Category: TPVD / Open Source User Group

2023 week #39: SL TPVD meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Cloud Island, July 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my chat log transcript of the Third Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, September 29th, 2023, together with the video recording of the meeting made by Pantera Północy, which is embedded towards the end of this summary. My thanks as always to Pantera for making these recordings.

Meeting Overview

  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development.
  • As a rule, these meetings are:
    • Generally held once a month  the third or fourth Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre. See the SL Public Calendar for specific meeting dates.
    • Open to all with an interest in viewer development.
    • Conducted in a mix of text and voice.
  • The notes herein are drawn from a mix of my own chat log and audio recording of the meeting, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Viewer Updates

[Video: 0:00-3:17]

The Inventory Extensions RC viewer updated to  version 6.6.15.581961, on September 28th.

The remaining official viewer currently in progress stay unchanged as:

  • Release viewer, version 6.6.14.581101, promoted August 23.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:

General Viewer Notes:

  • Given the speed at which the Inventory Extensions RC viewer has been iterated of late and bugs addressed whilst also reducing the crash rate, it now looks as if this will be the next viewer to get promoted to de facto release status.

PBR Materials Update

The following was offered in lieu of a CCUG meeting during the week.

Protocol Update

[Video: 1:05-3:16]

  • The communications protocol changes referenced in my recent CCUG meeting summaries (and of particular relevance to the viewer) are with LL’s QA, and also live on a series of regions on Aditi (Rumpus Room 31 through 34. An RC viewer update with the code supporting these changes is pending release until the simulator code has passed QA testing, hopefully in week #40.
  • This change should overcome the bandwidth overload between the viewer and the simulator with respect to scripted PBR updates. It is described as being terser than the current version, using much the same throttling and interest list culling as used in terse updates, and de-couples PBR updates from full object updates.
  • As it is a protocol change:
    • The deployment of the simulator code is liable to be cautious – initially to the Preflight PBR regions on Agni, with testing restricted to those before the update is deployed to the more public Rumpus Room regions on Agni, and then wider (full simulator RC channel?) deployment after that.
    • Some regressions are anticipated as this change gets to be used by a wider audience in Agni testing.

PBR Terrain

[Video: 4:48-5:05]

  • This is an offshoot project from PBR Materials covered in previous TPVD meeting summaries and particularly CCUG meeting summaries). The focus is on applying PBR materials as terrain textures to give an improved look to SL default terrain. It is not terrain painting (this is described as “something that’s on the radar” for possible future implementation).
  • The work includes all supported materials other than displacement maps, and is currently primarily viewer-side, but may be extended into the simulator code.
  •  The focus for Cosmic Linden at the moment is on improving terrain normal maps.

In Brief

Refer to the video for the following:

  • [Video: 5:15-7:20] Github Actions: LL is continuing the work to move their viewer build processes over to Github Actions, and this work is now seen is being “extremely close” to going live for all viewer builds from the Lab. In particular, this will potentially allow TPVs using the same build infrastructure to more readily leverage elements of the LL build process.
    • For example, scripts used to manage the build process under Team City have had to remain private to the Lab, due to the requirement for them to include credentials. With Github Actions, the credentials can be removed, allowing the scripts to become public actions and thus be used by TPVs.
  • [Video: 13:14-22:34]  Code-signing. This follows from the last TPVD meeting, and offered as clarification. Both Windows and MacOS require code signing through different mechanisms. This helps avoid things like anti-virus software and firewalls throwing up potentially off-putting warnings to users trying to install viewers.
    • As a purely speculative point in the last meeting, Vir Linden noted that within Github Actions, the infrastructure the Lab will be using for code signing can be opened-out to allow TPVs to leverage it using their own credentials, potentially helping to smooth the process of code-signing for those wishing to adopt it.
    •  However, it was noted that the problem for TPVs wasn’t so much the code-signing process as trying to keep personal information required by the credentials from being revealed. There has been one known case of this happening, exposing the individual concerned to potential doxing.
  • [Video: 25:44-end] Discussion commencing with building a TPV progressing through message protocols to region identification protocols between viewer and simulator (see this forum thread). It further encompassed:
    • A more general discussion on LSL coding (including the potential for impact on region / simulator / simhost performance), procedural changes to things like object movement to prevent message spamming, etc.
    • Commentary on the viewer stats and that due to the level of inaccuracy involved with the bandwidth /ping and packets in/out statistics, whether this should be removed, or if not removed, should at least be viewed with “a degree of scepticism” in terms of their reliability / accuracy, with the note that tools such as Wireshark / Tracy should be used which accurate stats gathering is required.

TPV Notes

  • [Video 9:24-13:10] Black Dragon is developing an improved first person IK system which constrains the camera to the avatar’s chest position, and which smooths camera turning with the avatar.
    • This has a range of uses, including with weapons / combat, where it allows them to be properly aimed, including up and down.
    • It is also something LL might review and consider for implementation in the official viewer, were the code to be formally contributed.
  • Firestorm has been shadowing PBR development with and “alpha” Firestorm PBR viewer available to a limited cohort of testers, and plan to have an update to that viewer based on the Lab’s protocol updates once the code has been made available on simulators on Agni and the Lab’s PBR RC viewer has been updated with the viewer-side code.

Next Meeting

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 week #35: SL TPVD meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Natthimmel, July 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my chat log transcript of the  Third Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, September 1st, 2023, together with the video recording of the meeting made by Pantera Północy, and embedded towards the end of this summary. My thanks, as always, to Pantera for making these recordings. 

Meetings Overview

  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development.
  • As a rule, these meetings are:
    • Generally held once a month  the third or fourth Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre. See the SL Public Calendar for specific meeting dates.
    • Open to all with an interest in viewer development.
    • Conducted in a mix of text and voice.
  • The notes herein are drawn from a mix of my own chat log and audio recording of the meeting, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Viewer Updates

[Video: 0:00-3:17]

  • The Inventory Extensions RC viewer updated to version 6.6.15.581538, August 29.
  • The Emoji RC viewer, version 6.6.15.581557, was released on August 31.
  • The Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, version 6.6.14.581315, August 30.

These updates comprise a promotion to RC status (Emoji viewer) and merging with the new release viewer code base. The remaining official viewers are unchanged as:

  • Release viewer,  version 6.6.13.580918, formerly the Maintenance U(pdate) RC viewer, version 6.6.14.581101, promoted August 23.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.581126, June 26.
  • Project viewers:

Note that the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

General Viewer Notes:

  • The Emoji viewer does not include the font updates, which have been moved to their own project. This viewer currently does not have sufficient data to determine where it might stand in terms of being promoted to de facto release status. It normally takes a few days for a reasonable cohort of users on the viewer so that stats on crash rates might be more accurately gathered, together with thing like bugs reported.
  • The Inventory Extensions viewer is currently awaiting UI updates, but is otherwise defined as “pretty close” to being ready for promotion once these updates have been implemented.
  • LL is in the process of determining how to standardise the use of whitespace in the viewer code. This is described as “getting around the infinite conflicts problem” in merging code within the viewer where whitespace is defined (e.g. tabs) differently to other / existing code (e.g. spaces – or vice-versa). It is also defined as “not fixing” the issue of coders all having different opinions on what whitespace should be, but while it is acknowledged the solution will not please everyone, LL will be moving forward with it, and will give more details on the direction they are taking in due course.

Multi-Factor Authentication Update

[Video: 3:27-5:50]

  • Multi-factor authentication has been a part of SL for some time (see here for notes on its introduction), and extended to the viewer shortly thereafter.
  • Within the next “week or two” the log-in service will be updated so that users who have opted-in to MFA will only be able to do so on viewers providing the necessary MFA support.
  • This move was first announced in October 2022, but implementation was delayed to allow all TPVs the time to incorporate the viewer-side MFA code – which should now be the case.
  • Notes:
    • This does not mean all users must use the authentication process; MFA as a whole remains optional. It simply means users who have opted in to MFA will only be able to log-in to SL using a viewer supporting MFA.
    • Should users lose there ability to access SL via the authentication process for whatever reason, they should file a support ticket to have their MFA status reset.
    • Brad Linden also indicated that LL does not have “any additional MFA methods in development right now”, and that requests for things like authentication via e-mail should be made via feature request Jiras.

In Brief

Refer to the video for the following:

  • [Video: 6:05-9:38] a general discussion on code-signing – approach, pros and cons (most TPVs have not implemented code signing). In short, LL are looking to leverage the move to Github Actions for the viewer build process / code management to make code signing “more portable” should any TPVs wish to implement it.
  • [Video: 26:06 to practically to the end of the meeting] Extended discussion on the Emoji viewer and use of emojis particularly being given the choice to enable / disable whether emojis are displayed in text within your own viewer, as several other platforms provide.
    • Some of the discussion appeared predicated on the automatic conversion of text to emojis, which is not actually what the Emoji viewer is doing.
    • It was pointed out that disabling emojis might be beneficial as an accessibility option.
    • The option to add a switch to disable rendering of emojis within the viewer was requested as a feature request for consideration.
  • [Video: 46:46 onwards] discussion on ambient lighting within EEP settings, PDR, PBR reflection probes behaviour (much of it is local chat).

Next Meeting

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 week #31: SL CCUG + TPVD meetings summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Strandhavet Viking Museum, May 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, August 3rd, and the Third Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, August 4th, 2023. 

Meetings Overview

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current work, upcoming work, and requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work.
  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors developers to discuss general viewer development.
  • As a rule, both meetings are:
    • Held in-world and chaired by Vir Linden.
    • Conducted in a mix of voice and text.
    • Held at 13:00 SLT on their respective days.
    • Are subject to the schedule set within the SL Public Calendar, which includes locations for both meetings (also included at the end of these reports).
    • Open to all with an interest in content creation / viewer development.
  • As these meetings occasionally fall “back-to-back” on certain weeks, and often cover some of the same ground, their summaries are sometime combined into a single report (as is the case here). They are drawn from a mix of my own audio recordings of the meeting + chat log (CCUG), and from the video of the TPVD meeting produced by Pantera Północy (which is embedded at the end of the summaries for reference) + chat log. Not that they are summaries, and not intended to be transcripts of everything said during either meeting.

Viewer News

No changes through the week, leaving the current official viewer in the pipeline as:

Note that the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

General Viewer Notes:

  • The Inventory Extensions viewer has a couple of bugs which are preventing it progressing but are being worked on. There are also some simulator-side issues (inventory thumbnail images being dropped) which are also being addressed. However, this remains the next potential viewer for promotion to de facto release, alongside of the Maintenance U RC viewer.
  • The Maintenance U RC includes an extension to actions available when clicking on in-world objects. CLICK_ACTION_INVISIBLE effectively makes an object “invisible” to mouse clicks, allowing it to be clecked through to whatever might be lying behind it.  This functionality will be supported within the next simulator deployment, due in week #32.
  • The Emoji project viewer may see some font changes prior to progressing further (which may additionally require UI work in general) & is still adding further UI additions.

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

  • To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
  • The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • Up to four texture maps are supported for PBR Materials: the base colour (which includes the alpha); normal; metallic / roughness; and emissive, each with independent scaling.
  • In the near-term, glTF materials assets are materials scenes that don’t have any nodes / geometry, they only have the materials array, and there is only one material in that array.
  • As a part of this work, PBR Materials will see the introduction of reflection probes which can be used to generate reflections (via cubemaps) on in-world surfaces. These will be a mix of automatically-place and manually place probes (with the ability to move either).
  • The viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page.

Further Resources

Status

  • LL is seeking feedback on how best to handle sky rendering. In short, ambient lighting is handled differently within “non-PBR” viewers and “PBR viewers” (notably, the latter uses HDR + tone mapping where the former does not).
  • As the majority of ambient environments have been designed using the “non-PBR” viewer rendering system, they undergo an auto-adjustment process within the PBR viewer so that that match the glTF specification requirements. Unfortunately, this can leave some skies / ambient lighting looking far too dark – and potentially lead to complaints from users on the PBR viewer (at least until more “PBR compliant” EEP assets make themselves available).
  • To compensate for this, LL included the option to disable the HDR / tone mapping processes in the viewer by setting Probe Ambience to 0 with Graphics preferences. However, doing this makes content specifically designed for PBR environments look muted and much poorer than they should. This brings with it the concern that to try to make their content look good in both “PBR” and “non-PBR” environments, creators will start to go “off-piste” (so to speak) from the glTF specification when making new content, thus defaulting the entire objective in trying to move SL to match recognise content creation standards.
  • There have been two main schools of thought within LL as to how to best handle both situations, these being:
    • Continue to iterate on the auto-adjustment system so it can handle a broader range of sky settings that are in popular use without them going overly dark within the PBR viewer.
    • Initially make HDR / tone mapping opt-in, rather than opt-out (so probe ambience is set to 0 by default, but can be set above zero by users as required) until such time as all viewers are running with PBR, then switch to making it opt-out (so HDR / tone mapping must be manually disabled).
  • General feedback at the meeting was for LL to continue to try to iterate and improve the the automatic adjustment to HDR / tone mapping for skies, so as to avoid the need for content creators to have to start producing “PBR” and “non PBR” versions of their content.
  • Outside of this, it has also been reported that multiple script-driven glTF materials updates (such has those that might be seen with the changing pattens on a disco floor, for example) actually cause multiple network connections, impacting network bandwidth to the viewer, which is hardly ideal.  This is currently being addressed, but until fixed on the simulator side, it will see a pause in glTF simulator updates being released.
  • The work on “hero” reflection probes for planar mirrors is continuing to progress.

Senra Discussions – CCUG and TPVD

Via the Content Creation Meeting:

  • A lengthy discussion on the Senra SDK and the requirement for Avastar with Blender – seen as a paywall block for creators who may not have previously entered the clothing market, but who want to in order to support Senra. Unfortunately, no-one directly involved in the Senra body development was at the meeting to handle questions.
    • Avastar is generally required with Blender as  the latter uses “none-standard” axes orientation compared to other tools, resulting in issues such as armature rotations being incorrect, plus its Collada export doesn’t (I gather, subject to correction here) support volume bones.
    • However, it was noted that other mesh bodies available within SL provide SDKs where these uses are fixed for Blender without the need to reference Avastar – so the questions were raised as to why LL haven’t done the same (or at least looked at those solutions).
    • The discussion broadened into issues with the avatar blend file itself which have long required fixing, with the promise that all comments on the SDK, Blender, and the avatar Blend file will be passed back to the relevant parties at the Lab.
      Those at the meeting from LL noted their hope that  – down the road – the switch from Collada to glTF-compatible formats will help to eliminate many issues related to avatar content creation, and if nothing else, will look to address specific issues . this, and that if nothing else, they will mark the need to fix the armature rotation issue with that work (“glTF Phase 2”) if it is not addressed beforehand.

Via the TPVD Meeting:

  • It was noted that there currently isn’t a formal venue for discussion Senra outside of the current forum threads or the Discord channel (for those able to access it.
  • The suggestion is currently to have a special purpose meeting – possibly under the CCUG banner – where those who developed Senra could respond to questions / concerns. This suggestion is being passed to Patch Linden who is better placed to arrange a meeting, given the Senra project largely falls within his remit.
  • There is a lot of concern / confusion over the SDK licensing (again, please refer to the forum thread on this for details).
  •  It was indicated that the Senra content will soon have inventory thumbnails included, ready for when the Inventory Extension viewer is promoted to release status.
  • Concerns about new users getting confused by wearing Senra items directly from the Library a) do not appear to be highlighted to indicate they have been added to the avatar (this is actually because the process of “wearing” the item has actually generated a copy within the user’s inventory, which *is* highlighted as added / worn); b) individual items added to an avatar in this manner go to the matching object class type system folder, *not* to a dedicated Senra folder (e.g. mesh clothing is copied to the Objects folder; skins go to the Body folder, etc.).

In Brief

Via the TPVD meeting

  • General discussions on:
    • Scalable fonts (as implemented by Genesis viewer).
    • How TPVs block older versions (for releases, the viewer requests a list of blocked versions from the TPV server in question (say, Firestorm, for the sake of argument), and if it finds itself on the list, it terminates trying to log-in to SL).
    • The move to de-dupe some asset types (textures, notecards, scripts  & (possibly) gestures by giving multiple CDN versions the same UUID number, including clarification on the difference between the original asset, the UUIDs for multiple versions and also inventory IDs (which handle permissions, etc.).
    • An extensive discussion on chat bubbles and toasts in the official viewer.
  • Please refer to the TPVD meeting video below for further details on the above discussions.

Next Meetings

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 week #27: SL CCUG + TPVD meetings summary

Posted on by Inara Pey

[REN] May, 2023 – blog post
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, July 6th, and the Third Party Viewer Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, July 7th, 2023. 

Meetings

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current work, upcoming work, and requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work.
  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors developers to discuss general viewer development.
  • As a rule, both meetings are:
    • Held in-world and chaired by Vir Linden.
    • Conducted in a mix of voice and text.
    • Held at 13:00 SLT on their respective days.
    • Are subject to the schedule set within the SL Public Calendar, which includes locations for both meetings (also included at the end of these reports).
    • Open to all with an interest in content creation / viewer development.
  • As these meetings occasionally fall “back-to-back” on certain weeks, and often cover some of the same ground, their summaries are sometime combined into a single report (as is the case here). They are drawn from a mix of my own audio recordings of the meeting + chat log (CCUG), and from the video of the TPVD meeting produced by Pantera Północy (which is embedded at the end of the summaries for reference) + chat log. Not that they are summaries, and not intended to be transcripts of everything said during either meeting.

Viewer News

  • The Windows 32 + macOS pre-10.13 RC, version  6.6.13.580794 was rapidly promoted to de facto release status on July 6.
  • The Second Life Project Inventory Extensions viewer updated to version 6.6.13.580656, on July 6.

The remaining viewers in the pipeline stand as:

General Viewer Notes:

  • The Windows 32 + macOS pre-10.13 viewer is the last official viewer supporting either the Win 32-bit version or Mac OS versions prior to version 11. As viewers for 64-bit only and MacOS 11+ become the defacto releases, this viewer (as it is and without further update) will be moved to a side cohort, and used when someone running a pre-11 MacOS release or a Windows viewer incapable of running the 64-bit version of the viewer will receive this version instead.
  • Maintenance T has returned to being the most likely RC viewer due for promotion to de facto release status, now that its high crash rate has (hopefully) been brought under control.
  • The Emoji project viewer is liable to see further improvements to the Emoji picker in the UI.

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

  • To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
  • There is a general introduction / overview / guide to authoring PBR Materials available via the Second Life Wiki.
  • For a list of tools and libraries that support GLTF, see https://github.khronos.org/glTF-Project-Explorer/
  • Substance Painter is also used as a guiding principal for how PBR materials should look in Second Life.
  • Up to four texture maps are supported for PBR Materials: the base colour (which includes the alpha); normal; metallic / roughness; and emissive, each with independent scaling.
  • Given the additional texture load, work has been put into improving texture handling within the PBR viewer.
  • In the near-term, glTF materials assets are materials scenes that don’t have any nodes / geometry, they only have the materials array, and there is only one material in that array.
  • As a part of this work, PBR Materials will see the introduction of reflection probes which can be used to generate reflections (via cubemaps) on in-world surfaces. These will be a mix of automatically-place and manually place probes (with the ability to move either).
  • The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • The viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page.
  • Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.

Status

  • The simulator code is now more widely available on the Main Grid, including some sandbox environments, but still in RC. These regions comprise:
  •  However, it should be noted that:
    • Bug-fixing within the simulator code is also on-going, so those testing PBR materials where the support is available should take note of this.
    • Obviously, to take advantage of these regions (both to upload PBR Materials and to see the new PBR environment lighting + the demonstration objects provided within some the regions, you must be running the PBR Materials RC viewer.
    • The cost of upload for Materials without any textures is free; however, the L$10 texture upload fee is charged on a per texture basis for any included within a PBR material surface (up to four can be included).
    • Any PBR materials content created within these environments which is later rezzed in any region that is not Materials-enabled, will become “material-less” in a non-recoverable way, and will need to be recreated.
    • Because of the above point, until PBR support is fully gird-wide, any attempts to put PBR-enabled goods on the Marketplace will be sanctioned.
  • General bug fixing on the viewer is also continuing, and the spread PBR across the grid is largely down to a mix of bug fixing and getting everything stable, and seeing if any particularly nasty blockers or bug rear up.
  • As an aside, the additional texture overhead for PBR Materials has been one of the drivers behind increasing the amount of VRAM the viewer can use for textures, as also now found within the PBR Materials viewer.

PBR Mirrors

  • This is a follow-on project to the PBR Materials, intended to provide a controlled method to enable planar mirrors in SL (i.e. flat surface mirrors which can reflect what is immediately around them, including avatars).
  • The approach Geenz Linden is taking towards enabling mirrors is to use a “hero probe” concept. In short:
    • With PBR, reflections are generated using reflection probes, per the notes above. These are capped at a maximum resolution of 128×128 per object face; hero probes will be capped at 512×512 per object face, providing a mush higher resolution of reflection.
    • Hero probes are an automated selection process. “Standard” probes cannot be converted to hero probes by manual intervention, nor can they be created.
    • A hero probe is selected on the basis of the “mirror” surface / probe and the proximity of the viewing avatar / camera to it.
    • Thus, if there are 5 mirrors place in a room, only the mirror closest to any given avatar / avatar camera will be used as a hero probe within that avatar’s viewer; the other four will remain “standard” probes, until such time as the avatar / camera moves closer to one of them, at which point it will become the hero probe, and the former hero will revert to a standard probe.
  • The primary use case for this work is mirrors, but it is possible, depending on performance impact, etc., that in the future, one additional hero probe might be allowed per scene, and the use case broadened (e.g. the water reflections).

In Brief

Via the TPVD meeting

  • Simulator updates: two simulator RC are currently with QA:
    • One includes updates to the avatar arrival code (i.e. handling avatars being received into the region via TP) which should help reduce the “viewer freeze” / frame rate drop others in the region can experience.
    • The other includes bug fixes and additional LSL functions.
  • General discussions on:
    • Anecdotal spotting of increased teleport failures, but lacking specifics on location, repro, etc. LL’s gridwide stats on TPs is not reflecting any noticeable uptick in failures. Therefore, those who do encounter them frequently are asked to:
      • Log where / when / how such failure occur.
      • If a pattern emerges (e.g. failures consistently occur when teleporting after doing X, or, say, in the first TP are logging-in, or anything else which suggests a possible underlying pattern), to file a Jira bug report, providing as much of the info they’ve gathered as possible.
    • A similar anecdotal report on people seeing themselves (or others as clouds for extended periods with in increased frequency. Again, where this is seen to happen consistently, a bug report is requested.
    • The official viewer CHUI + lack of chat bar (which also leans into what appears to be a lack of awareness that the Chat Console is not a “Firestorm feature”, but something generally available to people – although new users may need their attention directed to (and how to open chat from it), as the fade-out can case thigs to be missed and the click-to-open chat is not obvious.
    • On options available if TPVs that are not available in the official viewer (or possibly, with some, just not exposed through the UI), but which possibly should be.
    • Please refer to the TPVD meeting video below for further details on the above discussions.

Next Meetings

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 week #23: SL TPVD meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Nederlanse Bergee, April 2023 – blog post†

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, June 9th 2023 at 13:00 SLT. These notes are via a combination of my own chat log transcript of each meeting, and / or the video recording made of each meeting by Pantera Północy and embedded at the end of this article. My thanks, as always, to her for recording these meetings.  Note that the following is a summary of the meeting as a whole, and not a transcript of everything discussed.

Meeting Overview

  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development.
  • As a rule, these meetings are:
    • Generally held once a month  the third or fourth Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre. See the SL Public Calendar for specific meeting dates.
    • Open to all with an interest in viewer development.
    • Conducted in a mix of text and voice.
  • The notes herein are drawn from a mix of my own chat log and audio recording of the meeting, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Official Viewers Status

  • The Maintenance T RC viewer updated to version 6.6.13.580419 on June 7th.

The remaining official viewers currently in the pipeline remain unchanged through the week:

General Viewer Notes

  • The glTF / PBR material viewer (and project) are in bug fixing mode, specifically with some QA questions / concerns on the server side of things.
  • Inventory thumbnails viewer: work is progressing, and the simulator support code has been deployed to the simulator RC channels and is expected to go to the SLS Main channel in week #24.This will potentially allow the first release of an Inventory Thumbnails project viewer.
  • LL has completed the move of viewer builds to Github Actions, and has now successfully completed the first viewer builds along this new process. Th next step is to move all viewer-related work away from Team City completely.
  • This work also means that the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) for media handling is being updated.

In Brief

  • Prototyping is underway for the support of planar mirrors in SL and for the application of PBR materials on terrain (note, again, this is not PBR terrain painting, it is using PBR materials in place of the default terrain textures – see this blog post for more).
    • A test build of a viewer supporting the application of PBR materials for terrain has been made available through the Content Creation Discord server for limited testing, and feedback is being taken on this.
    • Work is underway to allow triplanar mapping for terrain repeats.
  • BUG-232037 “Avatar Online Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” was raised again, although more strictly a simulator issue. The precise cause(s) of the problem are still being investigated. Anecdotal evidence from some quarters claims the issue is getting worse, but whether this is objectively the case is questionable.

 Next Meeting

  • Friday, July 7th, 2023.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2023 week #19: SL TPVD meeting summary (PBR terrain)

Posted on by Inara Pey
Dragonfly, March 2023 – blog post
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, May 12th 2023 at 13:00 SLT. Meeting Overview
  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development.
  • As a rule, these meetings are:
    • Generally held once a month  the third or fourth Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre. See the SL Public Calendar for specific meeting dates.
    • Open to all with an interest in viewer development.
    • Conducted in a mix of text and voice.
  • The notes herein are drawn from a mix of my own chat log and audio recording of the meeting, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Official Viewers Status

General Viewer Notes

  • Inventory thumbnails viewer: work is progressing and a public-facing viewer should be available in the “not too distant future”.
    • The viewer-side work to support emojis is now more-or-less complete, and release of any project viewer is pending some additional back-end work.
  • There will be changes coming to the Second Life System Requirements, minimum specifications:
    • Mac OSX will be set at version 11.
    • Window 32-bit is liable to be dropped.
  • LL is close to completing the move of viewer builds to Github Actions. This has involved getting many of the 3rd party libraries for the viewer updated and refreshing all build dependencies.
  • This work also means that the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) for media handling is being updated.

Terrain “Mini Project”

  • There is a project underway to provide PDR support for terrain.
  • The overall scope is not clear, but it apparently exploits an asset-checking weakness in the simulator code related to terrain, allowing the use of Materials asset IDs in place of the usual texture  IDs, allowing them to be applied to the ground.
  • This is seen as a means of leveraging PBR Materials to offer some quality improvements to terrain ahead of any longer-term terrain project which might yet be considered / actioned.
  • It is hoped that this work will be available in a project viewer Soon™.

In Brief

  • PBR Materials mini-update:
    • Overall visual quality is pretty much where it will be when the viewer reaches formal release status.
    • There are still issues with rendering the sky – such as alpha glitching on the Sun. This is being worked on, but it is unlikely to see an imminent solution / viewer update.
    • Other known issues are also being worked on and progress is being made in clearing them.
  • A general discussion of the on-line  / off-line friends issues (frequently raised t the Server User Group meetings) – see BUG-232037 “Avatar Online Offline Status Not Correctly Updating”. As per notes from that meeting, the UDP fix does not appear to have had the desired impact in helping to reduce the issue, and LL are looking at the matter again.
  • A lot of general chat on WIP regarding PBR Materials and reflection probes, most of it relating to issues likely to be addressed – please refer to the video.
  • A general discussion on possible standards for avatar “metaverse interoperability” which runs through the latter half of the meeting. As a theoretical discussion rather than something LL is working on, please refer to the video.
  • There is also some further discussion on the Puppetry project, however, this will form an addendum to my recent Puppetry Project meeting summary, as it is more relevant there.

 Next Meeting

  • Friday, June 9th, 2023.