Inworld building in a competing system

[animats]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1562747398

Building a beach house in TCG World.

This is a new user building a beach house in a new virtual world called TCG World.

Everything the user is doing here is supported in SL. They rez prim-type items with textures and place them, they get objects from inventory and place them, and that's about it. But the viewer-side tools are so much more fluid. It looks smoother. Easier. More fun.

TCG's client helps a lot more with aligning objects than SL viewers do. The selection system for inventory is easier to use. The viewer is quicker at bringing up menus. That's really all they've got that SL doesn't. Yet the result looks far more polished.

The little stuff matters.

[Henri Beauchamp]

Building with pre-made and fixed size elements, as is expected from a world based on a game engine... I.e. forget about making your own design, it's all pre-designed...

Thanks, but no thanks, I prefer battling with SL's primitives, even if better build tools would of course be most welcomed.

Edited August 19, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Quistess Alpha]

1 hour ago, animats said:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1562747398

I think something like that could be emulated in SL with HUDs, raycast Etc. if a creator really put their mind to it, for a very limited specific case (say, Zimberlabs type blocks).

I don't know if the development and testing cost would make that a worthwhile proposition for any individual creator though.

[Lucia Nightfire]

2 hours ago, animats said:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1562747398

Building a beach house in TCG World.

This is a new user building a beach house in a new virtual world called TCG World.

Everything the user is doing here is supported in SL. They rez prim-type items with textures and place them, they get objects from inventory and place them, and that's about it. But the viewer-side tools are so much more fluid. It looks smoother. Easier. More fun.

TCG's client helps a lot more with aligning objects than SL viewers do. The selection system for inventory is easier to use. The viewer is quicker at bringing up menus. That's really all they've got that SL doesn't. Yet the result looks far more polished.

The little stuff matters.

TCG World, another crypto/NFT bro wasteland.

[animats]

1 hour ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

TCG World, another crypto/NFT bro wasteland.

Indeed, but at least they got it running and made it look good, which most of the other crypto bros have failed to do.

What I'm getting at there is that there are intermediate levels of building. There are prims and placing stuff, there's something like that video, and there's going down to the face and vertex level in Blender. What's in that video can be managed by the average user. An SL viewer could potentially support that. It's just ease of use UI tooling, not a system redesign.

[Coffee Pancake]

Aside from context (crypto) this is not really any different from the kind of building we have had in games for years now. Just lego bricking set elements together.

 

[animats]

6 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Aside from context (crypto) this is not really any different from the kind of building we have had in games for years now. Just lego bricking set elements together.

Right. Which you can do in SL, but it's harder than it should be.

[Beq Janus]

15 hours ago, Quistess Alpha said:

think something like that could be emulated in SL with HUDs, raycast Etc. if a creator really put their mind to it, for a very limited specific case (say, Zimberlabs type blocks).

I don't know if the development and testing cost would make that a worthwhile proposition for any individual creator though.

I think RezMela (mela with an ell not meta with a tee) in OpenSim have a system that would in theory work in SL too, that supports scripted builds using predefined components that are rezzed on an inworld base plate. I think there are videos around from Ramesh the founder but this page gives an idea. 

12 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Aside from context (crypto) this is not really any different from the kind of building we have had in games for years now. Just lego bricking set elements together.

Agreed, and I am pretty sure there was one of the start ups possibly sinewave or hifi back in the day that had modular building like the blender addons have where you have sliders for door size and windows etc. It is (I think) what @ChinReyhas been advocating for years now, "better prims"

.

Edited August 20, 2022 by Beq Janus

[Prokofy Neva]

The question is whether you can make a house like that and sell it on an open market and cash out to real currency -- in that game.

[ChinRey]

41 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

It is (I think) what @ChinReyhas been advocating for years now, "better prims"

No but in a way yes.

What I've been advocating (or rather dreaming of since it's never ever going to happen in SL) is a more flexible, performant, user friendly and generally suitable set of building tools. Archimatix and prims are based on very different principles but both could have been interesting there.

---

Prims are algorithm based with shapes generated from a very simple mathematical formula. The original prim system, invented and developed by Avi Bar-Zeev, only needed a few hundred lines of code to generate all the prim shapes we know today and a few more. Also, each prim only requires a few hundred bytes (maybe even less than 100 - I haven't checked) to be downloaded, making it far more performant in a server based virtual reality than (polylist) meshes can ever be.

is to extend the system, partly by enabling some options that have been nerfed away in a misguided attempt to simplify, partly by adding a few carefully selected new parameters - some of them new, others proposed by Bar-Zeev or even included in his original system.

---

Archimatix is an extension for Unity and it's supported by Sinespace which is Unity based. It is especially intriguing since SL actually already has something remarkably similar.

Archimatix is a combination of two different shape editing functions.

• One are the shape modifiers. These are essentially fitted mesh/animesh where the locations of the bones are set manually rather than by animations.
• The other are nodes where resizing adds/removes clones of the core shape rather than scaling it.

---

While I'm at it, there's this third object format that could also do with a serious upgrade: Sculpts.

What sculpts need to become a useful building material for the 2020s are:

1. A new interpreter using the data from the map directly to set vertice locations rather than the complex detour hack LL introduced back in 2008.
2. A proper decimator to eliminate zero angle vertices and zero size tris.
3. A more suitable LOD model algorithm.

There are other improvements and extensions that I think would be valuable too, sculpts could do with a dedicated binary or possibly xml file format for a start, but those three are the essentials and if I understood @animats right, he has actually already looked at the first two for his alternativ viewer project.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The question is whether you can make a house like that and sell it on an open market and cash out to real currency -- in that game.

You can't .. but no one cares that you can't.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, Coffee Pancake said:

You can't .. but no one cares that you can't.

 

Then they don't have a world they have a "proof of concept" *shrugs*. 

[Love Zhaoying]

I started to watch the video, realized that I had to fast-forward past the "stream will start soon..", ended at a random spot and watched a couple minutes. Saw the guy place a toilet and complain about how dark the room / walls were. So.. wasn't engaged.

[Coffee Pancake]

18 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Then they don't have a world they have a "proof of concept" *shrugs*. 

They have a entertainment product that's entertaining and fun.

If SL demonstrates anything, it's that a virtual world for the sake of a virtual world is a non starter for most people.

[Prokofy Neva]

4 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

They have a entertainment product that's entertaining and fun.

If SL demonstrates anything, it's that a virtual world for the sake of a virtual world is a non starter for most people.

Oh, well, before they know it, they'll be soaking in it, like Madge.

[animats]

3 hours ago, ChinRey said:

@animats right, he has actually already looked at the first two for his alternative viewer project.

Yes, but since the end result has to look the same as SL, the user does not see it. I'm not adding any new capabilities. Have to be compatible.

(The LL viewer and its descendants started with prims. In the viewer code, sculpts are sort of a mod to the prim code, and meshes are sort of a mod to the sculpt code. In my new code, in Rust, everything is a mesh, and there are translators which turn prims and sculpts into meshes. Different approach, but same look.)

[Extrude Ragu]

On 8/19/2022 at 11:33 PM, Quistess Alpha said:

I think something like that could be emulated in SL with HUDs, raycast Etc.

The trouble with raycast is that currently there's no way to know where the users cursor is in the viewport, just where the users camera is.

Suppose you could raytrace from the camera position and have the user alt cam around, but boy would that get old quick trying to make a house

[Quistess Alpha]

3 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

there's no way to know where the users cursor is in the viewport

That's a very good point. The only way I know of to track mouse hover is with MoaP shenanigans. You ~might be able to get away with using a 99%-transparent media HUD?

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 8/22/2022 at 1:04 PM, Extrude Ragu said:

On 8/20/2022 at 1:33 AM, Quistess Alpha said:

I think something like that could be emulated in SL with HUDs, raycast Etc.

The trouble with raycast is that currently there's no way to know where the users cursor is in the viewport, just where the users camera is.

Suppose you could raytrace from the camera position and have the user alt cam around, but boy would that get old quick trying to make a house

Isn't raycasting from the camera position exactly what the video shows?

Unless you mean the mouse-controlled build menu, in which case MOAP would work if you wanted those hover-over effects, and then just minimize it out of the way after a selection is made.

[Quistess Alpha]

22 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Isn't raycasting from the camera position exactly what the video shows?

Yes, but one of the things I failed to notice on first inspection, is that the game in the OP seems to be using something like (what could be described in SL terms) a 3rd person mouselook, which might be an interesting thing to add to a third party viewer.