[YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO POST YOUR FAVORITE PLACE ON THE GRID....]

Used to fly helicopters and planes through it.

[Favorite editor?]

Small continuation about Atom,
Pulsar was supposed to be a community fork of it to continue on. I haven't tried it yet and there's a large contributor list. Maybe someone here that's big on the opensource scene can vouch for it. Pulsar edit - github

(alternatively you can consider Zed instead, from the makers of Atom)

[Favorite editor?]

On 4/4/2024 at 12:47 AM, Wulfie Reanimator said:

[...]

• Atom (open source alternative to Sublime Text)

[...]

Atom officially sunset on December 15th 2022 archived without maintenance. Electron was considered a mistake also, generally. These days there are malicious malwares with it (electron/injection) through discord allegedly. And while it was neat in its day participating in the live edit coding together scene - it probably isn't anything to suggest using over better maintained projects. Unless care is taken so that any risks can not manifest. Though the primary reason to not recommend is that it just won't be current and the chances that people maintain extensions for it properly is similarly small.

Sublime would still be great if they managed to keep costs down. I haven't gotten around to renewing major version licenses since the price increases. A modern alternative to vs code, sublime (only because of cost factor, still single license for all platforms is alright), and notepad++ - for windows would be nice. Personally I use vs code at the moment, but held comfort when there we had at least three major modern choices. Rip atom.

[Getting that feeling again :(]

On 3/18/2024 at 6:53 AM, CaitlinParker said:

I did try to follow the videos that focused mainly on Blender, but even then I got lost.  The keyboard shortcut infographic definitely didn't make it any easier.

You've made a contract with yourself over it and left it hanging over your head. It remains in your profile as a goal. I think it might do you some good to resolve it one way or the other.

Personally I'd suggest reinstalling blender and giving yourself a decent chance. A real patient chance. The hardest part will be trying to not expect too much of yourself. If you need help getting used to shortcuts, or finding how to enable the search menu - I am sure there are plenty of people capable of giving you a pointer in the right direction.

If you struggle with generalistic modelling exercises. Perhaps succeeding with implementing a replica of the basic cube prim with all its functions correctly replicated would feel good for simply succeeding*.

*with the caveat that you'd be excluding any of the torture features. Only the material features, orientation, and physics counts.

[Forum needs a garbage section.]

I wouldn't be interested in how frequented an off-topic section is. I don't care for pumping up numbers with random nattering. What I would be interested in is if off-topic frictions were kept in off-topic somehow. Case in point the frictional grief between BilliJo and Love Z (and other such examples) is the kind of thing I just don't care to see in threads. It was a one job assignment in a thread about garbage and off-topic.

Explain to me how the rest of the forum benefits and advances from the existence of an off-topic section.
Are there issues having and continuing those kinds of discussions in-world between interested parties?
Some other fundamental need?

[Official Statement from Oberwolf Linden]

@Scylla Rhiadra I think what Starberry was trying to suggest was that ***** itself is not illegal if you remove all the illegalities of illegal depictions. But the topic itself has come out because of depictions or activities that are that some A rated venues have to or are expected to moderate against, including and not excluding any other rating.

Some people may feel attacked generally, or may feel some of their friends are attacked generally by the topic if they lose sight of the issue of adult activities specifically.

[Official Statement from Oberwolf Linden]

@Scylla Rhiadra Fair and agreeable response. Matters of internal code of conduct and stuff aren't really in our purview. The acknowledgement of it and ongoing investigations are more a courtesy or so. There was always a risk over time though the more active the content persisted that eventually this situation is born out of it. Dealing with the situation previously more or less just moved it around or at least that is how I perceive it.

Policies and enacting/enforcing policies is more in their immediate circle of control. So the statement and the policies are what is left for us as a topic.

[Official Statement from Oberwolf Linden]

It's not going to fold. They are going to make changes and keep going as Brad has said. The only way it would fold is if the revenue nose dived long term and it wasn't sustainable. This is not the first time Second Life has had this topic. It is at least the second if not third. Off the top of my head relating to a european ruling. Some years back someone was disappointed that not much seemed to have been effective since then to remedy the situation. They posed if they should involve the German government again or something at that point.

Later down the track we arrive at this point with a lot of people speculating based on their preferences and desires in both directions. Curious people note the hard to refute and at the time obtainable confirmations of pointed to content. As well as depictions of early followers of triggering event that have the means and capacity to make such links in detail.

The fact is it has happened, things were found, it has been acknowledged. The sooner everyone gets over that the sooner they can be a practical voice of what is the best balance to address the problem.

[Official Statement from Oberwolf Linden]

3 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Exactly what is the point? I seem to have missed it then.

Some legal matters were referred to earlier in the thread.

[Official Statement from Oberwolf Linden]

Sometimes though people need to keep in mind that people are at times expressing condensed versions of legitimate experiences that happen across the grid. And try to not get overly defensive or touchy about it. There are old infamous beaches closed that have dispersed what you would describe as on topic and assorted 'fans of the playground' types that Zalificent was describing, that some region owners have to deal with. The Lab has always had a land owner responsibility policy out there somewhere regardless of if it was enforced or not. The owners have always had to deal with this topic and as such some have placed signs out to let people know that they will not accept any excuse or reasoning if they are made uncomfortable about a questionable appearance.

[How to stop people from rezzing encroachment ?]

On 10/7/2021 at 8:48 AM, Da5id Weatherwax said:

The old "parcel megaprims pack" is still out there, people, and covers all the possible [...]

Regular supported prims have been increased to a 64m dimension for ages now, you don't need megaprims for any temporary planning work.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

1 hour ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

@NaomiLocketOne might wonder why you so vehemently defend garbage content...

one might wonder why so called garbage content is vehemently described that, when it isn't physically the problem it is made out to be in every place on the grid. It just isn't how it works. But seeing as "someone making money" keeps coming up, it is probably self evident the real reason why this keeps happening even though the grid hasn't fallen over from a booggyman.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

Just now, FinnfinnLost said:

Zeroing out LODs is, something that should remain, even if strict tri limits on custom ones would be enforced. There's a performance advantage to be had when not rendering small things at long or even medium distance at all.

Already done. They even zero out entire objects at distance. ahem.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

Just now, Mollymews said:

or

is clearly something wrong with this scooter. Other people can easy get two or even three times as many geese on their scooters

😺

I want to apply three different reactions but I'm going to have to settle for just the one. Not my fault
I do like your tongue in cheek post, though. props.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

I am presuming you will next go: aha, gotcha, it was one of those fancy render a 3D object on a webpage natively. As if the web browser dictates a 3d model for other engine contexts.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

7 minutes ago, FinnfinnLost said:

Quite frankly, I find your disrespect for programmers a bit insulting. In fact, I recently received a video by an artist, it was supposed to play in an embedded context. However, the system lacked the resources to properly decode it, resulting in stutters all over. And you know what? Instead of yelling at me to buy better hardware or write my own optimized media player, he edited it to be easier on resources. Ya know. Working with the limits of the system.

You mistake disrespect for programmers with understanding reality and the difference between good programmers and not so crash hot ones. There is a fun little programmer joke that says "You don't need artists, you only need programmer art." Artists don't cry over it. Boo hoo. It means there is a minimal need for execution ie: proxy art. Various levels of art happen after. If you have not reached the limit of your style guide you have not finished polishing your product up to the time limit for production. So the work does not stop until then.

Good luck with that "disrespect" out there. All you did here was tell me you're going to bring up the rendering of a video as some how a thing, when that is completely to do with programmers and nothing to do with the art asset it rasterised. That is what is off kilter. It doesn't relate at all in any way to the asset that is in it. It could have been the best or the worst it doesn't make a difference to choosing better compression. Why did you even go there?

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

3 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

There is no game out there where the kind of mesh creators in SL output is "normal".

And yes, without pressure, bad creators who make a killing on sales aren't going to listen, because sales are the only metric of whether they are doing well or not.

Not quite. If it grinds their own system to a halt or doesn't fulfill a purpose most of them aren't going to kill their own brand with it. There are some use cases where small bevels can be found in big titles. Just not "everywhere". But they do, do it. But you're arguing extremes contextually that are lost in scaling. They are making a killing because they made something someone wanted. It worked out long term and someone was a repeat customer, or they were not. Actual artists do have peer review.

Yes I get you can make x thing, throw it out there with a price, and someone gets said thing. This is still not the way.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

1 minute ago, FinnfinnLost said:

I write code for a living. Not in the graphics department, but certain principles still apply.

Also, it's great that id did it. But as a content creator it is your job to make sure you work WITH the engine, not churn out stuff that bogs it down and then insist on changes in the implementation.

That is however a two way street. If your studio CEO tells you, you will let his artists do more, you will or find another studio. Subsequently ID's CEO was right to tell his team they have every reason to be proud of what they had accomplished. Even when speedrunners were exploiting both code execution and level design. Right 100% that they should proud of what they accomplished. It is not just the artists that have to work with the constraints. You can have situations where you have worked under the constraints. A bad shader will alone will still wreck the scene regardless of the rest of the program. An engine is but one code revision. A engine that does not revise slowly makes its way to the hearts and minds of the retro. Not a bad thing in itself for the love of history and a childhood. We all do it. Emulators are awesome also.

I am not saying they should adopt a particular engine. I am saying, people need to leave artists to last which is the only sane thing. There are multiple points in SL's history across different people involved that have found a given issue and fixed it. They write about it, and it is commendable. It is also a bitter victory when you consider how many years SL has suffered a given point of failure or a terrible server configuration. You will not inspire artists to do better here or to think of this place first instead of last, if all you do is tell them to put up with the engine.

They will not listen to that, and have every reason not to.

At least the LSL mentors are more helpful, generally.

Art is as a subject unto itself, only held back by programmers that wish they were the programmer sitting next to them.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

1 minute ago, FinnfinnLost said:

That's a logical fallacy if I ever saw one. You can read a 2GB text file in chunks if whatever algorithm you're running on it allows it. If you want to draw a model then you need the entire model and textures in memory, preferably the graphics card's. Yes, texture streaming is a thing. But you still gotta render whatever is on screen.

Furthermore, there are numerous bottlenecks that have nothing to do with the game code, but the GPU's pipeline and the connection to the rest of the system. If the memory bus can't keep up, you get long delays before a high-quality texture can be rendered. If you fill the VRAM with unoptimized abominations, it will cause the GPU to either give up entirely or fall back to, for example, system RAM.

Bottom line, performance is also at the mercy of what you do with/to the graphics pipeline. And the performance of that , in turn, is heavily impacted by the content you wish to draw.

Had two courses about this kinda stuff. Who'd have thought it would get useful in the SL forums of all places?

 

Your first paragraph argued against itself, re: admitting that ID software were indeed correct, you can protect against it.

I don't argue that much about bottlenecks, they are everywhere. A lot of them before your art asset is ever a consideration in fact. Agreed what you do with the graphics pipeline has a lot to do with it. Which is also the very point that you can take a small file and make it a larger one at runtime easily - which has nothing to do with an artist. A technical artist can explain that, they also write code. It is good that you took courses, I also did. That doesn't make either of us experts. But I will point out, that I appreciate you expanding on my information. I only hope that you understand the gravity and weight of it, and the responsibility of good code (including shaders).

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

6 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

And to be clear this isn't just a problem isolated to SecondLife, this is a problem on the unity asset store, on turbosquid, on every single marketplace where creators are effectively shielded from peer review or supervision (like when working under an artistic director) and are only beholden to the person purchasing their work.

I would agree with you on balance, but not on strict principle. You're trying to apply a standardisation to a dataset that is already in general already standardised - but there is no such standardisation to a programmer. Yes there is peer review, but there is also revision history for a reason. The industry giants with art directors get this, which is why Digital Extremes reworked Warframe and rebelled against Nvidia's particle direction writing their own, because they could do it better and were long due to give back to the community that gave to them. And they did. They did not make excuses about it and come up with some nonsense that they had to overly punish art creation itself. They did the job.

Now I am going to stress, my rebuttal to you is not quite a rebuttal. It is mild for context, and specific. I am for performance and optimisation. And there will for sure come a time I will come across the very thing "some" of you are up on arms about. Just like when some land barons write out about some little feud that seems funny, then you see people doing the very things. It doesn't matter.

What matters is that the culture here is wrong on too many points. Attempts to assert a rigid nonsense that is demonstratably actually against the industry or buried so far in the past it only exists for stylistic reasons. And instead of making themselves more employable or better mentors, insist of trying to tell people they should be finantially put out, the task made harder, or some other nonsense that doesn't apply. To boot they even forget SL's own history and try to recite it to me (hense Exodus viewer).

There are better ways to approach the issue. If it were true that a "well known creator" happened to "break the grid" as such, they would no longer be here, and they would be instead infamous.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

To be very blunt, if you read a 2GB text file all at once, you are to blame, not the text file.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

Just now, Penny Patton said:

This you?

 

That is, and it is true. If you explore sorting algorithms you will not argue about it or make a logical fallacy. You would also not try to miss-represent it if you understood a file on a disk or in memory.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

8 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

At the very least now I don't have to point at other threads for an example of the kind of nonsense I described in my original post.

Actually you do, because regardless every year every studio will progress to higher detail to write home about in their favourite magazine as they have always done. I never said they don't rework art assets to meet the balance between technology and a given software engineers teams capability. That was never asserted, but it was a nice attempt to make something up. Be more professional next time and expand your horizons across more studios - they've even written books about how to publish once for every platform in the past. People just didn't like the outcome of that kind of performance.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It is not realistic to expect SL to perform like a game, or even for the same rules to apply. If SL's problems could be fixed by "better code", someone would have yanked a game engine off the shelf, bootstrapped SL's fully open source login code to it and we would all be buying them cakes. That having happed exactly zero times after 18 years in this hole should tell you something.

 

Again, if it wasn't for people with TPV's challenging the status quo, you wouldn't have advanced lighting and better materials in all 18 years. They did, and so you do.

[Proposal - FAST MESH]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

SL's problems aren't in the code. They are fundamental design decisions and key to SL. Take them away and replace them with resulting "better code" and we don't have SL anymore. We have Sansar, and that went so well you're still here.

You're basing your entire argument on some pretty huge assumptions about not only how all this works, but why it works the way that it does.

Everything SL allows you to do comes with an associated cost. Much of that cost is systemic, unavoidable and happens way before rendering even starts.

 

That is mostly untrue, but you are entitled to your opinion. Finding performance improvements in code, or changing how you approach an existing problem has literally nothing to do with sansar or abandoning SL, at all.

As for "gently punishing people that don't do how they want to do it" they already do through counting UV splits as extra verticies. They don't need to go further, and it isn't even entirely correct as demonstrated externally to SL that you can in fact build entire sims on a fraction of the texture use by increasing splits. You're preaching to the choir and missing too many marks.

(ETA: fortunately there is an alternative method to splits that can reduce exposure to that budget penalty, but that comes at a cost to freedom and its own limitations.)