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Crystal Fortress Skybox Review


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Because of this thread, I got the crystal place. I normally don't get the Premium gifts, because I never see one that's of interest to me. I have 3 observations about it:-

1. The dragon takes 2 clicks to rez and stay rezzed. It rezzes on the first click and then poofs in about half a second. Clicking it before it poofs, causes it to stay rezzed. So 2 quick clicks are needed - for me, anyway.

2. The crystals don't look like crystals, because they don't have sharp edges.

3. The teleporter is nice. The script can be removed and placed in any object if the pseudo-crystal shape isn't desired. For me, that's necessary because the crystaline teleport object tends to disappear (not transparent) after being used. My graphics are set to midway between low and mid, and I have to up the graphics setting to get it to show again.

If the crystals looked like crystals, I'd possibly use it, but I'm unlikely to use it as it is. I might make use of the teleporter though.

Edited by Phil Deakins
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22 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

and they are free.  It's a little hard to keep a straight face and complain about something you got for nothing.

They are not free. They are a Premium perk. LL plugs the Premium gifts as being a part of the Premium membership. Premium membership costs money, so whatever comes with it is paid for.

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You know, I am loving my 800-pound, er 800-prim tree. I can cut it down a tad by smushing the top if I need like 250 extra prims, but for now I'll just leave it until the new rental fills up. It really is a nice build. It has the "rockies" problem which I HATE which some house makers just refuse to understand (something about the mesh or its physics or SOMETHING makes the avatar rock up and down as he walks across the floor, damaging immersion and camera angles). But it's a spacious enough build that you aren't too bothered by it.

As for this crystal skybox, I have a crystal cabin out of a gatcha that people love to rent, but then the skybox I put with it which was from another maker and also called crystal something was not liked. I tried another one -- still didn't like. Had even a third one, very high prim and pretty but really, I couldn't justify prims like that in a rental, who will pay for them?

So I was thinking great, this new Linden crystal skybox may work. I did rent out their treehouse, people liked it although I personally felt it wasn't super on the issues of avatar movement around it.

My own feeling about it is that it is too "cartoony". Certain things in SL work as "cartoony" or drawn or painted, if the rest of the sim is that way. Otherwise, not. I feel like the Lindens are to us as I was with my children when I bought them Pokemon cards by habit when they had already started to outgrow them. We're not in a game. Most of us are not playing games within a game (that whole Linden Realms thing really turns me off, everything about it).

So they should make nice, normal stuff. And BTW, unless they've given up their open source/copyleftist roots, all Linden and Mole content should be on all perms. There's always this prudish fear that people will sell Linden content. But when it's on all perms and everywhere, that doesn't happen so much and if it does, so what? It's not like anyone can sell a Linden lamp from the library for more than a dollar. I just paid 5L for Alberto Linden's Corbusier couch that isn't in the Library but which is a staple at my motel. And I was happy to pay 5L (I lost it in a big inventory loss), it's worth it. 

The thing about the crystal box that is unfortunate is that I can't change it over to another person. It's not just that it's no-transfer, it's that I can't set the daemon to work for another, like you can on other things in SL (i.e. options for OWNER, GROUP, EVERYONE, LIST). If that's the case with the teleporter, I'll have to junk it. That leaves the koi pond which was ok but gets a little busy after awhile.

As for this new fabulous system to put up skyboxes -- huh? Other makers have had this system. And since time immemorial, we have learned to first sit on a board ourselves, then change the numbers to make the board shoot up into the sky with our avatars on it. That's what I still do. Or rather, first I scout out the sky by typing 4096 into the world map and then falling through the air, to find a good level not already taken as the skies can be very crowded or have eyesores just like the ground. Then I type "30" to get myself down to the ground after memorizing the location on the map, then I shoot the rez-faux up into the sky and then I follow it by typing that level into the map, or sitting on the rez box if that works.

 

 

 

 

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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38 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

SOMETHING makes the avatar rock up and down as he walks across the floor, damaging immersion and camera angles)

I have never seen this issue but you might try rezzing a prim on top and see if that works -- in case you haven't. Lots of times that is a "fix".  And the reason that the teleporter was impressive (to me and some other folks) is that there was no teleport sensation or fluttering or anything. You were just THERE.   

It was a nice build and the dragon is very cute. I am not premium and I would never use it anyway, but I like to see what others have made. But "too primmy" is too primmy. It seems like it should be about half that. Of course that is nothing compared to your 800 build :D.

 

 

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On 6/23/2018 at 2:10 PM, Rolig Loon said:

I tinker all the time, so I can get frustrated with no-mod things too.  I just know plenty of people for whom that's no issue.  They never mod anything.  They either don't care to, or don't know how. I have a friend who got the treehouse and lived in it for almost a year -- just replaced it this spring.  She seemed happy with it "as is".

I wouldn't upgrade to Premium just for the gifts -- actually I haven't been tempted to upgrade at all -- but some of them are fun things ... and they are free.  It's a little hard to keep a straight face and complain about something you got for nothing.

I'm getting so I take off a point on a review just for a product having no-mod. It really is pointless. It's not like putting it on "no-mod" deters copybotting. I think that's a psychological belief of some creators, because I think they care more about being ripped off than having a newb destroy their "creative vision".

It's too bad this crystal box isn't on mod. Because the first thing I'd do is change its colours now and then. Maybe in a future pack the Lindens will have strobe lights that do it. Actually I have various fairly lights that will do this, too. 

I will say that the "owner only entry" is actually a very brilliant idea. I don't think I've ever seen that before.One of the problems with rezzing a skybox if you haven't figured the numbers exactly in advance is that it can rez in the sky with you outside it, and with the mesh bouncing annoyance, it can be hard to rez a chair inside it to sit into it. So that little plug on the button to catapault you in is a great idea. It's also good if you put up a skybox but then a customer blocks the teleport or something. 

The other thing I will say is the daemon is very realistic. He hovers near you and looks at you with these big blue eyes. I kept thinking he might be like an AI or do something but I guess other than sparkle and "poof" he doesn't do anything. You can sort of ride him but I don't think he likes that. Again, in the future the Lindens may have this little guy get smarter.

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27 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

I have never seen this issue but you might try rezzing a prim on top and see if that works -- in case you haven't. Lots of times that is a "fix".  And the reason that the teleporter was impressive (to me and some other folks) is that there was no teleport sensation or fluttering or anything. You were just THERE.   

It was a nice build and the dragon is very cute. I am not premium and I would never use it anyway, but I like to see what others have made. But "too primmy" is too primmy. It seems like it should be about half that. Of course that is nothing compared to your 800 build :D.

 

 

161 prims is  lot for a skybox these days. Most skyboxes of that size, if they are mesh, are more like 40-60-80 at the most.

I will try the prim gambit, good idea.

UPDATE: Rezzing  a prim floor over the mesh doesn't do a thing to change the rocking, sadly.

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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4 hours ago, Holger Gilruth said:

i have no idea how you get this, i get everytime a click just a valentines gift on ALL Regions listed in Destination guide

Destination Guide - scroll down to Premium Gifts on the left side and click it.  Click on any of the first 4 destinations shown and Teleport there.  Spin around until you see the kiosk that says 'Get Premium Gift Here'

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5 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

I wouldn't have known either, but one of my premium accounts got an email with a link etc. The other premium account didn't get an email, but the reason is probably at my end.

Interesting.    I don't recall ever get emails about the premium gifts, but I do get other emails from LL.  

You can also get to the gifts from your Dashboard -- Something like Account / Premium Membership

Edited by LittleMe Jewell
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On 6/23/2018 at 1:21 PM, Callum Meriman said:

If you select just the internal part and not the outsides it gets worse:

194f9f575cc6029d4d89489d8b86d24b.png.c568ab0739e030b05a36e97ef07e6f9c.png

This decomposes to a single GLOD triangle on the roof.

With the three lowest LODS zeroed out, this is exactly the sort of content that *will* break when the Lab redo the LI calculations. This item will be without doubt be penalised.

So, not just making things mod, the Lab should lead by example here and not using this hack to artifically lower the LI cost. Proper LODS should be made. In this case with the object diameter so large, they could have been cubes. But not GLOD decomposition to 1 triangle by utilising the zeroed-out-lod hack.

As far as the textures, for the core part, there are two seperate 1024 textures on the floor, one 512 texture on the outside top/bottom and one 1024 texture for the columns.

 

I actually noticed this when I was writing my review but didn't mention it (I didn't did I?) because by the time my viewer switched to medium I was far enough away that I didn't think it was necessary to show the skybox.

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6 hours ago, Hintswen Guardian said:

I actually noticed this when I was writing my review but didn't mention it (I didn't did I?) because by the time my viewer switched to medium I was far enough away that I didn't think it was necessary to show the skybox.

I mentioned it in passing earlier in this thread and wrote a bit about it in another discussion but maybe I should add a bit more here too:

The crystal skybox is made from a single huge mesh, big enough it shouldn't normally switch to medium LoD at all and certainly not to low or lowest. This solves all LoD issues of course but the downside is that it adds quite a bit of lag because it forces the viewer to process every little detail even for items barely within draw distance range. For all practical purposes it means you have Lod Factor 10 hardcoded into the item (except - fortunately - it only affects that particular item and not the rest of the scene).

It's not really a problem for a single object, at least not a fairly moderately high poly enclosed box like this, so nobody should be scared of using the crystal skybox because of the lag. But the Moles do it consistently and so do a few other builders I've seen. You don't have to add many such items to a complex scene before the performance becomes less than ideal. (This is rather ironic since the Moles at least build this way because they believe it benefits users who are struggling with low fps. Essentially, they are trying to fight lag with lag.)

The only way to make genuinely low lag efficient mesh for Second Life is the same as for Unity, UE4 and just about all other virtual reality engines: choose the most effective LoD swap distances and then use lossless or near-lossless simplification to create appropriate LoD models. This is an art in itself and I dare say (although some people here will want to kill me for it) that it's the people who know how to do that well who are the true masters of Second Life mesh.

At the moment the Moles don't know how to do it but that's only because it never occured to them. I do hope and believe the discussions about the crystal skybox have been a wakeup call for them and that from now on we will see better and better optimized mesh from them as they learn and become familiar with the various techniques.

Edited by ChinRey
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25 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

This is an art in itself and I dare say (although some people here will want to kill me for it) that it's the people who know how to do that well who are the true masters of Second Life mesh.

Sooooo --- we take great pains (most of the time) not to wag fingers at -- let's call it -- inappropriate for SL mesh; that pretty much covers the bases.  But I would be very interested to know who you think these folks are.  I think since this is praise, it would be OK to name names :D.  

I am not sure I will completely agree as that is just PART of the SL mesh puzzle, but I always like to learn.   

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47 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

I think since this is praise, it would be OK to name names :D. 

But I can't possibly make a complete list so it wouldn't be fair to those I forgot in a hurry or those I've never even heard of.

Besides, there are level of skills of course; exactly how good do you have to be to call yourself a master? Do you have to be perfect? If so, nobody is qualified.

I think it's important that all builders, and actually everybody in SL, should realize that the LoD system is our friend. For all its flaws, it's not something we should fight against or try to override, it's something we need to work with if we want the most positive SL experience possible.

Any content creator who understands this, try the best they can and keep improving, has nothing to be ashamed of.

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The other thing I didn't bother mentioning in my original post (I figured someone would have seen it and fixed it by now) is the post about the skybox says this:

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Premium Members can stop by one of the Premium Gift kiosks to claim their gifts. If you’re not yet Premium, take advantage of this 50% off sale to upgrade and grab your tree house right now.

 

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While not helpful for the skybox the grid gods occasionally listen - the new weekly grab hunt's gift staff is modable - I linked mine to a magic staff root prim and now I can grief around by spamming stuff like butterflies on people :D

Thanks for listening Lindens and Moles.

Edited by Fionalein
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