Tag: Content Creation 2016

SL project updates 2016 51: server, simulator OS update

Posted on by Inara Pey
DRD Arctic Express
DRD Arctic Express – blog post

Server Deployment

While the No Change window was supposed to have come into operation on Friday, December 16th, there was indeed a deployment to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, December 20th. It comprised the same server maintenance package as deployed to the RC channel in week #50, comprising internal logging changes.

The deployment means that all of the server channels on the main grid (Agni) are now running the same simulator version. As there are no planned deployments to the RC channels, all four channels should remain on this release until deployments resume after the holiday period.

SL Viewer

We might see a 64-bit project viewer appear during the week. However, at the time of writing,  the list of viewers in the various pipelines remains as:

  • Current Release version: 5.0.0.321958, dated December 1st, promoted December 5th – formerly the Project Bento RC viewer.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance RC viewer, version 5.0.1.322219, dated December 9th – some 42 fixes and improvements + Bento support
  • Project viewers:
    • 360-degree snapshot viewer, version 4.1.3.321712 dated November 23rd – ability to take 360-degree panoramic images – hands-on review
  • Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847 dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Bento Support

With the release of Kokua for Second Life 5.0.0 and RLV 2.9.21 (see my article here), the following currently maintained viewers all have Bento support: Black Dragon, Catznip, Cool VL, Firestorm, Kokua for Second Life, Restrained Love. Alchemy is expected to update to include Bento “soon” and UKanDo is still awaiting a complete overhaul.

In terms of clients with 3D viewing capabilities, Radegast has been updated to support Bento, but the update is pending release. Lumiya for Android will have Bento support added “soon” (Lumiya 3.3 with Voice support released on Sunday, December 18th, and my review is available here).

Simulator OS Update

The Lab is in the process of updating the operating system on the simulator servers. At the moment the new OS version is installed on a number of regions on Aditi (the beta grid), including: Fire Ants 1, Fire Ants 2, Grasmere, Oak Forest, and Twilight Shores, not all of which are open to the public.

“This is one of those ‘features’ that might perform a bit better, but otherwise is a success if it behaves exactly like our current servers,” Simon Linden said at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, December 20th.

“We’re in the starting process of testing things. We have a lot of testing to do. [We’re] updating from an old version of Linux to a not-so-old version of Linux,” April Linden added. “Just to keep things moving. All the usual reasons. Performance updates, security, etc.”

Second Life hits a lot of low-level server code hard, including networking, memory and multi-processing. The overall hope is to have the newer revisions of the operating system will improve these. Expect this work to reach Agni in early 2017.

Group Chat

Group chat was long a bane of Second Life. In 2014/15 however, the Lab put a considerable amount of work into improving things, although some issues remain. One of these is that if an individual role outside of the default “Everyone” has a very high number of group members assigned to it (e.g. several thousand), it can dramatically impact things like group chat performance and can prevent the members’ list loading. One solution might be to delete the role (converting those in it to Everyone).

SL project updates 2016 50/2: re-caps and Content Creation UG

Posted on by Inara Pey

Fris' Land, Liebe; Inara Pey, December 2016, on Flickr Fris’ Land, Liebe – blog post

Server Deployments – Recap

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates and information.

  • On Tuesday, December 13th, the Main (SLS) channel received the same server maintenance package, as deployed to the RC channels in week #49. This includes the following feature requests: BUG-6377 – llGetObjectDetails(id,[OBJECT_ATTACHED_SLOTS_AVAILABLE])  and BUG-40871 – llGetEnv() constant “region_object_bonus”.
  • On Wednesday, December 14th, all three RC channels received the same new server maintenance package, comprising improved internal server logging.

SL Viewer

The official viewers list remains unchanged from earlier in the week:

  • Current release viewer, version 5.0.0.321958, dated December 1, promoted December 5 – formerly the Project Bento RC viewer download page, release notes
  • Maintenance RC viewer, version 5.0.1.322219, dated December 9th
  • 360-degree snapshot viewer, version 4.1.3.321712, dated November 23rd.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

No Change Window

A reminder that the end-of-year No Change window comes into effect from Friday, December 16th. There will be no further planned server deployments or official viewer promotions after that date, through until Monday, January 2nd, 2017.

Content Creation User Group

On Thursday, December 15th, the Project Bento User Group officially morphed into the Content Creators User Group (thus in a way  also now standing as a revamp of Nyx Linden’s old group).

Meetings will continue to take place at 13:00 SLT on Thursdays, at the Hippotropolis camp fire circle, with the exceptions of Thursday, December 29th and Thursday, January 5th. Anything related to Bento remains on topic for the group, but things of general interest to content creators are also open for discussion.

New Bento Issues

Bento is generating considerable interest among users – as witnessed by the release of Firestorm 5.0.1, when demand overwhelmed the Firestorm servers, and additional mirror services had to be set-up, with assistance from the Lab in doing so. However, some further issues have been identified as a result of Bento reaching a broader audience:

  • BUG-41063 – [Bento] Some Fitted Mesh No Longer Fits on Bento Avatars
  • BUG-41048 – [Bento] When wearing some Bento content, all walking animations freeze

The first of these bugs has been accepted by the Lab and is being investigated. The second appears to be most notably related to animations using the Bento wing bones, which appear to be overriding animation walks, causing an avatar to slide along the ground, rather than walking.

The issue particularly seems to impact walk animation using the llSetAnimationOverride capability, while older ZHAO systems (which tend to use the llPlayAnimation capability, appear to be unaffected. This may be due to the manner in which the latter handle start / stop animations calls, which is successfully preventing the issue manifesting with them.

The underlying cause is thought to be a possible animation priority setting / conflict or possibly the result of the wing bone animations having bone positions being set for all other, but not rotation data – but further investigation is required. Vir has taken samples of items which can cause the issue (again, notably, but not necessarily limited to, wings), and is going to have a poke at them to see if he can see what is going on.

Elsewhere, creators are waiting on Avastar to update, and Damien Fate has a rather neat HUD to help animate Bento hands and fingers. It’s unlisted, so I’m linking to it, rather than sharing it via embedding.

Fun Fact

The new Linden Lab portal parks have a LI capacity of 45,000 (with thanks to Cube Republic and Arton Rotaru for the pointers).

Portal Park LI capacity
Portal Park LI capacity

 

 

 

2016 SL project updates 49/2: Bento and web and bits

Posted on by Inara Pey
lw-3b_001
Luane’s Magical World, Morning Glow – blog post

Server Deployment – Recap

  • On Tuesday, December 6th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the same server maintenance package deployed to the three RC channels, comprising internal simulator changes.
  • On Wednesday, December 7th, the three RC channels will received the same new server maintenance package, which includes the following feature requests:
    • BUG-6377 – llGetObjectDetails(id,[OBJECT_ATTACHED_SLOTS_AVAILABLE]) – Returns a value that is number of attachment slots allowed by the server minus the number of attachments worn by avatar. Returns 0 if avatar is not in the same region or if UUID is not an agent.
    • BUG-40871 – llGetEnv() constant “region_object_bonus” – returns the object bonus set for a region.

Bento Update

The major news is that Bento was officially pronounced “live” on Monday, December 5th with the promotion of the Bento viewer code to de facto release status – see the official blog post or my covering article. Currently  – and as far as I’m aware – Black Dragon has a release out supporting Bento, Cool VL viewer has had Bento updates in the experimental branch for some time, and both Firestorm and Catznip will be issuing updates with Bento support very soon.

The announcement was followed with some further releases of Bento capable content on the Marketplace, and more will doubtless follow as Bento reaches more viewers and Avastar is fully updated (see below).

Troy Linden, the product lead for the project, passed on congrats and thanks to all who have been involved in the project, and Vir Linden’s role in getting things rolling and taking responsibility for getting things to work in the viewer.

One issue that wasn’t fixed prior to release was that of facial deformations occurring at altitude, which was noticed very early in the project.

Cathy Foil demonstrates the mesh deformation which becomes more pronounced with altitude (starting at around 1,000m and getting progressively worse through 4,000m)
Cathy Foil demonstrates the mesh deformation which becomes more pronounced with altitude (starting at around 1,000m and getting progressively worse through 4,000m)

As this particular problem appears to be part of a broader issue of floating point calculation errors and it can be overcome by using hardware skinning,  it wasn’t seen as a significant enough issue to warrant holding back Bento.  Should you encounter it, try using hardware, rather than software skinning on your system.

Future Follow-Ons for Bento

As Bento was being developed, a number of ideas for follow-on projects were put forward. Two of these include:

  • “unwearing” the default avatar while allowing baked textures & reducing the complexity of avatar bodies(see BUG-10980). Vir has previously indicated an interest in pursuing this idea (and the feature request has been accepted by the Lab).
  • Splitting the avatar shape into different elements (e,g, head and body), seen as making it easier for users who are uncertain about customising their form using the sliders, or who have a No Mod shape associated with their head or body to be able to mix and match more easily.

No final decision has been made on what might follow Bento or when, but given Vir’s feedback on splitting the avatar shape into separate elements would require a fairly extensive re-working of how avatar appearance is handled (up to and including changes to the baking service), it would seem unlikely this would be adopted,

Avastar and MayaStar

Avastar is still in the process of being updated to give expected support for Bento, and a new version is anticipated in the near future – users should keep an eye on the Avastar website for news. Cathy Foil believes that MayaStar is fully up-to-date, and while there have been reports of problems, these appear to be user error rather than bugs in the software, so she is considering further tutorial videos.

Future Meetings

Bento meetings will continue for a while (allowing for upcoming holidays). They may still be broadened into more of a content creation style meeting if there is sufficient interest. This is still TBD. The next meeting will take place on Thursday, December 15th at the Hippotropolis Camp Fire Circle, as usual, commencing at 13:00 SLT.

Web Properties Update

On Monday, December 5th, Grumpity Linden issued a further blog post on recent SL web property updates, which also included a minor update (contents unspecified to the lindenlab.com properties.   In terms of Second Life, the updates can be summarised as:

  • Maps:
    • slurl.com was officially retired on November 22nd, everything is now maps.secondlife.com – slurl.com/secondlife/ are redirected.
    • Viewing a specific location on maps.secondlife.com no longer throws a 404 error in the console.
    • Maps no longer  disappear at peak use times.
  • A large infrastructure update was made to secondlife.com along with security fixes and several minor bug fixes.
  • The Marketplace had an Events infrastructure stabilization to fix a few listing bugs.
  • A minor Security fix was released.

The update also referenced the new Grid Status page service.

Project Bento live in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Bento: extending the avatar skeleton - now officially live on the grid!
Bento: extending the avatar skeleton – now officially live on the grid!

On Monday, December 5th, Linden Lab announced that Project Bento is now “live” on the main grid following the promotion of the Bento Release Candidate viewer to de facto release status.

Project Bento is – as I’m sure everyone is only too aware – the project to enhance the avatar skeleton for use in mesh models, human and non-human (please note the new bones cannot be used with the system avatar).

It’s a project I’ve covered extensively in this blog, having been a part of both the closed and open beta phases of the work. However, just in case you have missed it. Bento adds a range of new bones the Second Life avatar skeleton, all of which can be rigged and weighted in mesh avatar models, and many can be used for a wide variety of purposes: limbs, wings, ears, tails and more. In particular, Bento adds over 30 bones to the avatar’s hands and avatar’s face, allowing mesh creators to design hands with movable fingers and faces which can be far more expressive. The Lab’s promotional video released as Bento entered a main grid beta phase is embedded below.

As many of the bones are tied to the Second Life appearance sliders, it also means that – subject to caveats from individual creators – avatar meshes can be customised easier by users. So, for example, avatar heads can be tweaked to give a more personal look when compared to the “off-the-shelf” version of the same head.

For non-human avatars, Bento brings a host of new possibilities and easier ways of doing things. Animal and humanoid avatars can be made which are more life-like, make better use of resources and offer fascinating new opportunities for wearable avatars, pets and more.

A GIF of Medhue Simoni's elephant avatar enjoying a little bit of the Bee Gees. Medue is one of the creators / animators who has been at the forefront of Bento development - check his video for more on the elephant and his You Tube channel for Bento information in general
A GIF of Medhue Simoni’s elephant avatar enjoying a little bit of the Bee Gees via Staying’ Alive. Medue is one of the creators / animators who has been at the forefront of Bento development – check his video for more on the elephant and his You Tube channel for Bento information in general. Credit: Medhue Simoni, via Linden Lab.

To aid in Bento content creation, the project has heavily engaged the talents of Cathy Foil and the Machninimatix team to ensure that MayaStar, Cathy’s SL plug-in for Maya, and Avastar, the Blender add-on from Gaia and Matrice are fully Bento compliant – and all three have been instrumental in moving Bento forward.

There are a couple of additional options which are included in the viewer called Reset Skeleton and Reset Skeleton And Animations, and can be found on the right-click avatar context menu. They have been included because sometimes, when changing between one mesh avatar and another, the basic SL avatar can become deformed, resulting in it looking squished, stretched, caught between two looks, or something else.

The problem is generally the result of race conditions when the avatar’s appearance is being updated, and both of these buttons are intended to correct the problem  – the option to reset animations as well is intended to fix deformations which may be due to animations also kicking-in incorrectly / at the wrong time.

The reset skeleton options (right-click context menu in the official viewer) should "fix other avatars which appear distorted in your view after changing their form (left menu) or your own avatar if the same happens to you (right menu) - note both options only affect your view of the avatar in question
The reset skeleton options (right-click context menu in the official viewer) should “fix other avatars which appear distorted in your view after changing their form (left menu) or your own avatar if the same happens to you (right menu) – note both options only affect your view of the avatar in question. Obviously, the location of these options may vary as TPV release Bento ready viewers

An important thing to not with both these option is they only fix the avatar in question (your own or someone else in your view. They do not affect how other people are seeing the same avatar.

As stated above, content creators have been engaged in the project, and so some Bento content is already available in-world and via the SL Marketplace – and doubtless more will be appearing in time. However, you do need a Bento capable viewer to render Bento content correctly. Hopefully, it will not be long before TPVs also release Bento capable updates as well (some already have Bento updates available as experimental versions, or undergoing closed user group testing).

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a list of additional Bento and related resources and information.

Additional Bento Links

Project Bento User Group update 34 with audio

Posted on by Inara Pey
Project Bento – extending the SL avatar skeleton
Project Bento – extending the SL avatar skeleton

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, November 17th at 13:00 SLT at the the Hippotropolis Campfire Circle. and chaired by Vir Linden. For details on the meeting agenda, please refer to the Bento User Group wiki page.

Bento Viewer

The new Reset Skeleton and Animations option
The new Reset Skeleton and Animations option

The Bento viewer RC updated on Tuesday, November 15th to version 5.0.0.321598. This build has fixes for the following (non-public) JIRA issues:

  • SL-524 – Reset Skeleton does not restore collision volume joint positions
  • MAINT-6913 – Problem with alpha on some Nvidia Mac systems when shadows are enabled
  • MAINT-6915 – Reset Skeleton is not enough to remove all traces of a previous Bento avatar.

To handle the last point, the Lab has added a Reset Skeleton And Animations option to the right-click menu (shown on the right).

However, as the problem can occur intermittently, it is still not guaranteed the additional option will handle those situations where an avatar isn’t fully reset using Reset Skeleton. Wider testing will hopefully uncover any remaining corner cases where this is the case – Firestorm hope to have a build available for testing with these updates fairly soon.

The “Viagra Bug” and Further Viewer RC Updates / Viewer Release

It is likely there will be one further RC update before the viewer is promoted to the de facto release viewer, courtesy of a new bug which has cropped up recently which results in a *cough* “ever-growing groin bone”, aka the Viagra Bug”. This is related to the addition of the groin slider,

Providing nothing else of significance is found, it is hoped that the next RC will be the version of the viewer which will be the one that will get duly promoted to release status. Given week #47 is Thanksgiving, it would seem likely this won’t be before week #48 (week commencing Monday, November 28th). The only other caveat to this would be an unexpected and particularly nasty bug showing up.

Best Practices and “How To” Guidance

Bento is going to bring with it a lot of questions from both creators and consumers. To help advise / educate people, The Lab is considering putting together a series of video and / or a set of “best practices” pages on the wiki – with a lean more likely towards the latter.

The general idea would be to showcase the work of individual creators, including their own guidance and advice (e.g. advice they have perhaps previously supplied, and now buried in, the 130+ pages of the Bento forum thread), and links to any videos, advisory web pages, etc., they have created (such as this series on Bento horse avatars, by Teager), so that creators and consumers can be better informed of Bento’s capabilities and opportunities. These best practices pages could include a biography of the creator providing their time / ideas / tutorials, while official videos – if the Lab go that route – could also showcase their work, discuss Bento with them etc.

Bento creators interested in helping the Lab in developing ideas and information along these lines are asked to contract Troy Linden directly (troy-at-lindenlab.com).

Other Items

Future Considerations

Its been suggested that having a “reset all skeletons” option might be an option for the future, rather than having to right-click individually on avatars which may be deformed and then correct them in your view – particularly as the Reset Skeleton options might be buried in the pie menu for those still using it.

Such an option would “fix” multiple deformed avatars (which might be the case when teleporting into an area with a lot of avatars), but it also might cause avatars which were not deformed in a person’s view to deform, possibly with no means to fix without a relog on the part of the person seeing them deformed. However, it is an idea the Lab is willing to consider for the future, if submitted as a feature request.

Similarly, the option to have unweighted (but referenced) bones be removed from the max bone count in a mesh (e.g so volume bones no longer count towards the available allocation) is being looked at as a possible follow-on update to the project.

Next Bento Meeting

Due to Thanksgiving in the United States, followed by a possible internal meeting at the Lab the week after, the next Bento meeting – subject to confirmation on dates in the user group wiki page – may not be until Thursday, December 8th.

Post Release Bento User Group

Thought is being given to continuing the user group meetings once the viewer has reached release status, initially as Bento meetings, where people can come and seek information, and then possibly but broadening into a (avatar focused?) content creators’ meeting, if there is a demand.

Additional Bento Links

2016 SL project updates 45/2: Bento update 33 w/audio + server / viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey
Project Bento – extending the SL avatar skeleton
Project Bento – extending the SL avatar skeleton

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, November 10th at 13:00 SLT at the the Hippotropolis Campfire Circle. and chaired by Vir Linden. For details on the meeting agenda, please refer to the Bento User Group wiki page.

There is a further RC update pending, as the Lab continues to work on reported bugs. Issues in particular which are receiving attention are:

  • An issue affecting some Mac systems running Nvidia graphics running out of the GL uniform buffer space. This can be fixed by cutting the number of joints per mesh, which may not always be ideal from a creator’s perspective. However, a further fix has been suggested by the alchemy viewer team, which Vir is looking at, which may be an option going forward.
  • An issue with the Reset Skeleton option not always un-deforming an avatar. This appears to be a permissions issue (you can generally deform your own avatar, but may not be able to properly un-deform someone else due to the permissions set on their animations). Vir is currently having a hard time pinning the issue down, and has requested than anyone able to consistently repro it with a model to drop him a line.

A further fix still to be added to the RC viewer is for collision volume joint positions which were failing to reset correctly when using Reset Skeleton.

There have been more bugs filed as a result of the Firestorm Bento pre-release and alpha version being made available to testers, which is helping to pin down the more significant issues and ensure that, where possible, fixes are put in place.

The most recent RC for the viewer at the time of writing (version 5.0.0.321250) has been showing an improved crash rate, with no significant spikes when compared to the current release viewer.

Legacy Content Deformation Issues

The deformation issue affecting some early Bento avatars and due to bad joint position overrides, as initially reported in BUG-40672 doesn’t appear to be widespread. As such, and subject to final confirmation by the Lab, it looks as though no changes will be made to the viewer to fork rendering behaviour (as discussed in my Bento update #32), which would require Bento content to be re-uploaded.

There are other bugs reported within BUG-40672 which have fixes, such as for the eye problem (again, see my Bento #32 update), the Haste Coy product problem, and the 1st Act Garou Male Avatar, and these either are, or will be in RC updates to the Bento viewer, where code fixes are required.

Firestorm Bento FPS Issue

Some people on the Firestorm Bento alpha release are reporting poor performance / low FPS when around other avatars. However, others are reporting an improved performance with the Bento version over the current 4.7.9 – although that could be a placebo effect. For those experiencing lower than expected FPS on their systems,try running the latest official Bento RC and see if the same performance issues are apparent. If they aren’t, try one of the following:

  • Try raising your Avatar Complexity to a high value / No Limit, as there is an odd issue on some systems where rendering a lot of “Jelly Dolls” can negatively impact viewer performance
  • Back-up your settings, and then reset everything to default values (e.g. as defined by the Bento RC) and check performance. If there is a noticeable improvement, gradually work through graphic settings and see if / when the updates start to impact performance. If you see a consistent impact which can be reproduced, file a Firestorm bug report.

Additional Bento Links

The Prim Rig, ANWR Channel
The Prim Rig,  – blog post

Other Updates: Server, Viewer, Avatar Complexity and Aditi Log-ins

Server Deployments – Recap

  • There was no Main (SLS) channel roll on Tuesday, November 8th.
  • On Wednesday, November 9th, the three RC channels should all receive the same new server maintenance package, which includes:
    •  llGetEnv() will support “region_max_prims” (feature request BUG-40825).
    • llGetObjectDetails() will have a new OBJECT_GROUP_TAG function  (feature request BUG-20064) – when pointed at avatars it returns the group tag you see floating above them; and also OBJECT_TEMP_ATTACHED – to tell you if something is a temp attachment (feature request BUG-5195).

SL Viewer Updates

The Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 4.1.2.321518  on Thursday, November 10th. This may well be the next RC to gain promotion to release status, given the Bento viewer is still awaiting a further RC update, as noted above.

The 360 Snapshot project viewer updated to version 4.1.2.321431 on Wednesday November 9th.

Avatar Complexity Issue

As noted in the Bento update, some people are experiencing FPS / performance issues on the Firestorm Bento viewer. However, there are a number of issues related to the level of detail (LOD) on “jellied” avatar attachments, which can have an impact on general viewer performance. The Lab is working on these problems, and hopefully, a fix will be appearing in a Maintenance RC at some point.

Aditi Log-ins

Some people are having issues when trying to log-in to Aditi, These are generally people who having logged-in to the beta grid in a very long time or are trying for the very first time with a particular account. If you are encountering problems, the best solution is to file a support ticket. It should generally be dealt with within 24 hours (weekends allowing), and your Aditi inventory will be synced with Agni (Main grid) as a part of the process of granting you access. You should only need to file a support ticket once.