Tag: Sansar Product Meetings

Sansar Product Meeting 2017 week #40: Discovery and more

Posted on by Inara Pey
Image courtesy of Linden Lab

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Friday, October 6th. These meetings are held every Friday at 9:30am PDT and 4:00pm PDT, and are open to all. There is no set agenda (currently), and the meetings are a mix of voice and text. The official meeting notes are published in the week following each pair of meetings, while venues change on a weekly basis, and are announced in the Meet-up Announcements.

The October 6th meetings took place at Spinnervale, a creepy experience for Halloween by Debi Baskerville (and which I’ve reviewed here). Attending the meetings were Bjørn Laurin, the Lab’s VP of Product, and Cara and Boden from the Product team.

Discovery Release Update

The Discovery release was deployed on Wednesday, October 4th – see my overview on the release for core details. However, there were some post-deployment issues which required hot fixes and updates to be deployed as well. These have thus far comprised:

  • Update 1 – October 5, 2017 – mainly addressing a major crashing issue that would trigger when an avatar enters an experience while other avatars are walking around.
  • Update 2 – October 6, 2017 – allowing people to add scripts and other components to objects bought from the Sansar Store following issues in the wake of the initial Discovery deployment. However, as a side-effect of the fix, items that were edited between the initial deployment and the update may revert back to their default settings, with items properties that were edited in the time between the Discovery release deployment and the update were lost. This was originally reported as a “known issue” in the October 5th update.

There may be further updates to follow, addressing some remaining issues.

Supply Chain Release Error

The second of the two issues noted above was the result of the premature deployment of code for Sansar’s supply chain economy and permissions system within the Discovery release.

As Bjørn explained at the meeting, the supply chain economy will allow everyone to get properly recompensed for their creations howsoever they are used. However, the first element of the code to support this – designed to protect original content – was deployed with the Discovery release without some key supporting elements, resulting in the issues fixed by the October 6th update.

Deployment of the supply chain capabilities may be around the end of the first quarter / start of the second quarter of 2018.

People gather for the 9:30am PDT Product Meeting at Spinnervale. Jenn is wearing the bat wings in the foreground

Other Noted Issues

  • Adding a metalness map to an object can cause it to dramatically change colour. This appears to be the unintended consequence of a fix for another issue.
  • Some people are seeing old messages and notifications re-received, generally during logging-in; friend requests me be repeated multiple times; accepting a friend request can request in the system add you as your own friend – and you can message yourself (!).
  • Some are seeing massively inflated audio emitters when working in Edit mode.
  • There are reports that items taken in Desktop mode can be “grabbed” away, either by other avatars – or even other things in a scene.
  • Some in Desktop mode have also reported that pressing and holding the mouse button to throw things doesn’t always result in a stronger throw; conversely, some in VR now have “superhuman” strength when throwing items.
  • Camera:
    • There is a report that going to free camera movement (aka flycam) by pressing F4 when in first-person view can allow the camera to pan when it is moved forwards / backwards. Although like a bug, a request was made for the feature to be retained.
    • llcameraforward camera vector behaviour is still no longer consistently tracking camera movements in third-person view (although it is still working as expected in first-person). This has been reported previously, but has not been addressed, and appears worse following the Discovery release. This is also affecting projectile behaviours as well.
  • The issue with objects appearing correctly positioned and aligned when editing a scene, and then appearing misaligned / out-of-place in the run-time experience (see here)may be related to a scaling issue, still to be fully investigated. One suggestion is that scaling using the Gizmo rather than the properties sliders can cause differences between the collision mesh and object mesh, which can cause the latter to be repositioned.
  • There is an issue with the client Atlas search – it only seems to search based on the first 3 or 4 characters in the search string.

There were some intentional changes with the Discovery release which weren’t as well represented in the release notes as they might have been. Future release notes will drill down more deeply into changes and updates to hopefully avoid this happening again.

Boden Linden (centre right and using a VR headset) talking at the 4:00pm PDT Product Meeting

Rough Time Frame for the Next Releases

  • The Friends release, focusing on social capabilities for Sansar will form the release following the Discovery release, and will likely be at the end of October / start of November.
  • According to Bjørn at the morning Product Meeting, the release after that will be the Store release, and Boden indicated that this will likely be in mid-December, as the Lab tends to close for an end-of-year break over Christmas / the New Year period.  Subject to confirmation, this release might be the first release of the clothing / fashion updates.

Sansar Camera

Third-person camera orientation doesn’t necessarily match that of the avatar, causing confusion for some. For example, I arrived in this experience with my avatar facing to the right relative to my camera. Pressing “forward” to walk didn’t turn my avatar in the direction my camera was facing (as might be expected), but rather had my avatar walking off the the right, the camera slewing around to take up position behind me

Feedback on the Sansar camera (when in third-person view) has identified points of annoyance, particularly for those used to dealing with Second Life. A couple of these can be summarised:

  • Lack of orientation relative to the avatar: when a user arrives at a spawn point in an experience, their avatar may be oriented to face a specific direction – but their camera may not be (it can be off to one side, for example. This can cause confusion with the direction the user should be facing, and disorientation when the user walks “forward”, and their avatar move from (say) left-to-right across their screen (the camera eventually swings around behind the avatar), rather than the avatar turning to walk in the direction the camera is facing as some users might expect.
  • When behind the avatar, the default third-person camera position suffers the Second Life error of being set too high above the avatar, which could potentially lead to issues of scale – again as is the case with Second Life.

Jenn and Bjørn have agreed to get someone who is working on the camera system to come along to a focus group meeting to talk through these kinds of concerns with people and determine what might be done to address them.

Continue reading “Sansar Product Meeting 2017 week #40: Discovery and more” →

Sansar Product Meeting 2017 week #39: upcoming releases

Posted on by Inara Pey
Starry Stars And Stuff…

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Friday, September 22nd. These meetings are held every Friday at 9:30am PDT and 4:00pm PDT, and are open to all. There is no set agenda (currently), and the meetings are a mix of voice and text, and the official meeting notes are published in the week following each pair of meetings. Venues change on a weekly basis, and are announced in the Meet-up Announcements.

The September 22nd meeting took place at Starry Stars & Stuff, an experience built by Jenn from the Lab, demonstrating what can be done by someone who does not create original mesh can do in Sansar just through a little terraforming and by buying items through the Store (and with a  little scripting help from Gindipple!).

Cara from the Product Team attended the morning meeting, and Carolyn attended the afternoon meeting.

Discovery Release

The Discovery Release is now scheduled for week #40 (commencing Monday, October 2nd). Highlights include:

Client-Side Atlas: ability to search the Atlas, matching the capability already in the web Atlas; a new Featured tab for featured experiences.

Desktop Mode Object Interaction:

  • This Will allow Desktop users to have a similar level of interaction with in-world objects as those using VR. Desktop user will be able to “pick up” objects, “hold” them, throw them, drop them.
  • Object selection will be via mouse selection.
  • Initially this will not include animations: clicking on an object will cause it to float over the avatar’s hand. However, future releases will support “holding” the selected object.

Sansar Store: masthead banners for branding; URLs are being improved to look more “store-like”.

Future Updates

  • Future improvements for the Atlas will include a Favourites / Bookmarks tab, an Events tab and the ability to sort listed experiences – some of these will be appearing in the Friends Release, due at the end of October / beginning of November.
  • The client-side Atlas uses a “gaze pointer” in VR mode, requiring  people focus their eyes on items in the Atlas – entries, the scroll bar, etc. This is not proving particularly user-friendly for some, particularly with the size of the Atlas, so the plan is to replace this with a means to select, scroll, etc., using the hand controllers.
  • Work is in progress to improve:
    • The upload of some file types.
    • Collision handling within Sansar, including convex hull collision, particularly for multi-part objects.
    • Performance for full collision meshes
  • More specific details of some future updates and an overview of the Friends Release (October / November) can be found in these reports here and here.

Sansar Store

The recently announced store policy and listing guideline changes came up for discussion.

  • The requirement that images for scripts listed on the Store “must focus on the script’s capabilities” has caused some concern due to the potential for confusion. How do you represent the sound of a gentle breeze in an image? Does an image of a carousel convey the idea of a rotation script to a consumer, or that the item on sale is a carousel – regardless of any accompanying description?
  • The Lab is looking at listings for audio and scripts with the idea of providing a set of icons creators can associate with their items when listing them on the store.
  • An audio preview capability is also being worked on, which will hopefully be available in the next couple of months.
  • The concerns expressed will be added to the feedback gained from the recent Store focus group meetings and carried forward to similar discussions at the Lab and in future focus group discussions – which Jenn will try to get a notice out about soon.
  • There is an acknowledgement that the announcement of the policy changes could have been handled better given meetings on the Store had been planned for the same week. Things came down to a matter of bad timing; Jenn has indicated LL will try to be more pre-emptive with meetings and announcements in future.
  • A suggestion was made about sharing ideas on policy, requirements, etc., via viewable documents and allowing feedback. This has – to a degree – worked with some of the technical work with Second Life (proposals for inventory updates and Windlight Environment Enhancements were made available through Google docs – although the latter was somewhat spoiled by pre-pubescent comments being left on the document).

Account Identification, Security, Etc

There are concerns about account verification, security, etc. Some of this is handled by the Lab’s subsidiary, Tilia Inc (Tilia Branch Ltd., in the UK), particularly with regards to payment information, payment processing, etc. Jenn is going to see if she can get input from the Tilia team on some of the issues.

Edit Mode Issues

The afternoon meeting focused in part on issues and pain points within the Edit mode. Items raised include:

  • Changing or deleting a script leading to the loss of parameters, etc., associated with another script (not clear is this is a copy of the same script used elsewhere).
  • The Gizmo used to manipulation objects can be hard to select and use.
  • The UI itself (issues with reading, etc.).
  • Lack of ability to:
    • Manage inventory – even described by the Lab as “desperately needed”. It is being worked on.
    • Easily return objects to inventory (with metadata for position, etc. saved?).
    • Customise options (mouse buttons, moving windows around, etc.).
    • Easily move and focus the camera, including better panning  / rotation and  flycamming type movements (this is something needed in the runtime mode for things like machinima)

A suggestion was made that it could be beneficial to split the Editor UI between Desktop Mode and VR, rather than trying to combine the two into a single UI, particularly given Desktop offers a full keyboard to use, whereas VR is obviously more limited.

Other Items

Edit Mode: Desktop or VR?

The morning session saw a straw poll taken of those attending on whether they used VR or Desktop mode in Edit mode. Some attending expressed surprise that editing in VR was possible.

Overall the choice appears to be being increasingly task-driven for those with HMDs rather than a clear either / or split. There are some aspects of scene building which are intuitively better in Desktop mode (initial design and placement, scripting, etc), while some are far easier in VR mode (e.g. relocating objects and their associated elements adjusting positions, etc.), and several of the creators at the meeting indicated they are now naturally moving between to the two modes, depending on what they are doing.

Experiences Dropping from the Featured Category When Updated

This is a pain point for both experience creators and the Lab. When an experience tagged as a Featured Experience in the Atlas is updated, the tag denoting it as featured in the Atlas is lost. A fix for this is being looked into. In the interim, those who are updating their experiences and finding they get dropped as Featured in the Atlas can drop a line to Jenn who will pass it on to the Product team.

Experience Loading Information

Suggestions have been made to carry over the experience description from the Atlas to the load screen on an experience, so that users entering the experience can be more informed (where descriptions are provided).

A request was made for some kind of progress bar to be displayed in experience load screens. This has been looked at by the Lab, but because experiences are coming via AWS, it is apparently harder to implement than may appear to be the case. Instead, the Lab is looking at alternative approaches, such as keeping frequently visited experiences cached for faster access and reducing the amount of data requiring download.

Sansar Product Meeting 2017 week #38: upcoming releases

Posted on by Inara Pey
(courtesy of Linden Lab)

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Friday, September 22nd. These meetings are held every Friday at 9:30am PDT and 4:00pm PDT, and are open to all. There is no set agenda (currently), and the meetings are a mix of voice and text, and the official meeting notes are published in the week following each pair of meetings. Venues change on a weekly basis, and are announced in the Meet-up Announcements. The September 22nd meeting took place at the Zen Garden by Sansar Studios.

Bjørn Laurin attended both meetings to talk about the upcoming September / October release, and the next couple of releases beyond that. As such, the discussions were lengthy, so I’ve attempted to bullet-point key aspects of the major topics below, and have included a number of audio extracts of  Bjørn’s comments.

Again, for ease of reference, some of the audio extracts comprise comments made at different points in the conversations, which I’ve attempted to bring together to offer a cohesive flow of information. There is ambient background noise in the audio, as there is currently no way of disabling this in the Sansar client. Similarly, any sounds of background typing is due to others in the meeting leaving their microphone open while not speaking.

Discord Channel

The official Sansar Discord channel launched on Thursday, September 21st. 2017. The channel is designed to act as an extension to the Sansar user community, allowing them chat with one another, make friends, plan meet-ups in real-time, exchange ideas, etc. Discord works on the web, a desktop app, and a mobile app, allowing users to stay connected wherever they are.

The Sansar Discord FAQ provides full details on the channel. Joining is a case of following this link and the instructions provided. Those who do not already have a Discord account will have to create one as a part of the process.

Sansar Store Focus Group Meetings

There will be two sessions focusing on discussions and feedback on the Sansar Store in week #39. Guidelines on intent and scope of the meetings and their location(s), will be published on the Sansar blog ahead of the first meeting. However, the dates / times are:

  • Monday, September 25th, 15:00-16:00 PDT.
  • Wednesday, September 27th, 14:00-15:00 PDT.

Upcoming Releases Overview

The Lab is referring to the next release as the “Discovery release”, of which highlights include:

  • Easier discovery of experiences in the Atlas
  • Branded stores on the Sansar Store
  • The ability for users in Desktop mode to be able to interact with objects in an experience (picking things, up, throwing them, etc.).

Currently, this release is scheduled for deployment on Thursday, September 28th, 2017, depending on final bug fixes / QA.

Bjørn also indicated that fashion and avatar customisation has risen closer to the top of the pile of upcoming features following the Discovery release. He specifically notes work on hair together with skin shaders for the hair and avatar skin; the upcoming fashion / clothing support releases, and coming options for experience owners to be able to monetise their experiences (e.g. ticketed access, etc.).

Desktop Mode Object Interaction

  • In the Discovery release.
  • Will allow those running Sansar on  the desktop to have a similar level of interaction with in-world objects as those using VR. Desktop user will be able to pick up objects, “hold” them, throw them, drop them.
  • Objects around an avatar with interaction will highlight on a mouse-click, allowing the user to select which one they want to pick up.
  • Initially  will not include animations: clicking on an object will cause it to float over the avatar’s hand. However, future releases will support “holding” objects (and eventually “picking up” objects see more on animations below).
  • There is some debate within the Sansar team in giving creators an explicit means of differentiating between users in VR mode and users in Desktop mode, or in allowing the platform to handle it internally.
    • Games designers see the ability to differentiate as “critical” to allow better design of control options, and which can be used by players in either mode, and Bjørn leans more towards this approach.

Atlas Improvements

  • The Discovery release includes a search option in the client version of the Atlas and a new Featured tab for featured experiences.
  • Future improvements for the Atlas will include a Favourites / Bookmarks tab, an Events tab and the ability to sort listed experiences.

Store Branding

  • Will be part of the Discovery release.
  • Comprises the ability to add a masthead logo to creator’s items. Details of masthead sizes available on the Discord channel.
People gather at the Zen Garden for the Friday, September 22nd meet-up

Beyond The Discovery Release

Avatar Identification in Desktop Mode

  • Possibly appearing in the October  / November release.
  • This will most likely offer the same capabilities as VR mode currently has: click on an avatar and see their name, offer friendship, mute them.

Fashion and Clothing

  • For the most part, fashion and clothing will be handled as a single release rather than a series of iterative releases over time adding essential capabilities.
  • The exception to this will be handling clothing layers which will be handled in two parts: separation of the current clothing bakes from the avatar and then the rest of the capabilities.
    • The separation of the bakes will see clothing initially defined as either a single, complete layer (e.g. socks, underwear, pants / skirt, blouse / shirt, jacket all-in-one), or possibly as a “top” layer (e.g. undershirt, shirt, jacket) and a “bottom” layer (e.g pants, underwear, socks, skirt).
    • Further division of individual clothing layers will come in the future, but is seen as a more complicated task.
  • Clothing will naturally fold, flow and fall like real clothing and cloth from the initial release.
  • The Sansar Store will also be updated with the “main” fashion update is released to more fully support clothing.
  • Bjørn’s hope for the “main” fashion release is December 2017.
  • Due to what is involved with support for fashion / clothing, there may be a requirement for creators to sign NDAs – Jenn will be reaching out to creators about this in due course.

Clothing Physics
  • Clothing physics will be part of the initial release.
  • It’s currently not clear whether cloth physics will have to be assigned prior to upload, or if it is something done from within Sansar (such as by right-clicking on an item in Edit mode and selecting a “make cloth” option).
  • Bjørn indicated that the process will not be complex but there will be two specific routes to achieve different sets of results for clothing.
  • There is vagueness around how things will work due to contractual obligations, but some may be familiar with the tools the Lab are using to making clothing in Sansar work.

Avatar Updates

  • The back-end avatar rigging will be changing over the next “one or two months”.
    • These changes will not be visible to the casual user, but the changes will facilitate clothing design and will allow designers to create their own clothing.
    • One consequence of this is that all current outfits will break – however Bjørn indicated that all broken outfits will be replaced.
  • Future avatar updates will include the ability to change the avatar shape – more body fat, less body fat, etc. However, these will not be in the Discovery release.
  • As part of the work on hair (noted towards the top of this article), it will be possible to blend hair styles with the face, and things like masks or facial tattoos with hair and facial features, so they all work naturally together, and  masks / tattoos respond to facial movements.
  • Aside I: the individual working on the avatar design spent ten years on developing the characters in the Halo game series.

Continue reading “Sansar Product Meeting 2017 week #38: upcoming releases” →

Sansar Product Meetings 2017: week #37

Posted on by Inara Pey
City Park by Lex4Art, the location for the Sansar product meet-ups, Friday, September 15th

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Friday, September 15th. These meetings are held every Friday at 9:30am PDT and 4:00pm PDT, and are open to all. There is no set agenda (currently), and the meetings are a mix of voice and text. Venues change on a weekly basis, and are announced in the Meet-up Announcements. The September 15th meeting took place at City Park, by Lex4Art. The official meeting notes are published in the week following each pair of meetings.

Cara (morning session) and Carolyn (afternoon session) from the product team attended the meetings. However, Cara’s microphone pick-up was not particularly good; couple with background office noises, this made it hard to hear her at the morning session.

Release Feedback

It has been a week since the August / September release, and feedback is now coming in, with some issues being highlighted, including:

  • Terrain Editor: some users have found that when incorporating terrain plains into their builds, everything works OK in Edit mode, but on publishing assorted problems can occur, including not being able to access the published experience. Suggestions for checking the issue is to try re-publishing the experience without the new terrain element to ensure it is accessible / eliminating the problems, and try publishing a simple experience with edited terrain / recreate the existing scene to see if the issues repro. Experiences exhibiting this issue should not be deleted.
  • Undesired object movement / re-positioning:
    • Some users have found that objects which appear correctly positioned and aligned when editing a scene can appear misaligned / out-of-place (see here), although one person indicated they were seeing similar prior to the release.
    • Others have reported objects in both edit and published mode have relocated themselves following the release.
    • Some have found that while a published experience looks correct, if they go to Edit mode to edit the scene, the objects are all incorrectly placed. Apparently, the support response to this issue is to delete all affected items with new versions from inventory – although this is subject to verification.
  • Physics Changes: At least one user has noticed what might be physics changes since the update, with the pins in his bowling alley displaying a persistent wobble.
  • Scripting:
    • Script breakage:some users found their scripts were broken following the update, requiring they be replaced.
    • The LLCameraForward camera vector behaviour is no longer consistently tracking the movements in third-person view (although it is still working as expected in first-person).
    • Trigger Volumes have been reported as not working for one of the headset hand controllers (not clear if this is the Oculus Touch or the Vive hand controllers). Details on the issue weren’t clear at the meeting. This is now being looked at by the Lab.
  • Avatar VR Shuffle: when a user in VR mode enters first-person view, their avatar starts performing a strange little shuffling dance, which stops when exiting back into third-person. This might be related to a known issue when VR first-person view can result in the avatar moving around a little when it is supposed to be standing still.
  • Scene Objects Window: there is a bug which prevents users from scrolling all the way to the end of a long list of object containers when using the scene objects window in Edit mode, which can leave items and options unreachable. The Lab has noticed the same issue and are working on a fix.
  • Edit mode font size: while not specific to this release, there have been complaints that the default font in the Edit mode UI is too small for some people to comfortably read.
  • Streaming: only supports a single stream at a time without updating the scene and re-publishing the experience. For Sansar to work with music events featuring multiple artists / DJs, this will need an update to support multiple streams. While not on the roadmap for immediate delivery, the Lab is considering “avatar emitters”, which would allow sounds from specific artists or presenters at a talk, etc., to be heard throughout an experience.

It’s generally requested that all reproducible issues are reported on the issues forum, together with updates as people further test things.

People gather beneath the media screens at one end of the park

Sansar Roadmap and Work in-Hand / Being Planned

The public roadmap is approaching a point where it can be released. However, this will not be a blow-by-blow of everything that is coming and precise dates. Rather, it will provide a high-level overview of significant releases – avatar customisation, further terrain editing capabilities, clothing and fashion design capabilities, etc., together with indicators of when they may / should be appearing in releases. Some of the current work either in-hand or being planned includes:

  • Atlas improvements: the ability to search the client version of the Sansar Atlas (the web version can already be searched), hopefully making it easier to location / discover experiences of interest. This should be in the next Sansar release.
  • Height Maps: as noted with the August / September release, a planned update to the terrain system will be the ability for users to upload their own custom height maps (not clear if RAW files will also be possible), and custom textures with terrain.
  • Making text chat visible to users in VR mode: this is currently being worked on, a may appear “in a couple of months”.
  • Desktop interaction: the foundations are being laid to allow Desktop mode users have greater interaction with in-scene objects.
  • Avatar identification in Desktop mode: the ability for users in Desktop mode to more easily identify other avatars. No time line on availability as yet.
  • Social capabilities: further social capabilities are being planned, including group-like capabilities. However, details are not clear (again) on what form these will take or when they will be available.
  • Collaborative building: this is being actively worked on, however, it is dependent upon a number of other factors (e.g. the permissions system). So again, no time line on when it might appear as yet.
  • Better inventory organisation: this is also in the planning phase, is a part of the roadmap, but specifics have yet to be released on what it will be, nor is there a time line. This is already proving to be a major pinch-point for creators, as there is no means to organise via folders or rename inventory items or even search inventory, etc., and is thus impacting people’s ability / drive to create.

Requests

The meeting saw a couple of new requests made:

  • Texture Atlas support: a texture atlas allows for easy re-use of textures across objects / UV maps. This sort-of sits between texturing and modelling, and allows textures to be-reused across multiple objects / UVs without multiple draw calls to the system. This is one of an ongoing series of questions around textures in Sansar and future plans for textures / materials / reflections, etc. Jenn and Cara are going to look at getting one of the Sansar team directly involved in this side of the work to come to a meeting and answer questions.
  • More attachments / support for multiple attachments on a single point: currently, there is only one attachment point on Sansar avatars (the neck).  This is because multiple attachment points proved to be buggy when first deployed. While such things need to be constrained (there is already a complexity limit when uploading attachments), having more attachment points  / the ability to attach more than one item to an attachment point is seen as needed by some. Further work on the avatar as a whole is planned, and this might include improvements to attachment handling.

There is also the request for LL to provide a means for people to offer updates to their products. This is liable to be a topic for detailed discussion at the Sansar Store focus meeting, due to take place at the end of September 2017.

Continue reading “Sansar Product Meetings 2017: week #37” →

Sansar product meetings 2017: week #36 – Aug/Sept release

Posted on by Inara Pey
People gather at Astro Port for the first Friday September 8th 2017 Product meeting

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Friday, September 8th. These meetings are held every Friday at 9:30am PDT and 4:00pm PDT, and are open to all.

There is no set agenda (currently), and the meetings are a mix of voice and text. Venues change on a weekly basis, and are announced in the Meet-up Announcements. The September 9th meeting took place at Mold3D’s Astro Port. The official meeting notes are generally published the week following each pair of meetings.

The meetings are chaired by Jenn (aka Xiola Linden) from the Community Team, and feature various members of the Sansar teams. Cara, Carolyn and Jeremy joined the Friday, September 8th meeting.

August / September Release

The long-awaited August / September release arrived on Friday, September 8th, 2017. Highlights of the release are noted  below (please refer to the release notes for full details of this release, including known issues). Note that many of these features are still work in progress, rather than being final / polished versions.

Terrain Editor / Sculpting

Experience creators can now edit terrain objects in Sansar: create mountains and hills, create dips, craters and valleys or uneven terrain (“noise”). This is the first iteration of these tools, and features will be added over time.

Simply drag and drop a terrain plain (in one of four texture defaults) from the system objects panel, then use the sculpt tool and options to shape it. Individual plains can be placed together to create as big an area of terrain as required (within Sansar’s own limitations).

See Working with terrain in the Sansar Knowledge Base for more information.

The Terrain toolbar with the sculpt and paint master controls highlighted, and option buttons to their right
  • Terrain plains can be sculpted on in defined areas, from around 32 metres on a side up to 256 metres on a side.
  • The paint tool can be used to apply textures (from pre-set families of four) to the sculpted terrain, with automatic attempts made to blend textures with height / depth (e.g. so grass gradually gives way to rock). The brush size for painting can also be varied in size from (approximately) one metre in size upwards.
  • The textures / materials associated with the editor are currently limited to only working with one family of four textures / materials at a time, although creators can hot swap between them.
  • This is not voxel editing, and is currently restricted to height maps, so no tunnelling into terrain at present. The sculpting tool is somewhat similar in approach somewhat similar to the Second Life terraforming tool, presenting a view of the terrain and the selected tool overlaid on it at the appropriate size, although unlike SL a choice of tool shapes is offered (round or square).
A terrain plain show a raw sculpt of a hill (left), and with smoothing being applied (right). Credit: Jeremy Linden
Future Terrain Editing Capabilities

The ability to add use custom terrain textures and height maps is coming soon, together with support for mega textures. The latter will allow more textures to be blended together at a time, which are then  composited together when an experience is published.

Jason (aka Widely Linden) indicated that the roadmap for terrain editing in Sansar currently includes (exact implementation still TBD):

  • A hybrid form of terraforming, using height maps for efficiency when sculpting the terrain, then switching to a voxel element when creating tunnels / caves, etc., which is then “stitched” into the mesh height map.
  • The ability to “geo-paint” environments – use a painting technique to add boulder, rocks, vegetation, etc., onto a terrain map. This will likely start with pre-defined geo elements, before moving to allow users to define their own elements.

A suggestion from Maxwell Graf to assist in making custom height maps (once they can be imported), is to consider installing Unreal or Unity (both free) and then purchasing a terrain editing tool for the relevant engine, and using that to create terrains, then export the height maps for import into Sansar (once possible) It was also noted that Visual Studio 2017 comes with Unity support, and it is easy to add Unreal support.

.OBJ File Format, Animated & Multi-part Object Import

The Animated objects capability isn’t, at this point, fully animated mesh – there is no ability to import or use a skeleton for an object (a-la SL’s animated objects project), although this is coming.

Future Capabilities / Ideas

Also coming in a future release for animated / multi-part objects, are collision meshes. These will allow can be bound to rendered meshes for collision purposes. So a multi-part cable car could have collisions enabled on specific parts to allow avatars to ride it. This has already been done as a test with the gondolas in Colossus Rising.

The cable car gondolas in Colossus Rising demonstrate how collision volumes can be bound to a rendered mesh object to allow interaction (in this case riding a gondola) with an avatar. This ability will be part of a future update to the animated / multi-part objects capability forming part of the August / September Sansar release

Jason indicated that – further into the future, and via a scripted / API meachanism which the Sansar product team is considering – animated objects should allow for very dynamic things like trees which not only sway in a breeze, but which move in accordance with the (changing) wind direction / force (rather than just randomly moving) or stop swaying if there is no wind. The same scripts will also be able to trigger associated sounds of the wind in the branches when affected by a breeze.

New Stereoscopic Media & UV Animation Shaders

A series of new shaders in the materials editor:

  • Standard + Emissive + Stereographic
  • Media Surface + Stereographic
  • Standard + Emissive + UV Animation
  • Standard + Alpha Mask + UV Animation.

UV animation supports both scrolling UVs and flipbook UV, and brings the ability to animate things like water, animated lighting, etc, in Sansar. Currently, these have to be configured and applied prior to upload, but future updates will allow editing and refinement of the maps post-upload.

Trigger Volumes

Trigger volumes allow scripted events (e.g. teleporting) without the need for dynamic objects, allowing for more flexible interactions inside events.

Continue reading “Sansar product meetings 2017: week #36 – Aug/Sept release” →

Sansar product meetings 2017: week #35

Posted on by Inara Pey
People gather for the Sansar Product Meeting, Friday, September 1st

The following notes are taken from the Sansar Product Meetings held on Friday, September 1st. These meetings are held every Friday at 9:30am PDT and 4:00pm PDT, and are open to all. There is no set agenda (currently), and the meetings are a mix of voice and text. Venues change on a weekly basis, and are announced in the Meet-up Announcements. The September 1st meeting took place at Maxwell Graf’s Rune, which is one of five parts of his Rustica “grand experience”. The official meeting notes published the week following each pair of meetings.

The meetings are chaired by Jenn (aka Xiola Linden) from the Community Team, and feature various members of the Sansar teams.

August / September Release

The next release was pushed back from August 31st as a result of a couple of last-minute issues which required fixing. The release is now being targeted of Wednesday, September 6th.  This is in keeping with the Lab’s approach to making major (feature) updates at the end / start of a month, with smaller interim releases focused on bug fixes and patches being rolled out as required between these major releases.

Highlights of the upcoming release include:

  • Terrain Editor (first pass): ability to edit the current terrain options; the ability to upload custom textures to follow.
  • Scripting Updates and Improvements, including:

  • Ambient Occlusion (AO): allowing things like indirect lighting shadows. This should not require creators to re-visit and update the Global Illumination (GI) bakes for their experiences, as the AO will be a real-time effect.
  • Avatar updates, including:
    • Selling Avatar Attachments: creators will be able to upload and sell their own avatar props (attachments) through the Sansar Store – more on this below.
    • Having been removed from Sansar due to speed issues when seen in VR mode, the ability for avatars to run will be returning in the next release.
    • Further improvements to avatar customisation, e.g. adding nail colours.
  • Ability to upload multi-part objects: there will be some limitations placed on this, which will be specified in the release notes.
  • Object Animations: animated objects created in Maya, 3D Studio Max, or Blender can be imported them into Sansar.
  • Media updates, including:
    • Support for custom music and live streaming via Shoutcast, Icecast and similar services. OGG should be supported via web links, although AAC will not be supported with this release.
    • The ability to play back s£ movies within experiences.
  • Bug fixes.

Some of these features may yet be subject to final testing by the Lab, so please refer to the release notes once the update has been made for details and links to supporting documentation. The release notes will form an e-mail to Sansar users and be available in the Release Notes section of the knowledge base.

When the release is rolled out, it will mean down time for the platform, and this will be announced through the forums and on the log-in screen, etc.

Sansar Product Meeting, Friday, September 1st

Avatar Attachments

As noted above, creators will be able to make, upload and sell avatar attachments in Second Life through the Sansar Store with the next platform release. However, because the initial provision of attachment points on the avatar lead to some outsized (non-resellable) props being made, there will be a number of initial limitations placed on the props which can be uploaded and sold, including:

  • Uploaded props will not initially be allowed to exceed a 1m x 1m x 1m size.
    • Existing props which are larger than this can continue to be used, but creators will not be able to sell them.
  • Attachments will be limited in terms of total triangles they can contain.

Full details of the limits and upload requirements will be documented in the Avatar Attachments knowledge base article once the release is public. Some of the limitations may be relaxed over time.

Contest Announcements

Partially to mark creators being able to upload and sell avatar props through the Sansar Store with the next release, and because Halloween in approaching, Linden Lab has launched two Sansar contests. On offer are five prize packages featuring Oculus Rift + Touch bundles. In addition, the Halloween themed contest includes a US $10,000 grand prize. Details can be found on the official Sansar blog, and on my blog.

HUDs and Web Support in Sansar

Second Life users are all familiar with the concept of HUDs to enhance users’ abilities to interaction with other scripted objects (usually attached to an avatar) and / or interact with external web services. Specific scripting support for HUD objects (and the ability to attach them to the Sansar UI) isn’t at present being worked on by the Lab.

Some broader web support, is being developed. This includes the ability to display web pages and media on objects in an experience (again, in SL parlance, the equivalent of media on a prim). There will also be some form of web browser capability within the Sansar UI, but there is currently no time frame on when this is likely to appear or what it will look like.

Request have been made to provide Sansar with a similar scripted functionality to LLHTTPRequest to enable more complex interactions between Sansar and external web services. Provision of such a capability has not – as yet – been discussed  for Sansar.

Avatar Sitting

The ability for avatars to sit on objects within and experience is not the roadmap, but will not be part of the next release, and may yet be further down the road, possibly as much as six months hence – although this needs confirmation from the Lab.

Continue reading “Sansar product meetings 2017: week #35” →