Category: SL User Group Meetings

2020 Content Creation User Group week #23 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Beguiled Art Gallery and Studio, May 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, June 4th 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.

Unfortunately, Vir was on a replacement computer for this meeting, and the audio quality was exceptionally bad in the early part of the meeting, making comprehension both in the meeting and when playing back my audio recording very difficult.

Terrain

  • LL has long acknowledged that terrain texture quality in Second Life is not overly great by today’s graphics standards.
  • There is no defined project to update terrain textures as yet, but Vir took the opportunity to take feedback on ideas for what might be included. Some of this comprised:
    • Better texture density for crisper textures.
    • Texture layering to allow for roads / paths, etc.
    • Support for higher resolution textures.
    • Splat maps for textures and for normal and specular support.
  • Voxel support was requested, but this is seen as a much larger project than terrain texturing, we Linden Lab to go that route, and it is certainly not something on the cards for the foreseeable future.

Jelly Dolls / Avatar Rendering

  • Vir continues to work on this and has (I believe) a viewer with some of his ideas included available for internal testing or review at the Lab.

Project Muscadine (Animesh Follow-On)

Project Summary

Currently: offering the means to change an Animesh size parameters via LSL.

Current Status

  • Still officially on hold.
  • Attach points support has been requested and could be a “next step”.
  • However, when work is resumed, the emphasis will be on fixing the identified bugs around the LSL parameter setting process

In brief

  • EEP: LL are still looking to correct:
    • Specularity (shininess) issues – see BUG-228781 and BUG-228581. One of these issues is now fixed internally to the Lab, the other is “in progress”. When deployed, should see behaviour return to pretty much how it was pre-EEP, how where the fixes will fit in viewer updates is still TBD.
    • Issues with the environment settings for Mainland. This has proven harder to fix. It appears that the wrong environment settings were baked into the Mainland regions, and the most direct means of correcting this is by manually correcting them.
  • The EEP issues – which arguably show things as they *should* appear, but which in doing so “break” content (hence trying to get the “fixes” in s that assets don’t have to be corrected & re-uploaded, etc.), sparked a discussion on how indicated changes to the rendering pipeline will be handled. Essentially these will be “opt in” for content created after any updates are deployed; old content will be “opt out”, to avoid breakage.
  • Next meeting: Thursday, June 18th, 13:00 SLT.

May 2020 Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes are taken from my recording of the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020. These meetings are held monthly, generally on the first Wednesdays of the month, with dates and details of the meetings available via the Web User Group wiki page.

When reading these notes, please keep in mind:

  • This is not intended as a chronological transcript of the meeting. Items are drawn together by topic, although they may have been discussed at different points in the meeting.
  • Similarly, and if included, any audio extracts appearing in these summaries are presented by topic heading, rather than any chronological order in which they may have been raised during the meeting (e.g. if “topic X” is mentioned early in a meeting and then again half-way through a meeting, any audio comments related to that topic that might be included in these reports will be concatenated into a single audio extract).

Account Self-Reactivation

  • Previously, if a user left Second Life and asked for their account to be de-activated, it would require a support ticket to have the account re-activated at a future date, should the user wish to return to SL and to that account.
  • Users can now re-activate their account directly.
  • This is seen as a way to help people returning to Second Life as a result of the SARS-CoV-2 situation to be able to resume using their “old” accounts, rather than having to fully start over without having to soak up support personnel time in re-activating an account.
  • To work, a returning user must know both the account name / password and the e-mail address used to create the account.
  • This method doesn’t replace raising a support ticket for account re-activation, so people can still file a ticket if they do not have all the required information.
  • Details on account reactivation can be found here.

Mobile Client

  • The iOS version is now in a closed alpha featuring some residents.
  • In keeping with the Lab’s plans, this version offers the ability to communicate via IM, and has a basic Friends listing.
  • Further updates will follow  – the next being the addition of Abuse Reporting support and improved management for the Friends list.
  • Once the Lab believe the client has an initial set of functions to make it useful as a communications tool, it will will move to a beta phase and made available to a wider cohort of users for further testing.
  • Work is progressing on an Android client, but it will take time for it to reach a point where it is ready for testing. When it is ready, it will likely follow a similar Alpha / Beta test process to the iOS version.
  • Additional work on SL web properties is also being carried out in relation to the Mobile client.

In Brief

  • The Adult Swim event held in May heavily involved the web team, and similar events are apparently being planned for the future.
  • Name Changes:
    • In response to requests, the list of last names provided on the Name Change page can now be seen by Basic members, so they can review the currently available names without have to upgrade first.
Basic users can now see the list of available last names on the Name Change page, so they can check to see if there is a name they’d like before they upgrade to Premium to use the capability.
    • No indication of how frequently the list of last names will updated, but plans remain to change out names once they reach a certain point of use and / or fail to gain traction and use.
    • There will be a blog post ahead of any update to allow people who what to take a name before it might vanish from the list can do so.
  • Work continues on deploying the updates Second Life logo / font (see Out with the green, in with the blue) across web properties as they are naturally updated for other reasons.
  • There was a reminder that user in Norway and Australia must now pay VAT or GST is now applicable on Linden Lab products services (see VAT & GST on Lab products & services for Norway & Australia).
  • Feature request and bugs discussed:
    • To help with EEP asset merchandising, the following feature request has been filed: BUG-228856 “EEP Category in Marketplace”.
    • BUG-228845 “Marketplace Edit Item Listing loses Image Upload option” has been accepted by the Lab for cloning to their internal Jira system.

2020 Simulator User Group week #23 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Vintage Lace, April 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken at the Simulator User Group meeting held on Tuesday, June 2nd.

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the simulator deployment thread for updates.

  • On Tuesday, June 2nd, the RC channels were updated with a server update, version 543116, intended to fix an expired cert that was causing problems with HTTP calls..
  • On Wednesday, June 3rd, and providing there are no issues arising from the above deployment, the same server update will be deployed across the rest of the grid.

SL Viewer

On Tuesday, June 2nd:

  • The FMOD Studio RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542964, and dated May 29th, was promoted to de facto release status.
  • The Mesh Uploader project viewer updated to version 6.4.3.542535.

All other viewer pipelines are as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • Project viewers:
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

In Brief

  • Parcel EEP settings are still drawing complaints from some who travel over Mainland (particularly by air) who are not particularly enamoured with seeing “their” daytime settings suddenly change. However, there is a simple answer: all they need to do is apply their preferred EEP settings to their avatar before flying, and *presto* they have a constant environment in their viewer for both parcel and region crossings. Simples.
  • Apparently, a rumour has been circulating somewhere that LL are “rethinking” the cloud uplift. In response to being asked if there is any truth to it, Oz Linden replied:

[There’s] no truth to the rumour at all. The only re-thinking we’re doing is how to do it better/faster.

  • Group chat lag still continues to be a problem for some groups – notably those with a large membership. This appears to be related to the volume of message traffic a back-end group chat server is handling, rather than a specific issue within the chat service.
  • Those wishing to test the upcoming changes to nearby chat ranges (channel 0), can do so on Aditi in the following regions: Animesh1, Animesh2 and Snark

2020 SL project updates week #22: TPVD summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Endless 58-58N, blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, May 29, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed.

This was a very short meeting!

SL Viewer News

[0:00-5:10]

  • The CEF Update RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542757, released on Wednesday, May 27th (with release notes!). This builds on the CEF “Special”; it has additional codec, improvements for streaming into SL, and a major update to the Chrome Embedded Framework.
  • The FMOD RC viewer updated to version 6.4.3.542964 on Friday, May 29th.

The remainder of the official views currently in progress are as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.4.1.540593, dated April 27th, promoted May 4th. Formerly the Zirbenz Maintenance RC viewer.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.2.541645, May 15th.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • Currently, it appears that the FMOD Studio RC viewer will be the next to be promoted to de facto release status in week #23 (commencing Monday, June 1st).
  • The Love Me Render RC viewer is also close to being ready for promotion.
  • There are some priority graphics fixes required for EEP, but these have yet to be merged into a viewer pipeline. These may be added to the Love Me Render viewer or may go to the next Maintenance RC viewer.
  • The Legacy Profiles viewer may be close to promotion to RC status, depending on the status on a further web update.
  • The Copy / Paste viewer is going through a further round of UI dates.
  • The Mesh Uploader may be also in a position to be promoted to RC status in the near future.
  • The Build Tools viewer is back with QA. If it passed muster, it may be issued in week #23.

Simulator Notes

[5:17-7:55]

The extended chat range project is now called the Voices Carry project. This is likely to be arriving in a simulator RC update in week #24 (commencing Monday, June  8th).

  • Further details on this update can be found in my Simulator User Group update.
  • It is important to note that this chat is only intended to apply to apply to nearby chat channel 0, so it should not impact scripted objects using other chat channels.

In Brief

[9:36-10:30]

Note: a lot of the following points were the subject of text chat.

The Firestorm team have encountered an issue with Bugsplat that results in the error “unable to create the error report” when a user is trying to send a crash report. Thus far, it appears LL has not seen this reported by users on the official viewer.

Bugs highlighted to the Lab during the meeting:

  • [14:52-21:30]
    • BUG-228752 “[EEP] Sky turns black when render quality is lowered to Low-Mid” is still awaiting a fix.
    • BUG-225784 “[EEP] BUG-225446 regression – HUDs are again affected by environment setting” is also awaiting the Lab.
    • BUG-228821 “Occasional Freeze in Post-EEP Viewers” is also still awaiting investigation.
  • [21:38-30:40] BUG-228592 “[Bakes on Mesh] editing clothing forces undergarments to top of the render stack” This is still to be fully investigated.
  • [31:04-38:50] BUG-227725 “SL Viewer and third party viewers hang while launching – dual monitors” – this appears to be an Nvidia / Windows 10 issue, although it does not appear to impact all systems. There is a lengthy discussion in chat on this issue for those who may have experienced in.
  • [39:57-end] BUG-228838 “Viewer changes have broken my entire outfit system” – this is an issue being experienced by people manually creating sub-folders within the My Outfits system folder / outfit folders within My Outfits in which to sort / copy outfit links.
    • Given that My Outfits is not designed to support sub-folder nests, whether this is a bug / breakage is questionable. H
    • However, LL will look at the issue – although it is unlikely that an “official” means of supporting sub-folders with My Outfits / outfit folders with My Outfits will be implemented in the near-term, as doing so will required server-side changes.

2020 Simulator User Group week #22 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Devil’s Bend National Park, April 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken at the Simulator User Group meeting held on Tuesday, May 26th. Not a lot was discussed in terms of meaningful reportage (again), so just a short update on server deployments / official viewer updates.

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the simulator deployment thread for updates.

  • On Tuesday, May 26th, the majority of the grid was updated to server maintenance release 542403, comprising the fix for the group notice archive timestamps bug.
  • On Wednesday, May 27th there will be a single RC deployment – maintenance update 542737, comprising infrastructure improvements related to the cloud migration work.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to the official viewers to mark the start of week #22, leaving them as follows:

  • Current Release viewer version 6.4.2.541639, dated May 11th, promoted May 19th, formerly the Camera Presets RC viewer.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • FMOD Studio RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542486, issued May 21st.
    • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.4.3.542484, May 19th.
  • Project viewers:
    • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.2.541645, issued May 15th.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

New Simulator Chat Range Capability

As noted in my May 16th TPV Developer meeting notes, a new ability is being developed to allow region / estate owners / managers to set the open chat range on a region (see BUG-228333). This update is only intended to affect nearby chat channel 0 (the default open chat channel).

The change has caused a certain amount of confusion. For example, will the chat range be defined by originating region or the recipient region?  For example, if you are in a region with a 100m chat range and are 10m from a neighbouring region, does your chat travel 90-100m into the neighbouring region, or will it be limited to the chat range set within the neighbouring region, if less than 100m?

Or what if you’re 10m from a region boundary, and the region has a chat range of 40m, and the neighbouring region 70m – does it mean people 50m from you in your region cannot hear your chat, but a) your chat will be relayed 70m from the region boundary in the other region,  or b) just 60m (due to the 10m between you and the region edge)?

Replying to questions like these, Rider Linden indicated that it would be the recipient region that would determine the distance chat is relayed within it, where you are close enough to be heard across a region boundary. Oz expanded on this, suggesting it would be a combination: the originating region’s chat range determining which, if any, neighbouring regions can “hear” chat from it, and the chat range in those regions determining which avatars within those regions can then hear the chat.

Rider further indicated that whatever the chat distance set, chat will never be relayed beyond the region(s) immediately adjoining the originating region. So, for example, if you have three region, A, B, and C, arranged in a single line one to the next, chat from A could be relayed in B, but not to C (and vice versa), but, depending on the chat range set in B, it might be relayed by both A and C or only in A or C, depending on the speaker’s location in B.

Hope that clears things up!

Obviously, the new capability won’t override parcel privacy settings. There is still no time frame as to when this feature will be implemented both server-side and in the viewer, which will require an additional UI element to allow the chat range to be adjusted.

2020 Content Creation User Group week #21 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Dya’s Scent of the Caribbean, April 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, May 21st 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

The CEF Special viewer has been withdrawn from downloads, pending the release of a more rounded CEF RC viewer containing broader support for more options for streaming into SL + more codecs.

The FMOD Studio RC viewer updated to version 6.4.3.542486 on May 19th.

The remainder of the current official viewer pipelines are as follows:

  • Current Release viewer version 6.4.2.541639, dated May 11th, promoted May 19th, formerly the Camera Presets RC viewer – see my Camera Presets tutorial.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Mesh uploader project viewer, version 6.4.2.541645, issued May 15th.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • The exact streaming services that will be supported by the next CEF update have yet to be confirmed.
  • The Love Me Render viewer is still being re-worked as a result of being “clobbered” by the EEP updates (presumably during the merge process). It is hoped this will be back on track soon.
  • The first viewer to be built entirely using the new build process using a recent version of Xcode (OS X) or Visual Studio 2017 (Windows) is still waiting to see the light of day.

Graphics / ALM / Code paths

  • The previous CCUG meeting raised the topic of possibly removing the ability to disable the viewer’s Advanced Lighting Model (ALM).
  • Vir emphasised that the idea is just a point of discussion, and not indicative of any decision having been made.

Graphics support is a whole lot of different possible code paths, which means there are tons and tons of options, [so] you can slice it and dice it lots and lots of different ways which makes it into a maintenance and update nightmare. So the more we can streamline it and say stuff works in particular ways, makes it easier to keep it working and to fix things when they go wrong. So, we don’t have any immediate plans to change Advanced Lighting, it’s just something we raised to gauge what usage patterns there might be.

– Vir Linden

Jelly Dolls / Avatar Rendering

  • Vir’s idea to render jelly dolled avatars as basic human form, sans attachments, is apparently proving more complicated a move than at first thought.
  • He’s not entirely surprised by this, considering all that an avatar made include: animations, shape deformations, etc.
  • Animations can particularly problematic when they are being used to deform the skeleton into a non-human form, and the system wants to render the avatar in a human form.
    • Allowing the animations to run means allowing them to deform the avatar shape.
    • Turning the animations off means leaving the avatar shape in a human form but stuck in the T-pose position.
  • The solution to the above issue would appear to be setting a stand animation that runs locally (i.e. in any viewer that is set to render the avatar as a jelly doll). However, this can require additional adjustments to be rendered correctly in a viewer.
  • Further local animations may be required to cover situation when a jellied avatar uses things like default sits, adding further complexity to the work.

In brief

  • There has been at least one report of the EEP viewer causing periodic freezes as if the texture cache being purged. While EEP should not have altered how the texture cache works, and as no bug reports have been filed on the issue as yet, LL ask that those have similar issues regularly / semi-regularly report them.
  • Some have noticed that EEP has altered how specularity is rendered where materials have been used. This is a known issue LL are investigating, as per BUG-228781 and BUG-228581.
  • The idea of an inventory tagging system was raised (e.g. to easy inventory sorting / searching, etc). Sort form answer: while there are benefits for some form of limited tagging, there are no plans to implement anything in the foreseeable future.
  • The question was asked on why Twitch allows VR Chat streaming but not Second Life. Short form answer: because that is what Twitch has decided (at least at present).
  • Next meeting: Thursday, June 4th, 13:00 SLT.