Tag: Content Creation 2020

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, December 17th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar.

The venue for meetings is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

No changes through the week to the current crop of viewers:

• Current release viewer version 6.4.11.551711, formerly Cachaça Maintenance RC viewer promoted on November 12 – No Change.
• Release channel cohort:
  • Dawa Maintenance RC Viewer, version 6.4.12.553723, December 15.
  • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.552100, November 12.
• Project viewers:
  • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.12.552224, December 4.
  • Simple Cache project viewer, version 6.4.11.551403, issued on November 12.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The two RC viewers are vying for promotion to release status. However, the next promotion is unlikely to come until the new year.
• The Profiles viewer, the Simple Caching viewer and the Project Jelly viewer are almost in a position to be promoted to RC status.
• There are some viewers waiting on QA – such as the next graphics fixes viewer (the Love Me Render viewer).

“Thanksgiving Bakefail” Issue and Current Outfit Folder Problems

• As a result of the “Thanksgiving Bakefail” issue that saw a portion of users unable to rez their avatars beyond a cloud status,  LL have been working on the back-end systems to make this kind of event less likely. This will also involve changes to the viewer as well,  so the work will “take a while” to complete.
• Essentially, these kind of issues are the result of multiple versions of the Current Outfit folder appearing in inventory, resulting in the viewer and the Bake Service coming into conflict over which version is the “current” version,  so appearance updates fail.
• The corrective action will be to ensure the back-end services (Bake, etc), have primacy for creating the Current Outfit Folder, and removing the viewer’s ability to do so.
• The problem has arisen because historically, to speed inventory loading, the viewer has been able to initiate creation of folders, including essential system folders.

In Brief

• Creators still feel the cost of Animesh (in terms of LI) is too high.
  • Vir hopes to re-visit the overall cost of Animesh, but reminded people that “too high” is a relative term; the cost of Animesh in terms of rendering and impact is actually a lot more accurate than is currently given for other items (hence the ARCTan project).
  • However, he acknowledges that the rendering cost formulas for avatars and in-world objects do have issues (again, hence ARCTan project).

Date of Next Meeting

• Thursday, January 7th, 2021.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, December 3rd 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar.

The venue for meetings is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

A new Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.12.553053, was release on Thursday, December 3rd. Otherwise, the current selection of official viewers remains unchanged:

• Current release viewer version 6.4.11.551711, formerly Cachaça Maintenance RC viewer promoted on November 12 – No change..
• Release channel cohorts:
  •  Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.552100, November 12.
• Project viewers:
  • Simple Cache project viewer, version 6.4.11.551403, issued on November 12.
  • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.11.551213, November 2.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

ARCTan / Jellydoll / Imposter Avatars

• Vir has most recently looking at timers / frame rate variability.
• As a reminder:
  • The current ARCTan work is focused on the viewer-side updates to avatar complexity calculations.
  • Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.

Graphics

• Work has commenced on separating out the rendering of viewer UI elements from scene rendering.
  • The reason for this is that the UI currently gets rendered on per frame basis, which is performance expensive on what is essentially a relatively static element of the viewer.
  • The aim is to revise the UI such that it is only re-drawn was needed, and it is hoped this will result in a performance gain in terms of viewer frame rates.
  • When this work is in a condition where it can be released, it will appear in its own project / RC viewer, and not as a part of the Love Me Render graphics-specific viewer pipeline.
• No news on work for replacing OpenGL.

In Brief

• There may be an issue with the viewer ignoring avatar custom joint positions if they do not have a weight associated with them. This appears true for .DAE files exports from Maya, and possibly with exports from Blender 1.7.9.a / 1.7.9.b (although Avastar may automatically compensate for unweighted custom joints by given them a default weighting). However, it is not clear if the issue lies with the modelling software or the mesh uploader, and its been requested that those experiencing these issues check the mesh upload data to see if anything is being pruned.

Date of Next Meeting

• Thursday, December 17th.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, November 19th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar.

The venue for meetings is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

At the time of writing, the current selection of official viewers (release, RC and projects) was as follows:

• Current release viewer version 6.4.11.551711, formerly Cachaça Maintenance RC viewer promoted on November 12 – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts:
  •  Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.552100, November 12.
• Project viewers:
  • Simple Cache project viewer, version 6.4.11.551403, issued on November 12.
  • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.11.551213, November 2.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The Custom Key Mapping viewer is thought to be reaching a point where it can be promoted as the de facto release viewer.
• A new Love Me Render (LMR) RC / project viewer is due to be issued. LMR-5 will include non-EEP bug fixes.
• The Copy / Paste project viewer is on hold as a result of running into UI complications, and is currently awaiting further work by the viewer UI team, or possibly a decision to scrap the viewer entirely.

ARCTan / Jellydoll / Imposter Avatars

• Vir has most recently looking at timers / frame rate variability.
• As a reminder:
  • The current ARCTan work is focused on the viewer-side updates to avatar complexity calculations.
  • Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.

Graphics

• Work has commenced on separating out the rendering of viewer UI elements from scene rendering.
  • The reason for this is that the UI currently gets rendered on per frame basis, which is performance expensive on what is essentially a relatively static element of the viewer.
  • The aim is to revise the UI such that it is only re-drawn was needed, and it is hoped this will result in a performance gain in terms of viewer frame rates.
  • When this work is in a condition where it can be released, it will appear in its own project / RC viewer, and not as a part of the Love Me Render graphics-specific viewer pipeline.
• No news on work for replacing OpenGL.

In Brief

• There may be an issue with the viewer ignoring avatar custom joint positions if they do not have a weight associated with them. This appears true for .DAE files exports from Maya, and possibly with exports from Blender 1.7.9.a / 1.7.9.b (although Avastar may automatically compensate for unweighted custom joints by given them a default weighting). However, it is not clear if the issue lies with the modelling software or the mesh uploader, and its been requested that those experiencing these issues check the mesh upload data to see if anything is being pruned.

Date of Next Meeting

• Thursday, December 3rd.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, November 5th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

SL Viewer

At the time of writing, the current selection of official viewers (release, RC and projects) was as follows:

• Current release viewer version 6.4.10.549686, formerly the Mesh Uploader RC promoted on October 14 – No Change.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • Cachaça Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.11.551139, issued October 27.
• Project viewers:
  • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.11.551213, November 2.
  • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.10.549685, November 2.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

ARCTan / Jellydoll / Imposter Avatars

• Bug fixes for Jellydolls include:
  • Fixing an issue where jellydolled avatars could suddenly vanish with viewed on Mac systems.
  • Ensuring Amimesh attachments on imposter avatars update in sync with the avatar.
  • Impostered avatars and their Animesh attachments are currently rendered entirely separately to one another, so the code might be looked at to unify their rendering.
  • A general clean-up on the imposter code, which has led to the discovery that while code was added to the viewer to check to see if impostered avatars had been updated, it has never been hooked up to updating the imposter avatar as rendered by the viewer, leaving them frozen. This is now being fixed.
• Once the Mac issue is sorted, the play is to merge the Jellydoll updates back into the ARCTan project (from which they were split earlier in the year).
  • However, the current Jellydoll work will progress as is through the currently project viewer continued through to RC and, ultimately, release.
• As a reminder:
  • The current ARCTan work is focused on the viewer-side updates to avatar complexity calculations.
  • Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.

Graphics

• No news on work for replacing OpenGL.
• Ptolemy Linden from the Graphics team has been working on performance improvements, notably related to Linden Water rendering. This work is currently focused on providing a means for those on low-end systems to completely disable water reflection rendering entirely and / or to make water opaque, both to reduce the rendering load.
• The entire water rendering issue is complicated for a range of reasons (e.g. the fact the water plane is still drawn at altitude even though its appearance is occluded by the sky sphere, the fact that any changes made for some users could impact the “shared experience” / expected behaviour for others, etc.).
• Ptolemy also noted that the viewer collects a lot of static rendering information that could potentially be used to assist with better drawing / rendering of scenes, and this could be something that might be looked at in more detail once the Project Uplift work is completed.

Date of Next Meeting

• Thursday, November 19th.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 29th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

There was a lot of general discussion about animation synchronisation, cloud uplift (the majority of which I’ve already reported in my SUG and TPVD meetings of late), etc., none of which should out as really reportable.

Jellydoll / ARCTan

• Vir has been working on some bug fixes to the Project Jelly viewer (version 6.4.10.549690 at the time of writing), and this work is now with the Lab’s QA team. When issues, this will see the viewer also based on the current release viewer code base.
• As a reminder:
  • The current ARCTan work is focused on the viewer-side updates to avatar complexity calculations.
  • Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.

Graphics

• The Graphics team is still looking at options for replacing OpenGL, particularly as a result of Apple’s plans to deprecate all support for it on their systems.
• The OpenGL project is large-scale, so the Graphic team is also looking at other shorter-term projects related to performance improvements. These may include:
  • Possible optimisations for people on low-end systems (as noted in my previous CCUG summary, roughly 1/3 of all users are running on systems that do not support Vulkan and many of these systems are more than 5 years old).
  • Linden Water: since the last TPV meeting (see: 2020 TPVD meeting week #42: summary) the Lab believe they have determined that the FPS loss seen when rendering Linden Water appears to be related to a combination of the actual rendering and with water reflections. This is still being investigated. One idea to deal with the latter is to completely disable water reflections in the viewer; however, doing this at present affects the sky and the look of the Sun, so again,further investigation is needed.
• In addition, the graphics team is looking to see if the viewer UI rendering can be divorced from other aspects of viewer rendering to see if any performance improvements can be obtained by keeping the two separate – currently, a lot of cycles are taken up in the drawing of things like UI panels and buttons.

In  Brief / General

• Teleport failures are still under investigation. Beq Janus from Firestorm is also investigation, and has encountered a situation where the failure may be related to the manner in which regions are queried bases on draw distance, and the system potentially becomes confused as to the actual destination.
• Megaprims and relaxing linking constraints (BUG-229551):
  • As  expressed by the feature request, the Lab sees this as being two issues: allowing the use of prims larger than 64m on a size / diameter, and handling region surrounds.
  • In particular, the Lab is looking at the potential of braking out region surrounds (“sim surrounds”) as a supported feature in their own right, simply because of the size of the use case. One suggestion for this is to have what is seen beyond a the edges of an individual region to be definable as texturing, rather than just the default of Linden Water.
  • Increasing prim sizing beyond the current maximum is seen as problematic as the size constraint touches on multiple aspects of the simulator code (e.g. Interest Lists being one) that would have to be overhauled – which is not something the Lab wants to undertake in the near future, although this does do preclude the potential for very large prim sizes at some point.
• The cloud migration work has left the Lab with a certain amount of “technical deficit” – work  deferred in favour of simply getting systems and services transitioned to running on AWS infrastructure and hardware. This means that once the Uplift Project is completed, there will be a number of areas of simulator and back-end services that will need to be re-visited.
• Potential projects to follow-on projects outside of the graphics performance updates mentioned above could include:
  • Updating the default terrain texture.
  • Further work on easing the new user experience,
  • Further work on viewer UI improvements.
  • Streaming changing an avatar’s appearance.
• Bone uploads: the question was asked that why, given Bento provides 120+ bones, single avatar sub-mesh uploads are limited to a maximum of 110 bones. The reason is that 110 bones is the maximum some graphics systems can handle in a single upload before things go wrong.

Date of Next Meeting

• Check the CCUG wiki page.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 15th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

There was a lot of general discussion about animation synchronisation, cloud uplift (the majority of which I’ve already reported in my SUG and TPVD meetings of late), etc., none of which should out as really reportable.

SL Viewers

Default Viewer

The Mesh Uploader viewer, version 6.4.10.549686, was promoted to de facto release status on Wednesday, October 14th. This viewer provides additional information on mesh models prior to upload, with contributions from Beq Janus from the Firestorm team and also revisions by the Lab’s viewer team. Cosmetic changes with this viewer include:

• Upgrade to preview resolution to 1024×1024.
• Scalable preview window.
• Fixed display of colours in preview.
• Adjustment of colours to better correlate to in world (yellow frame of mesh, blue tint physics).
• Rearrange UI elements to give more space for the preview even when not scaled up.

Informational changes  in this viewer include two new boxes: cost breakdown and physics breakdown – these provide access to information that has always been available to the viewer form the upload costs update message but were not previously shown to the user.

Legacy Profiles

The Legacy Profiles viewer (version 6.3.2.530836 at the time of writing) has been stuck awaiting a web-side update, but as the web team are all focused on Uplift work, attempts are being made to work around the delay in order to get the viewer moving again.

Graphics

• Work has resumed at looking towards a replacement for OpenGL, particularly as a result of Apple’s plans to deprecate all support for it on their systems.
  • Vulkan had been an option under examination, and additional logging was added to the viewer to help identify how many users are on systems capable of running it.
  • It now turns out that a rather high number of users (up to a 1/3 of all users) are running Second Life systems that do not have support for Vulkan (e.g. those 5+years old, and notably systems with Intel integrated graphics).
  • As a result other options are also being looked at, as is the potential for supporting people on older hardware separately to those using systems capable of running with more recent graphics APIs – although this is an option the Lab would approach with caution, due to the added complexities in maintenance.
• In addition, the graphics team is looking to see if the viewer UI rendering can be divorced from other aspects of viewer rendering to see if any performance improvements can be obtained by keeping the two separate – currently, a lot of cycles are taken up in the drawing of things like UI panels and buttons.

Jellydoll / ARCTan

• Vir has been working on some updates to the Project Jelly viewer (version 6.4.10.549690 at the time of writing).
• This viewer is a series of performance improvements related to Jellydoll avatars, and the additional work should be appearing in an update to the project viewer soon. After that, Vir is hoping to completely re-focus on the ARCTan work, which will eventually fold-in the Jellydoll work as well.
• Should he be able to switch back to ARCTan, the work will remain split between avatar rendering (to be tackled first), and then in-world object rendering to follow along at some point after.
• The work on avatar rendering will initially be focused on the data gathering aspect and better refining the avatar complexity calculations, followed by UI work to deliver more meaningful and consistent information to users about the rendering impact of their own avatar and those around them.

Date of Next Meeting

• Thursday, October 29th, 2020.