World and Session Thumbnails

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Within Neos, Worlds and Sessions have thumbnails which give a glimpse of the world or session which you are browsing. In all cases these thumbnails are 360 Degree photos of the session/world. Depending on settings they may contain users who are present or items within the sessions.

Locations

Thumbnails show up in a number of places, which in some cases may look different:

In Neos within the World browser - You can pan around these using your laser to take a look around the session.
In Neos within World/Session Orbs - As orbs are 3D objects in Neos, you can see the entire 360 image project within the orb.
On the Neos Discord within the #🌌active-sessions channel - These look flat as they are rendered flat within Discord but still use the 360 images. This leads to warping or distortion.
On third party sites or tools - These may look flat as they are rendered flat the tool. This may lead to warping or distortion.

Default Behaviour

Sessions

Without any intervention from other sources, the default thumbnail behaviour is to:

Every few minutes each user in a session's computer automatically takes a 360 photo and stores it locally.
The session host's computer negotiates with the users in a session to choose one of the taken photos.
The session host's computer uploads the chosen thumbnail for the locations shown above.

Worlds

When the Host of a session saves the world a thumbnail is captured from their location. It ignores users in the world.

Customising Thumbnails

You have the ability to customize the thumbnail of your world or session using a couple of components. When doing this it is important to remember the difference between the two groups of them.

World Thumbnail Components

World thumbnail components only control the thumbnail of a world. These will only show up if you're looking at a World Orb or the world in the world browser. If there are active sessions of this world you'll likely see a session thumbnail instead.

WorldCaptureThumbnailSource - Specifies a customized location to capture a thumbnail from when the world is saved.
WorldTextureThumbnailSource - Specifies a completely customized texture to use for the world thumbnail.

Session Thumbnail Components

For Sessions, there is only one component at play. It will be used if it is present.

SessionCaptureThumbnailSource - Specifies a customized location to capture a thumbnail for the session.

Overlays

Both Capture components have an Overlay property which allows you to overlay an additional 360 image on-top of the captured image. This should be an image of mixed transparency, anything opaque will be overlaid. There is also a limit on the amount of content which you can overlay, the overlaid image must have 25% Opaque coverage or less.

Multiple Copies of Components

It is possible to have multiple copies of both Capture components. In these cases one of them will be chosen at random to be used.