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Noel Loordes

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Posts posted by Noel Loordes

  1. 12 hours ago, Kai Lyvingstone said:

    I can't imagine how awful it would look on a phone, lol. Does nobody own computers any more these days? I can't imagine why people are so into everything being mobile, every time I try and browse the internet or do anything that's not Twitter on my phone it's obnoxious. Too many sims are too high-detailed to look any sort of decent on a mobile version. Maybe it would have worked if the game looks like it did back in 2004, but not any more.

    Depending on what you want to do, this doesn't really matter. For hanging out somewhere chatting, a mobile app would be incredibly useful, as it would allow remaining part of the conversation while reading on the sofa. Also, I somehow got a better framerate on Lumiya (Galaxy S7) over my PC (GTX 1050), so I'm not even sure if the performance disadvantage is all that big.

    If there were an iOS app, or even just a touch-friendly companion app for in-home streaming, I'd likely use that over a desktop client most of the time.

    • Like 1
  2. 20 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

    For everyone, including iPhone and Windows Phone users:  There is "Bright Canopy."  This is a subscription service, and it works like the "SL Go" service that's been mentioned.  The heavy lifting is done by a server, and you access the result through your web browser.

    I'm not sure, how most people intend to use these services. For me, the main purpose would be to hang out in my favorite SL places and chatting away while sitting on the sofa, doing something else on the tablet for the most part. In this usage, I'd be through the 10 hours included in their 17$/mtl plan within days. Also, judging from my experience with Lumiya and SL Go, I expect my bandwidth to become a bottleneck before the rendering capabilities of my iPad. There's also no indication, if the service even allows switching out of the app without interrupting the connection on iOS. Since its running in the browser, I'd be surprised if it did.

  3. @"Phones don't have the performance": Lumiya kind of proves that point wrong. I get decent frame rate there (Galaxy S7), mostly actually better than on my Laptop (GTX 1050 Ti), probably due to optimized settings. 

    Unlike the streaming based solutions available some time back, the phone-optimized UI even gives a reasonably good experience. Streaming on the other hand... For a start, it eats through data volumes too quickly to be useful on mobile, and was outright awful with 8MBit/s. The Lumiya way of giving "good enough" graphics with a mobile-optimized UI worked a lot better for me.

    I'd LOVE for something like Lumiya to be available for iPads. Sadly, with the way background activity is restricted, I'm not sure if such a solution would even allow switching to another app without disconnecting. Plus, Apple's ecosystem actively drives away hobbyist-efforts from iOS (need to buy a mac to develop in the first place, no side loading). 

    (Getting tired, hope nothing has become incoherent.)

  4. Observed on Firestorm Viewer.

    Using my favorite fantasy outfit for the first time since switching on Advaned Lighting model, I noticed a strage behaviour for the skirt part. Apparently skirts now have the effect, invis-prims used to have. Can this be fixed?

    Note: The alpha-occlussion effect also occurs for alpha-less texture, if the length is limited by the "length" setting of the skirt layer.

    image.thumb.png.340873f50e5ef6838e35cbc759dbcb4d.png

    In the background: A block with transparency "1%" (wood), in front of a red block without transparency.

  5. On 9/1/2018 at 12:13 PM, Love Zhaoying said:

    Are you certain it’s not a form of texture thrashing, trying to show you both mesh and covered avatar arm at the same time?

    Seems unlikely. For one, I would expect the brightness to flicker in some manner, if it were a thrashing issue of some sort, though I may misunderstand the term. Also while the base avatar and the attachment DO overlap, I am able to make this unnoticable by making sure that the textures match, as long advanced lighting model is disabled, or in the absence of local lights. And the part that stands out in terms of brightness is only partly overlapping visible parts of the base avatar (see screenshot). 

  6. 10 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

    @Noel Loordes The basic difference is that the render engine for things and avatars is different. The System Avatar render does NOT handle materials. 'Things' render through a channel that does handle materials. Both channels tend to handle shading in a way that reveals seams.

    These may help you understand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9APc-AVp0g
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owKVrnTAn3M

     

    Sadly, the video doesn't really clarify the issue with my mesh here. I was well aware of how smooth shading acts, but the difference is way too big in the presence of local lights (and only in the presence of local lights). Also, issues with normals/smooth lighting should also be visible without local lights or advanced-lighting model. And indeed there IS a slight mismatch, since it isn't really feasible to perfectly match the base avatar, but given matching textures these differences are barely visible.

    But can you elaborate on the materials comment? I am applying several materials in blender and export them to Second Life in order to allow selectively hiding parts of the mesh, when it conflicts with an outfit (e.g. long sleeves), since having different materials translates to different "faces" in the SL object "edit" dialog. I did so exactly, because creating disjunct meshes would create sharp seems, where smooth lighting doesn't work as discussed in the video. I do not however use specularity or bump maps.

    I'm just surprised, that doing so would result in such a massively different handling of local lights compared to the standard avatar.

  7. 10 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

    That has always been the case, although I could not tell you WHY objects and avatars handle light differently.

    That's unfortunate then, but at least it saves me the effort of trying to fix it.

    I'd be quite interested though to find a technical explanation, what causes the difference. There are more obvious differences (such as the inability to use reflections) with more tangible reasons, but the difference in handling local lights baffles me.

  8. I have previously created some custom mesh hands for a puppet-like avatar, based on the SL default avatar. Before I enabled advanced lighting model, I was able to match the color of the hands to the skin, such that when lower arm and beginning of the mesh overlap, the difference wasn't visible – this I achieved by making the skin compatible with base-avatar upper-body textures, and applying the same texture to body and hand.

    Then I enabled advanced lighting model, and now a PART of it is mismatched (see attached screenshot).

    Any idea, what may be causing this? It shouldn't be the normals, as those should cause issues even before advanced lighting model is enabled.

     

    alm.png

  9. By default, PERMISSION_TAKE_CONTROLS is granted automatically to attachments and items you sit on. Is it possible to prevent this?

    A lot of chairs and sofas, and some attachments, take control of the CONTROL_UP and/or CONTROL_DOWN keys (PgUp/E, PgDown/C) for allowing on-the-fly adjustments, with the undesirable collateral of making the key-combination "Alt+E", "Alt+C" unavailable for camera control. Since more often than not the corresponding scripts are nomod and/or in items I do not own, I am searching for a possibility to block the autmatic granting of this permission.

  10. A recurring issue as user of animation overrides, is that they are locked to one or a small number of specific avatar heights. 

    While trying to formulate a feature request for automatic corrections, I noticed that I can't make heads and tails of how the viewer currently calculates the joint positions. For instance, changing the neck-length of my shape shifts the avatar vertically with some point of the neck remaining at the same height. Changing the leg length keeps the knees at the same height, and changing the "avatar height" keeps the position of a point slightly above the knees.

    To me what would make sense, would be for the feet to remain at the same height, and the hip while sitting or ground-sitting, but this isn't what's happening.

    Does anyone know how this is being calculated and if there is a reason for it?

  11. On 1/10/2018 at 2:35 PM, LittleMe Jewell said:

    The recent Catzip version apparently has some improved inventory usage tools, but best I know the improvements do not include any of the features you've listed.

    Thanks anyway. Because of your answer I gave Catznip a go again, and it has some interesting features over Firestorm (e.g. that the keyboard works in the outfit manager, and that renaming outfits is working properly.) While not the solution I hoped for, it definitely has some big advantages for inventory management.

  12. Does some viewer support bulk-action features for inventory management? Having more than 40,000 items in my inventory, it has become slow, but manual cleanup is entirely unviable at the same time.

    Some examples I am interested in include:

    • Finding and deleting broken links.
    • Inside a directory (including outfits), bulk-rename objects and folders (e.g. for every folder named "MyOutfit XXXXX", rename the folder to "OldOutfit XXXXX", where XXXXX is an arbitrary string.).
    • Finding attachments/clothing that are not used in any outfit (e.g. in order to cut down on unused copies).
    • Finding inventory entries, for which exact duplicates exist.

    The closest thing I know of is the "replace links" feature of Firestorm. 

  13. Some viewers (e.g. Firestorm) allow to preview textures in-world from local files, updating automatically if the local file changes.

    Is there a viewer, that offers a similar option for mesh? This would be incredibly useful for fine-tuning mesh, as it cuts down the edit-save-upload-attach cycle to a fraction of the time, allowing entirely different workflows. So far I couldn't find any such feature.

    While the Beta-grid allows to avoid over-head costs from uploading mesh repeatedly, it doesn't speed up the workflows, or rather even makes it slightly slower by requiring to redo the final upload on the main grid.

  14. I often run into the issue that in some sim a game spams the local chat. Obviously it would be possible to block the object emitting the messages, but this would be likely to leave me wondering why the game doesn't work for me months later. 

    So I was wondering if there is a feature to block a source of chat messages only for the current session.

  15. The same error currently occurs for me with a customized shape of mine. None of the methods above helped either.

    Any idea what may be causing this? I can recreate the shape from similar shapes in my inventory, but I'd rather find the source of the problem, before it affects expensive paid items.

  16. Bottom line, there is not really a solution :-( 

    @Perry: Your method is sadly hardly viable for the chat activity I typically see (too view lines), especially local chat. At least at font sizes that I can comfortably read. 

    @Nova: I don't like sidebars either -- if they are non-optional. For the inventory for instance I'd never want a sidebar. For chat on the other hand... I'd sort of like the ability to dock selected windows. Programs which allow such typically allow making floaters into sidebars by drag-and-drop to the side. 

    For now I guess transparency will suffice though. 

  17. Currently I am continously having the chat-window open. At convenient sizes of the window this sadly means that my avatar will effectively be on the left side of the visible screen area.

    Is there some viewer or a possibility for it in the default viewer that allows docking the chat as a sidebar? Think e.g. of GIMP in traditional multi-window vs the newer single-window mode.

     

    +----------------+    +----+-----------+
    |+---+   _       |    |    |     _     |
    ||Ch |  ( )      |    |Chat|    ( )    |
    || at|  /|\      |    |    |    /|\    |
    |+---+  / \      |    |    |    / \    |
    +----------------+    +----+-----------+-
         NOW                     WANTED

     

  18. Did anyone have further experiences with this issue?

     

    I have now tried all (64bit) driver versions available from the Intel webpage and from the notebooks software support page. With all of them, when enabling basic shaders, I would see random flickering of GUI elements. Partly it looks like rebuilding of the elements (text vanishing and reappearing at high frequency), partly color glitches can be observed.

    While I couldn't get a screen-shot of the extreme cases (occur irregularily) I can provide some screenshots of the bug:

    1. Some UI elements how they look most of the time and how they look while flickering.

    sl-id19e2f0204156e553.png

    sl-id8bc51b01c49d6d24.png

    2. The chat bar continously has a discolored scroll bar when Basic Shaders is enabled.

    sl-id97e4bf18b68e07e8.png

    Similiar effect with minor elements in the preferences:

    sl-id987d7c49d38f4926.png

     

    Sadly, keeping basic shaders disabled is only a more-or-less solution as basic shaders seem to be required for correct lighting of mesh; Without it I would see weird effects like inverted brightness (objects looking as if light comes from the opposite direction) or entirely missing lighting. 

    Interestingly texture glitches (flickering colors of floor, prims vanishing and reappearing at high frequency) would only occur with the official viewer, but not with Firestorm, Singularity or Catznip Viewer. 

  19. I am searching for a human mesh body that provides good backward compatibility, i.e. mesh clothing made for the standard avatar should work for the mesh body too. 

    Ideally it would also support old alpha textures, but considering their limitations (such as not allowing hiding arms separately) this is a minor point. 

    I have seen some mesh avatars, but being bound to the clothing available from a single vendor is just not an option for me. 

    The ideal solution would be a mesh replacing the standard avatar mesh while retaining (partial) configurability through the appearance dialogue and compatibility with clothing layers, but as far as I know this is not possible. 

  20. Related to an older post, but not quite the same: I'd like to be able to use mouse-look style controls while flying, but see my avatar from a 3rd person perspective. So far I was unable to find a viewer that allows such controls.

    When walking I can click on my avatar and have camera and movement direction rotate my keeping the left mouse button pressed (though sadly, this seems to ignore mouse sensitivity settings and is entirely too sensitive to even small mouse movement). When flying this BASICALLY works too, but unlike mouse look it doesn't allow changing height by looking upward or downward and flying "forward". Also, keeping the left mouse button pressed at all times and most importantly, having to click exactly the avatar and not even attachments is far from ergonomic.

    World of Warcraft would be an example of a more convenient control scheme, that allows to switch between keyboard-centric and mouse-centric controls easily at any time, there by holding down the right mouse key. The important differences to the left-click solution in SL are currently:

     

    • It doesn't matter WHERE I hold down the right key. Since SL doesn't make use of "keeping right-mouse down" but only of click/releasing the mouse button, such a control scheme shouldn't cause a conflict. Removing the restriction of where to click makes quick switching between UI interaction with the mouse and mouse-control more seemless.
    • Mouse-control affects the direction of flight. 

    Is there some viewer that offers such or in any other way alternative controls to flight (and maybe walking)? 

    Another issue would be how difficult it is to jump on top of small objects, thanks to physics-simulation in movement such as non-instantaneous acceleration when walking, but I'm pretty sure that server side implementations play a big role there.

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