Our monthly Q&As haved moved to two new time slots, alternating between EU and US friendly hours. Also find out what was discussed in the last Q&A session!
Hello everyone,
As noted on Discord, we are moving our monthly Q&As to a new timeslot. Two of them, actually! Our first new timeslot happened this month, on what we'll call our EU-friendly time slot at 9am Eastern / 1pm UTC. Our next will be happening on a more US-friendly time slot of 7pm Eastern / 11pm UTC on July 14th.
Time zones are always a challenge for us as a company with a global staff and global users. Hopefully one of these time slots works for you, but we know that it is unlikely for everyone to be able to make every monthly event, so we're going to start providing official summaries of the questions and answers posed during the event. These are not full transcripts, but think of them more as minutes. Please feel free to submit questions to an event even if you can't make it yourself, they will still be answered even if the person submitting them is not present.
We'll be experimenting with this format a bit over the next few months, and of course we welcome feedback on how this is working for everyone.
So let's get into what we talked about today:
Adam's schedule is allowing him to spend more time on Sinespace-focused work than the previous few years have allowed. While this includes a heavy focus on pushing NextGen forward, he is also looking for quick wins on the CurrentGen/Legacy architecture, in part aided by AI-driven development processes.
Recent engagement on the Discord staff-hut channel is part of this, taking a look at ways we can potentially improve asset loading times and reduce stalls during startup. A major culprit of this is how custom shaders are loaded, a limitation of the Unity engine itself. Is custom shader support worth the cost it imposes? Broadly, most creators (including us) seem to think so. Adam points out that Xulain's cool shoes with a fur shader would not be possible otherwise, along with many other cool effects. But not everything uses custom shaders, and there may be ways to optimize around content that needs them vs content that does not. Also looking to improve processing infrastructure to reduce processing times and upload sizes as part of this.
Adam notes that the current live viewer includes a new feature we have not talked about much, which is relaxing our HTTP restrictions. This means that placing a whitelist file on the server root is no longer necessary. This should enable scripts to access a wider variety of external APIs for content purposes. Custom headers can be used to distinguish calls coming from the Sinespace platform. Open question to scripters: Would Lua web socket support be useful to anyone?
Q: Will Sinespace Worlds get further updates (Phase 2)?
A: Yes, we still intend to continue delivering features for Sinespace Worlds, although they may not be all in the same release. Future updates are focused on discoverability and shareability, helping users find the right worlds and get into them smoothly from both internal and external sources. This includes a world explorer in the viewer, improving on the existing region explorer. We also want to make world descriptions / tagging more prominent and searchable, as well as adding ways to externally link users into specific worlds via sharable hyperlinks. The viewer release for this month adds support for directly teleporting from one World to another through Explore, Events, and scripting, so you don't have to log out to change worlds.
Q: Is it possible to see a demo of avatars in NextGen, as mentioned in previous events?
A: Basic avatars are rendering and animated now, but the work on NextGen is currently focused on rendering correctness/performance and making sure legacy content can be brought over properly, so the avatar system is not complete yet, but will become a focus soon.
Q: When will NextGen Alpha be available to existing users to test?
A: We are aiming to have an early look build available next month. This will be a limited build aimed at soliciting feedback about the work-in-progress state of it. This build will not be feature complete and will not be intended for live use. Expect it to be rough. Longer term, we are aiming to have something more like a beta build available by the end of the year.
Q: What are the marketing plans for Worlds and for NextGen after it is released?
A: For Sinespace Worlds, we chose not to market it directly until it had a specific set of features in it. These features are broadly what we covered in the Phase 2 question above. Once that is done, we will definitely be talking about it to more people and in more places, including press releases. For NextGen we have broader plans once it is ready, including taking it to various conferences to show it to both users and developers.
Q: Will existing content inventories be usable in NextGen?
A: Our plan has always been to support existing content going forward. This has been a primary tenent of the Sinespace platform since the beginning, which is why we have Unity 5 content still running on newer Unity engines to this day. NextGen embodies that same philosophy (and in fact will make it much easier in the future). We know you all have a great deal of both time and money invested in your regions, your avatars, and your inventory, and we want you to bring all of that with you and have it work as you expect it should. The UX of the viewer will be different, and some content may not look EXACTLY the same, as we still want to find a better solution for custom shaders and this may include replacing them with MaterialX conversions or similar solution, but most things should be indistinguishable.
Q: Can we have inventory folders on NextGen?
A: Yes, but we want to rely as much as possible on metadata. Folders get disorgnaized quickly and have to be manually curated constantly, it doesn't scale well when users have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of items. Grouping and tagging and searching is key, but manual folders will be supported as well.
Q: Will the next build fix the double radio streams bug?
A: Yes, it should already be fixed in our nightly builds as we prepare for the next viewer release.
As a last little note, we have added a #next-gen channel to our Discord as a place to focus on talking about and asking questions about the NextGen work. Please feel free to ask anything you want there. We will also be looking at a broader Discord cleanup, including archiving some old channels and streamlining the remaining channels to be more relevant.
Thanks to everyone who was able to make it today, and we hope to see you at next month's Q&A.