Tag: TPVD meetings 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 29th 2021 at 13:00 SLT, and the TPV Developer’s meeting of Friday, April 30th.

These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar. The venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire, and the TPV Developer meeting is held at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

SL Viewer

The Eau de Vie Maintenance RC viewer version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23rd, was promoted to de facto viewer release status on Thursday, April 29th.

The remaining viewers in the pipeline comprise:

• Release channel cohorts:
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.18.558365, dated April 22.
  • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.18.558441, dated April 21.
• 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 Legacy Profiles viewer should be getting an update that will include some cosmetic tweaks to the UI, but will be functionally identical to the current project viewer version.
• The LMR 5 viewer is being readied for promotion to release status, and work on LMR 6 is continuing.
• The revised Simple Cache viewer is back with LL’s QA team, and should be re-emerging fairly soon.
• The improved UI viewer that is primarily intended to help new users looks like it will be issued during summer.
• A viewer with a fix for the Mac notarisation fix (currently OS X users have to jump through some additional hoops to get the operating system to run the viewer) should be appearing Soon™.
• Voice viewer: the Lab has been working to try to address the more annoying aspects of voice cutting out when someone is speaking. A viewer with various fixes / tweaks is currently being tested by Lab staff, and may be available for wider use also in a Soon™ time frame.
• A further viewer in the works will include further updates / fixes for the Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF – used in media playback and streaming into SL).

One of the issues LL are running into is that thanks to the SNAFU following the release and roll-back of the original Simple Cache viewer, there is a growing number of official viewers stacking up waiting to enter the RC and project viewer pipelines.

RLV/RLVa and Experiences

Most people are familiar with the RLV and RLVa protocols / API functionality that is available in various third-party viewers. Whilst originally developed for more adult-oriented activities in Second life, these API options do have a wide range of other potential uses, some of which might be said to now be matched by Experience functionality (for example: automatic teleports).

While there is currently no specific project in the works to extend Experience functionality, the Lab has actually had internal discussions about the potential to provide various RLV-like options that could help improve Experiences. As such, the suggestion was made that if there are various (and generic, rather than adult-specific) use cases that might be achieved using RLV but would be useful to have as Experience functionality, these are noted in Jira feature requests so that they might be considered in due course.

 

Note: it was brought to my attention that not everyone is aware of the Soon™ joke. It is a play on the use of “Soon™” by Blizzard Entertainment, and the fact that, given LL’s preference not to present what might be taken as “tablets of stone” dates for the delivery of any given feature or bug fix, Oz Linden would refer to upcoming features / capabilities / fixes being available as “Soon”, “Pretty Soon” and “Real Soon / Real Soon Now”, which all become generally defined by the catch-all idea of “Soon™”.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, March 18th 2021 at 13:00 SLT, and Pantera’s video recording of the TPV Developer’s meeting of Friday, March 19th, a copy of which is embedded at the end of this article.

These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar. The venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire, and the TPV Developer meeting is held at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

SL Viewer

There have been no changes to the current pipeline of SL viewers since the update to the Key Mappings viewer at the start of the week. This leaves the pipelines as follows:

• Release viewer: version 6.4.13.555567 (Jelly Doll improvements) originally promoted February 17th.
  
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.17.556726, dated March 15.
  • Maintenance RC viewer – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.14.556149, dated March 4.
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.14.556118, dated 23, 2021.
• 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.

Viewer Status

• The Simple Cache viewer is being updated and will re-enter circulation as a new RC viewer. Depending on the outcome of further testing this man or may not be the next viewer promoted to release status.
• The other RC viewer with the potential to be promoted is the Key Mappings Viewer.
• LMR 5 has encountered some additional crash issues  centred on Intel GPU drivers, and so is unlikely to be in line for promotion at present.

Graphics Work

The graphic team is addressing bugs relating to lighting underwater and to the Moon haze. This work, together with the LMR 5 issues mean Euclid Linden’s work to separate out UI rendering from scene rendering is currently on hold.

ARCTan

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

As of January 2020 ARCTan has effectively been split between viewer renderings focused on revising the Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) calculations and providing additional viewer UI so that people can better visibility and control to seeing complexity. This will be followed in the future by work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.

This project has reached a point where consideration needs to be given to how performance controls that can leverage the avatar-related ARCTan data can be implemented. However, this work is waiting on Steeltoe Linden.

In Brief

• There was more general discussion on improved avatar scaling  – uniform / proportional scaling, etc. However, as has been pointed out in the past, the general design of the avatar skeleton, coupled with the morphing capabilities (sliders) do not make uniform scaling easy to implement.
  • One of the calls for making such scaling possible is to allow users scale down their avatars so that regions feel much “bigger”  and thus can present larger settings. However, this view ignores the fact that there are other practical constraints on the region and the underpinning simulator that mean just because avatars are smaller, “more” can be packed into a given space.
• The majority of the meeting was general spitballing on options for revising the avatar per above, requests to implement Marvelous Designer, providing morph targets, and so on. However, none of the chat related to projects the Lab are currently working on or plan to implement in the foreseeable future.
• The TPV Developer meeting amounted to some 6 minutes of discussion, ergo no timestamps to the video.

Date of Next Meetings

• Content Creation: Thursday, April 1st, 2021.
• TPVD: Friday, April 2nd, 20221.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, March 4th 2021 at 13:00 SLT, and Pantera’s video recording of the TPV Developer’s meeting of Friday, March 5th, a copy of which is embedded at the end of this article.

The majority of the TPVD meeting was given over to a discussion of the texture cache issue, together with a general discussion on the simplified cache structure and also on Jelly Doll avatars.

These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar. The venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire, and the TPV Developer meeting is held at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

SL Viewer

[From the CCUG meeting & TPVD Meeting]

Release Roll-Back & Issues

• The Simple Cache viewer, version 6.4.14.556088, had to be rolled back following its March 2nd promotion due to a number of bugs (e.g. cache location not being adhered to – BUG-230337; uploads of textures above a certain size were failing – BUG-230295).
• The roll-back saw the Jelly Doll improvements viewer, version 6.4.13.555567 (originally promoted on February 17th) revert to being the de facto release viewer.
• However, the roll-back resulted in some users who had updated to the Simple Cache viewer users experiencing a corrupted texture cache when using an older version of the viewer.
• Unfortunately, LL are having problems consistently reproducing the texture caching issues, so it is unclear how matters will be resolved.

This means that for the meantime:

• Those experiencing texture issues on the official viewer as a result of having used the Simple Cache viewer and then rolling back to, or installing, another version should try clearing cache and re-starting the viewer.
• Until the Lab have more of a handle on the texture cache issues:
  • Those RC viewers that had been internally merged with the Simple Cache viewer will also be rolled-back to an earlier version.
  • Internal viewer testing procedures will be reviewed.
  • TPVs that have also merged the Simple Cache code will also likely need to roll back their code.
• One suggestion for resolving this issue is for the official viewer to increment the texture cache version number, forcing a complete wipe / reset of the cache
• Independent of the texture caching issues, and due to BUG-230337 and BUG-230295, the Simple Cache viewer will go back to a development status so the issues can be fixed.
  • Firestorm apparently has fixes for these particular issues, and these may be contributed to LL.

General Viewer Notes

• A new Maintenance RC viewer – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.14.556149, was released on March 4th.
• The Custom Key Mappings viewer updated to version 6.4.14.556098, also on Thursday, March 4th.

The rest of the official viewers in the pipeline remains as follows:

• Release channel cohorts:
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.14.556118, February, 23, 2021.
• Project viewers:
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

There may be a viewer promotion during week #10 (commencing Monday, March 8th).  While no final decision has been made, it is possible the LMR 5 may be the viewer that gets promoted.

Viewer Rendering

[CCUG Meeting]

• Euclid Linden continues to work on separating UI rendering from general scene rendering in order to improve overall viewer performance.
  • Currently the UI is completely redrawn every frame, along with the rest of the scene, whether or not it requires update.
  • This can take up to 40% of the rendering time, depending on the complexity of the scene being rendered, with around 10-20% being an average, so it is hoped the changes will particularly help those on less-capable systems.
  • There may be some subtle / slight reduction in UI responsiveness under certain circumstances, so a means to tweak the UI update rate may be provided via something like a Debug setting.
  • Note: this work is not physically altering the appearance of the UI, only the frequency with which it is drawn.
• Ptolemy Linden continues to work on more general rendering performance improvements and rendering bug fixes.

In Brief

• [CCUG] Map tiles are still being worked on. In the future the lab may look to implement a new means of generating the Map tiles in a more robust way.
  • The Lab has an internal proposal for updating terrain textures, but it has yet to be formally adopted.
• [CCUG] Allow upload of ground  constrained animations – on the LL’s list,  but has not been looked at as yet.  Vir believes that as the capability is already supported (but undocumented) is should only require an alteration to the simulator animation code to ensure the constraints are correctly understood.
• [TPVD] Firestorm has entered QA, with a release planned for mid-March.

Date of Next Meetings

• CCUG: Thursday, March 18th, 2021.
• TPV Developer: Friday, March 19th, 2021.