The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, June 19th. A video of the TPVD meeting is included below, with any time stamps in the following text referring to it. My thanks as always to North for the recording and providing it for embedding.

SL Viewer

RC Viewers

[0:39 / 08:00] The Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM) viewer reached release candidate status on Thursday, June 18th with the release of version 3.7.31.302677. This means the VMM code is now officially available for TPVs to integrate into their viewers. When this viewer reaches release status, it will signal the end of the current VMM beta period.

[22:37] Currently, the Lab is aiming to promote the Experience Tools, VMM and attachment fixes (Project Big Bird) in order – although what that order might be, has yet to be finally determined.

A new Maintenance RC viewer, version 3.7.31.302685, entered the release channel on Friday, June 19th, with some 50 fixes, improvements and updates, covering building, snapshots, group ban fixes, rendering fixes, etc. Please refer to the release notes for full details.

Project Viewers

An update to the Oculus Rift project viewer (currently version 3.7.18.295296, and not updated since October 2014) is anticipated to be arriving “soon”, although no precise date is available.

[09:10] A new voice project viewer is expected to appear in week #26 (week commencing Monday, June 22nd), with fixes for voice issues directly from Vivox.

[09:32] A project viewer based on the latest HTTP updates (llcorehttp) that rider Linen has been working on is also expected to make its appearance shortly. This will likely remain at project viewer status for a while as it goes through various iterations as further improvements and revisions are made.

[10:00] A further project viewer with the Lab’s revamped notifications interface (see BUG-8000) is also anticipated as arriving soon as well.

Chromium Embedded Framework

[10:14] Work is progressing with the switch from webkit to the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) for media management such that it is entirely possible that a project viewer using CEF may be appearing in the next two weeks.

Snowstorm Project Viewers

[10:30] There are two Snowstorm (open-source contributions) viewers in progress. One of these includes the Avatar Complexity work and the ability to save graphics preferences for the viewer which are being developed by Jonathan Yap (see below for more on this viewer).

The second is a viewer build clean-up viewer that includes a number of TPV-contributed updates and fixes. This latter viewer is currently awaiting internal resources at the Lab, but should hopefully “very, very soon”.

Avatar Complexity

The Avatar Complexity (aka Jelly Babies) project is the upcoming functionality which provides greater control to user to define how other avatars are rendered in their world-view.

However, a recent hiccup means that the project has been on hold. n making some changes to the code, Oz accidentally broke the code such that instead of rendering as a solid colour, avatars exceeding the limit are currently rendering as transparent, and this is yet to be fixed.

Commenting on situation at the TPV Developer meeting, Oz indicated any help any willing devs can provide to help sort the problem out, would be appreciated. The public repository for the code is here.

The code problem arose as Oz sought to make changes such that avatars above the rendering limit set by the user render as “Jelly Babies” (i.e. a solid colour, as previously indicated in discussing the project), those avatars with incomplete rendering data are rendered grey (as we currently sometimes see in-world), and those that the user has muted are simply not rendered at all.

Changes to Linden Damage

[15:15] As noted in part 1 of this week’s report, there were some changes made in April to the way the official viewer handles avatar damage messaging. In short, damage cannot be set it the parcel level only; also, the viewer does not display the health meter on damage enabled parcels, but people can be “killed” and teleported home – for a full list of issues, see BUG-9422.

From a users’ perspective, no longer being able to set damage at the parcel level (it now requires damage to be enabled at estate level and then toggled on / off by parcel) is proving to be a nuisance, as are the current conflicts within the viewer as to how it interprets what has / has not been set.

Acknowledging the issues with how the viewer interprets the damage settings, Oz noted that the updates are currently purely view-side, and that additional work on the viewer and on the server code is likely to be required. However, the overall intention appears to be that damage can no longer be independently toggled on / of if it is not set at the region / estate level. Simon Linden gave some reasons as to why this is now the case during the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, June 16th (see the link above to part 1 of this report). However, Oz has agreed to discuss things internally further, although this won’t by until Grumpity Linden (who oversaw the updates) has returned from maternity leave.

Group Member List Changes

[35:00] The recent changes made to the way members’ lists for large group are handled has caused some upset. Describing the current situation with such groups as sub-optimal, Oz again reiterated the changes were needed to prevent other problems from surfacing, and as such are somewhat interim in nature. However, in order to be properly fixed, the Lab requires time to look at matters and spend some time on designing a new API for dealing with groups and group management.

Log-in Issues Due to “Flat” Inventory

[47:17] In week 17, I wrote about how large “flat” inventories (e.g. tens of thousands on items within a single folder, rather than being split between multiple sub-folders, can cause the log-in process to slow significantly for it it to time-out and the simulator to disconnect the viewer.

The inventory transform mentioned at that time has now been deployed to the Lab’s support staff, so users who are experiencing log-in issues can report them to support, and if they are related to “flat” inventory structures, support can run the transform and correct things. This will take folders with 10,000 or more items in them (item being individual assets and sub-folders), and split them into sub-folders.

This should be available for both Premium and Basic members.

Other Items

Mac Retina Support

[23:45] Cinder Roxley has offered her work on Mac Retina displays, which has been incorporated into the current release of the Alchemy viewer to the Lab for consideration (she has a contributor’s agreement with the Lab) – see STORM-2116. This work provides much better resolution when using Retina viewers, and cinder has also removed a number of deprecated functions from the viewer code as well.

Rendering Issues

The Lab is interested in receiving JIRA reports on issues with rendering in-world objects (not attachments – see the notes below for these) which can be consistently reproduced. This will allow them to investigate matters further and identify / separate out potential causes of such rendering problems (which could be the result of interest list issues, or of mesh and texture data fetching issues via the CDN or UDP message failures, etc).

As noted in previous updates, the majority of viewer-side attachment rendering issues (items detaching / turning invisible on teleport, / region crossing, etc.), are believed to have been addressed with the Project Big Bird viewer (currently 3.7.31.302640). Anyone suffering from persistent attachment issues is therefore requested to try this viewer and see if their problems are resolved. Should issues still occur, which can be reproduced, a JIRA on the problem should, if possible, be filed.

“Cube Trick” Rigged Mesh Avatar Deformations

See BUG-8616 and BUG-9010. A fix for both of these issues is in progress, but not yet ready for deployment in a viewer.