2023 week #19: SL TPVD meeting summary (PBR terrain)

Dragonfly, March 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, May 12th 2023 at 13:00 SLT.

These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar; also note that the following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Official Viewers Status

General Viewer Notes

  • Inventory thumbnails viewer: work is progressing and a public-facing viewer should be available in the “not too distant future”.
    • The viewer-side work to support emojis is now more-or-less complete, and release of any project viewer is pending some additional back-end work.
  • There will be changes coming to the Second Life System Requirements, minimum specifications:
    • Mac OSX will be set at version 11.
    • Window 32-bit is liable to be dropped.
  • LL is close to completing the move of viewer builds to Github Actions. This has involved getting many of the 3rd party libraries for the viewer updated and refreshing all build dependencies.
  • This work also means that the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) for media handling is being updated.

Terrain “Mini Project”

  • There is a project underway to provide PDR support for terrain.
  • The overall scope is not clear, but it apparently exploits an asset-checking weakness in the simulator code related to terrain, allowing the use of Materials asset IDs in place of the usual texture  IDs, allowing them to be applied to the ground.
  • This is seen as a means of leveraging PBR Materials to offer some quality improvements to terrain ahead of any longer-term terrain project which might yet be considered / actioned.
  • It is hoped that this work will be available in a project viewer Soon™.

In Brief

  • PBR Materials mini-update:
    • Overall visual quality is pretty much where it will be when the viewer reaches formal release status.
    • There are still issues with rendering the sky – such as alpha glitching on the Sun. This is being worked on, but it is unlikely to see an imminent solution / viewer update.
    • Other known issues are also being worked on and progress is being made in clearing them.
  • A general discussion of the on-line  / off-line friends issues (frequently raised t the Server User Group meetings) – see BUG-232037 “Avatar Online Offline Status Not Correctly Updating”. As per notes from that meeting, the UDP fix does not appear to have had the desired impact in helping to reduce the issue, and LL are looking at the matter again.
  • A lot of general chat on WIP regarding PBR Materials and reflection probes, most of it relating to issues likely to be addressed – please refer to the video.
  • A general discussion on possible standards for avatar “metaverse interoperability” which runs through the latter half of the meeting. As a theoretical discussion rather than something LL is working on, please refer to the video.
  • There is also some further discussion on the Puppetry project, however, this will form an addendum to my recent Puppetry Project meeting summary, as it is more relevant there.

 Next Meeting

  • Friday, June 9th, 2023.

2023 week #15: SL TPV Developer meeting summary

Kawaii City, February 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from m y audio recording and chat log transcript of the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday,  April 14th 2023 at 13:00 SLT.

These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar; also note that the following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Official Viewers Status

[Video 0:00-2:51]

  • Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
    • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.11.579238, April 4th.
    • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
  • Project viewers:
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 11 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

Future Viewer Notes

  • Inventory thumbnails viewer: work is progressing well, however as well as viewer changes and additions to the inventory database (the latter of which has been completed), it will require updates to the Avatar Inventory System (AIS) and a simulator update, so the will be no project or RC viewer until this back-end work has been done.
  • Work has resumed on providing emoji support in the viewer (Oh, joy.). This work is based on a contribution from the Catznip viewer.

In Brief

  • [Video: 3:04-5:46] PBR Materials mini-update:
    • The viewer has been updated, but is still at Project Viewer status.
    • A new dynamic exposure setting has been added to improve tone mapping.
    • Bug fixing work is continuing, and Brad Linden is working on getting PBR Materials to work more robustly over networks with heavy loads.
    • The hope is that the next viewer update will clear QA for release as an RC viewer, so that it will be available when the back-end / simulator support gets deployed to the Preflight simulator channel which Rider Linden hopes to achieve in week #16.
    • Making the PBR work more widely available by enabled Agni (Main grid) support and moving the viewer to RC status is seen as a key test of how will the Graphics Team has managed to both support the PBR rendering and maintain the broad look and feel of SL as it appears under the current rendering.
  • Genesis is working on an update which will include and expanded Preferences, together with the ability to search Preferences.
  • A general discussion on a third-party viewer (Rust) that is in development, but not ready for prime-time, server-side rendering and a ringing of the memory bell for the Pelican (IIRC streaming viewer LL toyed with back in around 2007). Please refer to the video, below.

 Next Meeting

  • Friday, May 12th, 2023.

2023 week #11: SL TPV Developer meeting summary

The Great Library of Eruanna, January 2023 – blog post

The following notes were taken from m y audio recording and chat log transcript of the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday,  March 17th 2023 at 13:00 SLT.

These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar; also note that the following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Official Viewers Status

  • Release viewer: Maintenance Q(uality) viewer, version 6.6.9.577968 Thursday, February 2.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Project viewers:
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.578792, March 15 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

General Viewer Notes

  • The Performance Floater / Auto FPS viewer is still being worked on in the hope that performance can be further improved on lower-end systems.
  • Work is also being carried out to have the viewer work with a broader cross-section of translation tools.

Inventory Enhancement Project

  • The work to provide thumbnail images of  folders and items in Inventory is progressing on the viewer-side, but deployment will be dependent on both viewer availability (project / RC to release) and assorted back-end service and simulator updates to handle the new data.
  • Once the thumbnail preview work has been completed, it is possible the Lab will look to further enhancements to inventory management. One future enhancement under consideration is support for folders to be included in the Contents inventory of individual objects.

In Brief

  • See also my CCUG meeting summary, as this meeting crosses topics with that.
  • Estate Level Scripted Agent Controls (aka “Ban the Bots”): per my SUG meeting notes, there is a new simulator release due to be deployed which will provide estate / region holders and their managers limit access to their regions by scripted agents (bots).
    • This work will initially be console-based in the viewer until UI updates can be made and a viewer update with them deployed.
    • However, a bug has been found in the simulator code, which is currently being worked upon. The hope is this will be fixed without any delay to the code being rolled-out.
  • It was re-iterated that the next major new graphics project following glTF materials is likely to be support for Vulkan / MotenVK as the graphics API of preference (Windows / Mac). No time frame on when this work will commence, tho.
  • As I reported in November 2022, Atlassian has announced it will be restructuring how it licenses the Jira bug reporting product from 2024 onwards.
    • No decision on the direction LL will take as this change in made has as yet been taken, but there are ongoing internal discussions on options.
    • However, at this point it appears as if whatever route LL decides to take, they will need to review how public issues are raised and passed to them, etc.

 Next Meeting

  • Friday, April 14th, 2023.

2023 week 7: SL CCUG and TPVD meeting summaries: Mirrors!

Under the Northern Lights, December 2022 – blog post

The following notes were taken from:

  • My audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, February 16th 2023 at 13:00 SLT.
  • My chat transcript and the video recording of the Friday, February 17th TPV Developer’s meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy and embedded at the end of this article. My thanks, as always, to her for recording these meetings.

These meetings are for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current work, upcoming work, and requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work. They are chaired by Vir Linden, and dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.

Notes:

  • These meetings are conducted in mixed voice and text chat. Participants can use either to make comments / ask or respond to comments, but note that you will need Voice to be enabled to hear responses and comments from the Linden reps and other using it. If you have issues with hearing or following the voice discussions, please inform the Lindens at the meeting.
  • The following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting, and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Official Viewers Summary

Available Viewers

The have been no further updates to the currently available official viewers sine the PBR materials viewer was updated at the start of the week, as reported in my week #7 SUG meeting summary. Therefore the pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release viewer: Maintenance Q(uality) viewer, version 6.6.9.577968 Thursday, February 2, 2023.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Project viewers:
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.578161, February 14, 2023. This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

General Viewer Notes

  • It is hoped that the Performance Floater RC viewer will be promoted to de facto release status within the week, which would allow all official viewers to leverage Visual Studio 2022 on Windows builds going forward.
  • There are some changes to be made to github due to all the pull requests (PRs) going to branches which can change over time, causing issues as they do so. In the future, it is likely that PRs will go into the Main branch (which only changes on a per release basis) and from their moved into their intended branch.

CCUG – glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

  • To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
  • To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
  • The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • In the near-term, glTF materials assets are materials scenes that don’t have any nodes / geometry, they only have the materials array, and there is only one material in that array.
    • It is currently to early to state how this might change when glTF support is expanded to include entire objects.
  • The project viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page, but will only work on the following regions on Aditi (the Beta grid):  Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
  • Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.

Status

  • Viewer:
    • Work continues on bug fixes.
    • A major new bug is the discovery that the UV treatment is off-specification. This appears to be due to OpenGL putting the 0,0 coordinate in the lower left corner of the image rather than the top left. This does mean that all PBR materials uploaded to Aditi (the beta grid) prior to the fix going into the viewer will effectively be “broken” post-fix. Viewer:
    • The lighting model for water in the project viewer has been updated to use the glTF specification lighting model for water so that reflection probes can be used to generate reflections on water. However, trying to adapt the “old” water shader to use the glTF lighting model is proving difficult, due the “bonkers” way things like fresnel  offset and scale have been implemented. This issue is to be addressed.
    • It is believed that most existing content should render reasonably faithfully under the PBR / glTF, with the exception of the known issue of alpha blending on colour curves. Runitai Linden has a couple more ideas how this might be improved, but overall, it might come down to having to explain that the colour space is changing for glTF, and as a result some alpha blended content will need to be adjusted in order to render correctly.
    • As Advanced Lightning Model (ALM) will be enabled all the time in the PBR viewer (the Forward renderer will be disabled), the viewer’s quality settings are being updated so that Shadows will be disabled by default across a much wider range of settings, as these are what causes the significant performance hit when ALM in enabled, rather than ALM itself (but Shadows can still obviously be manually enabled).
    • This viewer also causes instrumentation regressions within the Performance Floater viewer, which will likely be addressed when the code is ready to be merged with the release version of the viewer. .
  • It is hoped that the simulator-side support can be deployed to an RC on the Main grid (Agni) in the near future in order to further advance viewer testing as that moves from project to RC status as well.

CCUG – Mirrors(!)

  • The “very next thing” LL plans to implement after PBR Materials reaches Release Candidate status is – mirrors!
  • These will be planar mirrors, so best suited to flat surfaces such as the face of a cube, rather than curved or spherical surfaces.
  • Mirrors will effectively be a real-time 1:1 rendering of what is seen within the scene that is being reflected, but with some limitations to cater for performance. Those limitations  / controls under discussion at the Lab include:
    • The mirror effect will only be generated in viewers that are very close to it.
    • Perhaps limiting the number of mirrors which can be active within a viewer to just one per scene (so if there are two mirrors close by your avatar, only one will be active at a time). Or allowing user select the number of mirrors they wish see “working” at any given time.
    • Adding a viewer Preferences option to enable / disable mirrors, depending on the user’s needs.
    • Nevertheless, even with precautions such as the above, there will be a performance impact in having real-time mirrors active in the viewer.
  • Mirrors will likely support LSL control over them.
  • It is already being recommended that mirror surfaces are only used as mirrors, not as a means of generating “reflections” in general – which should be left to reflection probes / cube maps.
  • It is hoped that the way the mechanism for rendering reflections onto a mirror surface would use the same channels as reflection probes – so when the mirror is seen from a distance, it uses the reflection rendering based on the local reflection probes, but when approached, the reflection probe rendering would fade out, and the real-time planar mirror reflection rendering would fade in.
  • That said, precisely HOW real-time mirrors will work is still subject to discussion and planning: at the moment, the focus has been only considering time in terms of ensuring the PBR work does not block opportunities for adding real-time reflections, and that they will play nicely with the PBR Materials work when they are being developed.

CCUG – Avatars / New Start Avatars / Ecosystem

  • A question was raised about the upcoming new mesh starter avatars previewed at SL19B in June2022. These have yet to be releases, and are not intended to compete with existing mesh avatars, also LL hopes creators will help develop an ecosystem in support for the avatars as the devkits for them are released – there is no confirmed release date for the avatars.
  • The above lead to a general discussion on the learning curves involved in getting to grips with avatar bodies and heads, trying to math heads to bodies, etc., the need for more discussions on avatar capabilities, helping people understand the avatar content creation process so they can join the ecosystem, etc.
  • The was an agreement that more discussion on avatar-related content creation, real and perceived limitations on the avatar system – particularly rigging clothing and attachments and the reliance on additional toolsets (e.g. AvaStar MayaStar, etc.), issues of supporting information available through the SL Wiki / Knowledge Base, etc. See In Brief for more on discussions / potential new meetings.
  • There are internal discussions going on at the Lab concerning avatar physics, enabling the simulator to “know” more bout the avatar, how it is being animated, having the simulator-side physics engine fully recognise the avatar body as a physical object (rather than just a simplified capsule), etc., via the likes of the Puppetry project and elsewhere, but solutions are still TBD.

In Brief

  • CCUG: Alpha blending issues on avatars – there was a general discussion on alpha stacking/ordering and blending issues, with Beq Janus’ blog post on the subject relating to avatars / outfits being referenced as a good primer on the issue and steps to mitigate problems.
  • TPVD: work is continuing on the Inventory thumbnails work, but nothing ready for any form of public release.
  •  TPVD: it has been suggested that LL might want to add code to the new Group Chat History functionality to indicate the end of historic Group chat within a Group chat tab / panel, as people appear to be getting confused as to why they are opening Group chat to find past conversations displayed (due to word about the new functionality taking time to spread).
  • TPVD: concern was raised that the allowance of lossless Normal Map under PBR will lead to a lot of abuse with people using it to upload lossless textures as well, which it was feared would hit people’s VRAM. Runitai pointed out that lossless does not necessarily hit VRAM, but does impact caching and bandwidth. This sparked a general conversation on textures, resolution, quality, etc. However, the risk of people abusing the upload was acknowledged, and store will be monitored for unexpected spike in usage after the release of PBR.
  • TPVD: a discussion on viewer development as support for AAA game-style rendering. Please refer to the video for details,
  • Both meetings: user on-boarding – at both the CCUG and the TPVD meeting it was suggested that there needs to be a regular user group meeting to discuss user on-boarding, engagement and retention and how to address these on an ongoing basis.
    • This led to a lengthy discussion on the issues of engagement + retention which illustrated one of the core issues in just discussing it: everyone has a different opinion on what “the problem” is with engagement / retention.  Some see it as primarily being an expense issue (the cost of creating a good-looking avatar); some see it as people being unable to find interesting this to do; some see it as being performance / hardware / overall appearance of SL.
    • The problem with the above is (and as demonstrated at the TPVD meeting particularly) it can lead to very siloed outlooks where disagreements as to “the problem” become the focus of conversations, rather than agreement that all of these issues can play a role, and as such, solutions need to be perhaps more “holistic” in nature and encompassing all of the perceived pain points.
    • It has been suggested that an upcoming CCUG or TPVD meeting could be utilised as a kick-off session for broader discussions about on-boarding, etc.

Next Meetings

  • CCUG: Thursday, March 2nd, 2023.
  • TPVD: Friday, March 16th, 2023.

2023 week #1: SL CCUG meeting summary

Mullein Woods, November 2022 – blog post

The following notes were taken from m y audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 5th 2023 at 13:00 SLT.

These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar; also note that the following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Official Viewers Status

  • On Wednesday, January 4th, 2023:
    • The Maintenance Q(uality) RC viewer updated to version 6.6.9.577418.
    • The Performance Floater / Auto-FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.9.577251.
  • Both the VS 2022 Build RC viewer and the LMR6 project viewer have been withdrawn.

This leaves the rest of the currently-available official viewer as:

  • Release viewer: Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.8.576863 Monday, December 12, 2022.
  • Project viewers:
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.577157, December 14, 2022. Note: this viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

Inventory Enhancement Project

Linden Lab is looking to enhance the Inventory system.

  • The first element of this work is to be the addition of a fixed-resolution thumbnail preview capability, allowing users to see a small image of a given object (where this makes sense – so the likes of note cards and scripts would be excluded) within inventory, with these thumbnails either being of individual items or entire folders.
    • The first phase of the work is determining how to generate the thumbnail images and ensure they maintain an association with the objects to which they are related (e.g. so if an item is sold or transferred to another user, the thumbnail goes with it).
    • Once this has been decided, the next phase will be to build-out the UI so that such thumbnails can be viewed from inventory.
    • This work will not replace the Outfit Folder image capability nor will it prevent creators from including high resolution images with their products if they wish.
  • Once the thumbnail preview work has been completed, it is possible the Lab will look to further enhancements to inventory management. One future enhancement under consideration is support for folders to be included in the Contents inventory of individual objects.

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

  • To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
  • To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
  • The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • The project viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page, but will only work on the following regions on Aditi (the Beta grid):  Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
  • Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.

Status

  • The focus remains on bug and regression issue fixing within the viewer and quality of life improvements, particularly as in wider grid testing, it has been found the PBR viewer can only generate single-digit FPS in some regions.
  • Screen Space Reflections (SSR): Geenz Linden continues to work on integrating SSR into the PBR viewer, but is encountering issues.

Animation System Enhancements – A Discussion

In response to requests for the animation system to be improved (e.g. via CCUG meetings, as a result of the Puppetry project, etc.), Vir Linden asked those at the meeting to state what they see as the most important changes / updates they would like to see. Responses included those expressed at the Server User Group meeting earlier in the week:

  • A procedural animation system to allow creators / users to set the rules of how avatars walk, run, jump; their timings, how animations play priority wise and mixing wise in the series, all able to be packaged up into an item – it has been suggested that whilst “old” the SL is well-placed to be folded into a procedural animation system.

  • Improved animation formats and easier means of animation import into Second Life.
  • The ability to dynamically set animation priorities for more fluid animation integration (e.g. when you are holding and pointing a gun, you continue to point it as you walk, rather than the avatar’s arm dropping to a walking animation when moving).
  • Viewer-side animation editor.
  • Better support for inverse kinematics.
  • Collaboration between the Puppetry team, the glTF team and any animation project to ensure consistency of decision-making about formats, proper LSL support / calls, etc.

This discussion covered a lot of ground, including the potential for the implementation of an “animation 2.0” system which could potentially operate alongside the existing system (much like PBR materials and “legacy” materials); the benefits in greater adherence to emerging standards – particularly in the area of avatar / skeleton formats and capabilities, and the fact that SL is both well-placed to be a part of defining those standards whilst also being hamper by the fact the existing SL avatar format is a niche product / approach, and more. However, the two key points of the discussion might be summarised as:

  • Changes to the animation  / avatar systems are not projects the Lab is working on at present.
  • However, the it demonstrates that, as with recent projects, the Lab is looking seriously at enhancing SL and moving it towards more readily understood standards. As such, it is taking the time to ascertain options that are exciting to creators an users and which might be seen s benefiting the platform and its future growth, and so might be formalised into active projects – and include user engagement where appropriate in their development.

In terms of what might be attempted by way of “small-scale” improvements to the animation system, the viewpoint from LL is that the ability to dynamically set animation priorities and adding scaling support to the animation format are seen as providing users / creators with recognisable benefits.

Next Meeting

  • Thursday, January 19th, 2023.

2022 week #50: CCUG and TPVD meetings summary

Power up for Charge, October 2022 – blog post
The following notes were taken from:

  • My audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, December 15th 2022 at 13:00 SLT.
  • My chat log transcript and video recording by Pantera Północy of the Third-Party Developer Meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, December 16th, 2022 at 13:00 SLT. My thanks to her for the video (embedded towards the end of this article).

These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar; also note that the following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meetings and is not intended to be a full transcript of either meeting.

Official Viewers Status

[Video: 1:44-2:13]

Available Viewers

  • On Friday, December 16th, Linden Lab issued the Maintenance (Q)uality RC viewer, version 6.6.9.577220, with several new features and various fixes.
  • On Wednesday, December 14th, the Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer updated to version 7.0.0.577157.

The rest of the current crop of official viewers is as follows:

  • Release viewer: Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.8.576863 Monday, December 12 – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Performance Floater / Auto-FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576737, November 28.
    • VS  2022 RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576310, issued November 4 – utilises Visual Studio 2022 in the Windows build tool chain.
  • Project viewers:
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8.
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.576966, December 3.
      • This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.

CCUG Specific

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary
  • To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
  • To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
  • The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • The project viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page, but will only work on the following regions on Aditi (the Beta grid):  Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
Status
  • Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.
  • The focus remains on bug and regression issue fixing within the viewer and quality of life improvements.
  • There has been a discussion on revising the workflow for setting reflection probes & in providing a debug setting to make things easier to see when manipulating reflection probes.
    • This has been prompted be those testing the PBR viewer setting-up their own reflection probes incorrectly (e.g. by making the probe sphere / cube shiny prior to converting it to a reflection probe – which should NOT be done), failing to achieved the anticipated results and then filing bug reports.
    • It is possible that some of the required workflow could be factored into the UI itself to off a more intuitive sense as to how reflection probes are supposed to work.
    • An alternative to this might be to introduce a new “reflection probe” prim type, which includes all the core parameters – however the additional work and messaging required to achieve this would lead to a further lengthening of the project’s development time.
    • Tutorials to help people get to grips with reflection probes (and, I presume, PBR as a whole are “in the works”).
  • Screen Space Reflections (SSR): Geenz Linden is working on this within the PBR viewer. Whilst a checkbox for SSR has been added to the viewer, there is further work to be done on the integration and rendering sides (e.g. getting SSR to work on water & transparent surfaces).
  • Hardware profiling / optimising the viewer is still on-going (although it is likely that whatever is done, SSR will result in a noticeable performance hit if enabled).
  • [TPV Video: 9:11-10:44] The decision has yet to be made on whether or not to axe the forward rendering (i.e. non-ALM) path from the viewer.
    • This decision is awaiting more information on hardware performance on lower-spec systems using the updated deferred rendering (i.e. ALM) rendering path.
    •  It is known that Mac rendering performance on the PBR viewer is particularly bad, which may be down to a configuration issue.

In Brief

  • Mirrors (in some capacity) are described as the “very next thing” the graphics team will commence work on after the PBR / reflection probes work gets to RC status (as Vir Linden pointed out, Mirrors currently require more reflection on how they are to be implemented!).
  • The meeting in places broadened into general discussion on content breakage (and the need, where possible, to maintain the functionality of content users have purchased in expectation of its longevity; the benefits / disadvantages with morph bones versus blend shapes for customising the avatar shape (and the possible routes to an “avatar 2.0”), the need for a better animation system (or even an actual animation system), etc.
    • Much of this was more esoteric in nature at this point in time, although the likes of Puppetry is laying the foundations for broader animation work; as does the glTF 2.0 specification, which is the baseline specification for the PBR / reflections probe work, and will be expanded upon in future projects  – such as with mesh uploads.
    • In terms of animation systems, some of the groundwork is already in place inasmuch as SL already effectively treats morph bones and animated bones as individual animation tracks, offering to potential for this to ne “unwrapped” and moved to a glTF approach to animation management.
  • Some of the above conversation touched on the ideas of market renewal / fragmentation. For example: the introduction of reflection probes offers a degree of market renewal for creators of buildings, skyboxes, etc., through the provisioning of new builds (or new versions of existing builds) leveraging the capability; however, the adoption of an upload schema for fully customised avatar skeletons might lead to greater market fragmentation (how do you ensure, for example, that human animation/pose A will work equally on custom human (style) avatar skeletons W, X, Y and Z, or will they each require custom animations?).

TPVD Meeting Specific

Inventory Thumbnails

[Video: 2:25-7:08]

  • A new project (commencing in 2023) to add thumbnail previews to inventory, allowing users to see a small image of a given object within inventory (thumbnails can be individual items or, if preferred an entire folder).
  • The first phase of the work is determining how to generate the thumbnail images in the first place on a manual or (preferably) automated basis, and then ensure it maintains an association with the object to which it is related (e.g. so if an item is sold or transferred to another user, the thumbnail goes with it).
  • Once this has been decided, the next phase will be to build-out the UI so that such thumbnails can be viewed from inventory
  • It is likely that thumbnails will have a fixed / limited size resolution, and will not be subject to any upload fee.
  • This work:
    • Is not an adjunct (or related) to the Outfit previews currently available in the viewer.
    • Will not prevent creators from including high resolution images with their products if they wish.
    • Will only apply to inventory objects where it makes sense (e.g. textures and notecards would likely be excluded).
    • Is seen as a possible foundational piece to adding new fields to the inventory database, which could open the door to further information fields being added to inventory in the future,

Github Move “Phase 2”

[Video: 7:12-8:18]

  • Following the switch-over to using Github for viewer code repositories on Monday, November 21st, 2022, work is now progressing on “Phase 2”.
  • This is remaining TeamCity operations with Github Actions for viewer builds (so those pulling an official viewer repo will be able to build it directly).
  • This work will also incorporate the rebuilding of those third-party libraries involved in the viewer build process, as and where required.

In Brief

  • [Video 16:10-18:41] LL has been digging into viewer crash rates by operating system, with the note that the number of crashes on the Mac OS appears to be disproportionately high. It is hoped that if the underlying causes can be readily identified, these issues can be subjected to rapid fixing. It was not clear at the meeting if those TPVs supporting OS X are seeing a similar elevated crash rate.
  • [Video 20:40-21:35] It is estimated that the split between viewer operating systems for the official viewer  is roughly:
    • 1-2% Linux (although this does not include running the Windows viewer under emulation on Linux).
    • 6% Mac.
    • The rest: Windows.
    • Firestorm appears to mirror the above.
    • [Video: 35:08-36:10] It is possible the the work on the viewer library refresh will allow LL to look again at the issue of providing a Linux viewer build.
  • The meeting has a general discussion on operating systems, & variants (64-bit vs. 32-bit), etc, and the lack of an official Linux build,
  • A reminder that Microsoft ceases official support for Windows 8 on January 10th, 2023. This means that from that date, Windows 8 will no longer be officially supported by Second Life as a viewer operating system, and LL will not guarantee the viewer will run as expected on Win 8 going forward from that date.

Linden Lab Holiday Closure

A reminder that Linden Lab will be effectively closed (outside of Support cover) from end of business (PST) on Friday, December 23rd, 2022 through until start of business (PST) on Monday, January 2nd, 2023.

Next Meetings

  • CCUG: Thursday, January 12th, 2023.
  • TPVD: Friday, January 20th, 2023.