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Adeon Writer

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    Are all the new homes taken up?

    in Linden Homes

    Posted · Edited by Adeon Writer

    If you get a plot and you have no house (Which is very likely, it's the main reason people abandon their plots so it's the main reason you'll end up getting one)

    DON'T ABANDON YOUR PLOT! Ask Linden to restart the region, houses re-rez themselves on region start.

    • Like 3

    Will the New Linden Homes Affect the Rentals Business?

    in Mainland

    Posted · Edited by Adeon Writer

    6 hours ago, ChinRey said:

    One thing I find interesting is that I've seen people comparing Belisseria to Bay City. It seems the new continent has caught quite a bit of attention from the BC SL'ers. It's particularly interesting that nobody's yet mentioned what is supposed to be one of Bay City's biggest selling points, the double prim tier. The new continent doesn't have it of course but that doesn't seem to matter at all.

    Right. I owned 1024 sqm in Bay City Brewster for almost a year. The buy-in last May was insane. I won't even admit how much it was. Before base 1024 premium, I owned 512 sqm of the same sim for the last 5 years or so. But, I considered it the best plot of all of Mainland if you only want Base Premium, because I personally hold a high value on neighbors and immersion and, in my opinion, most of mainland is kinda ugly and immersion-breaking, but not Bay City.

    These new premium homes were so attractive to me that I sold what I considered to be the best plot of mainland, at a LOSS, just to move to one, the lack of double prim didn't even matter to me. The build just looks so much nicer, and playing house in suburbs is all I wanted anyway. It might look like the 9th layer of hell to some, and I get that, but to others, me included, it's what I've been looking for in SL for a very, very long time.

    Plus i can extend my drawdistance more without dying. And the neighbors are actually online!

    Totally worth it to me. No regrets.

     

    (And even if I sold my bay city plot at a loss, it was still a considerable pile of pocket change.)

    • Like 2

    Will the New Linden Homes Affect the Rentals Business?

    in Mainland

    Posted · Edited by Adeon Writer

    4 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

    Tell that to my hundreds of tenants, some of whom have been in my rentals literally for 10 years.

    A good point. My statement came off as a little harsh too. Rental doesn't work for me, but everyone is different.

    Still, I don't see Linden homes being any danger to land rental. The 0LI houses are nice, but you only get their own selection. That's one edge you'll always have over LL.

    As I understand it, LL's setup with linden homes isn't doing anything special that only the Lindens can do - just houses with their root on their own parcels. If you wanted to, you could offer their same service on a smaller scale, with your own 0LI (from the renter's perspective) content/scripts. Not everyone's a scripter, but the stuff they're using isn't too complex.

    Are all the new homes taken up?

    in Linden Homes

    Posted

    I've seen "Traditional" appear a few times during my refresh, but when I hit "Next" to grab it it always errors out saying someone else snagged it first. So I just took that to mean that they do in fact appear on the website instantly. But maybe they don't?

    • Like 1

    Will the New Linden Homes Affect the Rentals Business?

    in Mainland

    Posted · Edited by Adeon Writer

    Let's be honest, renting has always been a terrible deal for everyone except the landlord.

    Quote

    Qie Niangao wrote:

    It does feel strange, though, conforming to the cookie-cutter suburban aesthetic that I've always eschewed.

    But it's exactly what I've been looking and waiting for. And, the fact that we have polar opposite opinions here is important. Mainland will always have a place.

    I bought-in to the VERY expensive Bay City plot just to have an aesthetic that was similar to these Linden Homes. That northeast 80s/90s vibe is exactly where I wanted to be. So I'm very happy this exists. Can't wait for them to print more so I can actually get one.

    I don't think it will kill land rentals, or mainland, though. There will always be a place for people who want to built their OWN place and not fit to a particular theme.

    For people like me, though, I happily sold my 1024 sqm "prime mainland" Bay City plot to jump on this free plot, which has only half the prims, just for the better neighborhood view.

    Some of us just want to play dollhouse in a cookie-cutter town. I don't know how many of us there are, but hey, we filled it up fast so LL knew their demographic here.

    • Like 5

    Question Regarding Child Avatar

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by Adeon Writer

    Do not allow yourself to have a snapshot taken where you and the object are both in frame and can be seen at the same time.

    That really is the point of all of this. You don't want a snapshot of a child standing next to some bondage thing, for example, and suddenly that picture is on the news. Who cares if you aren’t using it, it still looks terrible out of context.

    Personally I’d advise just not going to adult sims, though. Most I’ve seen really have no place for child avatars. Anything can be made to look bad out of context, and out of context in an Adult region is all you need to get banned.

    • Like 2

    Global Illumination

    in Second Life Viewer

    Posted · Edited by Adeon Writer

    On 7/25/2017 at 1:03 AM, Klytyna said:

    You'd also find that everyone who suddenly found that they cant wear stockings, or translucent silk clothes, or have rain you can still see through, all those things that require blended non binary transparency, would scream blue murder, and come looking for you with torches and pitchforks.
     

    I'm going by memory here but I recall blended alpha looking just fine, it was just not included in the GI pass. This was only a problem when someone tried to match up a blended alpha texture with a identicle, but alpha-free texture, as that would cause what was originally similarly shaded textures to show a seam of shading differences. However, that was the specific case where alpha masking is the correct alternative, which would've played fine with GI if they were around at the same time.

    This can be seen in non-SL games as well, blended alpha plays just fine with GI engines.

     

    It was the lack of alpha masking, and the blended-work arounds that were used as an alternative, that made GI mess them up. But we don't need to do those kinds of things anymore, GI would play just fine with blended alpha, as it is used today.

    As for it being intensive - SL tends to push today's GPU's the hardest knowing tomorrow's GPU's could handle it better. Intensive isn't much of a reason not to include optional eyecandy dor those who can see it. Also it was intensive 5 years ago. Probably not anymore.

    Global Illumination

    in Second Life Viewer

    Posted

    My video really doesn't do the feature justice. I wish I would have taken more pictures with it out in the wild, back in the day. Minus blended alpha content, SL never looked better with it on. It's just never looked the same without it. It brought the entire scene together. Strongly missed.

    Have you seen the new avatars? July 2017

    in Your Avatar

    Posted

    On 7/7/2017 at 8:27 AM, Ivanova Shostakovich said:

       Wow! The AO checks your shape gender. I really did not expect that level of BS. What happened to "My Imagination"? 9_9

    Just to clarify - the script doesn't - and in fact can't - check your gender. It's one of the things Linden was very careful to never let scripts do!

    The message is just a regular chat message when you wear it - you are free to entirely ignore it, it can't stop you. But it may inadvertantly deform you a little!

    Global Illumination

    in Second Life Viewer

    Posted

    Global Illumination, or in laymen's terms, light refraction.

    Does anyone remember this feature from a few years ack? I believe it was killed off because it didn't play well with blended alpha textures; which was bad, because back then we didn't have the option for alpha masking as we do now.

    It was a wonderful feature, I feel like it just came at the wrong time.

    Now that we have proper alpha modes, I wonder if it could return?
     


     

    • Like 1

    Project Bento Feedback Thread

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    I feel like you're somewhat misunderstanding your question ...

     

    Animation files are entirely keyframes. if you have no key frames, you have no animation.

     

    But yes, the animation file on the server contains only keyframes you have made, points of data that mark where on the timeline any bone changed it's rate of rotation. Everything else is tweened. This is so the animation can be played at any speed with any framerate. (Animations will be as smooth as the refresh rate of your monitor, the timeline is floating-point, not frame number)

    Project Bento Feedback Thread

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    Read my post two posts up. We have found translations translate distances relative to the size of the bone being translated, on coordinates relative to that bone. Try it yourself and see.

     

    For example: If you translate a head bone, the distance that bone moves due the animation will scale with the head size slider, so the result looks the same no matter what size the head is. 

     

    ie, if you make a bone translating animation, it will work for all avatar sizes.

    • Like 1

    Project Bento Feedback Thread

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    Raz Welles and I have just found an interesting discovery. It would appear that bone translations DO scale up with the size of the bone being translated - IE, the one reason Vir Linden provided for Bone Translations being disallowed, is actually invalid.

     

    So long as a slider scales up a bone, so will it scale up any relative distances of any translations done on that bone.

     

    I have already personally verified this is the case on main grid. If anyone could indepently verify this - and if you come to the same conclusion, I believe it would greatly assist in the case for allowing them.

     

    You can test this as translations are still allowed on main grid - so you can do your bone translating of non-Bento bones there.

     

    Be sure to test actual bone translation, not translation of attachment points, which are known to not scale, and are being blocked with Bento anyway.

    • Like 2

    Project Bento Feedback Thread

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    Allowing bone translations would only be one solution to current problem with the Bento face bones. But first it's important to actually recognize the problem, before talking about possible ways to fix it.

     

    The problem is: When animating, you want to tug part of a model around, in order to animate it. There's many ways in 3D modeling to accomplish this, but the only one currently available for Project Bento, is bone rotation. So, why is this a problem, and why is bone rotation only, with the current setup of bones, problematic?

     

    When you rig part of a model to a bone, those verts will inheret both the position and rotation of the bone they're weighted to. This is fine if you're moving a limb around - limbs quite litterally work like ball-and-socket joints, so point rotation is the only thing you need to animate "actual" avatar joints realistically.

     

    The problem comes when you want to simulate not the movement of bones, but the movement of muscles, like facial features. Here you aren't animating joints. Nothing is hinging or rotating - things are being tugged spacially. And in 3D modeleing, that is represented by "bones" in techical names only - what they really do is move around spacially, tugging around the verts that are weighted to them.

     

    So can you acomplish that by just rotating the face bones with part of the face weighted to them? Well... sort of. If you keep it subtle. If you put a bone beneath the surface of the avatar's skin, rotating it a little will make the surface slide... with the downside of also making the surface rotate. Raz Welles posted an example of this a few posts back. An example would be an eyebrow raise. You'd need to "rotate" the eyebrow bones up - this would raise them, at least a little, but it would also change the surface of the face so that the eyebrow starts rotating about the bone origin. This means face expressions can not be in any way exagerated, and must be overwelmingly subtle, lest portions of the face start rotating around and distorting unrealistically.

     

    So, adding translations fixes the problem perfectly, right? Yes, it does. But it's also not the only viable solution.

     

    Back before rigs supported bone translation, the need was still the same: You can't do good facial expressions using simple bone rotations, since you need to move the bone without rotating it. The answer was the "spider rig" faces where each bone was actually a chain of 3 bones. This allowed any given end-bone to be repositioned anywhere spacially within the range of the chain, while still having the end bone be at any rotation as well - the problem is you'd need a bone chain for each face bone, hence the spider-like look to the skeleton. This would send the amount of necessary bones into the stratosphere (creating a chain for each face bone so that they can be positioned in space without actual bone translation), but it would save LL the need to fix all the issues with bone translations by avoiding their use altogether. 

     

    Regardless of the solution, the problem is the same: Face bones need to able to be manipulated spacially without changing their angle. Bone translations let you do that directly, but bone chains let you accomplish it in a more limted way with only rotations. Regardless of how it's accomplished, the need is there. The current face bones, with rotation only, are heavily crippled.

    • Like 2

    Project Bento Feedback Thread

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    That's correct; bone translation via BVH only worked by fluke. Bone translation via SL's internal animation format, .anim, was supported natively, but not on purpose.

     

    Also: Many avatars get around the need to relog by playing the reverse animation when a deformed attachment is removed. So long as one is removed before a new one is added, they clean up after themselves and don't trash the avatar.

     

    This of course would not be an acceptable solution for any formal LL feature, and there'd need to be a way to clean up the avatar whenever an animation stops.

     

    But first let's focus on why we need it: Rally creators to make some example rigs and animations, showing what is possible with bone translations, and what work around compromises must be done to achive similar results with rotations only.

    • Like 2

    Project Bento Feedback Thread

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    The Lindens have stated that they want concrete examples of what why bone translations are important - examples of what can be done with translations, and what work-arounds and compromises must be done to accomplish similar results with rotations only. That's a very good point, and yes, we really need some emperical evidence here.

     

    But one problem I feel Linden Lab really should bring to mind is that they didn't actually block bone translations on Aditi. Many people exersizing the Bento skeleton right now have no idea bone translations were even intended to be blocked. You can rig and animate the face just fine right now, and many people are just declaring it "ALL CLEAR!"

    Project Bento Feedback Thread

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    Since potentially everyone's going to be having their avatar_lad.xml files updated with the coming Project Bento, now might be the perfect time to fix some the slightly different origin points for right-side-of-body attachments. Previously the problem with fixing it was not everyone seeing the same thing until everyone was updated.

     

    Fixing it would make having perfectly mirrored attachments much easier since they'd be on the same coordinate system. I believe it was shown to be far too subtle to break existing content.

    • Like 1
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