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Fluffy Sharkfin

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Posts posted by Fluffy Sharkfin

  1. 11 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

    Free animesh ponies for everyone!

     

    8 hours ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

    Bring back Telehubs, teleport fees and taxis!

     

    In light of recent developments in this discussion I'd like to revise my previous answer and suggest that, in lieu of free animesh ponies, LL distribute wearable saddles to all new residents which can be "hired" via a tip jar so that they can earn money by giving people rides to and from the newly re-instated telehubs!

    • Like 1
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  2. 6 minutes ago, Starberry Passion said:

    I don't think so, Both Legacy and Maitreya achieve similar body shapes, but you can achieve the same with others just with reborn you'll have a butt.

    Legacy is smaller in size, except the butt is bigger but they are more similar than you think I just made the shapes not too long ago, Someone said there is no one with a good rectangle shape.

    You can make this shape on a legacy, like so

    517fbb2a2fb43bf651620b086e9bb574.png This is a Legacy body

    and you can make a similar shape on a Maitreya, you just have to make  a few changes to it, here and there and vice versa.

    I'll admit I've got way more experience working with the Maitreya body and haven't really bothered with the Legacy.  I guess since most people go with the typical hourglass or pear shapes I just assumed Legacy wasn't as versatile as the Maitreya.

    I agree you can definitely create a wider variety of shapes than you normally see around SL, it's just a matter of choosing the right bodies for the right shapes.

    • Like 2
  3. 43 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

    I just don't see how certain shapes can be achieved with the most popular bodies in SL, the shape system doesn't allow for it.

     

    23 minutes ago, Starberry Passion said:

    I just made every shape I said, with a Legacy body.

     

    I'd say it's even easier to achieve a wide variety of shapes with the maitreya body, especially if you use deformers and add-ons.

    Certain bodies just aren't going to work for certain shapes because the creators have already accentuated some aspects of the anatomy beyond what the appearance sliders can compensate for, but there are enough popular bodies that you can find one or two that will accommodate almost any shape.

    • Like 1
  4. 2 minutes ago, InnerCity Elf said:

    Semi-ban the word "banlines" on the forum - any time anyone uses the word, they have to pay 1L$ into the "banlines funds", which finances an in-world region with two zones.

    One, a battlefield, where friends and foes of banlines may fight each other with those gatling guns from the first post.

    One a party zone, where they can smoke peace pipes together.

    And forum gets monthly statistics of how many avatars were counted per zone...

    Add a forum feature that changes random words of every post to "banlines"! :P 

    • Haha 1
  5. 1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

    I tried that, they taste terrible and get stuck in my teeth.

    My mind flashed back to the scene in Trainspotting but I decided not to link it since it's wildly off-topic and also really gross! 😅

    I like my reality just the way it is, and while I find the whole subject of implanted technology and brain interfaces fascinating I'm with Paul on this one, I'd rather keep my tech on the outside for now.

    I've had the OpenBCI site bookmarked for a while now and have often toyed with the idea of trying out some of their more affordable options.

    • Thanks 1
  6. 1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

    Are you blob-shaming?!?!? LOL! (I know it is a scene from "WALL-E".)

     

    Of course not!  I will defend any persons right to be a blob if that's what makes them happy! :D

    But we all know how marketing works, pretty soon everyone will be thin shaming and the next thing you know we're living in a Blobocracy (but not an actual blobocracy cos apparently that's a real thing 😮) where everyone is judged not by their merits or actions but purely by their roundosity!

    • Like 1
  7. 6 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

    The video I saw awhile back, showed someone using a phone app to control home smart devices. That was the main use-case the video was highlighting.

    I can definitely see a number of very useful applications for brain implants that allow you to remotely control technology, but the question is will it be used to improve peoples lives and empower them or will it simply enable people who are, as Sid put it..

    7 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

    to lazy to use a keyboard, mouse or game-pad on top of that?

    Ultimately it could be used to improve humanity or we could all end up looking like this...

    wallee_orig.jpg

    • Like 1
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  8. 4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

    Or maybe being "blackout drunk"..!

    I guess it's not as permanent as a factory reset at least. 😅

    Neuralink will probably be a lot more appealing in years to come once the technology has advanced but so far the most advanced real world application they seem to have tested is one of the recipients playing a game of online chess which isn't exactly pushing the boundaries of human limitations.

    It's definitely something that could benefit a lot of people with disabilities in the future though, I just hope that development is allowed to focus on that and not dictated purely by profit.

    • Like 1
  9. 48 minutes ago, atyid said:

    Hi! I want to make a toucher with different animations, depending if your avatar is sitting or standing.

    Everything I search leads to scripting sits for furniture. Where should I be looking?

    Obviously you'll need to use llStartAnimation (and other related commands for requesting/checking permissions, etc.) but in addition you should also take a look at llGetAgentInfo and specifically AGENT_ON_OBJECT which you can use to detect whether or not an avatar is seated or standing.

    • Like 1
  10. 13 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

    I must have missed this bit somehow.

    Let me give you a frame of reference that puts things in a better perspective.

    The control to the final user you talk about is de facto transferred to the people in the recipient studio that have to work with said content. So the same control you're advocating for, even though it's true that is not going to the end user intended as a consumer of the final product, is going to another type of "end user". The environment artist who makes the modules for a certain building is more often than not a different person than the level designer/layout artist, most likely to not even be sitting in the same studio, these days.

    So what you're saying as a need for SL and not for a game studio is definitely applicable to a real studio, maximum ease of use as a first rule of production. And for this reason, not knowing where/who the models pack is going to, the general rule still is to name everything according to a series of identifiers, among which there is also a "mirrored" or similar keyword, where the scale tools do not help with negative scaling.

    I agree that in most cases the individual creating the assets will not be the same person responsible for their implementation within a game engine but there are still considerable differences between a level designer working as part of a development team and the way in which SL residents utilize assets within SL.

    To use your "mirrored" keyword as an example, if a level designer were facing the same issue being described in this thread they could simply ask one of the coders to add an additional function within the shader which would automatically invert the appropriate channel of the normal map whenever it encounters an asset which contains the "mirrored" keyword, whereas obviously SL residents don't have the ability to modify the shaders used to display the assets they're working with.

    Incidentally both Unreal and Unity do support texture mirroring.  In Unreal Engine you can mirror a texture simply by multiplying the UV coordinates by -1 on the required axis (similar to how textures are mirrored in SL) while in Unity you can set the TextureWrapMode to Mirror/Mirror Once rather than Repeat and then offset the texture accordingly.

    As an alternative to adding checkboxes which allow users to manually invert the red or green channel of a normal map LL could potentially implement a similar approach to the one used in Unity and provide the option to toggle between either repeating or mirrored tiling and then automatically invert the correct channel within the shader each time the mirrored version of the normal map is displayed, then rather than setting the texture scale to -1 residents could set the texture offset to 1.0 on the required axis in order to display a mirrored version of the textures/materials.

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  11. On 4/2/2023 at 11:55 AM, OptimoMaximo said:

    So the point is to see why a certain feature, however useful might it be, isn't being used by those that work on this stuff on a daily basis for a living.

    Because the vast majority of those people aren't developing for a platform built entirely from user-created content.  Second Life requires end users to have as much control as possible over how content is displayed whereas most game developers are entirely responsible for creating and optimizing all of the environments, props and characters and provide users with little to no ability to directly modify any of the content within the game/platform.

    On 4/2/2023 at 11:41 AM, ChinRey said:

    I'm not sure but isn't this just a matter of changing the swizzle? If so, it should be easy to implement and it could be useful for some other purposes as well. The viewer already has code for inverting a channel of a texture even. Maybe that code could be reused for normal maps?

    It should be a matter of simply providing a couple of extra checkboxes in the texture tab of the build window which when checked will invert the red or green channel of the normal map, this would allow users to flip a normal map horizontally and/or vertically and then invert the corresponding channel(s) to compensate for the reversed texture orientation.

    • Like 1
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  12. 51 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

    Mojo made it sound like ALM would remain optional in Lab Gab:

    It may have sounded that way but ALM is permanently enabled,

    52 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

    just turn off Reflections and that will  kind of basically get the lighting system back  to where it was as it was in the old viewers

    is in reference to the fact that you can enable/disable reflections, shadows, etc. when using ALM which does give similar performance/visual results to using a non-ALM viewer but it will still be using the new PBR/ALM renderer.

    • Like 1
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  13. 3 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

    add enough geometry in the areas that moves and bends

    1,000,000% this!

    If your mesh has the same polygon density in areas that don't bend or flex as it does on areas like knees, elbows, etc. then you're doing it wrong!

    When creating rigged mesh it's not the number of polygons that really matters, it's the location of the polygons/edge loops that make the most difference.  In fact in a lot of cases having less polygons in the right places will make it easier to get the desired results than having a very dense mesh since having the right topology on joints like knees and elbows makes it a lot easier to ensure that your mesh retains the correct shape when it bends.

    I'd recommend taking a look at some of the examples on this page Topology - polycount (especially the limb and shoulder topology sections) and noting how the edge loops are arranged in some of the examples.

    • Like 1
  14. 1 hour ago, Marianne Little said:

    Argh, it is some learning curve. I can use this texture. I got it to look like a metal edge. I like the darker shading too. I got a bigger butterfly image, worked on 4096 x 4096 and resized it to 1024. But this LOD is crap.

    I use it indoors, so a 8-10 m distance should be enough. I can use LOD 4 or course, but I see it as a challenge to get it better on LOD 2. And have an upload as low as possible. Sigh. I read some article about LOD, but now I can't find it.

     

    LOD collage.jpg

    Sometimes you can get better results by creating a completely different model for your lower LODs rather than trying to reduce your high LOD by a sufficient number of triangles.

    In this case I'd consider using something like this...

    image.thumb.jpeg.15ce279fb2ab44535b21c8fe8242aa98.jpeg

    The model itself is 18 triangles and as you can see the corresponding UV is neatly squished into a small corner of the texture area.

    Since you only ever see this model at a distance you don't really need a wood texture for the frame (just sample the average colour for the high LOD texture and use that instead) and the square area in the middle should be large enough to add a lower resolution image of the butterfly with a matching background colour (and perhaps a faint shadow to add a little fake depth). 

    Then all you need to do is include the texture for your new low LOD model in an unused portion of your high LOD texture.

    ETA: For the lowest LOD you could even replace the above model with a single plane (2 triangles) and place the UVs for it over the same small low LOD texture since at that distance it really wouldn't matter if the model is flat or not.

  15. 3 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

    That's not what I meant.  I meant were text based communication to go away *when and if* AI voice-to-text replaces it.  But, if actual text were ever replaced by AI completely, I'd think that would be far into the future and is a *who knows*.  But, for many things on the internet in general, I already use voice activation and would love voice-to-text.  But, voice-to-text will lose the nuances of what a human can actually do is all I was saying.

    Understood.  The point I was making in reply is that, for those with a disability that prevents them from using either, the potential loss of nuance would most likely be preferable to being excluded from the conversation entirely.

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