Tag: Content Creation 2019

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, December 19th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

The majority of this meeting was a generic conversation of ideas such as moving Second Life to support PBR, what might be done to improve Pathfinding, etc., none of which are on the road map for Second Life at present; as such these notes keep the the current projects that are in progress at the Lab.

SL Viewer

A new Maintenance viewer, code named Xanté, was released on Thursday, December 19th. Version 6.3.6.533748 contains around 30 fixes for reported issues and bugs. All other viewer remain as per my Current Viewer Release List.

With regards to viewers:

• The Lab’s focus has been on transitioning their Bitbucket viewer build repositories from Mercurial to Git – see my week #50 TPVD meeting notes for more.
• As well as the current pipelines of viewers, work is also in hand to ensure the viewer is ready to manage Name Changes when that capability is deployed in early 2020.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will now likely not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• Bug fixing continues, notably around alpha rendering issues.
• The hope is that of the remaining issues, some my be related, and so solving one will help to solve others of a similar nature.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

Current Status

• Vir is working on getting things to a state where he can do so practical testing over the holiday period to ensure the relevant data is being collected. This is dependent on whether he has the time to confirm the internal version of the viewer is logging everything it needs to be logging.
• The work is still very much focused on the data collection aspect, rather than doing anything with the data that is gathered.
  • The kind of data being gathered includes: what are the graphics and geometric properties of the objects in a scene, what rendering settings are being used, poly count for different LODs with a model, what are the graphics properties in use (materials, texture + texture size, etc.), plus the time required to generate a frame successfully given the work required to render the scene.
• Once the data has been gathered, the idea is to run the viewer on multiple hardware configurations (GPU, CPU, etc.), and gather data on the the impacts of changes those various properties.
• The aim is to get a more accurate feel for how performance is impacted, and how significantly changes impact performance (e.g. what’s the impact of enabling Full Bright compared to enabling materials? Which is genuinely better: properly optimised mesh or plain faces with materials or a combination of low-resolution mesh + materials?
• As well as allowing the complexity calculations for avatar attachments and in-world objects to be better refined, the data gathered might, further down the line in the project, enable LL to make plausible forecasts of what might be seen by way of performance improvements in relation to suggested constraints being put on objects as a part of the creation process.
• Textures are still proving a problem in terms of measuring impact (e.g. is it more a total threshold limit being hit, rather than the number of textures used within an individual object?).
• Anther limiting aspect is the number of different bottlenecks users can experience quite outside of the Lab’s control (e.g. their network connection, what else is going on across that connection at the same time, etc)., and bottlenecks within individual systems that can vary.
• One attempt to improve things that has been made in Firestorm is for the matrix calculations for worn mesh to be cached the the bones to which the mesh has been rigged hasn’t moved between frames. This can save up to 7 sets of calculations for a mesh with 8 faces that the viewer may not actually need to make. This may be contributed to LL for evaluation.

** The next Content Creation User Group Meeting should be on Thursday, January 9th, 2020, but check the wiki page for confirmation **

 

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, December 12th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will now likely not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• Bug fixing continues – the estimate is around 18 or so bugs the Lab would like to resolve prior to any potential release.

Project Muscadine

Project Summary

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

Current Status

• Still on hold due to the focus on ARCTan.
• There are still requests to allow attachments on Animesh items.
  • This is something Vir hopes to look at in detail later in Muscadine.
  • It may require attachments to be handled differently to how they are managed with avatars.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

Current Status

• Vir is working on getting things to a state where he can do so practical testing over the holiday period to ensure the relevant data is being collected. This is dependent on whether he has the time to confirm the internal version of the viewer is logging everything it needs to be logging.
• The work is still very much focused on the data collection aspect, rather than doing anything with the data that is gathered.
• It is not currently clear whether the ARCTan work will appear in a dedicated project viewer or will form a part of a Maintenance viewer update.

Texture Caching and Loading

• LL is working on a viewer intended to improve texture loading and texture caching (the latter as part of a general overall of how the viewer caches data).
• This will hopefully include a rethinking of the order in which textures are loaded (e.g. objects  / faces that all use the same texture may all have that texture loaded together/in sequence, rather than the texture having to be re-loaded each time it is encountered).
• The improvements should see textures load faster in general. In particular, there is a re-examination of some of the “optimisation” work previously done with textures, as this might actually now be slowing things down, so the hope is the new viewer will streamline how textures are handled and loaded in general, so bringing about improvements.
  • An example of this is switching the viewer from downloading a texture (or grabbing it from cache) and rendering it incrementally to just letting it grab the entire texture, particularly now that most broadband connections will allow this without it becoming a significant bottleneck.
  • This will allow a significant reduction in the amount of checking and re-checking the viewer has to carry out when obtaining and loading textures, which can have an impact.
• Hopefully, the viewer will also improve the texture load order (e.g. those textures nearest to you or filling your immediate field of view, such as a vendor board on a wall, will be loaded and rendered first, rather than waiting for other textures loading first).
• There is currently no date on when this viewer might surface for public use.

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, November 14th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will now likely not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• Merging with the last set of viewer releases has caused issues, and these are currently being addressed.
• Beyond the above issue, clearing the remaining EEP bugs is “a priority focus”.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

Current Status

• Vir is working on providing a means for data collection across a range of different viewer-side hardware specifications.
• His previous work on textures and texture handling / loading have revealed it is hard to quantify in terms of accounting for performance impact, as textures don’t result in the same kind of impact as mesh triangle complexity.
  • With mesh, there is a clear complexity correlation between the number of triangles and performance /  complexity hits.
  • The number of textures on a object don’t behave the same way, other then during initial loading or if they push against memory limits, so, there’s no gradual degradation in performance with texture that can be seen with mesh, making it harder to produce accurate calculations.

Avatar System

The avatar system has become considerably more flexible over the years, but also far more complexity to use. Given this, Vir put out a question on whether there is anything creators would like to see Linden Lab do in terms of managing the avatar behaviour and configurability.

For example, one aspect of avatar system management is HUDs, which can be impactful in a number of ways  – resources simulator side, texture use viewer side; general ease-of use. Discussion on this raised some suggestions ideas:

• Presenting them through (if possible) a dedicated floater in the viewer that could be dragged around like any other floater, minimised, etc.
• Possibly extending llDialog to prove better support for HUD-like actions via dialogues.
• Providing an HTML-based means for HUD-style interactions.
• Having a “favourites” inventory folder sub-set, floater and toolbar button, a-la Firestorm that users could use for their various HUDs and (hopefully) encourage them to only attach (via the toolbar button / floater) when required – thus assisting with reducing VRAM usage for users / eases resource loads when avatars move between simulators. This idea has been discussed at the Lab.

A further discussion on this involved avatar shapes and applying / managing parameters.

• Currently the body shape is a “container” for all body parameters (head shape, body size, leg length, torso dimensions, etc).
• This can make it hard when trying to carry out localised modifications to a part of a body (e.g. applying head parameters to a “preset” shape designed for a specific head brand).
• There have been suggestions to help improve this, including:
  • Providing a means of exporting specific shape parameters for making new body shapes (see feature request BUG-216131).
  • Manipulating the shape via LSL (not seen as necessarily user-friendly).
  • Having some form of wearable that can be associated with specific body area parameters so that when used, would cause the currently worn body to adopt those parameters.
  • Provide a means to support some kind of “mask list” that just governs which bones they affect. This would allow for quite arbitrary sub-sets (as defined by the shape creator), but is seen as not that user-friendly, and potentially introducing added complexity into shape manipulation.
• Some of these suggestions have a potential hit with increased UI complexity, but the idea of having explicit sub-set of shapes (e.g. one for the head, one form the upper body (or torso), etc.,) that have an obvious link to the sliders they would affect / be affected by, would seem to be the easiest for users to understand.
• To address the head issue noted above, the most direct solution would be to separate the head shape from the body.

Other Items in Brief

• Rider Linden is working on the texturing download and caching updates for the viewer, but these have run into merging problems with the current release viewer, so there is nothing available for public consumption on this work.
• Several creators have noted issues with Bakes on Mesh and the left arm / leg, Universal wearables, tattoos and skins (see this forum post as an example, together with this feedback thread post). No precise solution has been offered (there has been a suggestion for LL to provide a means to convert existing skins to universals for left arm and left leg, but it’s not clear how well this would work in practice).

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 24th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

SL Viewers

Pipeline Updates

The Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.3.532031 on Wednesday, October 23rd, bringing it to parity with the current release viewer. The rest of the viewer pipelines remain as follows:

• Current Release version 6.3.2.530962, formerly the Vinsanto Maintenance RC viewer, dated September 17th, promoted October 15th – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.3.532031, October 23rd.
  • Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, version 6.3.3.531767, October 21st.
  • Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.3.531784, October 18th.
  • Voice RC viewer, version 6.3.3.531811, October 18th.
  • EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.530150, August 19th.
• Project viewers:
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.3.531844, released on Monday, October 21st.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.530473, September 11th.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

Current Status

• Vir is working on trying to gather data on the impact of textures in rendering avatars and objects.

Project Muscadine

Project Summary

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

Current Status

• The server-side support or Muscadine is awaiting an update.
• The viewer has been merged up to the latest release viewer (no actual updates to the Muscadine code), and is awaiting QA testing.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will now likely not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• The anticipated viewer update has been delayed as a result of a couple of the changes made resulting in unintended outcomes whilst in testing. Plus the viewer now needs to be merged up to the current release viewer.
• Still no back-end updates while Ptolemy and Euclid continue to get up-to-speed with the SL rendering engine and pipelines.

Other Items in Brief

• BUG-227585 “[BOM] Display the new Universal wearables between the Skin and the Tattoos ones” is a feature request suggesting the new Universal Wearables for Bakes on Mesh be moved from sitting above the skin and tattoo layers, to being between them.
  • With a noted reservation that doing so will change behaviour so are already using, the Lab has accepted the idea as something they might consider.
  • The Jira includes additional discussion points  / ideas.
• The meeting included a discussion (voice and text) on alpha sorting and the issues that can occur within it when using alpha blending. Some of these issues are SL specific, others are more generic in nature and found within OpenGL in general. The suggestion was made to allow a certain amount of creator-defined ordering with objects, but there were several concerns raised around this by creators and the Lab, including the potential for performance impacts.
• The above discussion spiked into one about avatar meshes, the potential for a new “standardised” (or “Lab-driven) “mesh avatar 2.0”, that could be far more rendering efficient than all existing models, th pro (better efficiency of design and rendering) and cons (whole new system incompatible with existing heads / bodies & getting people to use it).
• Also folded into this was a conversation on how to encourage creators to make more efficient content.
  • One suggestions is to have some form of “scoring” system taking into consideration item complexity, use of textures, etc., that determines how high up on Marketplace searches goods appear & thus are likely to be seen and purchased – the idea being that by trying to “game” the scoring system, creators produce better content.
  • This skips the case of items sold in-world (how are scores enforced on vendors?). And also has a problem of how does an automated system “score” pre-packaged items uploaded to the MP (since it would only be able to assess the packaging, not the content)?
  • Alternatively, Vir pointed out that there is a lot more that the Bake Service could do in assessing the complexity of avatars in-world, and this could be potentially more meaningful in the future as ARCTan progresses beyond the current scope of the project.
• Overall, and given the amount of legacy content in SL, one of the core ways of encouraging better content  is seen as not only making improvements to the mesh uploader and trying to push creators into making more efficient content – but to give users the tools and reporting that help educate them about what is going on around them, what is causing potential performance issues and then allowing them to start making more informed decisions on how they set their viewer and the kind of content they purchase.
• Date of next meeting: Thursday, November 14th, 2019.

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 17th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

Current Status

• Data gathering is continuing, with the intention of gathering enough information on different rendering operations to be able to update the current cost coefficients being using in the rendering cost calculations.
• Normalising the settings across different client-side hardware is seen as a challenge.
  • One thing the Lab proposes doing is running the resultant model across a range of client hardware types and different ranges of settings.
  • However, if there are significant differences across hardware types (which is likely), then some weighting mechanism will need to be used.
• One issue noted as a part of the work is a persistent spike – frames in every second that were much longer than the others in the Windows viewer. This was traced back to a call being made to an expensive API that wasn’t even required and has therefore been removed.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will now likely not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• The viewer is being merged up to the latest release viewer (version 6.3.2.530962, dated September 17th, promoted October 15th). This may also include at least one UI issue fix as well.
• There are no further simulator-side updates that are ready for deployment as yet, but work has been continuing in resolving bugs.

Other Items in Brief

• Following on from the discussion at the previous meeting about object size and land impact calculations a feature request – BUG-227762 “Removal of Size from Land Impact calculation/Texture LOD/Adjustable LOD distance” – has been submitted, and has been accepted by the Lab for consideration
  • The Jira also touches on texture management and handling, suggesting a way the textures for an object could be manipulated / downscaled in real-time.
  • It was pointed out that Firestorm offers an automatic downscale of 1024 textures in its 32-bit versions (and the setting in optional in the 64-bit versions), but the suggestion is that be providing users with information in the viewer could allow them to make more informed choices when making adjustments to help with their own performance.
  • This JIRA will be looked at in reference to ARCTan.
• Something of a companion idea to this would be to allow a texture upload to produce multiple versions of a texture (e.g. a 1024×1204 also produces a 512x512x256x256 and 128×128). This has been discussed in the past, and is seen as something that, will requiring input from the Product Team, might be worth exploring.
• A suggestion to lessen the reliance on high-res specular maps is for the Lab to provide a set of default grey textures at (say) 128×128 against which specular glossiness and environment could be set. A counter to this was that the blank white texture could be used and tinted to grey.
• There was also general discussion on PBR and its possible introduction to SL in the future (it is *not* on the roadmap right now!) and its potential impact on existing content were it to be introduced.

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on Thursday, October 10th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Graphics Team

There are two new Lindens now on the rendering team – Euclid Linden, who has been with the Lab for around a month at the time of writing, and Ptolemy Linden, who has been a Linden for the last couple of weeks, again at the time of writing. Both will be working on various rendering projects which will include the Love Me Render viewer updates and also projects like the Environment Enhancement Project (EEP) – which is considered a priority in order to move that project towards release.

Viewers

No further updates thus far in the week. The hope is that the Vinsanto Maintenance RC viewer (version 6.3.2.530962 at the time of writing) looks to be in “good shape” for promotion, but currently requires a little more time in its release cohort.

This leaves the official viewer pipelines at the time of the meeting as follows:

• Current Release version 6.3.1.530559, formerly the Umeshu Maintenance RC viewer, dated, September 5 – No Change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Voice RC viewer, version 6.3.2.531587, October 8.
  • Love Me Render viewer, version 6.3.2.531296, September 30.
  • Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, version 6.3.2.530972, September 24.
  • Vinsanto RC viewer, version 6.3.2.530962, September 17.
  • EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.530150, August 19.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.530473, September 11.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16.
• Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November 2017 – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
• Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

Current Status

• Work is progressing on building a predictive model based on the data LL has been gathering on mesh complexity, frame times, etc.
• This model will be tested across a wider range of client hardware types and different ranges of settings.
• The data thus far confirms that geometric complexity plays a large part in performance reduction, but also that there are a lot of other variables in play: rigged meshes are very different in behaviour impact to static meshes; some graphics properties can make a “big difference” in frame time, etc.
• Details on the impact of textures has yet to be folded into the project.

Project Muscadine

Project Summary

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

Current Status

Still largely on hold while ARCTan is being focused on.

Other Items in Brief

• Mesh Uploader: a couple of points were brought up concerning the mesh uploader:
  • At the time mesh was introduced, materials were no supported; therefore, in the uploader there is code to discard tangent space (which can be used by normal maps). This means normals must be calculated in real time, causing both performance problems and inconsistencies between how normals appear in Second Life and how they appear in the 3D software used to create them. It’s been suggested this issue should be the subject of a Jira.
  • Allowing for the work on ARCTan, some see the uploader unfairly punishing on grounds of size and LI.
    • It what pointed out that a very large mesh that can be complex to render get hit with a high LI and high upload cost, but a very small object  – which may still have tens of thousands of triangles – is not penalised to the same degree, even though it might be as costly to render.
    • The alternative suggested was to have costs based not on LOD boundaries & changes rather than a simple size / LI basis. The idea here being that the cost is more reflective of what is seen and rendered by the viewer, which is seen as “levelling” the playing field (if a small object has a really high LOD tri count, then it would incur higher costs, in theory making creators more conservative in how they construct their models.
    • It was pointed out that in some respects complexity / LODs are already being gamed (e.g. by having one high LOD model then setting the medium and low LOD levels to use the same low poly version of the model for both and avoid costs for a proper mid-level LOD model), and such an approach as suggested might further encourage similar gaming.
    • Vir’s view is that the issue is not really that tied to the uploader per se, but is more in the realm of overall cost calculations (although LOD models obviously impact upload costs). As such, ARCTan is really the first step in trying to deal with these kinds of issues, and may help alleviate some of the perceived imbalance seen with upload costs.
• Materials and Bakes on Mesh: a request was again put forward for LL to provide materials support for Bakes on Mesh. This is not an easy capability to supply, because:
  • System layers for clothing do not have a means to support any materials properties.
  • The Bake Service has no mechanism for identifying and handling materials properties to ensure they are correctly composited.
  • Thus, in order to support materials, both the system wearables and the Bake Service would require a large-scale overhaul which, given all that is going on right now (e.g. trying to transition services to being provisioned via AWS services), the Lab is unwilling to take on.
• A request was made to allow 2K textures to be displayed by Second Life under “controlled conditions”, the idea being that a single 2K texture could eliminate the need for multiple smaller textures. The two main problems here are:
  • There is already a propensity for people to use high-res textures across all surfaces, whether required or not on the grounds “higher must be visually better”, so allowing even higher resolution textures to be displayed could exacerbate this.
  • Given there is no real gate keeping on how textures are used in-world once uploaded, how would any “controlled conditions” on the use of certain textures actually be implemented (both technically and from a user understanding perspective)?