Tag: 2018 Product Meetings

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meeting held on Wednesday, February 28th. The subject for the meeting was Interactivity in Sansar, although more than this was covered. These notes are an attempt to bring together the key points of discussion from the meeting.

These weekly Product Meetings are open to anyone to attend, are a mix of voice (primarily) and text chat. Dates and times are currently floating, so check the Meet-up Announcements and the Sansar Atlas events sections each week. Official notes, when published can be found here.

Bust a Move Release and Update

• The Bust a Move (February) release was made subsequent to the meeting, which includes some of the updates indicated in the meeting – these have been noted below.
• An update to the Bust a Move release was made on Friday, March 2nd, 2018, specifically aimed at fixing the issue of complex Marvelous Designer clothing items exploding briefly when entering cloth simulation mode.

Roadmap Notes – Interactivity

Aleks summarised the following as the key points for interactivity in Sansar the Lab has deployed , or is looking to, deploy and build on, over the coming months.

• Keyframed motion type: introduced with the Bust a Move release on March 1st, which allows objects to be moved by object animations and certain script API functions.
  • This means that, while they are capable of movement, they are unaffected by gravity, cannot collide with static or keyframed objects, and can collide with dynamic objects and avatars, but are not moved by them.
  • Keyframed objects are useful for creating things like doors, that need to perform a specific motion reliably without adding unnecessary strain to the physics simulation.
  • It is acknowledged by the Lab that “keyframed” in this context is perhaps not the best descriptor for the functionality, and it may be changing to “scripted objects”.
• A New Dynamic objects flag: used to determine if a dynamic object can be picked up or not.
• Gravity / Centre of Mass:
  • Initial gravity scaling (0 through 5x “normal”) introduced with the Bust A Move release.This is straight up-and-down gravity.
  • Does not affect animations / locomotion, etc., at this time (a walk in 0 gee will be the same as in 1 gee, for example).
  • Ability to set centre of mass of objects and adjust the mass of objects via script will be coming.
  • Cylindrical and / or spherical gravity are not being worked on at this time.
  • Opens the case for avatar jumping / flying.
• Friction and bounce controls to be made available for both terrain and objects surfaces. So ice will be slippery, a lead cannon ball many be set so it doesn’t bounce, but a rubber ball does, etc.
• Scripted object interactions: this will allow creators to define what items  support interactivity, and how users can interact with them.
  • Will likely take the form of some kind of indicator which is visible when a mouse pointer (Desktop Mode) or hand (VR mode) is over the object, perhaps with a little tool-tip outlining the available interaction.
• Manipulation abilities: the Lab is investigating how best to allow creators to define how items are held (e.g. a rifle and a hammer have different means of being held, one to the other) and for users to manipulate the objects they are holding (left hand? right hand? swapping between hands? etc).
• Resource containers: objects that can be used to contain all of the sounds or animations or textures or rezzable which might be used in a scene, which can then be called via script as needed.
• New interaction API: to provide abilities such as touching a button to change the colour or intensity or brightness of a light, or pull a lever, etc.
  • Again such capabilities will be introduced iteratively over time.
• Scripted animation of textures: the ability to animation multiple textures on a surface, and potentially hook-in to a flipbook of textures.

Persistence Across Sessions

• The Lab is looking at how to handle data persistence across sessions in Sansar (e.g. progress to date in a quest, or points scored in a game, etc.).
• It’s not clear if this will be something handled internally with experiences, or by providing experience creators with some form of API, allowing them to create external mechanicals to store such data.
• Seen as a capability which will be added once more in the way of game creation capabilities have been added to Sansar.

Particles

• Not on the immediate  roadmap, and viewed as a “nice to have”, but not a priority at this point.
• Are being considered with regards to emotes, e.g. type or say “smile” and a smiley pops up over your avatar or similar.
  • (Quite how this wouldn’t be as “immersion breaking” as having an unobtrusive voice indicator illuminate over an avatar’s head when voice is being used, as some at the lab claim, totally escapes me.)

Scripted Animation

• Comprehensive scripted controls (start, stop, select a frame, change speed, etc.) for animations (and eventually leveraging the ability for .FBX files to contain multiple animations?) are being developed.
• Initial work will be to provide scripted access to one animation on an object, rather than being able to control multiple animations.
• The ability to swap between different sets of animations is acknowledged, but seen as “further out”.
• This should allow for a range of NPC-style creations which can respond to avatar proximity.

Permissions System / Supply Chain

• Still being worked on by the Lab.
• Seen as a “sticking point” for many capabilities  / options within Sansar.
• Currently prioritised is a script update system.
  • This won’t extend to objects, which will eventually have their own update mechanism.
  • It is not an automated update process (i.e. a new script is released and all previous versions are automatically updated).
• Overall, the permissions system / supply chain is split into a number of areas, none of which is set for deployment in the near-term.

Performance Improvements

• Voice is being revised so that when in an experience, only the voice data for those you can hear speaking is sent to the client, rather than voice data for all users in the experience, regardless of whether or not you can hear them.
• Avatar LODs are also being looked at to help reduce the amount of avatar data being transferred to the client (do you really need to have every single tri in an avatar’s hair rendered when they are 300 metres away?).

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meeting held at 16:00 PST on Thursday, February 15th, 2018. are open to anyone to attend, are a mix of voice (primarily) and text chat, and there is currently no set agenda.Dates and times are currently floating, so check the Meet-up Announcements and the Sansar Atlas events sections each week. Official notes, when published can be found here.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the Tuesday, February 13th Product Meeting for week #7.

New User / On-Boarding Process

As noted in recent Sansar project updates (see 2018 week #3 for example), this is a priority for the Lab: making the new user sign-up and on-boarding smoother, possibly with fewer steps and hopefully (in the future) providing the means for experience owners to engage directly with their own audience through the events listing, their own web page with a URL to their experience and bring that audience of new users directly into their own experiences.  The Lab has been looking at a number of possible options for direct on-boarding, including something akin to Second Life’s Social and Learning islands.

Introducing Sansar to an Audience

Related to on-boarding is the idea of how to introduce Sansar to a new audience. Like Second Life, Sansar isn’t a game; there are no goals to work towards, no achievements to gain, no quests to be completed per se (although individual experiences can obviously include these). Therefore, providing videos, live streams, etc., which might help newcomers understand Sansar is a difficult topic to encompass.

• One suggestion is to focus on the common elements within Sansar – such as the form-form ability to create environments, or the ability to participate in the economy either as a creator or a consumer (or indeed, a consumer-creator), and make “let’s play” style videos.
  • This could would well for the consumer-creator especially: showing how someone not versed in Maya, Blender, ZPaint, etc., can enter Sansar, come up with an experience idea, purchase items through the store and then create an experience and using the Edit Mode to lay things out and then set-up an Atlas presence and bring people into that space.
• A problem with a “creation” perspective videos is that they might only appeal to a small percentage of a potential audience – simply because a) creation is complex in Sansar (even for the consumer-creator) in using the Edit Mode; and b) many people are looking for more-or-less for instant gratification. So having a focus on what people might find and do could be more effective.
• Another suggestion is to have videos of the community meet-ups and the Top Five videos better promoted.

Audience Identification and Outreach

Part of the problem with encouraging an audience into Sansar is actually identifying that audience. Again, this is not a “one stop shop” like a conventional game. Those running a social environment for discussions and conversation in Sansar aren’t necessarily seeking the same audience as those making a learning or historical experience, who in turn aren’t necessarily going to be looking to the same audience as a sci-fi role-play experience. Thus, consideration must be given to experience creators finding their own channels to reach their preferred audience – be it YouTube or some other video outlet, forums, etc.

Is Sansar Ready for a Bigger Audience?

This is a chicken-and-egg question: users are need to drive adoption and grow content. Content is needed to attract users and engagement – content here not only being experiences and mesh models etc., but the platform’s capabilities: users being able to interact with one another and with the environment, etc. Right now, and in many respects, Sansar isn’t ready for a broader audience, simply because it isn’t capable of supporting these broader / deeper levels of activity. Focused communities cannot easily be managed, for example, because there is no mechanism (platform content / capability) to be able to do so.

This is already potentially leading to people visiting Sansar and walking away with the impression it is just a pretty place with nothing to do – so how to engage with these people and encourage them back needs to be considered and made a part of thinking, rather than – for the time being at least – simply looking to try to attract people in from elsewhere in greater numbers, by it from the world at large or SL or other platforms.

Social aspect of Sansar are picking up – look at the events listings during the week (not so much at weekends as yet). However, these can be very close-knit (for example, the preference is for voice chat, not text – which can be off-putting for those who do not wish to use – and equally importantly, if often overlooked – people who do not wish to hear chatter. Voice, frankly can be off-putting socially, simply because so many people don’t have the wherewithal to toggle their microphones off when not speaking, often leaving disconcerting background noise, conversations with other in the physical world with them, and so on.

On-Boarding / New Users Focus Group Discussion

On-boarding is liable to be the subject of a focus group meeting in the near future.

In Brief

• Experience access control: currently, access to an experience can be limited to those on the creator’s Friends list. The next element – possibly to be rolled-out in the March update (ish) will be the ability to govern access via a white list of names. Anyone not listed for access won’t see the experience on their Atlas.
• Sansar roadmap: this will likely be a focus for the Product Meet-ups in week #8 (commencing Monday, February 19th, 2018).
• Improved object interactions: the ability to touch-interact with objects (e,g, touch a book and it opens, click a switch and a lights come on, etc)., are being worked on – but the Lab is sensitive to developing these capabilities so that such capabilities can be scaled and grow to meet a broad a range of needs as possible, rather than pushing the capabilities out quickly “to give people something to do”, and then having to revise them, possibly breaking content.
• Windows Mix Reality Headsets: some people have been trying Windows Mixed Reality headsets with Sansar. While Sansar doesn’t officially support these headsets, people are finding the work, but the avatar arms don’t respond to the user’s hand / arm movements, even those the available VR interaction (picking up objects, etc), does work.