Improving Mouselook

[NiranV Dean]

So recently more and more people have been getting my input on several things that LL seemingly deemed not worth investigating.

In the past i've already been fixing and improving little things that seemingly don't find much use, some more experimental, others to actually improve experience and sometimes also as a direct reaction to someone asking me to investigate.

One such pain points has always been the Mouselook we are given. It has many flaws, weird quirks and generally isn't very good, only fullfilling the bare minimum of a first person view.

Realistic Mouselook

To improve these i've added a "Realistic Mouselook" option years ago that does away with how the Mouselook works. Instead of placing the camera at eye height center on your avatar root and offsetting your avatar to match up with your camera, which can and will depending on your avatar lead to really weird things where things don't line up, as example because your avatar is being made fit for your camera (rather than the reverse) your avatar might actually stand "behind" its actual position, or clipping into a wall behind you. Realistic Mouselook fixes this by placing the camera into the avatars eyes and making it follow your head, whatever your head does, so will your camera. This doesn't just fix the weird offset but also allows animations to have an effect on your camera. Most commonly it will be perceived as "headbobbing".

Head Scaling

Another issue often reported, especially with whole-body avatars (commonly furries) displaying their head and/or eyes in Mouselook, just a couple months ago i adressed this issue with a Head Scaling feature that will scale down your head and all its bones to 0, effectively "removing" the head, this is in addition to another fix to allow rigged meshes to be hidden in Mouselook when they are attached to the head.

First Person Aiming

Just a couple days ago i was asked to investigate whether it would be feasible to add something that allows first person animations to follow your look direction to improve first person shooter games inside SL. I implemented some experimental body-tracking that makes your chest look at whatever your camera is aiming at, given a nice aim/gun holding animation you can see the gun aiming at wherever your camera is aiming. I've made a video to showcase this below.

Mouselook Linkset Animation Fix

Another user reported that this is all fine and dandy but linksets in Mouselook break apart when animated, so i investigated and fixed this as well, allowing linksets to be animated in Mouselook without them lagging behind.

 

Bringing all these together i think this is a vastly improved Mouselook that makes for a better experience. I still have a couple more plans but what do you think? Should i look more into this? I'm fairly happy with these experiments, they have proven to be very fun and transformative for the experience.

[Ardy Lay]

Holy cow that looks like a video game!  Hehe.  Go for it.  Looks like improvements to me.

[AmeliaJ08]

That demo with the gun in view looks amazing. I had never thought of how lacking mouselook is since my only real use of it is when playing bowling games but this seems like a genuine improvement.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Good job!

[NiranV Dean]

4 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

That demo with the gun in view looks amazing. I had never thought of how lacking mouselook is since my only real use of it is when playing bowling games but this seems like a genuine improvement.

Well imagine instead of a gun, you have a bowling ball on the right and your hand on the left showing you where you are aiming with two fingers or a thumb.

How about a bow with the tip of the arrow to aim.

Stonetossing, one hand a stone, another to aim.

This could even be used to do proper aiming through a scope, binoculars or over iron sights.

Actually now i want to animate all of these... looks like i know what to do next.

Edited August 31, 2023 by NiranV Dean

[Lucia Nightfire]

Now fix https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-6808 so mouselook while having sex on furniture can look great again. 😉

Realistic head rotating limits might need enforced, though.

[animats]

Good job! This makes a lot of sense and will make sense to gamers.

2 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Realistic head rotating limits might need enforced, though.

If you move the mouse in normal mode, your head should turn as it does now, but the viewpoint should turn, too. So, where your head is looking is where you are looking. Useful limits are about ± 70° in both left-right and up-down directions.

Not sure what to do about HUDs. I've been toying with an idea for Sharpview that most HUDs move to a "lapboard" you only see when you look down.  Some VR systems work like that. Get clutter off your main screen. Not sure if this is a good idea. Some way to hide less used HUDs would be useful.

[NiranV Dean]

16 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Now fix https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-6808 so mouselook while having sex on furniture can look great again. 😉

Realistic head rotating limits might need enforced, though.

I think you skipped a point in my post. It IS already fixed. It's even shown in the video. Not to mention that my avatar shown very much fullfills the requirements for not so "great sex experience" in first person with that long snout clipping through your cam.
In addition to that, the Viewer already enforces rotation limits, although only for up and down, left and right could be enforced in addition that that theoretically very easily.

On 8/30/2023 at 10:27 PM, NiranV Dean said:

Head Scaling

Another issue often reported, especially with whole-body avatars (commonly furries) displaying their head and/or eyes in Mouselook, just a couple months ago i adressed this issue with a Head Scaling feature that will scale down your head and all its bones to 0, effectively "removing" the head, this is in addition to another fix to allow rigged meshes to be hidden in Mouselook when they are attached to the head.

Edited September 1, 2023 by NiranV Dean

[Flea Yatsenko]

That's awesome Niran, that's the kind of little stuff that SL needs to get more wide stream appeal.

[oneLastHusky]

I'm very thank for your great work to  improve our experience.

But do you guys have any ideas about the "lock mouselook direction with head direction option"?

I have seen many requests about this in the forums and I'm also seeking this feature. When in animations, lots of them will move your head to a needed direction, but once you turn on the mouselook, your sight direction always leave where you are looking at before the animation and not track the head direction.I think this will be very helpful when doing some video recording.

For example:In first pic, I'm looking at the ground and then when I turn to another pose, you guys can see I'm still looking at the same direction in the second pic, but the right direction should look like the third pic.

[NiranV Dean]

On 9/21/2023 at 1:13 AM, oneLastHusky said:

I'm very thank for your great work to  improve our experience.

But do you guys have any ideas about the "lock mouselook direction with head direction option"?

I have seen many requests about this in the forums and I'm also seeking this feature. When in animations, lots of them will move your head to a needed direction, but once you turn on the mouselook, your sight direction always leave where you are looking at before the animation and not track the head direction.I think this will be very helpful when doing some video recording.

For example:In first pic, I'm looking at the ground and then when I turn to another pose, you guys can see I'm still looking at the same direction in the second pic, but the right direction should look like the third pic.

I've not heard about a lock mouselook to head rotation option yet, locking your view direction to your head's will absolutely cause you to keep rotating infinitely if not used with something like the option to turn up the rotation-degree. This can and will only work properly while being stationary and locked in your rotation, aka when sitting down.

[Katherine Heartsong]

I'm not familiar with Black Dragon beyond hearing the name, but what's shown above is a great set of improvements. I can't leave FS behind though because I am deeply attached to both the Favourites panel, but mostly the custom AOs feature so my screen has no HUDs on it. I will download and try it out though, if to do nothing more than a FPS test and get familiar with your app's UX.

Where is the download of the most recent version, Niran?

Edited September 26, 2023 by Katherine Heartsong

[NiranV Dean]

On 9/26/2023 at 8:15 PM, Katherine Heartsong said:

I'm not familiar with Black Dragon beyond hearing the name, but what's shown above is a great set of improvements. I can't leave FS behind though because I am deeply attached to both the Favourites panel, but mostly the custom AOs feature so my screen has no HUDs on it. I will download and try it out though, if to do nothing more than a FPS test and get familiar with your app's UX.

Where is the download of the most recent version, Niran?

The most recent release can always be found via the Download section on the right sidebar on my blog. (Direct links are bound to die as i remove old versions)
https://niranv-sl.blogspot.com/
Note that it does not include the above improvements yet (that would currently only be in a test-test-super-test build but will soon become part of the PBR alpha build if i get some time to work down the still (surprisingly) quite small buglist)

Edited September 28, 2023 by NiranV Dean