The Lab ending work on mobile viewers

[subgay]

What's wrong with Second Life? 🙃

[Adamburp Adamczyk]

I've just asked at the Community group to have a Linden comment on this thread, they've said will look at it and pass the request on.

[Rowan Amore]

Maybe a shout out to @Keira Linden?  She posted in the original thread in the Mobile section.

[Grumpity Linden]

Hiya!

It's like we said in the message: We've decided to pause development on this branch, but we are working on a new direction for mobile, and think it will be exciting news.  This Linden, for one, is really looking forward to being able to talk about it. 

[Tonk Tomcat]

I so hope strict polygon limits and texture usage are involved in those new directions. Otherwise it will take some more decades till mobiles will be able to render the lovely 500k highpoly, 1 gigabyte texture memory shoes.

[Coffee Pancake]

7 hours ago, Grumpity Linden said:

Hiya!

It's like we said in the message: We've decided to pause development on this branch, but we are working on a new direction for mobile, and think it will be exciting news.  This Linden, for one, is really looking forward to being able to talk about it. 

This is the confusion.

That branch logged in to special regions (IMO a good solution to ghost avatars in world) and then allowed sending IMs. That was it. There isn't much of a new direction from there unless logging in and messaging people is now off the table.

[subgay]

11 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

I so hope strict polygon limits and texture usage are involved in those new directions. Otherwise it will take some more decades till mobiles will be able to render the lovely 500k highpoly, 1 gigabyte texture memory shoes.

Excuse my ignorance but I guess that second life it's more a physical world than a virtual one, is that the problem? Other platforms like avakin have a totally operational 3D world since long ago in android

[Tonk Tomcat]

12 minutes ago, subgay said:

Excuse my ignorance but I guess that second life it's more a physical world than a virtual one, is that the problem? Other platforms like avakin have a totally operational 3D world since long ago in android

Correct me if i'm wrong, but as far as i see you can not create and upload your own meshes into avakin. That's the problem in second life, because most of the "creators" have no clue about how to do game ready meshes.

[Coffee Pancake]

30 minutes ago, subgay said:

Excuse my ignorance but I guess that second life it's more a physical world than a virtual one, is that the problem? Other platforms like avakin have a totally operational 3D world since long ago in android

SL's problem is fundamentally an architectural one.

Games (and most everything  you will ever play that uses 3D graphics) provide all the information needed with the rendering engine, all organized and ready to be loaded and put on screen just as quickly and efficiently as possible. All the content you might ever encounter is set in stone.

SL isn't like that. Every asset is a trail of breadcrumbs that explodes into lists of objects and textures, each must be downloaded on demand and decoded ready to display on screen. No objects are fixed so prebaking anything is impossible. Any object or texture can be changed from one frame to the next. This gives us a very powerful creative platform, but comes at a cost.

They don't make them like SL. On purpose.

16 minutes ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

Correct me if i'm wrong, but as far as i see you can not create and upload your own meshes into avakin. That's the problem in second life, because most of the "creators" have no clue about how to do game ready meshes.

This is a misconception. It's not "bad content" or "lazy creators", it's the systems that have to deliver that content to the GPU.

SL meshes can be on the higher poly count end of things, but this alone isn't the problem. Any modern GPU will blast right though SL models and spend most of it's time sitting around waiting to be told what to do next - This is why buying a better GPU only brings small performance improvements typically due to better IPC efficiency or boost clock speeds.

A particularly painful example is rigged mesh content consisting of multiple separate meshes (like bodies with alpha cutouts). A list of animations acting on the avatar must be resolved and then applied to each individual rigged mesh by the CPU. This scales linearly, so 10 meshes takes 10 times longer than 1 mesh, and each mesh attachment can be made of many individually rigged parts. Again, this isn't a creator problem, in order to provide the alpha cut out functionality  they have to use many meshes.

The end result is that SL slows to a crawl in a crowd. The actual rendering part is only a tiny fraction of the entire frame loop.

SL creators are for the most part very conscious of the content they create.

What doesn't help is the poor mesh uploader's tendency to create garbage looking low detail models, especially when pushed hard to achieve a lower Li score (Li is a billing and land accounting measure, not an indicator of complexity). This results in users cranking up their detail settings to compensate.

 

If you put SL content in a game engine it would fly. But we wouldn't be able to do most of the things that define SL (without incurring a much larger performance cost) ... and we would have Sansar or Blue Mars, and everyone _really_ loved those.

Edited October 29, 2021 by Coffee Pancake

[Tonk Tomcat]

11 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

SL creators are for the most part very conscious of the content they create.

And that is infact the worst part about that. Even if you would have a better technology for delivering the content, there is not a single game, even the most recent ones, with polycounts that high than in sl. The creators are not lazy, they are ignorant and/or greedy, because they skip the part of retopo the high polygon meshes to release new content fast and make money. If we would have a polygon limit that applies to the needs of this old sl architecture, we could easily have a smooth running world. But as long as there are shoes or single shirts with 1gb of textures (what is like a whole complete small game you can get on steam) and 500k polygon meshes, that's even more than a recent full game character, of course nothing will run smooth, even when they improve the tech behind everything.

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

And that is infact the worst part about that. Even if you would have a better technology for delivering the content, there is not a single game, even the most recent ones, with polycounts that high than in sl. The creators are not lazy, they are ignorant and/or greedy, because they skip the part of retopo the high polygon meshes to release new content fast and make money. If we would have a polygon limit that applies to the needs of this old sl architecture, we could easily have a smooth running world. But as long as there are shoes or single shirts with 1gb of textures (what is like a whole complete small game you can get on steam) and 500k polygon meshes, that's even more than a recent full game character, of course nothing will run smooth, even when they improve the tech behind everything.

Or you could just be wrong.

A poly limit would not make SL faster. The vast majority of items would be below that limit, and those that weren't would circumvent it by using a second mesh .. which would be worse.

Please show a single SL item with 1GB of textures.

[Tonk Tomcat]

No i'm not wrong, because, why do you think in every single computer game they try to keep the polycount as low as possible? And that counts even more for multiplayer games. Go to any sl event and check out the ppl there, and the majority of worn mesh stuff will be def. above any limit that you'd have for any game content. I already saw shoes with 500mb of textures and worn single attachements with more than 1.5 million polys. Of couse the content is causing issues in sl. Polycount and texture usage is not the only issue, but it also counts a lot to that. Most content "creators" in sl just don't want to spend the needed time to create game content because they want to rush out things to make money. And of course the poly limit will help. You just try to find arguments when you say ppl will try to bypass those limits, but then LL just have to make sure that thats not possible. As long as you don't set any limits, ppl will do what they want, same as rl. No matter if that's bad for everybody else.

[Chris Corvinus]

On 10/28/2021 at 6:15 PM, Grumpity Linden said:

Hiya!

It's like we said in the message: We've decided to pause development on this branch, but we are working on a new direction for mobile, and think it will be exciting news.  This Linden, for one, is really looking forward to being able to talk about it. 

Unless it's a full on 3D mobile viewer (which lumiya achieved) it's gonna be a severe miss. That's the only direction for mobile.

[Flea Yatsenko]

Good, the original client missed the mark. The mobile client needs to be something that can engage the mobile audience and get them to become a part of the SL economy. It was just going to be a way for existing users of SL to be able to chat on their phones.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

13 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

t was just going to be a way for existing users of SL to be able to chat on their phones.

Good,  that's really only most of us need it for, SL 3D on mobile people are going to learn,  it's like using a laptop for SL,  it will die a death quicker than normal.

[subgay]

2 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Good, the original client missed the mark. The mobile client needs to be something that can engage the mobile audience and get them to become a part of the SL economy. It was just going to be a way for existing users of SL to be able to chat on their phones.

They better hurry because the mobile audience is going to join platforms like Facebook MEta and the new metaverses

The new mobile audience is unaware of second life because the media considers Second Life something of the past, so it is up to them to be up to date with the new technologies and not been left behind when also Second Life users discover new virtual realities

Let me add second Life Mobile not only applies to new audiences but to ex users of second Life now surfing the net with smartphones exclusively

some experts were saying yesterday on televisión that the real future of the virtual reality is the ability to visit other metaverses with the same user from one platform, that is visiting Other virtual realities with your second Life avatar for example

Edited November 1, 2021 by subgay
Good

[Arielle Popstar]

7 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Good,  that's really only most of us need it for, SL 3D on mobile people are going to learn,  it's like using a laptop for SL,  it will die a death quicker than normal.

Except that a half million people who have Lumiya know that is not correct and that even now, each successive generation of phone it gets increasingly better at rendering the scene except for those parts LL broke with their network protocol changes. LL could simply have taken a $100,000 and contracted an experienced android developer to have come up with something similar, rolling in any of the newest features like BoM.  Had they done so we would have had a 3d graphic capable mobile viewer 2 years ago instead of waffling about and getting nowhere and dwindling down to promises of an "exciting" announcement.....soon. We should know from past experience how slow that will actually be. 

 

[Mollymews]

Grumpity Linden said that they Linden are going in a new direction for mobile, which Grumpity said they were quite excited about

never know but the direction could be that Linden have bought (or in discussions to buy) Lumiya, and bringing the Lumiya person/people into the Lab to advance the product

dunno if this is true but I hope so. Would be nice, as would be a further validation that residents can make significant contributions to Second Life, which the Lab recognises with cash money

[Nick0678]

4 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

. LL could simply have taken a $100,000 and contracted an experienced android developer to have come up with something similar, rolling in any of the newest features like BoM.  Had they done so we would have had a 3d graphic capable mobile viewer 2 years ago instead of waffling about and getting nowhere and dwindling down to promises of an "exciting" announcement.....soon. We should know from past experience how slow that will actually be. 

Nah, they were busy with... Sansar...

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Mollymews said:

Grumpity Linden said that they Linden are going in a new direction for mobile, which Grumpity said they were quite excited about

I'm just hoping it's not cloud rendering again or a 'show off your avatar' toy app.

[Mollymews]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I'm just hoping it's not cloud rendering again or a 'show off your avatar' toy app.

i like to think that today Linden Lab is to virtual world users as Microsoft is to business users. Meaning that they both have a steady incremental approach to improving their bread and butter offerings to their users

Microsoft on occasion will buy a 3rd-party product that adds a significant immediate benefit for their business users

a example of this was Skype

what they did was buy Skype, put Microsoft in front of the name, and launched the product as wrote, to their users as a Microsoft product.  That Microsoft name alone increased the number of Skype users 100-fold pretty much overnight. Microsoft business users thought "Microsoft" and started using it, whereas before many business users were reluctant to use Skype because "Not Microsoft"

Microsoft knew that they would incrementally improve the Skype product over time (internally in the Microsoft dev way), while also knowing that they had a out-of-the-box offering for its business users to begin using immediately

users who didn't have to wait for Microsoft to bluesky develop a whole new mechanic from scratch, with all the pauses, stops, turnbacks and fails that bluesky development can (often can) result in

yes Linden could start again on a whole new bluesky mobile path, and again, and again. But why would the new company owners do this ?  They are not Philip or Cory Linden who were into building their vision of The Metaverse. From what I can see our new owners are way more into building the happy customer base to grow The Business. And if I Owner can buy customer happiness then I will because that's business

and as The Owner, my development team can have all the technical debates between themselves that they like, but in the meantime I Owner am progressing My Business

[Nick0678]

6 hours ago, Mollymews said:

Microsoft knew that they would incrementally improve the Skype product over time

Actually Skype improved by "Micro" soft is a bloated 300mb+ turd now when back in the days was light and portable offering the exact same functionalities.. (sure it didn't have so many emoticons.. )

[Mollymews]

30 minutes ago, Nick0678 said:

Actually Skype improved by "Micro" soft is a bloated 300mb+ turd now when back in the days was light and portable offering the exact same functionalities.. (sure it didn't have so many emoticons.. )

you do know that Skype was originally developed in Borland Delphi Pascal 3.0 back in the days. It wasn't light. And when the devs and the product were bought by AOL, it didn't get any lighter

[Nick0678]

1 minute ago, Mollymews said:

you do know that Skype was originally developed in Borland Delphi Pascal 3.0 back in the days. It wasn't light. And when the devs and the product were bought by AOL, it didn't get any lighter

Nope i only know that version 6 and 7 were just fine and version 8 is a turd.

[Mollymews]

Just now, Nick0678 said:

Nope i only know that version 6 and 7 were just fine and version 8 is a turd.

this is fair comment. I sometimes think Windows 10 is a turd.  I want my Windows 8 back