ChinRey

Alwin Alcott wrote: these prices are completely and totally in line what developed land always did when it was released. Like it or not, but it;s how commercial sales work. Don't want to spend it?...fine... don't. Indeed. Personally I have no interest in those parcels at all. It's not somewhere I would like to live and I can't see how a project like that can have any significant influence on the rest of SL. But the fact that somebody actually are willing to spend that kind of money on Second Life land in 2016, now that is interesting. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that LL still has the drive and creativity to take on such a project.

TheDandy Schism wrote: What I'd like to know is why are the Private Full Sim Estates being discriminated against by only getting 5,000 more primage whereas the Mainland gets 7,500? I don't know but one possible explanation is that private full sims have higher avatar limits than mainland sims. With more resources assigned to handling avatars, there is bound to be less available for other content.

Drongle McMahon wrote: or why some twisted prim shapes end up with those astronomical physics weight figures That is certainly a bug. A jira on it was accepted, but then resolved as "Trivial" ... Hmmmm... I'm sure we all know that are some people who always get hung up on tiny details and fail to see the big picture... and I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some of them might ask how a bug that has caused inexperienced builders more headache and gray hairs than anything else in SL and also is the reason why we have to keep this awkward double LI accounting system could be described as "trivial". But then again, some people just never get it. Drongle McMahon wrote: I'm not sure if Havok treats the physics of a sculpt as 36 triangles or a single 14 sides convex hull (the calculated physics weight suggests triangles) ... It is actually the low LOD of the torus, which has 162 triangles (9x9x2). It's a bit odd because the two ends are different. One has the flat faces you can see, while at the other they are angled. Woops, sorry I got the poly count wrong. But you gave the answer, with one side angled inwards it isn't a convex hull at all so it has to be handled as a triangle list. Makes you wonder: since the goal obviously was to maximize the sculpt's physics weight, why didn't they use a full resolution torus? or - even better - a twisted one? Just like Arton I need a bit of time to reply to everything you posted here, Drongle. It was quite a load of info! (Edit: about sculpt physics, before I re-read Drongle's post I completely forgot the fact that the physics weight is independent of size. But the physics shape can't possibly be a single convex hull since it isn't actually convex and even though I have very little, if any, respect left for LL's original sculpt/mesh software developer team at this stage, I find it very hard to believe they made it from multiple hulls.)

Medhue Simoni wrote: Contact Troy@lindenlab.com if you have any thoughts on this, or want to be involved. Want to is one thing. Question is if I have the time. I'll think about it.

arton Rotaru wrote: ArtistDoc.pdf Wow, thank you Arton! That's actually not the document I had in mind. Somebody (I think it was Aquila) once showed me a pdf file with an introduction to Havok written by LL. Unfortunately the computer I had a copy of it on is long dead and I don't have the URL either. Among other things, I seem to remember it said that a pyramid was the second most efficient and that's not a Havok shape at all. Anyway, a brief look at these two docs suggests that SL isn't utilizing Havok very well, at least not for static objects. Paragraph 1.12.2.5 in the ArtistDoc is perhaps the clearest: The sphere and the capsule are the two most efficient shapes - we do not have access to either at all A cube is more efficient than a triangle yet we can often have farily complex unanalyzed physics with dozens of triangles and still get a lower physics weight than a two cube analyzed physics shape A convex hull (other than a cube) is the second most expensive shape yet we can have quite complex hulls as part of an analyzed physics with little or no increase in physics weight. The weight of a physics model made from a single triangle is 0.200, a cube is 0.360 but according to the documentation, the cube is the lightest The physics weight of a prim cube is 0.060, a mesh cube 0.360 The physics weight of a prim cylinder is lower than that of a mesh triangle The documentation suggests we should minimize the number of triangles but we can often reduce physics weight by adding triangles in strategic places (even when those added triangles don't seem to help define any of the lighter Havok shapes) I'm not sure if Havok treats the physics of a sculpt as 36 triangles or a single 14 sides convex hull (the calculated physics weight suggests triangles) but in either case it seems to be an unneccessarily complex shape I can't find any explanation why size matters to triangle physics Nor can I find any explanation why long and narrow triangles are such a bad thing... or why some twisted prim shapes end up with those astronomical physics weight figures It seems the mesh uploader only uses two shapes, the triangle and the convex hull. So a sphere is represented by a list of triangles or a very complex convex hull and a cube is defined as a convex hull even though exactly the same shape can bne handled better when defined as a cube. That's clearly not the best way to do it.

IvanBenjammin wrote: but their silence on most things mesh makes me feel that they don't understand their own system, and that's disheartening. Oh yes, Oz has actually more or less confirmed that. But to be fair, we shouldn't really blame the current SL team for the sins of the past. Linden Lab's development work is far better organized and much better focused than ever before. (That's why I suggested a time machine earlier in this thread. Problems should always be handled by their roots and in this case we need one of those for that. ) The Lindens who developed SL mesh didn't document what they did properly neither internally nor for us users. Key people in that project don't work here anymore and even if they did, they probably wouldn't remember in detail all the cool (presumably) and unusual (definitely) shortcuts they took more than five years ago. That's the situation and we just have to deal with it the best we can. IvanBenjammin wrote: Maybe I'm just tired after wrestling with the uploader for an entire day (I hate you so much, physics...). Oh, the physics. That's a different can of worms. This probably isn' very useful : http://anarchy.cn/manual/12/HavokSdk_ProgrammersManual/bk03.html LL did actually publish a simplified end user's manual for Havok. It is a pdf file somewhere in the wiki (Aquila, do you remember where?) and if I remember correctly, it seems to contradict Havok's own manual in at least one crucial detail. Beq once suggested to me that SL is using a simplified rather than a full version of Havok, not sure if that's the case.

Qie Niangao wrote: ... and as I mentioned above, three of the six ready-to-rez prefabs are named "... Shop1" through "Shop3" so at some point some Mole or other must have at least thought they were making commercial structures. Or to put it another way: who wants to live in a fully transparent glass house in an A rated sim? I don't think that one at least was really intended as a residental building.

Sorry if my paintbrush reply sounded a bit flippant, I just couldn't resist it. The answer is of course that all copyrights have some sort of expiration date. It simply wouldn't be possible to enforce them throughout the centuries. shaniqua Sahara wrote: copyleft is freedom not freeloading. This started as a thread about ripped content and I don't really think you should mix copyleft into that because as you well know, respect for copyright is one of the most fundamental principles of the copyleft ideology. People should be allowed to, but never forced to, give their works away for free. I have the deepest respect for the copyleft movement and I've certainly contributed to it myself as a musician, reasearcher, curator, 3D modeller, texture maker and even as a programmer. In-world I've probably given away more of my own works than I've sold, I'm the host and curator of one of the three complete Arcadia Asylum libraries and I've uploaded and give away for free all the official Linda Kellie texture packages. I can't tell you what I've done outside SL since I'm not rpepared to give you my real name or any of my other internet aliases here so you have to take my word for that. Except, I do actually use the Chin Rey name at Filter Forge too. If you want to, you can take a look at the few filters I've contributed to public domain there. Since I mention Filter Forge, it is slightly annoying to see PAT and Peeps and Skye and Timeless and Toolshed and Kismet and whatever they're called those countless sellers of hastily created FF textures make good money from the work my fellow filter creators have done (afaik nobody's uploaded any of my textures from there yet). But it's part of the deal. You know when you click on that upload button that others may do whatever they like with your work, even sell it as their own. If that's not acceptable, don't submit your filter to the public library. It's a very different story when it comes to what skilled 3D modellers try to make commercially. Making a substantial amount of content at that quality level is so time consuming that uness you are rich, are living on a pension or have somebody else to support you, you have to ensure some sort of income from it. And Second Life really need content of that kind. Not all the time. There's more than enough room for less optimized amateur and learner builds in SL but only if the backbone of content is efficient enough there atcually is computing resources to spare for those less efficient builds and the overall lag level is low enough the happy amateurs don't have to spend more money on hardware than they are prepared to to actually get in. And it's so easy to cheat. Put together some clumsy attempt at a hedge with Mesh Generator, take a delicate picture for MP, sell for 500 Lindens, get yourself profiled at a video blog that isn't at all sponsored by LL. A few resource hogging items won't make mcuh different to a sim, let alone the grid as a whole. But take thousand of copies of one of them and spread all across the sims - it doesn't take many of those before we have a significant performance drop, excluding a significant number of people from SL and reducing the overall experience quality for us all. Oh wel, this turned into a rant again, when will I ever learn. All amateur orchestras I know of hire professional musicians for bigger events, not to replace the amateur members but to support them and helpt them shine. We need something like that in Second Life too and IP protection is essential for recruiting and keeping those professionals. It's worrying that LL doesn't seem to understand that. Or maybe they understand but jsut can't find a solution

Wings 3D's sculpt map exporter only works with 32x32 or 64x64 grids with the vertices numbered in a very specific order. There used to be ready made templates but I don't think they are available anymore. If you know how to launch Blender, you can easily make one yourself: Launch Blender In the Create tab to the left, select "Grid" In the "Add Grid" options that turn up, set both X Subdivisions and Y Subdivisions to 32 (64 is pointless since those extra vertices will be omitted from the end result anyway) In the Edit menu, Export as Wavefront (obj) Launch Wings 3D, import the obj. file you created and start moving the vertices around. But do not under any circumstance add or remove vertices, that will break the exporter. You should also be aware that like other dodgy sculpt creator tools, such as Rokuro, Wings 3D creates oversampled maps with 128x128 pixel resolution. You really should scale them down to 64x64 in an image editor before uploading to SL; oversampled scupt maps are horrendously laggy and often fail to load.

shaniqua Sahara wrote: yes. a brush is an invention, according to "IP" rights why shouldn't that inventor be compensated..... Are you saying painters steal the paint brushes they use? I always thought they bought them. Yes, I'm all with you there. Painters should of course pay the creators of the brushes and paint and canvases and everything else they use!

shaniqua Sahara wrote: there is no such thing as intellectual property. nobody owns ideas, words or meshes. why is it ok to use words that some else made to write your story or colors some else make to paint your art? I can go along with that as long as you agree to extend it to everything. We shouldn't have to pay for food or (RL) housing or computers or electricity or anything. It should all be free for the good of the people! I come from a musician background and saw what music streaming did: record sales just stopped overnight, many good musicians were no longer able to make a living and since musicians need food and shelter too and those things for some reason aren't free, they had to give up their jobs and try to find something else. shaniqua Sahara wrote: you'd be no where without things other people invented That's right. But you know what, those people who inveted... they too needed (and need) food and shelter. They don't just want, they need some sort of income from the work they do. That is what intellectual property protecion is all about in the end, it's to ensure that creative people of all kinds will be able to continue to create for the good of all mankind.

shaniqua Sahara wrote: my two cents. most people who upload a lot of meshes have to take Lindens into account. it is often ten times more costly uploading meshes with lower LODs than not. less prim count, cheaper price = a must do for most. No, it isn't. Good LoD models do not increase the upload cost. shaniqua Sahara wrote: while i'm here i'd like to also mention that most "content creators" are people trying to have fun making things, their not trying to be artists or have the know how to make everything as otptimal as it could be. Yes, and as I said earlier in this thread, we have to distinguish between the people who create just for their own enjoyment and those who expect to get paid for their work here. shaniqua Sahara wrote: i say turn up your LOD settings to where you can, make what you like how you like and go to town. eventually some will get better at it and others won't. that's sLife. we're all different sorts and stripes in it together whether we like it or not. I may be a blue eyed idealist but to me this is very much about making Second Life accessable to more people. Higher LoD setting means higher hardware requirements and not everybody who might enjoy Second Life are willing and able to pay for that. Just one quick and random comparasion: I haven't tried either of them but judging by the stats a Nvidia GeForce GT 740 should be able to perform about the same at LoD setting 1 as a GeForce GTX 980 at LoD setting 4. The price difference is about 320 dollars. That is the actual cost we all have to pay for poorly optimized cotnent in Second Life (actually it's even more since the 980 also needs a bigger and more expensive power supply - not sure how much that adds to the price). A few extra cents in upload charges is nothing by comparasion.

Drongle McMahon wrote: "you get higher LI if you don't keep your vertices straight" Yes. I guess we were just thinking about how they annoyingly get unstraight in the first place. Yes and joke aside, it is both interesting and quite useful to understand that better. Drongle McMahon wrote: I suppose the reason the strightness helps is because it improves the compressibility of the uploaded data. Is that your impression too? I can't think of any other explanation. As far as I know, the formula for calculating download weight only contains two variables, the item's dimensions and the size of the compressed file. It is worth noticing that sometimes you can actually get lower download weight with slightly offset vertices. That's conistent with the compressability explanation since perfectly aligned vertices isn't necessarily what gives compressor the easiest bytes to handle. I can't see how a human can reliably find those other sweet - and even sweeter - spots but it should actually be possible to write a computer program for it.

Aquila Kytori wrote: and can also confirm you are perfectly correct, no deviation what so ever when moving a vertices 0.25, 0.5 or 0.75 along the x axis. This is way above my head, I'm just a simple builder. All I know is that you get higher LI if you don't keep your vertices straight.

Chic Aeon wrote: BUT while I was there I looked at the land tab, and I WAS RIGHT about the prim count. It is DOUBLE what a regular mainland 1024 would be now - 702. So pretty confusing especially since the video says differently. Nothing new there. It's the same setup as Nautilus and Bay City and, if I understand correctly, some private as estates as well. More than half the sim is public land with a fairly low prim use and the sapre prims form there are reassigned to the house parcels. That being said, isn't it about time we stopped being obsessed by prim count? Take a look at old sims like Pyri Peaks, Vintage Village or Damania for example. People were able to build like that with 15,000 prims back when size limit was 10 m and there was no mesh. With quality mesh and other modern building techinques these sims could have been done at 1500 prims each. WIth modern building techinques, higher sim prim limit and double parcel prim quota you effectively have 30 times as much land impact per square meter as they had back then and I simply can't understand how it can possibly be room for that much content unless you stack sky platforms so close you could jump from one to the next.

Prokofy Neva wrote: I counted 32 houses on the sim I was looking at closely which is why I said 32. Perhaps some sims have less if they also have the infohub on them. No, they have 24 each. It's much easier to count on the map than on site but you can also do a prim count reality check, with 32 702 prim parcels there would only ahve been 36 prims left in the sim for the roads, the plants, the houses and everything else Ancient and Abnor Moles have put there.

Pamela Galli wrote: So, 64 houses per region. 24 I'm wondering if it's worth the bother to make a series of houses specially to match the region. It's easy enough a style to follow and houses of this complexity shouldn't be more than 10-12 LI but there may not be big enough a market,

Aquila Kytori wrote: I was curious about what you meant about not using modifiers because of “vertex drift”... Yes, I suppose I didn't explain that properly. Say your mesh has to vertices, one with the coordinates <50.000,50.000,50.000>, the other <50.000,50.000,10.000>. Move the second vertice to <50.001,50.000,10.000> and you get a significant increase in download weight. Significant on this scale of course. Two vertices don't cause any download weight worth mentioning anyway and won't even make a mesh but apply the principle of precision vertice alignment whenever possible and you can save an amazing amount of LI. The almost 90% reduction me and Arton managed to demonstrate with our hexagons is a bit extreme but 10-20% is not at all unusual. Here's a very simple example, a torus with 24-12 resolution (576 tris):  If I use the decimate modifier to reduce the triangle count to 144 for the mid LoD model, I get this shape:  Download weight 0.402 with auto generated low and lowest LoD models:  If I decimate manually to 144 tris, the model looks like this:  A visually better solution but right now it's the download weight that counts. It's 0.379  Aquila Kytori wrote: Accurate to 7 decimal places, I repeated for moving 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5 etc up to 1.0 along x axis. The 0.5 was exactly 0.5 in the print out but all the rest had a similar deviation as the first. Was this the kind of “drift" that you were referring to ? If so does the collada exporter export to 7 or 8 decimal places ? surely not . I don't know about 7 or 8 decimal places but remember it can add up. Dodecagon freshly created in Blender, except it's UV mapped:  Same with vertices lined up as well as they can be in Blender:  With the top face shifted 0.0001 mm on the y axis: 

Dain Shan wrote: Depends on what you call a "Decent LOD" Better than 99.99 % of the meshes for sale in SL. An item this size will have its first theoretical switch point at more than 100 m distance even with RenderColumeLoDFactor set at 1 so it's almost impossible to mess up the LoD even if you try. Dain Shan wrote: Also you said it yourself.. its a sculpt / MESH combo. Yes, and that's an important point. In this case I needed mesh for the physics and then I added two extra rocks to the mesh since they didn't increase the LI anyway but it's not about whether prims, sculpts or mesh is the best. It's the combination that is the best - together they offer far more options than either of the three does on its own.

Drongle McMahon wrote: Are you saying that all Blender modifiers suffer from this "wobble" effect? I didn't know about the wobble effect until you mentioned it here but Blender has "vertice drift" even for vertices that are supposed to remain unchanged and this drift can often be big enough to affect the LI. The algorithms used by the modifiers don't know about SL's sensitivity to vertice positioning and do not take that into account. The only way to get max. optimisation is to check every vertice manually. On second thought, that might be taking things a bit further than most mesh makers are prepared to go but it's not actually that difficult or time consuming once you've got the routines down and prepare for it all through the modelling process. Drongle McMahon wrote: Anyway, I wrote an R function that does the rounding of the normals I described (13,000 or so of them) in about half a second (on ssd disc). That's fast enough for me. Wow, yes that sounds like a useful tool! I guess it's time for me to take the plunge and learn the dae syntax. If I only can find the bits about meh models among allt he talk of animations in the docs.

arton Rotaru wrote: But you bring a valid vector to the equation which I never thought about. Upload cost. That could be another reason why some people skip LOD models. Though, if upload cost is really a reason to hamper models from being shown as good as they can, that would be really sad. There may well be people who try to save upload cost by skimping on the LoD. Compared to some of the other fallacies we've mentioned here, that one seems downright plausible. Download weight doesn't really affect upload cost very much and, as we have shown here and in several other threads on the forum, poorly made LoD models doesn't really save downlaod weight anyway. Sassy once said that any upload cost higher than 11 L$ was a clear sign of a faulty mesh. I thnk that's a bit extreme but 12-20 L$ upload cost definitely means you should reexamine the mesh before uploading. Higher than 20 means there's bound to be something wrong somewhere, possibly with the exception of large fitted meshes and other unusually complex objects that jsut can't be split up in a sensible way.

Chic Aeon wrote: It is certainily likely and quite possible that those reviews aren't actual reviews at all. It's possible but in this case I doubt it. The reviews were well spread out in time for a start. A while ago I stumbled across another piece of crap with a suspiciously large amount of five star reviews and decided to investigate a bit. I looked at the profiles of the reviewers and couldn't find anything that suggested foul play. Genuine SL'ers with very different ages and parts of very different inworld groups so I'm fairly sure they wrote those reviews in good faith. However, some of them had their home listed in their picks and I went and had a look. None of them was actually using the house they had given such a positive review of. I guess the love didn't last. Chic Aeon wrote: I doubt seriously that the person on your land would have bought the house if his LOD wasn't set up so high. It's probably more like: see pretty picture on MP ... buy. The LoD isn't actually a problem in this particular case. It's a very small sky platform with fairly tall screens around it so the basic structure will always show in full LoD. This is the reason why I allow the house on my land. I don't even want to think of how it would work in a normal more open environment though. Chic Aeon wrote: We will be living with the aftermath of "how to make your scuplties look better" notecard instructions for a long while I am afraid. Yes, that's another of the Seven Big Blunders I mentioned earlier.

Very interesting. I didn't keep the file so I can't show my UV map but it wasn't actually that different. I had the ends joined to the last quad in the row so the row didn't extend all the way across the grid. I suppose that's the explanation. I would think the most LI efficient UV map would be to have the side and the ends mapped separately, each covering the whole grid but I'm not going to test it because this has given me another important point to make. Arton's and my examples show one way a skilled SL mesh maker can manipulate the LI without resorting to LI butchery but they also illustrate another perhaps even more important point: All these examples are in full LoD, that is all LoD models are identical. That means no breakdown at any distance and no Li changes when the object is resized. And even so, no matter how hard I tried to maximize the LI but I simply couldn't get it up to 1. I've seen people who regard themselves as skilled mesh makers upload simple cubes with poor LoD. Now, you can of course ask what (if anything) goes through the mind of somebody who believes a mesh cube in SL is a good idea at all but even so, how on earth do they manage to mess up the LoD??? This is the level of ignorance we see far too often. And, just to avoid any misunderstanding, I'm not talking about the many unpretentious people who find joy putting things together in SL, I'm talking abut people who call themselves experts, market their builds as "high quality" and expect to be paid quite substantial amounts of Lindens for it even though they fail to graps even the most basic principles of the craft they pretend to be masters of. I couldn't mention names here even if I wanted to (which I don't) but there is a new house on my land now. The tenant wanted it and it's hidden way up on a sky platform so OK, I don't mind. It's a dodgy build in any way but the most noticeable detail is the house control panel. It's a flattened mesh cube. That is, it's a mesh cube if you cam in on it, at any reasonable viewing distance it's a mesh triangle. I got a bit curious so I checked the maker's profile and it was full of EULA, what you were allowed to do and especially what you were not allowed to do with his masterworks (which incidentally aren't even modifialbe and certainly not transferable). Checked out MP, that house costs 1495 Lindens, it's marketed as low LI even though it weighs in at a whopping 18 (for a very simple structure with horrible LoD) and it has eight 5 star reviews, including some rather recent! The maker obviously can't make a proper mesh to save his life yet he's been able to fool enough of the people he had foisted his garbage onto to believe it was top notch! This is not an unusual story and it's what ruins Second Life and causes most of the mesh disasters. It's not the people who read and contribute to this forum. Everybody here are eager to learn how to improve our skills no matter how good or poor they are at the moment. If we weren't we wouldn't be here. The problem isn't of all the unskilled but unpretentious builders either. The problem are all those "builders" who think they already know everything and are so full of themselves they don't realize the only thing they've mastered is ignorance. Oh well, this turned into a rant. Sorry about that. Here's another suggestion for Patch, assuming he read my first one but couldn't find a time machine: Go to Meauxle Bureaux and delete it. If you really want to promote quality building, you just can't afford to have a textbook example How Not To Make Mesh as the "Home of the Linden Department of Public Works". Besides, some of the people who committed items to that monstrosity have later grown into quite decent mesh makers and they really don't deserve to have their beginners' mistakes displayed that way.

arton Rotaru wrote: Mine comes in at 0.255. :matte-motes-tongue: Interesting. I can't see a way to achieve that number...  I mean exactly that number of course On the other end of the scale:  I couldn't get it all the way up to 1.2. Sorry. And a final one - this is what's technically known as cheating (or "no UV map" if you like):  Come to think fo it, maybe I can see how Arton got a slightly different base value than me, different UV mapping could do that

Aquila Kytori wrote: Just a guess, could it be that maybe, perhaps or be that possibly the first has faces aligned exactly to X or Y and Z axis ? You figured it out right away??? Now let's see if anybody else can guess. And no cheating! Don't look at Aquila's answer! Seriously, this is a rather extreme example but a 20-30% change in download weight depending on the alignment of the vertices in the model and on the UV map is not unusual at all. Unfortunately, One of the invetibable consequences of that is going to be very, very unpopular: Never ever use a modifier in Blender to alter the geometry of your model!Not if you want the best possible LI that is. The reason si that it'll take so long to clean up the file after the modifier you're always better off doing the job manually. I actually never work in Object Mode in Blender at all. I go to Edit Mode and give each and every vertice the personal attention they deserve. Edit: forgot to actually answer Aquila's question: Aquila Kytori wrote: Just a guess, could it be that maybe, perhaps or be that possibly the first has faces aligned exactly to X or Y and Z axis ? Well, an equal sided hexagon can't really have faces aligned to both x and y axis at the same time of course and both models are precisely aligned on z (if I had changed that too, download weight might well have ended up at 1.2) but yes, you got the idea.