I've tried SL in virtual reality and it is not bad at all

[Savage Absinthe]

On 2/14/2022 at 2:29 PM, Solar Legion said:

The topic has come up before - more than once. The limitations have been explained - more than once.

You see a "negative" response. It is noting more than stating reality: Second Life is not set up for nor conducive to a proper VR experience nor will it ever be so without seriously hindering creativity in one way or another.

Everything does not have to have/use/offer VR. At all.

if it "hinders" your "creativity" to create quality, game-ready assets that can be rendered smoothly, my advice is to git gud

[Solar Legion]

1 hour ago, Addison Whimsy said:

if it "hinders" your "creativity" to create quality, game-ready assets that can be rendered smoothly, my advice is to git gud

That's nice.

Unless you're going to pay each and every single content creator a Game Studio level wage, sit down.

Better yet, face reality: Second Life is not designed for VR. Period. End. Move on.

Want a Second Life experience in VR? Build it yourself. Period. End.

Have a nice existence.

[Love Zhaoying]

Isn't VR why Lod gave us Sansar?

[Katherine Heartsong]

Until I can jack a terabit cable into the base of my skull and close my eyes and "see" a VR world, I'm not buying into the experience. Big heavy things on my face, figuring out how my glasses fit, the progressive lens issue ... nope. Not ready from prime time.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

5 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

Until I can jack a terabit cable into the base of my skull and close my eyes and "see" a VR world, I'm not buying into the experience. Big heavy things on my face, figuring out how my glasses fit, the progressive lens issue ... nope. Not ready from prime time.

Glasses fit fine!

[Katherine Heartsong]

6 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Glasses fit fine!

Good to know, but single lens or progressive lens? With progressive lens people need to adjust the angle of their eyeballs downwards or tip their head back (as well) to see things up close. Only far away things are in focus when they look straight ahead. The focal point of an object/screen in a VR headset a mere inch away from my eyes would need me, at least, to be staring literally down at the bottom frame of my glasses for purposes of focus. Curious how a VR headset copes with that?

Again, I have no skin in the game. Wearing anything on my head except a baseball hat is a no go for me.

[derek244]

I purchased occulus as well. I did see that SL will work for it with some configurations. I plan on trying it in the near future.

[NiranV Dean]

On 2/14/2022 at 7:31 PM, bigmoe Whitfield said:

to keep the average user from getting sick, which is needed for SL.   90fps minimum.   with how SL is,  it's not exactly possible.

Not sure what you see as the average user but seeing that VRChat runs at 20-36 FPS for the vast majority of people i'd say no. 36 FPS (Quest 1 with async reprojection) is completely fine. If you get anything but the Quest 1 you'll have 90-120 FPS max (that means you'll most likely run at reprojection framerate -> 45 / 60 FPS). I can very confidently say that after almost 8000 hours of VR (5200+ of which are VRChat)

On 9/27/2022 at 10:03 PM, Solar Legion said:

That's nice.

Unless you're going to pay each and every single content creator a Game Studio level wage, sit down.

Better yet, face reality: Second Life is not designed for VR. Period. End. Move on.

Want a Second Life experience in VR? Build it yourself. Period. End.

Have a nice existence.

I recommend you sit down. As user of a shared world we should all be striving for good quality and optimization. Not to mention a lot of content creators make money for literal unoptimized trash, which could be optimized in less than an hour. It's not hard. I learned in a single day, it takes less than an hour to optimize a model and is a thing you only ever do once (and can also be pushed as update). There is no excuse we don't have "game-ready" assets especially from so called "professional" content creators. I'm sick of hearing this load of *****. There is very much incentive for each and everyone of us, especially content creators to optimize, we all share the same world, we all see the same thing, that means WE ALL suffer together from bad optimization. YOU make others suffer with your bad content.... and then some content creators even have the audacity to complain about SL's performance and put the fault at SL/LL. For once i have to say something nice about SL, for an overly complicated burning dumpster fire of a mess that is cobbled and held together by bandaid it is running surprisingly well considering how incredibly inefficient all of this mess is executed and the amount of trash it has to process. I can tell you that Unity breaks apart far before we even come close to an average scene of SL.

Second Life doesn't need to be made for VR to sport optimized content.

And their payment is every modder's payment -> word of mouth, good rating, downloads/uses, popularity, all of which translate into more units sold in SL.

Edited October 24, 2022 by NiranV Dean

[Solar Legion]

Ah yes ... "I can do it, so everyone else can too!"

Not a valid argument. Ever.

Not that surprising, considering the source ....

[NiranV Dean]

18 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Ah yes ... "I can do it, so everyone else can too!"

Not a valid argument. Ever.

Not that surprising, considering the source ....

What are you on about? Until just 2 months ago i had essentially zero knowledge about Blender, let alone how to do any professional stuff. I have only ever been very slowly doing absolutely minimal moving vertices around because thats all i could do. Now that i'm fully committed to optimizing my stuff i looked up a couple tutorials and started doing a lot more. I'm literally a blender noob. These people have been working with Blender for a long time, there is NO excuse and NO valid argument that these people can't do the same, watch a couple videos and follow them step by step. This requires absolutely 0 confidence, 0 knowledge, 0 skill. ANYONE and i mean absolutely ANYONE can do it.

I use the "source" (me) as example because i am bad at everything, i have 0 skills and like everyone was an average user at some point, until i decided to do more and actually started working on it, i use myself as proof that everyone can achieve these simple tasks. I made a Viewer with 0 coding skills, learned coding while doing it, i started making and optimizing models with 0 Blender skills, learned a lot about Blender and optimisation. I'm saying that anyone, especially well known content creators can do what is required if an idiot with 0 skills like me can do it, if they just wanted. I have seen a cripple who's entire body was paralized play and finish a solo round Mass Effect 3 on Gold difficulty, something i still have trouble today and i was pretty good and have 2 fully functional hands. He beat what i still can't most of the time, with his goddamn tongue and a stick in his mouth, how's that for your "invalid".

But the ignorance and stupidity is not surprising considering that such a response came from you. I wouldn't be surprised if you are one of those that believe no-mod protects from copybotting.

Edited October 24, 2022 by NiranV Dean

[Solar Legion]

That's nice. Also quite typical.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Solar Legion

[bigmoe Whitfield]

1 hour ago, Solar Legion said:

That's nice. Also quite typical.

it's why I had not replied since, but some reason was quoted, I'll stand by what I said.  90+fps is key.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

What are you on about? Until just 2 months ago i had essentially zero knowledge about Blender, let alone how to do any professional stuff. I have only ever been very slowly doing absolutely minimal moving vertices around because thats all i could do. Now that i'm fully committed to optimizing my stuff i looked up a couple tutorials and started doing a lot more. I'm literally a blender noob. These people have been working with Blender for a long time, there is NO excuse and NO valid argument that these people can't do the same, watch a couple videos and follow them step by step. This requires absolutely 0 confidence, 0 knowledge, 0 skill. ANYONE and i mean absolutely ANYONE can do it.

I use the "source" (me) as example because i am bad at everything, i have 0 skills and like everyone was an average user at some point, until i decided to do more and actually started working on it, i use myself as proof that everyone can achieve these simple tasks. I made a Viewer with 0 coding skills, learned coding while doing it, i started making and optimizing models with 0 Blender skills, learned a lot about Blender and optimisation. I'm saying that anyone, especially well known content creators can do what is required if an idiot with 0 skills like me can do it, if they just wanted. I have seen a cripple who's entire body was paralized play and finish a solo round Mass Effect 3 on Gold difficulty, something i still have trouble today and i was pretty good and have 2 fully functional hands. He beat what i still can't most of the time, with his goddamn tongue and a stick in his mouth, how's that for your "invalid".

But the ignorance and stupidity is not surprising considering that such a response came from you. I wouldn't be surprised if you are one of those that believe no-mod protects from copybotting.

Have you considered teaching classes in Blender?

[NiranV Dean]

3 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Have you considered teaching classes in Blender?

Time to do this.

I'm so infinitely sick of seeing these human content creators being full of *****e and false information and fueled by pure capitalism and laziness. I was going to write a full Guide on how to optimize models just to show everyone how stupidly easy it is and why everyone should be in rage against any creator daring to come up with cheap excuses like "too much work" "takes too long" "isn't worth it".

So here it is, step by step how to optimise any and all models.

To start off, i prepared a little scene, i loaded my optimised Wicker and the original unmodified Wicker.

To showcase how much you can optimise while retaining (or outright improving or adding more details) i've put both side by side, gave them the same blendshapes and the same materials. The left one is the original, the right one my custom one. First thing you will notice is that the left original is missing some hair in the front, again this is the original, it doesn't come with said hair, that's an addon.

The polygon counts are as follows:

The original unmodified version has 67.338 polygons.

My modified version has 45.961 polygons.

How is this possible you may ask? How does the modified version retain the same quality and even add more stuff to it? Optimisation. Taking a slightly closer look we can see that some areas on the optimised version are less dense.

Particularly the head and claws are very apparent. So the first step to doing optimisation is simply identifying where we can optimise, you don't need to be skilled or a professional to identify some key places, just looking at the wireframe the head, tail, claws and feet seem like a good place to start. After identifying where we can optimise we can start right away.

While in Object Mode:  select the model and change it to Edit Mode: 

Now in edit mode we can start editing the model, the easiest way to optimise any model if you have any normal non-*****ed model is simply smart dissolving edge loops. That sounds incredibly technical but is incredibly easy infact. In the top left, next to the Object/Edit mode dropdown select the edge selection mode:  this allows us to select edges (instead of single vertices), other methods involve using the face selection mode. With the edge selection mode enabled simply select any edge you deem unnecessary like so:

I chose the claws here because as you can see they are incredibly dense for no reason, perfect place to start optimising. Now that we selected a single line you'll probably say "but that's going to take an eternity and you'd be right... but there is a very nice feature called edge loop selection. Simply hold down the ALT key and click an edge like in the above example, Blender will automatically follow along that edge until it loops around or ends.

As you can see it selected the entire line all around looping back to the beginning. Now the actual magic. Dissolve. Blender has an amazing feature called "Dissolve", it essentially does all the work for you. With the edge loop still selected, right-click anywhere and select "Dissolve Edges" from the dropdown. It should be almost at the very bottom.

Now what this does is it "removes" the selected edges and makes all necessary changes in the UV and the mesh to keep everything properly connected. The result is this:

And that's essentially it! The same can be done with faces (and vertices although i HIGHLY recommend not doing that). Simply go around, select edge loops, dissolve them, make sure you hold SHIFT in addition to ALT to add to the selection rather than replacing it. A nice, quick and easy starting optimisation would be dissolving every second edge loop. Like this:

Right-click, dissolve edges, boom. Optimisation!

Can you tell the difference unless we zoom this close? You can't. This little 1 button press and 2 click (times 10) maneuver which can be done in less than 30 seconds just saved us 600 polygons. 600! On a single claw. Do this to all 4 claws on both hands, thats 8x600=4800 polygons just gone. Each claw taking 30 seconds, that's roughly 4 minutes for 4800 polygon savings just on the claws alone! We haven't even looked INTO the hand, the claw extends into the hand itself, geometry that is invisible to the user and could be mostly removed or reduced too. All of this can be applied to the foot claws, the head mane and if you really want to the arms and legs too without impacting visuals. We can easily get this model down to 45000 polygons before we have to start looking into less obvious places.

Note that this entire process, from start to end takes roughly 30-60 minutes depending on the density and quality of the mesh, more density means more clickies but even if this was to take an entire day (which it can take if you split it up a bit, take your time and really look into every single tiny corner and optimise for even the smallest gains) it is something you as creator only ever have to do once for a model. You can also always keep a high-poly copy in case things go south. Remember to make multiple saves whenever you have done a chunk of work.

With that being said, human models will most likely not look like the above avatar with fancy rectangles, they will most likely look very scuffed with triangles all over the place. Blender does have an option to automatically convert to rectangles but i'd not recommend that. In that case its their own fault and they are pretty much out of luck, edge loop selection wont work on these so they will have to manually select each edge, this is obviously going to increase the time by a lot but again still something that only needs to be done once. What they could try is selecting everything (CTRL + A) switching into the UV Editor and selecting everything in the UV Editor too (CTRL + A):

 

And using the UV - Seams From Islands menu option 

This will automatically mark all edges as seams in the main render view:

All red lines are UV seams, what they could try is selecting everything except the seams and then trying the Triangle To Quads option. Here's a triangulated mesh reverted back to quads:

It does a... somewhat okay job but it breaks at seams, which is why you may want to deselect them beforehand (haven't tried it in that picture) it will leave them intact and allow you to manually optimise them.

Anyway. The main point of this guide was to show you that it literally takes 5 seconds, 1 button press and 2 clicks to do an optimisation. 30 Minutes tops to do some rough optimisation given your model isn't a flaming dumpster fire of doom (and even then you can still optimise it but it will take longer, you might want to consider retopologising it alltogether). In that case i'd recommend this video i watched:

It's an amazing guide and makes retopo really easy. Combine that with the Data Transfer modifier to transfer all weights from the original model to the new retopologised one and it makes optimising a breeze! I used the above video tutorial to retopo a really badly made hoodie and i'm quite happy with the outcome.

[Aishagain]

My typical reaction to all this to sit quietly and boggle.  Everyone so far seems to have missed one of the fundamental issues with VR on a multinational medium. 

Ping.

As far as I can see, having >200ms ping to SL is inconvenient at best (it makes vehicle operation during a racing simulation really difficult in third-party) in mouselook it is nearly impossible but in full VR it is both very difficult AND thoroughly nauseating (at least it was to me when I trialled a non-SL application recently).

Couple that to problems for anyone not using single-vision spectacles makes VR a vomit comet for anyone outside the USA where SL is concerned. 

In my opinion, yours may differ.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Aishagain

[NiranV Dean]

3 hours ago, Aishagain said:

My typical reaction to all this to sit quietly and boggle.  Everyone so far seems to have missed one of the fundamental issues with VR on a multinational medium. 

Ping.

As far as I can see, having >200ms ping to SL is inconvenient at best (it makes vehicle operation during a racing simulation really difficult in third-party) in mouselook it is nearly impossible but in full VR it is both very difficult AND thoroughly nauseating (at least it was to me when I trialled a non-SL application recently).

Couple that to problems for anyone not using single-vision spectacles makes VR a vomit comet for anyone outside the USA where SL is concerned. 

In my opinion, yours may differ.

In VRChat you have a 100-200 ping too when connecting from EU to US or the other way around. Even with a 40 ping everything is still highly delayed. Getting stabbed across the room even in a EU server is pretty common. You can see the person walking up to the place you were 5 seconds ago, carefully taking aim before placing that knife up your butt, all of which you can very comfortably watch from across the room. It is annoying but not neauseating at all. But VRChat is client authorative. Whenever you move or do any action it happens instantly for you but takes time for everyone else to be seen. Objects you pick up or drive are switch ownership to you, meaning you will take care of synchronising its movement for everyone else, this makes sure that for you the experience is always instant, its not so great for others to see in some cases. A clever trick is because you are responsible for the synchronisation of any objects you own, objects you pick up and carry around will have the same delay as you do, meaning they will be synchronised with you and line up properly. This is the default behavior and can be overridden by the world creator, some worlds use host-only sync which means you are at the mercy of a 200+ ping, making especially vehicle and world interaction lag behind a lot. Most people don't seem to have a problem with that tho, they go to flight or drive maps and deal with the incredible input lag of those vehicles and they don't vomit. What seems to trigger most people is simply... moving, like just moving, sliding around (rather than teleporting). The lag would be annoying but hardly a big problem for motion sickness, to fix it though SL would have to switch to a fully client predictive model (SL already predicts and interpolates movement but its not doing it ahead of time), this could simply be added as an option you turn on, making the client instantly emulate your movement while sending it to the server (rather than waiting for the server to report back), this will innevitably create cases where when theres physics lag the client may think you move faster than you currently can due to lag, making you bounce back to the synchronised position aka rubberbanding, this once again could be combatted with more predictions based on ping and region FPS (both of which the Viewer knows of).