Tag: Content Creation 2021

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, June 17th, 2021. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar and the venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates for the viewer since Monday, June 14th, leaving the official viewer pipelines as follows:

• Release viewer: LMR 5 viewer, version 6.4.19.560171, dated May 27th, promoted June 7th – NEW.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Project UI RC viewer, version 6.4.20.560520 dated June 14th.
  • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.19.559726, dated May 19th.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26th, 2020.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9th, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22nd, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The Project UI RC viewer will be the next to be promoted to de facto release status, and this will be in the “next week or two”.
• The Mac notifications viewer has still yet to surface as a either a project or RC viewer.
• The revised simplified cache viewer RC is returning to LL’s QA team, and if it passes through testing, should be appearing as a new RC, but this may not be for another couple of weeks.
• A further CEF (Chrome Embedded Framwork) viewer for web content – media streaming, etc., – is also in the works, that should support more streaming / media codecs and fix a number of streaming-related issues.

ARCTan

Summary: An attempt to re-evaluate avatar rendering costs and the cost of in-world scene rendering, with the current focus on avatar rendering cost / impact, with the in-world scene rendering / LI to be tackled at some point in the future.

• Work is continuing on the new performance floater. This pulls together information from various menus / debugs to display useable information on avatars / attachments that are heavy in rendering cost, and what can be done.
  • This work is currently separate to the work on revising that actual formulas used for calculating avatar complexity
  • It had been indicated the UI work could appear in the viewer before the avatar ARCTan calculations are updated to more accurately reflect the cost of rendering avatars.
  • However, there is a concern that if this is the case, the new floater will simply be ignored when made available, and will continue to be be ignored after the calculations have been revised.
  • It has therefore been suggested it would be better to revise the calculations first, and then release the viewer with the new information floater and explanations as to why it should be taken note of. LL have indicated they may consider doing this.
• There is an on-going debate as to how useful information / self-regulating exercises like ARCTan are, compared to the enforcement of hard limits.
  • Self-regulating exercises (users making use of the information provided by their viewer) tend to be ignored (e.g. the Jelly Dolls complexity slide is generally left ramped up to the highest), thus defeating the purpose of such exercises.
  • However, enforcement of hard limits runs the risk of causing a high level of upset (and possible quitting) of a good portion of the user base when they find they can no longer overload their avatars with high-vertices/high texture load/heavily scripted attachments.
  • To  avoid the latter, it has been suggested the viewer should be able to automatically reduce avatar rendering to progressively lower LOD settings based on the load they place on the local system, rather than purely by distance from the camera.
• It’s also bee suggested that for meshes in general, Second Life should have a robust auto-LODing system at upload.

In Brief

• A long-standing issue for content creators producing mesh linksets for upload to SL, is that while they could give each element in the linkset a unique name for easier re-assembly post-upload, following upload, only the first element of the linkset would retain its name – the rest would be converted to “Object”, making re-linking an onerous task.
• BUG-202864 “Change Mesh Uploader to preserve Scene File object names when a full linkset is uploaded” was raised in 2018 as a request for this to be addressed, and a viewer-side change to support this was implemented thereafter.
• However, as per the week #22 CCUG, the server-side update also required to support this was not made, and the matter slipped off of LL’s radar.
• Following that meeting, Vir Linden referred the matter to Rider Linden on the simulator team, and he has reported that:
  • The required server-side support will be going to RC, hopefully in week #25 (commencing Monday, June 21st).
  • In the interim, those wishing to test the capability can do so via the Preflight group of regions over the weekend.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, June 3rd, 2021. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar and the venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates for the viewer for the week, leaving the pipelines as follows:

• Release viewer: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23, promoted April 29 – 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):
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.19.560171, dated May 27.
  • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.19.559726, dated May 19.
  • Project UI viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559612, May 14.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The current version of LMR 5, 6.4.19.560171 is set for promotion to de facto release status at the start of week #23 (commencing Monday, June 7th).
  • This viewer includes a fix for BUG-230789 “[MAINT-E] Alpha failures with Release 6.4.18.558266 (64bit)”.
• The New User Experience project viewer will follow LMR 5 as the next viewer on the runway for promotion to de facto relapses.
• There is to be a “general push to improve graphics performance over the next few months”.
• BUG-5975 “Normal map rendering issue when UV island tangent basis has angular difference and mesh is smooth shaded” is an issue that should be fixed with LMR6. This may cause some content breakage, but will do more to fix an unwanted edge case that can affect content.’
  • The majority of the meeting focused on a discussion of this issue, which is more fully explained in this document, with Ptolemy Linden from the graphics team noting that investigations in to how best to resolve the problem and those related to it for SL are still on-going,

ARCTan

Summary: An attempt to re-evaluate avatar rendering costs and the cost of in-world scene rendering, with the current focus on avatar rendering cost / impact, with the in-world scene rendering / LI to be tackled at some point in the future.

• Work has finally started on the UI refactoring to present people with a “one stop shop” for displaying surrounding avatar complexity information and action upon it.
• This work is currently separate to the work on revising that actual formulas used for calculating avatar complexity, but the new UI should work with the existing calculations / values. The idea is to make the UI elements for ARCTan visible in a project / RC viewer whilst work continued on the new calculation formulas, then merging the new formulae into the viewer down the road.
• It is currently anticipated that the viewer with the UI work will appear some time in the “next several weeks”.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, May 20th, 2021. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar and the venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

Wednesday, May 19th saw two RCs updated:

• The Fernet Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559726. This version includes a set of Voice updates intended to reduce the number of drop-outs experienced when using the Voice plug-in. The full details of these updates can be found in the release notes and in the LL technology blog post.
• The Love Me Render 5 (LMR5) viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559046.

The rest of the official viewers in the pipelines remain as:

• Release viewer: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23rd, promoted April 29th.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Project UI viewer, version 6.4.19.559612, issued May 14th.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26th.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9th, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22nd, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• Both the updated Maintenance RC and LMR 5 are the front runners for promotion to de facto release status. From Vir’s comments, there appears to be a lean towards promoting the Maintenance viewer.
• Whichever f the above is promoted first may see the Project UI RC viewer leapfrog the other in being the next viewer set for promotion.
• LMR 6 is continuing through bug fixing work and being prepared for QA testing. It’s unlikely to appear until LMR 5 has been promoted.
• The Legacy Profiles viewer is going through a further UI clean-up, and should be progressing towards either a further project viewer release or possibly an RC release in the not too distant future.
• The simplified cache viewer is now being updated with suggestions for improvements submitted via Jira, and a new version should be appearing “pretty soon”.
• It’s still hoped the at Apple notifications fixes will be appearing in an RC viewer in the near future as well.

Due to the volume of viewers entering the backlog awaiting release, LL is considering merging some of the upcoming RC versions in a bid to reduce the overall number that could end up in flight, and ease the pressure on the release cycle. This will depend on how suitable different RCs are for merging with one another.

ARCTan

Summary: An attempt to re-evaluate avatar rendering costs and the cost of in-world scene rendering, with the current focus on avatar rendering cost / impact, with the in-world scene rendering / LI to be tackled at some point in the future.

The UI updates for how avatar complexity information is presented to users will likely be made available as a project / RC viewer separately to any updates to the ARC calculations, so when it appears it will display values based on the current calculation formula. The updates to the formula itself will be then be implemented separately as the project progresses.

Jira Note – Reports Failing

There have been instances of reports filed via the Jira erasing the descriptive text when filed. Until the problem is resolved, the recommended workaround is to copy the descriptive text fields to a notepad app or similar, then check the report after submission. If the text is missing, the report can be edited and the information cut-and-pasted back into it.

In Brief

• Account / inventory syncing between Agni (the Main grid) and Aditi (the Beta grid) remains broken, but LL are working to fix it. One aspect of the issue appears to be inventory size on Aditi accounts.
  • As a temporary workaround, it has been suggested that those who can access the beta grid and who have very large inventories, consider deleting unwanted items from their Aditi inventory (not their main grid inventory), as this seems to improve the chances of a successful log-in.
• In 2019, a viewer-side change was made to ensure individual objects in a mesh linkset upload would retain their original name (rather than all being converted to “Object” with the exception of the first object in the linkset). However, this change is still awaiting server-side support in order to work, and there is currently no ETA on inplementation.
• There have been requests for additional Bakes on Mesh AUXiliary texture channels. However, there is reluctance at the Lab to do so without a substantial use case, as it would require an extensive overhaul of the Bake Service to accommodate the additional channels, which is not something LL wants to contemplate at present.
• Date of next meeting: Thursday, June 3rd, 2021.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, May 6th, 2021.

These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar and the venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

Content-wise, this was a short meeting, many of the usual attendees being absent, perhaps caught out by CCUG meetings over the last few months only taking place every other week, and this one following directly after Week #17’s meeting.

SL Viewer

There have been no further updates to the current crop of official SL viewers since the release of the Project UI viewer (see: Lab issues Project UI viewer aimed at new users), leaving the pipelines for the week as follows:

• Release viewer: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23rd, promoted April 29th.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Project UI viewer, version 6.4.18.558718, issued May 3rd.
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.18.558365, dated April 22nd.
  • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.18.558441, dated April 21st.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26th.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9th, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22nd, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

• The current RC viewers – LMR 5 and Maintenance 2 – are currently awaiting new versions following their merges with the current release viewer code base. There has been a delay in testing due to members of the the lab’s viewer QA team being on vacation.
• LMR 5 is now considered “complete”, so following the code merge, should be in a strong position to be promoted as the next de facto release viewer.
• LMR 6, the next rendering focused viewer is still in development. So far a dozen bugs are being addressed to be a part of this viewer, and more are being added to the list. As such, it’s liable to be a while before this viewer appears as an RC.
• It is hoped the Apple notifications fix viewer and the updated Voice viewer that helps with expected Voice drop-outs both available in the very near future.

Documentation and Resources

The core of this meeting focused on a a discussion about where “accurate” avatar skeletons can be obtained, as the current resources appear out-of-date (e.g. the Fitted Mesh resource page indicates the skeletons in the supplied link are pre-Bento), whilst the Bento page indicates one skeleton may be “broken”.

Whilst there are alternate reliable sources for skeleton information (e.g. via Machinimatrix), these are not always resources newer users may be comfortable using as they “are not Linden Lab” – even though the people responsible for them worked closely with other users and the Lab on projects such as Bento and helped define the Bento skeleton.

This highlights a particular issue in not having up-to-date “official” resources on matters such as content creation – which may in turn be a contributing factor in the development of poorly-made / poorly-optimised SL content. Two problems here are that:

• LL  does not have the resources to manage and maintain the entire SL wiki (and in fact there had been murmurs in the past about consideration being given to deprecating the wiki in favour of other sources,   although this is currently not the case).
• Due to issues of “bot griefing”, access to editing the SL wiki had to be restricted several years ago “pending” improved tools to prevent such events – but this has yet to happen. Therefore, it is much harder for users to help maintain the wiki, as tended to be the case in the past.

In Brief

• Account / inventory syncing between Agni (the Main grid) and Aditi (the Beta grid) remains broken. No ETA on when this may be resolved, other than “watch the status page“.
• Date of next meeting: Thursday, May 20th, 2021.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, April 15th. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar, and the venue is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

SL Viewer

The current run of official viewers is as follows:

• Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27 – 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):
  • Maintenance RC viewer – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.18.557782, dated April 12.
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.18.557797, dated April 7.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

Graphics Work

LMR 5 may have a further update in the coming week and is now “close” to being ready for promotion as the de facto viewer. Love Me Render 6 (LMR 6) is in preparation with a further mix of fixes, including some that are EEP related (e.g. rendering the Moon with haze).

ARCTan

Summary: An attempt to re-evaluate avatar rendering costs and the cost of in-world scene rendering, with the current focus on avatar rendering cost / impact, with the in-world scene rendering to be tackled at some point in the future.

The UI updates for how avatar complexity information is presented to users now looks as if it will be presented as a project / RC viewer separately to any updates to to the ARC calculations.

In Brief

• Feature request BUG-227670 “Official Viewer: New default of 32m DD on installation when low end GPU detected” – this was put forward to help those logging-in to Second Life for the first time and arriving at a gateways only to encounter loading delays.
  • While accepted, it has the problem that a 32m draw distance is less that the potential size of a linkset, and so may cause issues of its own (what should be drawn within the linkset if it extends beyond the viewer’s 32m cut-off?).
• Creator  owner permissions issues: it appears that some are seeing various losses of permissions on items that have created / owned (e.g. a full permission object of their own becoming No Mod or No Copy after being rezzed in-world.
  • This is a long-term (12+ years – see VWR-16097 and SVC-6185 for example), hard-to-reproduce issue that some are reportedly seeing re-surface.
  • It can sometimes be down to a single linked item in a complex build randomly changing its permission, requiring a careful comb-through of the entire linkset.
  • It appears to happen more frequently to objects located within high traffic regions and where there can be a noticeable delay (e.g. between pulling an object from inventory and in-world, or taking it from a scene back into inventory), which may point to a simulator / viewer race condition.
  • An updated bug report of the issues being encountered has been requested.

Date of Next Meeting

Thursday, April 29th, 2021.