Kurshie Muromachi
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Posts posted by Kurshie Muromachi
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In regards to some of the discussion on gamers, VR and stuff, the New Paradigm Strategy Group did survey on gamers. It surveyed over 3000 people from the US in Q4 2019. You can check out the stats at the following link.
https://research.npstrategygroup.com/gaming/
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16 hours ago, animats said:
Epic probably got the GPU to do much of the work, a big advance over the old GLOD system.
I was looking around and came across something that they could be utilized to do this dense mesh processing on the GPU. Something known as Mesh Shading. And, the RDNA2 on the PS5 incorporates Mesh Shading. The thing is that this tech has been around for a while.
You can look here for more info. Here's a snippet...
QuoteToday’s graphics pipelines, with vertex, tessellation, and geometry shaders, are very effective at rendering the details of a single object, but still have limitations when trying to replicate the detail of the real world. In particular, each object requires its own unique draw call from the CPU, and the shader model is a per-thread model, which limits the types of algorithms that can be used.
Efficient processing of geometry is one of the cornerstones of real-time computer graphics, and NVIDIA has a long history of innovation on this front: our very first GPU, GeForce 256, offloaded the CPU from having to perform this computationally expensive task; GeForce 3 was the world’s first programmable GPU, giving developer unprecedented control over geometry processing; and the Fermi architecture introduced tessellation - a technique commonly used in film to represent geometry detail at its finest scale.
Now, with VR, Ray Tracing, and complex games chasing photorealism, the demand for finer geometric fidelity is higher than ever before. To accommodate these ever-increasing requirements for more efficient geometry handling, the Turing architecture introduces Mesh Shading, an entirely new programming model for geometry, merging the flexibility of compute shaders with the efficiency of the hardware-scheduled graphics pipeline. And best of all, Mesh Shading’s new, more flexible model enables developers to eliminate CPU draw call bottlenecks through the use of more efficient algorithms for producing triangles.
Here's a tech video of it.
Update: Turns out that it may or may not be just Mesh Shading. Still unsure of this aspect. Anyways, looks like this thing refered to as virtualized geometry is actually something unique and was initially considered in 2009 in its rough form. There appears to be software rasterization of triangles involved. It's mentioned that 2 software rasterizers are running in async compute. They also do virtualized shadow maps. (Refer here) There's probably even more. It will be interesting to see more specifics come out.
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8 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:
They use the words "unlimited/limitless" a lot, but I have to wonder what the limits really are.
My guess is that this is more to do with the production workflow (hence the Zbrush references) than it is to do with the target runtime. The target runtime is probably just automagic stuff within the limitation of hardware specifications.
8 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:And as a gamer, I do seriously worry that we're going to get even more 100-200GB+ games.
I thought the same thing. Last game I got (Red Dead Redemption 2 for PC) was quite a download. I can't imagine them distributing raw/full-rez content for target platforms. There's gotta be some optimization/crunching somewhere in the packaging. From the looks of the article I linked, they seem to be using traditional methods of delivery where needed but for higher-end stuff maybe they're considering the cloud for on-demand streaming. Flight Simulator 2020 has over 2 petabytes of content and they utilize Azure cloud for on-demand. So, maybe it works both ways. There's likely packaging optimization for target needs but also the option for on-demand streaming when needed for people who can handle it.
15 minutes ago, Hooten Haller said:Also notice the demo only mentioned the PS5 and didn't discuss how portable that quality is to, say, a general OS.
In the article I linked above, it mentions the following...
QuoteThe demo is demonstrating the highest level of quality, which is available on PlayStation 5 and other next-generation hardware. Every other platform that doesn’t have these capabilities will go through a more traditional rendering pipeline, in which we’ll take these assets you’ve built and scale them down to more traditional LODs, rendering them so you can — there will be a version of this demo you could run on Android devices from three years ago. It will have much lower polygon detail, but it’ll be the same scene and you can build the same game.
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Anyways, I like the ideas for UE5. I think what they're trying to do here is what Blender Eevee is doing but on a game engine level with platform targeting + backwards compatibility. They're looking for ways to improve the production/iteration process because games do take a lot of effort and anything that can improve the workflow is a pretty big deal IMO. I imagine there's still going to be some handy work involved in some aspects like character animation where manual labor is critical to make a character work right. But I could see Zbrush models working more for static models. Would like to see more details on the production → gameplay process.
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More information here with Q&A on specifics. Sounds awesome.
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Blender 2.82
in Mesh
To add to Wulfie's response...
9 hours ago, animats said:Where did they hide that menu item?
There's a dev entry for providing search (F3) enhancement to find where something is in the menus. They have an example screen there so you can see what it looks like. I'm not sure what the status of this is in terms of making use of the feature and which version it's in.
7 hours ago, animats said:Why is my toolbar at the bottom when the documentation shows it at the top?
Something doesn't sound right. The toolbar should be at the left, tool settings at the top and status/info bar at the bottom. Do you have a link to this particular doc you're referring to?
8 hours ago, animats said:Trying to find the magic button that enables the pop-up toolbar
This can be set when you run Blender for the first time. You choose between that, search and playback timeline. You can change this in Preferences > Keymap > Spacebar Action. There's also the pie menu for those who like that feature. That's located in the same settings window but enable "Tab for Pie Menu" and I'd also recommend "Pie Menu on Drag".
8 hours ago, animats said:Having three different ways to make something disappear from the screen, in different places in the menus.
Not sure what you mean here. What exactly are you trying to disappear? If you're talking about an object, are you talking about deleting or hiding?
- Deleting - The usual X key or right-click Delete
- Hiding - The Outliner at the top-right with the eye icons is just for that. Just click the eyes. If you need it to be hidden from render, you click the Filter icon in the Outliner pane and enable the render icon. With those filter options set, you can then toggle those directly from the Outliner per object listed.
8 hours ago, animats said:Having to run Blender from a shell so that Python messages appear. Blender has a Python console, but do they appear there? Nah. Someone now sells an add-on to fix this.
I'm not a fan of this either. I would prefer having a built-in option to allow people to dump the errors to the built-in console so there isn't swapping between windows especially for people with single monitors. I did find a script that someone provided that may be of use to you and it's free. Tested it and it seems to work.
8 hours ago, animats said:Reading documentation that says to use the FOO icon in the BAZ toolbar, without showing a picture of either.
If it's referring to the toolbar, it should be the toolbar on the left side. In this case, it may be helpful for you to expand/resize the toolbar so that you see labels. Hover your mouse just to the right of one of the icons and a drag cursor will appear. Expand it right till it shows labels for the icons (single column > dual column > labels).
I can't help much with the DAE/SL related stuff.
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8 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:
but imagine trying to do it with only half the server development staff needed to keep the platform viable: that "lack of resources/heads" problem.
I didn't check yesterday but the Lab has a new job up for a Systems Engineer. The jobs page was empty just some days ago so it's very recent. The posting seems to ask for things related to the AWS/cloud system.
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9 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:
Cloud Party was a VERY LEAN platform. 256 textures were advised and sometimes putting many textures on ONE texture -- things that put it back to SL 2006 type days. Your scene (forgot what they were called) while very large at the end had VERY LIMITED for resources. No way could a SL sim from 2012 work with what Cloud Party allowed. Cloud Party was also "on demand" while SL has always been persistent and "always on".
So basically very little in common. Beyond apples and oranges, more like a crab and a whale LOL.
The Cloud was also fairly new, not that tested. According to Lab Chat and other mentions moving to the cloud -- just getting READY for all parts to move -- is a huge undertaking. Only so many things can happen at once.
If the cloud existed back then, and LL is working with the cloud, then a team dedicated to getting the cloud in place much sooner seems like an important focus in order to get further systems in place going into the future that rely on the cloud. You guys can disagree with me but I think the cloud for SL could've been officially in place years ealier. A lot of things tend to take a long time with LL because of priorities shifting around and lack of resources/heads to get things done.
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4 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:
How do you know that it didn't?
Because it would've been released officially to the public sooner and what I was saying is dedicated focus, not just here and there at times.
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2 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:
The only "disturbing" news that I heard was that EEP will be going live soon complete with known flaws and that content creators will (may) need to update their products because of the way things look.
Somehow I forsee Niran flipping his lid once again when this is released. But, expecting content creators to update their stuff based on the way things look... oof. Gonna wait and see just how bad this release will be.
Anyways, watched the interview and something stands out...
If SL is such a complicated architecture, then why didn't the cloud transition process start YEARS earlier? In 2012, Cloud Party was already officially using the cloud architecture to spin up/down instances when they were needed. I get CP was a new product and started the cloud up-front, but with SL being so complex, I think it would've been obvious to have started much, much sooner and focusing on it. Perhaps hired a team dedicated to it without interuption. It just seems like the cloud implementation is such a major foundational piece of what makes SL that other systems and even development progress rely on to be in place.
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Experiencing the same issue but slightly different result where I click Place Your Order and the page refreshes and that's it. I even tried Safe Mode with no improvement. There's a Refresh Firefox option but I'm not gonna bother with that. I found some bug reports on the JIRA with similar sounding situations (dating back to 2015) and one backtracked down to an accepted status with no one assigned. I did try out the Developer Edition of Firefox (v73) and it seems to be fine even in the strict protection mode. So, hopefully the next Firefox release will resolve this for us.
Edit: I found an alternative to the Refresh Firefox where I could backup just my about:config settings for a quick test since my concern was the advanced settings interfering with the operation of the site. With a fresh prefs file made, the site now works just fine. So, at least in my case, it's some advanced about:config privacy setting or borked profile issue.
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10 hours ago, Chaser Zaks said:
Find your real location. Geo IP isn't accurate, and they can narrow it down to or near your city, but not your address.
I feel like there's some what ifs and catches to this. Things like universities or even certain businesses running SL. Not certain on this, though.
10 hours ago, Chaser Zaks said:Methods that can't get your IP address:
- Voice - some people think voice is medium to get IP addresses, but voice is mixed on vivox's servers, no one but vivox sees your IP address, and everyone listening only sees vivox's IP address.
With the exception of the voice call feature, according to Oz. This is probably a less used feature, but still.
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36 minutes ago, animats said:
Yes. Rosedale's vision of Second Life was of a broad platform, "Internet 3.0", that would go in the direction the users took it.
There's a talk by Tim Sweeney (CEO of Epic Games) from SIGGRAPH 2019 on his thoughts of a metaverse. Gets a bit technical. Essentially his idea is a W3C of metaverse and it sounds like its own internet in a way. There's some Q&A at the end as well.
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3 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:
If you just feed a material with a precomputed AO you save a lot from rendering it realtime, with better control over its spread. Moreover, AO in PBR is used to lower the specular intensity in the darker area, for obvious reasons: the shaded areas receive less light.
I see. That seems to make sense for the PBR side of things. But don't you have to account for objects close to one another that are from separate creators? If they precompute their AOs for a single given object, the AO isn't aware of close proximity objects that someone else made. In other words, AO is aware of self cavities, but not objects (from separate creators) touching one another. SSAO handles this sort of scenario but then it conflicts with the baked AOs.
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@OptimoMaximo Nevermind the previous post... somewhat. I'm not a content creator but I've read a "bit" about PBR here and there. I was curious to see your table layout because I thought there may have been some loss in explanation. My lack of knowledge though. I didn't see Roughness mentioned but found from another forum post that the Specular Exponent is more or less the inverse of Roughness in PBR.
Now, my question is why the loss of the Normal Map's blue channel for AO? Is it really not needed? Is there data to prove that it is not needed or is it just that SL doesn't actually use it or use it well? I'm finding little info on this.
Is AO really needed if proper AO post-processing was done in real-time considering the nature of SL's dynamic lighting? -
10 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:
Hhmm nope. Even with the max number of maps possible, we would end up with 3 textures per material: environment in the specular = metallic and ambient occlusion in the normal maps blue channel. As I said in another thread, a proper development would start implementing a proper mip mapping system. The one we have now is a joke and it can't be considered proper.
I would be curious to see this laid out in a table. I know where you're going with this and it's exactly what I've been pondering. There's gotta be a way to minimize the number of textures within SL by utilizing the channels and organizing them in a way so that maps that aren't detail critical could be grouped to take advantage of smaller dimensions. Is the JPEG2000 format an ideal format to really be using now that we're years ahead from since then? I believe that's what's being used for mipmapping if I'm not mistaken.
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Been too long to remember exact details but I think I was searching for keywords like build or create 3D online or virtual world and SL showed up in search results. It was around 2005 at the time. I also did try There.com virtual world but not sure if that was before or a little after starting SL.
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I noticed that if you have third-party scripts and/or frames turned on in uBlock Origin, a facebook.net domain will show up.
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8 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:
Considering how IPs haven't ever been displayed in SL, making them visible now would be ridiculously unnecessary (and would cause panic) and just an overall bad decision.
That's why I gave the example because I know there are people who would be against it.
8 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:But you can't get any identifying information about the person behind that IP address. No street address (or even postal code), no name, no email, nothing.
While someone could potentially live very close to a geolocated IP, my concern isn't really to do with location. For me, it's mainly because I want my real IP private. As you say, it's up to the user.
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2 hours ago, Adam Spark said:
Every website you visit gets that. Your IP is just your computer's web address. It means nothing and really reveals little of importance. The risks involved with somebody having your IP are highly overstated.
Yes, I realize websites see IPs but I generally use VPN while browsing.
If the IP address "means nothing and really reveals little of importance," are you suggesting it's perfectly fine that everyone in SL should see everyone else's IP address?
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Black Dragon's Poser tool is great. With the many variations of bodies and poses (that are based on certain bodies/shapes) as well as variations in sit posers and prop sizes, it's really useful in being able to tweak them to specific needs.
A note... If you would like to play with certain face or hand poses from a face/hand pose HUD while you're in the middle of a Black Dragon Poser pose, you can disable the bones for the face/fingers by selecting them in the list and clicking "Disable Selected Bones". This will give back control to the HUDs for those bones. The downside is that if you reactivate the bones, they revert back to the original start pose rather than basing from the current pose (that was adjusted from face/hand pose HUDs). Maybe I'm missing something, but it would be useful to reactivate the bone pose from the current state rather than the original state.
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5 minutes ago, Alwin Alcott said:
your IP travels freely is allover the internet. IN SL every stream you listen to, gets your IP, your browser, your isp... and so on...
That's why I turn off auto media and don't click links.
If LL or my ISP knows my IP, that's fine. I could use VPN but not on SL.
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No. I heard some "rumors" years ago about people using voice to exploit/leak real IP addresses. I don't know if that was true or if it's still true, but not bothering to chance it. If anyone has the official word on this, I would like to know.
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I derender to...
- To fix issues with the rendering of objects I don't have permissions to fix
- Remove objects or jellydolls that are affecting or in the way of the end result of my photograph. Examples of objects being weather mesh systems, mesh sun rays, or poorly positioned objects with baked cast shadows floating in midair.
Otherwise, everyone is jellydolled. I think that's about it.
Do note that with the Black Dragon viewer, you do have some extra client-side only control to force items (where you don't have permissions) to masked alpha or even remove baked cast shadows if you wanted. So, you don't always have to derender.
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7 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:1 hour ago, Beth Macbain said:5 hours ago, Kurshie Muromachi said:
When I see the reports provided by former employees who have worked at Linden Lab within the last year and a half, I can't help but think that there's some sort of internal issue/struggle with the Lab. Even some of the things that employees have reported have been echoed in some form or another here on the forums.
Read the reports on pretty much any company and you'll see the same. Glassdoor is anonymous and bitter ex-employees often use it to lob grenades, and HR directors often use it to post false positive reviews to make their company look better than it is. I would take anything I read there with a grain of salt. It's the Yelp of job seekers.
One thing I have learned over the years is that in most categories people will write about negative experiences far more than positive ones. Some review sites do a better job at encouraging folks to do positive reviews as well as negative or mediocre ones, but Glassdoor isn't really one of those sites - at least in my experience within the IT world.
These days, it seems so many folks want their moment of fame. I take pretty much everything on the web with a grain of salt, especially anything that gives even the slightest appearance of being there to get noticed. But then I've always been very cynical of people and their motives.
Right. It's just a lingering concern. And I don't look at just negative reviews. Some positive reviews even have concerns within them. And yea, I know about the HR thing.
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Future of the metaverse, and all that
in General Discussion Forum
Posted · Edited by Kurshie Muromachi
Still, just a small bit of data to think about even if it is a small group.