Masami Kuramoto

Innula Zenovka wrote: SL2 is going to have what Cloud Party, Blue Mars and Open Sim never had -- a functional and very liquid economy right from the word go. Since L$ accounts will be accessible from both grids, people are going to have far more willing to drop a few hundred L$ on their first and second visits than they were anywhere else, and having done that, they'll have more of a reason to return for more visits, and maybe bring some friends. Yes, but will they spend more in total? I don't think so. A considerable part of SL's current population has no payment info on file. The idea that SL 2 will turn freeloaders into paying customers or even attract large numbers of new customers with no prior SL experience is quite far fetched in my opinion. I think it is more likely that SL 2 will be designed to provide an experience similar to SL 1 but at much lower operational cost for LL, e.g. by launching simulators on demand from cold storage rather than having lots of empty regions burn CPU cycles all the time. However, no such cost reduction through SL 2 will materialize as long as the Lab has to keep SL 1 running anyway. Developing SL 2 makes no sense unless the goal is to get rid of SL 1.

Innula Zenovka wrote: I think that what may well happen, at least initially, is that creators will use SL 2 for creating experiences. If, for example, as may well be the case, sim crossings are easier to negotiate in SL 2 and it becomes possible more easily to script better and more versatile vehicles, I can see people staying on SL1 for most things but going to SL 2 to fly, sail or drive. That way, I wouldn't need to abandon my old inventory. I'd simply need to buy my new vehicle in SL 2 and some clothes to go with it, and split my time between SL 1 and SL 2 People have split their time in similar ways between SL and Blue Mars, SL and Cloud Party, or SL and OpenSim. I'm not aware of anyone canceling their SL account in favor of an alternative. If this is how people will use SL 2.0, it will be a disaster for LL because the company will end up operating and maintaining two expensive platforms competing for the same customer hour and dollar.

Linden Lab may soon find out how difficult it is to make people migrate to an empty world while the old and familiar one with all its content is still around -- even more so if the new world imposes stricter limits on mesh detail etc. to support mobile devices. People dislike re-learning, scaling down, giving things up and starting from scratch, even if the new platform comes with some improvements and much lower prices. Consider how hard it was to make people switch to Viewer 2. Consider how few gave up their SL inventories in exchange for abundant OpenSim land. It will be interesting to see what Linden Lab will do when they hit that wall with SL 2.0.

Gavin Hird wrote: For all practical purposes there are currently only one alternative platform that can readily take content developed for SL, namely opensim. Despite all the qualities of opensim (that I love), the hard fact is it is even less scalable than the current SL backend and server code. – Significantly less scalable as it currently is. That is simply not true. The scalability of Second Life is limited by the hardcoded maximum size of a single grid, i.e. 4096x4096 regions. OpenSim not only removed that limit but also added the capability to partition the world (and its hardware resources) into multiple interconnected grids, each with its own map layout and its own set of grid services (e.g. asset storage). The maximum size of this "hypergrid" is limited only by the number of available IPv4 addresses -- because there is currently no IPv6-capable viewer. OpenSim recently also removed the hardcoded region size limit of 256x256 square meters, enabling large open spaces to be hosted in a single simulator instance without any region crossing effects. The bottom line is that everyone can be not only a region owner, but a grid owner as well, and each grid can be configured as powerful or lightweight (in terms of CPU power per unit of virtual space) as needed. As an added bonus, if one such grid goes down, none of the others will be affected in any way. Users can teleport from one grid to another, send IMs across grid boundaries, take their inventory to any place they like, etc. OpenSim wins that scalability contest hands down.

Gavin Hird wrote: Ambitions are there and it is a good start, but the problem with Kitely marketplace is you have to upload your creations to their asset servers, meaning you also must be a Kitely paid user, to trade on the marketplace. This is problematic for anyone who have their assets well established elsewhere, even on grids they operate themselves. A true marketplace for Hypergrid should be able to broker content without moving this from their original asset store. There is a lot of FUD about OpenSim and content protection, as you can tell from Innula's posts, and the Kitely guys have figured out a way to exploit that to their benefit. The fact that you have to upload your merchandise to their asset server is sold as a security feature. In the end they will control all the commercial content on the hypergrid, because every item and every transaction has to pass through their servers, and they can change their terms of service at any time, just like Linden Lab did. You would think that content creators wouldn't fall for the same scam twice, but here we are. Kitely has managed to put itself into quite a unique position as the hypergrid's first and only vendor of commercial content, capable of delivering even to non-commercial grids without any local economy and currency. If they want to, they can even establish "Kitely Credits" as some kind of hypergrid Linden Dollar, a reserve currency for their marketplace -- and become the hypergrid's central bank. It's a bit like Philip Rosedale's "High Fidelity" business model, except that Kitely's platform is more mature.

Mony Lindman wrote: Hmmm that's a little too technical for my "artistic brain" lol but still very interesting. I wonder why there are only small , mostly private grids there and none of the bigger Open Sim worlds like Inworldz or Avination.. I supose its because of those legal issues you mentioned. But LL could bring some order into that chaos also .. Added in edit : Or even better, SL could use that technology or a similar and better protected one to connect with the bigger grids in Open Sim. The time when Linden Lab had the opportunity to become the hypergrid's central bank and central marketplace has passed. That role is now being played by Kitely. OpenSim is no longer compatible with Second Life anyway; the scripting languages are different, and Linden Lab's viewer would crash right after teleporting to an OpenSim varregion. With only a small development team left to maintain Second Life, Linden Lab is unlikely to catch up with OpenSim and fill the feature gap between them. And to be honest, even if LL still had the capacity to merge SL into the hypergrid, I doubt that the OpenSim community would welcome them. The hypergrid is run by artists/techies who left the old world behind for good reason. They are happy to build their own worlds from scratch without interference from Linden Lab.

Drongle McMahon wrote: With no map, there is no seam. With the blank map, there is a seam. So it's something happening with any UV map. The effect of the blank map can't have anything to do with tangent basis etc. Since there is no seam with no normal map, it's not to do with the basic rendering in ALM. So it must be happening in the code that applies the normal map. My blank is <128,128,255>. It might be interesting to try slightly different colours. As far as I know, a blank map would be <127,127,255>. Any other color will bend the normal relative to the current tangent basis.

Drongle McMahon wrote: Here are the two maps (reduced), with the differences (value x 5) in between. That kind of "waviness" in normal-mapped surfaces is not just due to differing tangent spaces. It's also a result of baking to the wrong kind of geometry. Your normal maps show that your bake target was a smooth-shaded cube, i.e. a low-poly sphere. That's why there are those large color gradients in areas that should be completely flat (and therefore use nothing but RGB color 127,127,255). If you had used a cube with sharp edges, your normal map would look more like this: This map comes straight out of Blender, without postprocessing in Handplane or similar tools. Color gradients occur only in areas where the high-poly cube had additional detail such as ridges and bevels. All the coplanar regions are uniform 127,127,255 and therefore maintain their flat appearance in-world when mapped to a basic 12-triangle cube with split edges:

If your lowpoly mesh has split edges, you have to split its UV layout along those edges as well, but that doesn't mean that you have to split the model if there are multiple UV islands. What the guy did in the video is exactly backwards. The most important thing to understand about baking in general is that the projection from highpoly to lowpoly always occurs along the interpolated vertex normal of the lowpoly mesh. Interpolation stops at split edges, which is why you can't get a seamless bake on a model with split edges unless you use a cage or a proxy that is entirely smooth. If your model has flat areas, you have to insert additional control loops to keep the projection flat as well, otherwise there will be distortions towards the edges of those flat areas. If you use xNormal for baking, you have to insert those control loops into both the lowpoly mesh and the cage (since the topology of the cage must match the topology of the lowpoly mesh). If you bake in Blender, only the proxy mesh needs those control loops, so you can save a few vertices in your lowpoly model.

Gavin Hird wrote: Why don't you just download opensim free of charge and start create your relevant, unique and exciting grid for only the cost of the power to your server(s)? Just about any creation is free too if you hypergrid your utopia, or even better join one of the big grids for free. You'll find plenty of 5 minute PhotoShop clothes and fast creations that can help you move faster. (To be fair to opensim creators, there are some very high quality work there too, but the bulk is from mediocre to craptastic.) Enjoy your new journey! ;-) The next time you get out of your basement, ask some professional 3D content creators what they think about the bulk of Second Life content. You'll be surprised -- and embarrassed. Here's an example: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=123296 Seriously, as a Second Life resident you are hardly in a position to judge the quality of anything. You are here, which means you have learned to endure (and enjoy!) the most craptastic looking game in history. What OpenSim has going for it is the non-scarcity of space and the absence of eyesore shopping malls. The total area of all (known) OpenSim grids already exceeds the size of Second Life, and if you exclude the shopping malls, OpenSim is probably three times larger than SL. What SL builders cram into one sim or less, OpenSim builders usually spread out over an area of 2x2, 3x3 or more sims because they can afford the space. The effect of this cannot be described, it has to be experienced. It's like moving from Tokyo to the Midwestern U.S. Unlike SL, where people get banned for flying over someone else's land or for not having payment info on file, OpenSim is much more relaxed and hospitable. I'm not sure why some people here suggest OpenSim as a place to implement communism. There is nothing communist or even remotely socialist about OpenSim. On the contrary, the hypergrid is the only major 3D virtual world where people can actually own their land (read: server space and data) rather than rent it from a central government. You think SL is about capitalism? Where is your property? Haven't you read the TOS? You guys don't even own the content that you upload!

Sharie Criss wrote: Are there more controlled ways of editing the mesh weights than weight painting? There is a less controlled, more automatic way of creating mesh weights which produces very good results for skirts. It has been in Blender since version 2.4x. See http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/49086-mesh-nda-lifted-15.html#post1026510 If you have to adjust the weights manually for some reason, there are weight gradient and blending tools available to smoothly interpolate bone influences across a mesh. They are documented here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Vertex_Groups/Weight_Paint_Tools

Use separate textures for coarse and fine detail. Here's an example: This plane uses the two 512x512 diffuse and normal maps you can see below. The diffuse map is stretched across the entire plane while the normal map is tiled 64x64 times. In the background the normal map fades away (so the tiling won't become too obvious), but in the foreground it distracts from the pixelation of the diffuse map.

LL's failure to provide an Avatar Development Kit has puzzled me for years. I mean, how hard can this be if even Cloud Party's super small dev team gets it right? Without third parties filling the gaps (deformer, liquid mesh, materials, Avastar, Chip Midnight's clothing templates etc.), LL would be lost. It's like there is no one left in-house who fully understands their software.

It is possible but computationally expensive. There are ways to use modern graphics cards to speed up physics-based cloth simulation, but these are not available to most SL residents. (LL collects such hardware info for statistical purposes.)

Toysoldier Thor wrote: Secondly, LL MUST execute the DMCA as instructed to them by what the state IP Owner (as this person has convinced DMCA they are) has instructed LL to do. LL is not the IP owner. They never were and with the new TOS they still are not. So if the DMCA tells LL to take remedial action... they still must comply. A takedown notice is only valid if the content to be taken down is infringing. A takedown notice that misrepresents properly licensed content as infringing is actually illegal. The license that creators grant to LL by agreeing to the new TOS is so broad, it's almost impossible to imagine situations where LL's use of uploaded content would be infringing. It's an irrevocable license that even allows sublicensing "for any purpose whatsoever". If LL decided to put full-perm copies of all your stuff into every resident's inventory, this license would allow them to do so. If someone copybotted all your stuff and sold it on the marketplace, LL could grant them a sublicense and make it legal. If you DMCA'ed them for doing so, they could even charge you with misrepresentation according to Section 512(f). That's how broad this license is. LL has to comply only in cases of unlicensed content, i.e. if the IP owner never agreed to the new TOS or never agreed to upload the content. But then again, these cases are rare, and for most SL merchants that ship has already sailed. I don't expect LL to abuse their new license, but it will give them some wiggle room where the regular DMCA takedown process would clearly punish the wrong party (as it did in C. vs. H.).