Thumbs Up Release - October 9, 2018

New Features

Client

• Avatar improvements in VR - Kick up your VR experience with the all new avatar experience.
  • Flexible body movement - We unpinned the spine to enable fluid upper body movement, allowing the avatar shoulders and wrists to move more naturally. This enables you to twist and turn your body in different angles. You can also kneel down in the physical space and your avatar will bend their knees and crouch!
  • Hand gestures - Try the new hand gestures that allows you to move your avatar fingers. You can view the list of gestures here. Take note that the hand gestures are not yet visible from a 1st person perspective in this release, but you can view them in 3rd person mode. Check out the list of controls here.
• Full-screen mode - Desktop users can now experience Sansar in full screen mode from the More options menu on the App launcher.
• Twitch chat - If you log in Sansar using a Twitch account, you can now watch and participate in your own Twitch channel chat or another streamer’s channel chat without leaving Sansar. Read here to learn how.
  • Read and send messages to the Twitch channel chat at any time.
  • Send /me actions to twitch and see Twitch emojis in the Sansar Twitch chat tab.
  • Type /help in the Twitch tab to learn the commands.
• Voice indicator - Having trouble distinguishing who’s speaking in a sea of avatars? Check out the new voice indicator that should identify the avatars who are speaking or have an open mic. If you prefer not to see voice indicators, you can disable or enable this from the settings menu at any time.
• In-client store purchasing - In the last release, we introduced shopping in the client. Now, you can complete your shopping experience without having to buy the item from the store.
• Permissions system - The long-awaited and frequently requested permissions system is finally here! This enables a broad range of capabilities for content creators, especially those interested in selling items in the Sansar Store. See Allowing resale of store items and Buyer's Permissions for more information.
  • Save to Inventory - You can now save objects with edited properties or additional components from the scene back to your inventory. Currently, you still won’t be able to join two objects together. For more information, see article link.
    • Take note: Legacy items (items created before this release) will not be saveable unless you uploaded the item yourself. You can only save items that you’ve created yourself or that were copied from system objects. Legacy items created by other store sellers cannot be saved back to the inventory.
  • Licensing - When you upload an item in Sansar or create one by saving it back to your inventory, the item will contain the basic license with your personal avatar info attached. This enables you to enable other content creators to resell your item and get commissions for any resale of your item. For more information, see article link.
  • Buyer’s permissions - When you upload a new item or create a new item by saving it back to your inventory, you should be able to set whether another user has full or limited editing permission on your item’s appearance and properties, as well as, set if you’ll get commissions from selling that item. For more information, see article link.
  • Item resale and royalty payouts - You can allow other content creators to resell your items and set a royalty price point that you will receive for any resale of your item.
  • Royalty payouts - When an item is sold with several components from multiple sellers, the system will look at each component’s resale price point and pay out each seller.
  • Disable materials editing - You should no longer be able to change the materials of legacy items sold uploaded prior to this release. For new items, you can enable materials editing by giving full editing permissions or limit it by setting it to property changes only.

• Settings panel in VR - You can now access the settings panel from the VR main menu.
• Revamped chat app - A couple of changes to improve the chat app.
  • Appended simultaneous messages from the same user.
  • Support for SHIFT + enter to enable line breaks in one message.
  • Support for CTRL + A within the text input field to select all on the text.
  • Better hyperlink support in chat. Sansar experience links will automatically convert into the experience’s name. Try it out and share some links in Sansar!
  • Improved auto-scrolling behavior that doesn’t auto-scroll while back reading and should only auto-scroll down when reading the latest message in chat.
• Scene creation updates
  • Held object orientation - A new tool for experience creators that allows you to set the orientation of an object from your scene when a user interacts and grabs it. Go here to learn more.
  • Keyboard shortcut support - Press TAB to move between input fields on the properties panel.
  • Voice broadcast - Enable voice broadcasting in your scene by streaming it through the scene background sound or audio emitters. 
  • Keyframed object grabbing - Support for grabbing keyframed objects. 
• Script updates - A couple of new scripting capabilities. See Script API updates for more details.
  • SimpleScripts API - All SimpleScripts now have a Group property to control which scripts communicate with each other.
    • This would set the scripts to only send events to and receive events from other scripts in the same group by default.
    • Send messages to a different group by appending @othergroup to the event.
    • Advanced Optional Sequencing for events to emit or receive events in a certain order.
  • Inventory scripts - Updated a few scripts with some additional properties
    • SimpleDispenser - Support for more randomized movement.
    • SimpleLights - Support for lighting fade ins and fade outs.
  • RigidBody grab/release callbacks API - Scripts can perform actions when a RigidBody is grabbed or release by an avatar, using the API.
    • RigidBodyComponent.SubscribeToHeldObject. This method returns information about who has grabbed/released the object, and what hand they are grabbing it with.
    • Scripts have access to the RigidBodies that an avatar is currently holding, using the API AgentPrivate.GetHeldRigidBodies.
    • Scripts can control at runtime whether or not an object can be grabbed by avatars, using the API RigidBodyComponent.SetCanGrab.

Web

• Browser push notifications - Enable browser notifications for Sansar to remind you about upcoming events that you saved to your Sansar calendar so that you don’t miss any.

Documentation

New Articles

• Allowing resale of store items
• Avatar hand gestures in VR
• Buyer's Permissions
• Defining grab points

Updated Articles

• The App launcher
• The Audio Emitter
• Buying items from the Sansar Store
• The Chat and People apps
• Identifying and interacting with avatars
• Scene Settings
• Settings 
• Twitch integration

Note: For updates on the Script API documentation, see Script API updates.

Known Issues

Resolved known issues from previous releases

The team did a great job in fixing a lot of issues in Sansar. Here's a peek at some of the most notable fixes:

• Moving left or right with A or D while holding shift or ctrl may freeze the camera while editing a scene.
• Camera movement can be performed with the keyboard or controllers while various modals are active.
• Properties panel didn't allow tabbing out of input boxes. Now you can move between input boxes using the TAB key.
• The dropdowns on the scene toolbar do not collapse automatically when the user interacts with something outside of the dropdown. In this release, clicking outside of the dropdown will automatically close the scene toolbar dropdown menus.
• The capability to copy text to the clipboard in the Script Console doesn't work. In this release, you should be able to copy text to your clipboard.
• The capability to shift-select multiple lines of text in the Script console doesn't allow you to copy text.
• Using Ctrl+Z to remove a directional light that was added to the scene will prevent new directional lights from being drag and dropped into the scene.
• Opening the people app in the scene editor, and then dragging it makes the app snap to the right edge of the window.
• Crash reports from spamming the chat app while loading an experience.
• Clicking on an object component will cause the object to become selected and appear highlighted in the scene objects panel. Clicking the component a second time will keep the component selected, but will cause the scene objects panel highlight to turn off, making it appear deselected in the scene objects panel.
• If you stretch the Chat panel in non-VR Mode, the VR chat panel does not span the width of the whole panel.
• Holding right click in any UI panel, then left click and dragging in the viewport will cause the previously used ui panel to scale as if the user had clicked on the padding around the panel.
• Arrow to reply to direct messages does not appear if the direct message is more than 82 characters long
• Switching between tabs in the Chat app causes the Experiences tab to autoscroll back to the top.
• Users can send empty messages in the chat app.
• The experience tab in the chat app is available when accessing the chat app from the loading screen or scene editor.
• Crash reports from activity in the chat app, especially when direct messages are sent and the user switches between direct messages and experience tab.
• Script messages sent to the Chat app will display "could not resolve" as the username along with the default profile image.
• Scaling down an asset that already has very small triangles, so that the triangles are now degenerate, will cause all the dynamic assets in the scene to fall through the ground while visiting the experience.
• Items you already purchased are not marked as "Purchased" in the in-client store.
• Events with custom images made from the My Calendar tab do not display the image until the tab is refreshed.
• The People app always shows an empty 'Friends' list after the user logs out and switches to a different account.
• The store product's inventory/item name does not show. Instead, the store title is listed twice in the item detail's page.
• "Dynamic objects" filter in "Scene Objects" panel no longer shows dynamic objects
• Component selection from the object structure list doesn't work properly.
• The directional light would show a warning when using undo to bring back a deleted directional light. Additionally, after receiving the warning, the system prevents any new directional lights from entering the scene.
• Locked objects can still be moved while in VR.
• If SimpleCollisions.cs is placed in an object, it behaves as expected the first time a character collides, but crashes with an exception if the same character collides with the object a second time.
• Avatar ID no longer appears when hovering over an avatar's name in the Chat app.
• Reported crashing that the client crashes when switching or leaving experiences.
• If a user revisits the same experience, their avatar name is shown in the Nearby tab of the People app each time they rejoin.
• Material Settings and Import buttons are either cut off or missing in the scene editor
• Reported crashes when entering VR while in the scene editor.
• Repeatedly grabbing an object in a scene will cause it to shift upwards with every succeeding grasp.
• Pressing the Y button to close the app launcher from the scene editor open the Atlas app (Oculus Touch controllers in VR).
• Events in progress cannot be edited due to an incorrect time limit popup error.

Known issues for this release

• You can view the full known issues list from this release and previous releases here.