See what was discussed this week!

Housekeeping & Notes

Our Shanghai team are back from their holiday nice and refreshed! No-one else is away or out of contact this week.

Upcoming Features, Fixes and Changes

Viewer Updates

Viewer 2018.9b28 is getting a small patch this week to fix a bug ("Stable"). This will be going to the preview server briefly before going live (update: this is now on the preview server). We will then be releasing a bigger update ("Unstable") shortly after (update: Monday).

Stable Viewer Fixes:

• We have fixed a glitch where controls could lock up.
• [Update: several safe fixes from the Unstable viewer below have been ported into this release, mainly new script functions.]

Unstable Viewer:

• Adds support for Gamepads and Joysticks again (much better support than before!)
• Support for Patterns in Furniture and Vehicle Items (experimental!)
• Furniture and Vehicles can be previewed in 3D in the shop
• Improvements to movement and camera controls
• Scripting: Added a ForceDeactivate method to vehicles.
• Scripting: Function for linking script-created chat zones with XMPP.
• Hair: Fixed an issue where certain hair shaders would cause a black and white glowing disco glitch.
• Vehicles: Vehicles can now modify camera FOV based on speed – You can narrow the FOV at high speed (this makes vehicles seem like they are driving faster, without raising the speed or lowering control).
• Processing Servers: A small tweak has been made to stop creators from uploading content with inappropriate UTF8 filenames (y̵̰͔͌̓͂͜ȅ̷͉̊s̵̢̍,̷͖͎̼͑̐̎ ̸͙͚̔̀y̵͙͔̗͗̆o̴͖͙̰͊u̷͍̔͜ ̸̱͛͗c̷̺̝̩̈́̕͠à̴͉͕ń̶̜́́ ̵̫̺͑̋s̸̼̀̚͜ͅt̷̩͖͇͗̅͌o̴̪̫̒͑̒p̴̄͗̐ͅ ̴͙́ṯ̴̢͆h̷͍͠i̴̲̠̮̊̈́̔s̷̟̈́̈́̎ ̸͚͗͑n̷̺͖̪͒͠o̶̬̗̐͆w̴͇̜͌.̶̱̠͋́). The next editor pack will now also block creators before uploading these.
• Snapshot Window: Some snapshot filters were missing TAA as we're currently disabling that – We now override them to always force all snapshots to use maximum quality FXAA regardless of the profile settings.

Control and UI Changes

Avatars

We are working on adding new visualization to loading avatars. We will be adding new visual effects shortly. We have also fixed an issue with avatar elbows in the viewers.

Input Manager

We have replaced our internal Input Manager. The Input Manager controls how keyboard/mouse input is processed. By changing this, we have gained three features:

• Gamepad support and virtual mouse – Gamepad support is back and improved. We have also added a virtual mouse so you can drive the entire UI from a gamepad. Any gamepad should work, but we recommend using an Xbox One-compatible controller. This feature will work on Windows, Mac and Linux.

On-screen input and touch controls

• For people accessing the PC and wanting purely mouse driven control, you can now drive all input via an on-screen window
• We have added support for rumble/force feedback in vehicles

Character controls

• A few tweaks to mouse driven control e.g. holding both mouse buttons
• Improvements to flying with the mouse (vertical input will be factored in). You can also fly/steer fully using both mouse buttons.
• Small tweaks to how input is registered for jumping

Camera controls

• Camera now has no latency in steering and object tracking/movement is better. The general movement has been made slower but more precise as well. If you hold the controls for a while, it will speed up the movement.
• Camera refocus now registers on Alt+Left click instead of Alt+Right click (experimental).
• We have added an experimental option to use the cameras depth buffer instead of using physics for establishing mouse click position.

Shop

• Shop previews are now possible for furniture and vehicle items. This enables pattern support for non-clothing items and Pattern Derivation. We will be making tutorials on this soon as this is available to the public.

Editor Pack Changes

General

• We have recategorized all of the ‘Add Component’ layouts. Everything is now under Sinespace/ and is more logically organized. We have added components which should be there, and taken away some internal items which didn’t belong.

Clothing

• Processing the K-Factor is now hinted in such a way that moves it from a O(N^2) to O(N) calculation. This means that the K-Factor progress is much faster. For items with upwards of 30K polys, this originally took 20 minutes plus. This should now process in about 30 seconds instead. [Processing of heavy items should be faster too -Adam]

Vehicles

• For land vehicles, you can now add an ‘air camera’ which is switched to when a vehicle has no wheels touching the ground.

Scripting

• We have added a .Guest property to determine if an avatar is a guest and also added a .Register method for whitelabel users.

If you'd like to come along and discuss these items in more detail - our weekly technical office hours with our lead developer Adam Frisby is at 6PM UTC/2PM EST/11AM PST every Wednesday.