Linden Lab is building a NEW virtual world

[Medhue Simoni]

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irihapeti wrote:

a avatar that has less options in determing shape than we get in SL now. Less options so that fitted mesh clothes fit perfectly automagically every time for the greatest number of users. This being better for the users (the automagic fitting without tweak and hacks like alphas) and better for the creators who have a fixed range of shapes they have to design/create for

like SL but simpler

 

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Why? The problem with clothing was that LL never implemented morphs. Because of this, LL had to find a way to make things kind of work. If the new world uses FBX with morphs included, then a clothing creator would just make morphs to fit any shape possible. With morphs, every Avatar, even custom Avatars, would be able to be even more customizable than the SL avatar could ever be. Heck, you could make a morph that turns some1 into a frog. Better tech brings even more wonderous possibilities.

[Drongle McMahon]

"If the new world uses FBX with morphs included..."

Sadly, it seems it will use FBX, but that is not a condition for morphs, as Collada includes them too.

[irihapeti]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

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irihapeti wrote:

a avatar that has less options in determing shape than we get in SL now. Less options so that fitted mesh clothes fit perfectly automagically every time for the greatest number of users. This being better for the users (the automagic fitting without tweak and hacks like alphas) and better for the creators who have a fixed range of shapes they have to design/create for

like SL but simpler

---

Why? The problem with clothing was that LL never implemented morphs. Because of this, LL had to find a way to make things kind of work. If the new world uses FBX with morphs included, then a clothing creator would just make morphs to fit any shape possible. With morphs, every Avatar, even custom Avatars, would be able to be even more customizable than the SL avatar could ever be. Heck, you could make a morph that turns some1 into a frog. Better tech brings even more wonderous possibilities.

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i just answer a very similar question over the street

i put the question asked first. then my answer

+

question:

"It's actually super easy to make rigged mesh attachments automatically fit to a customizeable avatar mesh. Game developers have been doing it for like a decade now.

There is absolutely no reason to make the avatars in a new SL less customizeable. None."

+

answer:

is two parts to this

 

the first is the problem of how to get a topological surface to conform to another topological surface in real time without bleed for all surfaces. If this was easy to do then Qarl (and others before him who have considered this problem) would have solved it already

 

the second is what you mention. That games makers have fitted mesh for years to custom rigs. Which is true. Is not the same problem tho. the second is bounded. The first is not

 

to solve the first problem you have to bound it. So that all topological surfaces within the bounds conform in real time without bleed. Which is how is solved for the second part by the game makers

 

you have to determine what those bounds are. Is not all surfaces. Is no known solution for all surfaces. If this was solved for all surfaces then it will also proof that P is in NP or proof that is not. Either way will be the most significant discovery in the field of computer science ever. And the ramifications of it will be huge. Like for example: every encryption system ever invented will be broken immediately

 

+

 

it maybe that the bounds determined for the betterworld are less than those available than in SL now. It maybe more. There will be bounds tho. And I think that will be less optionally within the bounds

 

this dont negate what you suggesting/wanting. Custom rigs. I think we will get them. People will be able to make own avatars of all kinds custom rigged. and create outfits for those custom rigs. In far more ways than is possible now. But there will be bounds to those also

 

better (meaning more choice) but simpler (meaning what those choices can optionally do within their own bounds)

 

+

 

 

about bounded

 

the SL avatar is bounded. What the creators can make in SL at this time is unbounded. Bounded + unbounded = unbounded. Bounded + bounded = bounded

 

P vs NP: P vs NP Problem | Clay Mathematics Institute

 

formal description here: http://www.claymath.org/sites/default/files/pvsnp.pdf

[Gaia Clary]

I am unsure if i should be happy or sad about the possible use of FBX over Collada. Actually Blender has decided to put a lot of work into FBX as well (they now have a payed developer who is actively developing the FBX exporter) while the Blender Collada exporter has been set to sleep for a while and does not get any more improvements at the moment.

But what is your reason why you think it is a bad thing (besides that it is a proprietary format) ?

 

[Shayne Hesten]

Reply to Wanda with apologies for the delay since I was not getting email notifications.

I feel you may have misunderstood and my profile says I do not keep an inworld store anymore, it does not say I am not inworld.  In fact, I am inworld above 8 hours a day, every day, with no RL holidays, and always available for my customers

Yes, keeping SL profitable will keep the present SL alive.  Yes, that is profitable for LL since this is not a free game/virtual world/space on the internet.  It has to be paid for, it has to continue to make a profit like all business ventures, it is not a charitable venture.

By this point, there are many very sensible discussions available for you to read about the future of SL and also the development of the new platform.  And there are discussions where Lindens have taken part. 

In the first reply to your post by Gaia Clary there is a wealth of very intelligent and highly relevant points.  Gaia has written excellent scenarios and you can see that panic and worry will see the end, whereas a continuation of love and support for SL will carry it forward for years. 

 

[rhian Milena]

Hello,  I am looking forward to the new grid.   I will say I am a TPV user.  After watching all the vidoes, reading the blogs.   I  do have a better understanding . I think one of my main concern is probably silly for right now,  is my legacy name.  Will I be able to keep my name?   Seriously  i would hate to start a new LL grid with the last name of Resident. I always felt it was a mistake of LL to remove the last name, it was the loss of one indivuality.  Also how would this effect my virtual life in Second Life.  I still want to be an member of it as well. 

A few of my favorite features of being in TPV.  They are more open, they look for suggestion,  they include us.  Nothing is such a secret.  They have a wonderful inworld support group.   Added to their toolbar is the AO.  That is easy to to use and  drop your animations in.  I certainly love it,  I love being able to switch to different AO's without having to to look in my inventory to  detach and wear.  Its is nice not to clutter up my screen with AO's 

[Qie Niangao]

Oh, speaking of Mesh in the new world, whatever import format(s) they choose to support, please let them not castrate their internal asset representation as they did in SL1, such that a rezzed instance is immutably tied to a single model. I mean, that's fine for building backdrops and (most) game characters, but for an interactive virtual world, it was a huge step backwards from every other object type in SL.

I don't really understand how they made that mistake. Does LL have nobody on staff who remembers the principles behind the original data model? It's as if the folks working on Mesh had simply no clue about how SL is used, and what a disaster it is that we have to rez a whole new object in order to replace one Mesh with another. (This is nothing to do with "animating" Mesh -- that's a whole other set of requirements. I'm talking about changes that might occur once an hour -- or once a fortnight.)

[Pamela Galli]

And on top of that, no ability in the official viewer to copy parameters. Which means that it is completely unusable, as far as I am concerned.

[Innula Zenovka]

I can't offhand remember where, but Ebbe has certainly said in one of the threads here that we'll keep our names and friends lists in the new SL.   

As to the TPVs and their features, it's way too early to say what's going in them.   We may not have a viewer at all -- as I recall, Cloud Party didn't need one.   Animations and scripting are going to be done differently, too, so we may well not need AOs in their present form (either as attachments or inventory items) at all.

[Gavin Hird]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

Oh, speaking of Mesh in the new world, whatever import format(s) they choose to support,

please

let them not castrate their internal asset representation as they did in SL1, such that a rezzed instance is immutably tied to a single model. I mean, that's fine for building backdrops and (most) game characters, but for an interactive virtual world, it was a

huge

step backwards from every other object type in SL.

I don't really understand how they made that mistake. Does LL have nobody on staff who remembers the principles behind the original data model? It's as if the folks working on Mesh had simply no clue about how SL is used, and what a disaster it is that we have to rez a whole new object in order to replace one Mesh with another. (This is nothing to do with "animating" Mesh -- that's a whole other set of requirements. I'm talking about changes that might occur once an hour -- or once a fortnight.)

---

I suspect this has more to do with the physics engine than anything else. For the standard prims the engine basically have enough info about them to recalculate the collision model based on the parameters. For a mesh it does not have a clue what comes its way when you make a change (except a trivial resize.) 

[Drongle McMahon]

"But what is your reason why you think it is a bad thing..."

Well, no doubt partly because I am biased by the amount of effort I put into understanding collada, but also...

Mainly because, as far as I can see, there is no publicly available definition of the format, and it can therefore be varied at will by Autodesk without telling anyone.So there is no authoritative resource to tell us what to expect in the way LL interprets it. I'm afraid  all that means Blender users like you and me may be at a severe disadvantage compared to those who can afford the Autodesk software. I guess that may be the intention, but I hope not. Rather, it appears that LL will use an established engine, and the import formats are then fixed by that choice. Let's hope LL will at least come out with a precise definition of their interpretation of the format and exactly what they will and will not read from it (like they never did for collada).

The Blender guys are clearly doing a good job of reverse-engineering the specification, but it's beyond their control to know whether the result is going to be reliable (is there a risk that Autodesk will stop them anyway?). I guess we don't know whether the accepted input will be ascii or binary. If it's only binary, that makes it inaccessible for trying to work out problems (like the material naming issues, or the effect of vertex/triangle ordering on physics weights, for example). Even the ascii version seems to be a lot harder to read and manipulate than collada, and you can't (yet) re-import ascii into Blender to check things out.

 

[Drongle McMahon]

Let me explainn to those who might not know that there was an early setup where a rezzed mesh object could be changed by dropping in a different mmesh asset, just as you can change the geometry of a sculpty by dropping in a different sculpt map. That capability was removed by making the object and the mesh data inseparable.

Sculpt map switching was used to animate sculpties, and I think the resulting resource consumption was considered unacceptable. As well as using a large amount of download and/or cache resource, this could also lead to unsatisfactory stuttering and lag because of dowload and/or disc access for caching. With sculpties, it also meant recalculating the mesh for each frame (which would not be needeed for mesh). I am pretty sure it was to prevent this use that the facility to do this with mesh was removed. Why a throttling alternative, which might have left Qie's uses possible, was rejected, I don't know.

On the other hand, I can't immediately think what hourly or fortnightly changes would be so much better met by an assignable mesh asset than rezzing a new instance. Can you enlighten me with some examples?

[Gavin Hird]

But again, sculpted items do not impact the physics engine, so if you tried to use the meshes as animated meshes like some do with animated sculpts, in addition to the performace impact you stated, I guess the physics engine would struggle a lot in addition. 

[Drongle McMahon]

Yes. you are right. The sculpty's physics shape doesn't change, while the mesh's does (generally). So the rationale is even stronger for mesh than for sculpties. I suppose you could restrict swapping to meshes with "None" physics to get around that.

[Gaia Clary]

well, i am biased as well Hmmm, although this topic is not directly related to this thread... maybe still good to post here:

I have been asking Blender development months ago about why they decided to switch to FBX. Here are some of their reasons against Collada (mostly collected from various talks in chat):

 

1. Autodesk does not actively support Collada, so even the Autodesk Collada exporter does not give clean results.
2. Collada is a super complex format and each 3D tool seems to have different ideas about how it should be interpreted.
3. Collada can be and IS extended by tool specific additions which makes creating a generic Importer almost impossible
4. OpenCollada development seems to be rather slow, so bug fixes do not get applied quickly enough.
5. There is only a small number of Collada users.

And here is why the Blender developers have decided to put effort into FBX:

 

1. Users (from Unity?) have requested to support FBX.
2. FBX matches Blender's internal data better
3. Some of Blender's core developers want to do it.
4. There is some budget to develop the FBX module.

Just to make this clear: This are NOT my arguments! That is what i was told from Blender developers.

I do not know how LL looks at this and i do not know if all of this is driven by rationale or by interest ... However honestly i do not care too much about where this will end. We will do our part as good as we can, and eat whatwever will be put on the table... :matte-motes-evil-invert: )

[Medhue Simoni]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

"

If

the new world uses FBX with morphs included..."

Sadly, it seems it will use FBX, but that is not a condition for morphs, as Collada includes them too.

---

Yeah, but the reason I want FBX, is because Unity3D uses FBX. You can also import DAE, but I'm not sure all the funtions are unlocked. It would be nice just to create in 1 format and use it across multiple platforms. Hopefully, the Blender team will work on the FBX importing, as I just had to animate a whole set of birds inside of Unity3D, because I could not import them into Blender. What a pain in the butt.

[Gaia Clary]

Let's say it like this: Whatever format LL's new world will supports, as long as it is necessary and as long as it can be legally done, we will step in to get our tools to work. In which way ever....

Remind that this was my only question that i asked Ebbe:

"What data format will the new world support ?"

And we got his answer. So all is well for me for now :matte-motes-whistle:

[Qie Niangao]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

On the other hand, I can't immediately think what hourly or fortnightly changes would be so much better met by an assignable mesh asset than rezzing a new instance. Can you enlighten me with some examples?

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The uses I've most often heard are about the ability to offer small changes in a single mesh's geometry. I guess an example would be a car that has a bunch of alternate options for wheels, where one would dearly like to switch those wheel geometries without having to either replace the car altogether or (perhaps worse?) script a solution that surgically changes the linkset by removing one mesh wheel object and replacing it with another.

The specific problem I face is more stark, and for my application, it's impractical for me to use Mesh at all, given the SL1 implementation that conflates instance and model. I have a network of scripted objects scattered around the grid with instance UUIDs that are static, but I change the appearance of those objects occasionally, when I'm feeling creative. If their UUIDs change, I have to revise scripts in another whole bunch of objects scattered around the grid. It's possible to reduce that impact by using another level of abstraction -- an object "registry" that keeps track of UUIDs, so all comms must first clear through the registry, sort of like DNS (where that registry can be in-world or external). But that's an extra layer of both system delay and in-world processing, to say nothing of the added script memory to support that extra complexity.

Now, I don't really care in SL1 because I still have prims and sculpts that I can modify to my heart's content while retaining their instance identity, so I can just ignore mesh altogether. But if a new world were to support only a similarly neutered representation of Mesh and no other object type, I'd have to abandon changing such objects.

[Gavin Hird]

I suppose if you could create custom morph targets on your mesh, it would go a long way to accomodate some of the use cases you describe.

Now to replace them with a new topo but keeping the same UUID, a new collision model would have to be calculated for the one you replaced the original with. You would aslo have to have mesh versioning in the database, as many versions would point back to the same parent UUID.  

[Drongle McMahon]

Yes. I can see the usefulness of both those, expecially the UUID one.

[Drongle McMahon]

"here is why the Blender developers have decided to put effort into FBX:"

Quite understandable and reasonable, but given the lack of definitive specification, that way they surely put theselves at the mercy of Autodesk if and when they are seen as significant competition. I do hope they have a good understanding with Autodesk about that. Meanwhile, we could do with some tools to make the (esp binary) fbx data human-readable.

[Coby Foden]

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rhian Milena wrote:

I think one of my main concern is probably silly for right now,  is my legacy name.  Will I be able to keep my name?

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Yes, your name will be the same both in the present world and in the new world. That has been said by Ebbe Linden; the link for the post where he said this is below:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Linden-Lab-is-building-a-NEW-virtual-world/m-p/2758334#M185698

3 - Will at least the L$ currency remain the same and will available balances be usable in both worlds?

• Yes

4 - Will the 2 worlds be connected in any way and will an avatar be able to move from one to another with the same name and profile and groups and friends? And .. some of its inventory..

• Identity and friends will be preserved. Inventory depends on above decisions under #1 but we clearly want as much of existing work to be possible to leverage as long as it will not impact how good the new platform can be.

[End of quote]

 

[Thomas Galbreus]

Ebbe Linden wrote:

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Racheal Rexen wrote:

Hello Ebbe, thanks for taking the time to answer ours questions, My question is if the Adult Community will have a place in the new Virtual world? 

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We have no plans to disallow anything that's going on in SL and is legal. We're proud of the freedom we offer.

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1. It is not legal in all countries. As a German you have one foot in prison if you engage your avatar in any sexual activity or expose any other sexual content to SL users, because SL has no age verification that would confirm with the German law whatsoever.

 

2. We all know the bad reputation of SL is one of the big reasons it stopped to grow - many think SL is one big brothel and don't want to be associated with it for that reason, so either stay away from SL or don't dare to talk to anyone in RL about being in SL.

 

If one of the new virtual worlds will not allow ponographic content in it's TOS it will definitely be my first choice.

[kiramanell]

Whilst I make no use of SL's Adult stuff myself (it's just pixels, for crying out-loud), nonetheless, like it or not, Adult content makes up a significant portion of SL business. Like porn sites on the Internet.

Also, please, don't turn SL into another censored, moralizing Disney feature. We Europeans like to think for ourselves. if you don't want to be confronted with Adult content, set your MP filters accordingly, and don't visit Adult sims.

[Thomas Galbreus]

Of course it is a significant part of the current business, but it is also a big deterrend for many which limited the growth - the media reports about virtual prostitution etc. had a long lasting effect to this day. So I think it would be a wise decision to prohibit any "adult" content in the new world right from the start. Who thinks it is exciting to get naughty with pixels will still have SL1 or perhaps Open Sim grids that offer it.

I do set my filters and avoid that content as as effectively as possible, that was not my point. The point was it gave SL such a bad reputation that usually eybrows go up as soon as you tell someone about using it - and I am done with trying to explain there are other things in SL, but the first thing someone sees in a forum or at marketplace is content about enslaving and abusing women.