering load.
• The entire water rendering issue is complicated for a range of reasons (e.g. the fact the water plane is still drawn at altitude even though its appearance is occluded by the sky sphere, the fact that any changes made for some users could impact the “shared experience” / expected behaviour for others, etc.).
• Ptolemy also noted that the viewer collects a lot of static rendering information that could potentially be used to assist with better drawing / rendering of scenes, and this could be something that might be looked at in more detail once the Project Uplift work is completed.

Date of Next Meeting

• Thursday, November 19th.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 29th 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.

Jellydoll / ARCTan

• Vir has been working on some bug fixes to the Project Jelly viewer (version 6.4.10.549690 at the time of writing), and this work is now with the Lab’s QA team. When issues, this will see the viewer also based on the current release viewer code base.
• As a reminder:
  • The current ARCTan work is focused on the viewer-side updates to avatar complexity calculations.
  • Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.

Graphics

• The Graphics team is still looking at options for replacing OpenGL, particularly as a result of Apple’s plans to deprecate all support for it on their systems.
• The OpenGL project is large-scale, so the Graphic team is also looking at other shorter-term projects related to performance improvements. These may include:
  • Possible optimisations for people on low-end systems (as noted in my previous CCUG summary, roughly 1/3 of all users are running on systems that do not support Vulkan and many of these systems are more than 5 years old).
  • Linden Water: since the last TPV meeting (see: 2020 TPVD meeting week #42: summary) the Lab believe they have determined that the FPS loss seen when rendering Linden Water appears to be related to a combination of the actual rendering and with water reflections. This is still being investigated. One idea to deal with the latter is to completely disable water reflections in the viewer; however, doing this at present affects the sky and the look of the Sun, so again,further investigation is needed.
• 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.

In  Brief / General

• Teleport failures are still under investigation. Beq Janus from Firestorm is also investigation, and has encountered a situation where the failure may be related to the manner in which regions are queried bases on draw distance, and the system potentially becomes confused as to the actual destination.
• Megaprims and relaxing linking constraints (BUG-229551):
  • As  expressed by the feature request, the Lab sees this as being two issues: allowing the use of prims larger than 64m on a size / diameter, and handling region surrounds.
  • In particular, the Lab is looking at the potential of braking out region surrounds (“sim surrounds”) as a supported feature in their own right, simply because of the size of the use case. One suggestion for this is to have what is seen beyond a the edges of an individual region to be definable as texturing, rather than just the default of Linden Water.
  • Increasing prim sizing beyond the current maximum is seen as problematic as the size constraint touches on multiple aspects of the simulator code (e.g. Interest Lists being one) that would have to be overhauled – which is not something the Lab wants to undertake in the near future, although this does do preclude the potential for very large prim sizes at some point.
• The cloud migration work has left the Lab with a certain amount of “technical deficit” – work  deferred in favour of simply getting systems and services transitioned to running on AWS infrastructure and hardware. This means that once the Uplift Project is completed, there will be a number of areas of simulator and back-end services that will need to be re-visited.
• Potential projects to follow-on projects outside of the graphics performance updates mentioned above could include:
  • Updating the default terrain texture.
  • Further work on easing the new user experience,
  • Further work on viewer UI improvements.
  • Streaming changing an avatar’s appearance.
• Bone uploads: the question was asked that why, given Bento provides 120+ bones, single avatar sub-mesh uploads are limited to a maximum of 110 bones. The reason is that 110 bones is the maximum some graphics systems can handle in a single upload before things go wrong.

Date of Next Meeting

• Check the CCUG wiki page.