animats

I've tried Signature Geralt, and it's not bad. Maitreya is "oh, there's a little men's section in the back." Slink's default male skin looks awful. I have a few of the off-brand low-end mesh bodies, but not much fits. It's not the money for the body. It's that the "more expensive options" for men only work with clothing custom designed to fit them. Not only is the clothing more expensive, the selection is worse and the triangle counts are often so high that I'd be invisible. Which one? OnUpUp? As I wrote above, it's not bad, but the sizing is off. It's supposed to fit classic avatar mesh clothing, but it's sized wrong to do that for fitmesh, probably because it's older than fitmesh. It's so close. If only the creator were still around to update it. I'm trying to come close to the look I have now, but with better clothing. (I'm also going through all this partly because I'd like to find a pain-free path to a good mesh male body for new users.)

OnUpUp shape, Boris skin Now we're getting somewhere. This is an OK basic male avatar. The out of the box experience isn't too good. It has a built-in script that runs a priority 4 stand animation and doesn't turn it off when sitting. So the script fights with vehicles and furniture for control of the body. The script can be removed, but then you have to add something to do eye blink and close the mouth. Fitmesh doesn't quite work. Waist is too small for pants. (Since it's fitmesh, changing the waist or butt size changes the pants, too, and the gap remains.) You have to set everything to BOM mode yourself, and remove the alpha HUD. It's too bad the OnUpUp creator is gone. This one could be fixed without too much trouble. Fitmesh jeans, for a classic avatar. Note gap at waist. It's much worse without the jacket. This mesh avatar is too small to fit into classic mesh clothing. Fitmesh is a great idea, but if it doesn't fit, there's nothing you can do about it. I've tried several sets of fitmesh jeans from different vendors; they're all too big, like this. So, after all this, I still don't have a male mesh avatar that can wear classic male fitmesh clothing. Women can use Ruth, but as far as I can tell, there's no male option that works as well as Ruth.

It's been 90 days since the original announcement, and it hasn't happened. Did the deal fail to close? (As a rule of thumb, about half of announced merger and acquisition transactions fail.)

Now, the NVidia Omniverse. This is a collaborative space for designers. It's all cloud-based; the viewer is just a web browser. A demo: This is how good the latest GPU technology can look. The GPU for this costs US$8000. This isn't cost-effective for gaming and social virtual worlds. Not yet. They offer a form of in-world editing. A user using Maya can be putting their objects into a shared scene someone else is editing with a different tool. Collaborative in-world editing The metaverse dream just got closer. Someday there will be something like Second Life that looks this good. The first games that look this good will probably be out in 2021.

I've seen that a few times entering Juinita on Robin Loop. It's the usual sequence: vehicle enters new sim, avatar doesn't, fail.

They have one. It's available in support chat. It's not very smart. It's just a query engine hooked to a small FAQ. One step up from "Press 1 for sales, press 2 for support..." You have to have enough traffic that the same questions come up regularly, and then provide enough answers to cover them. LL doesn't really have the volume of query traffic to justify the effort. That technology is for places that get thousands of questions per day. Those things get much more useful when they know more about the customer. Those are the ones that know what your credit card balance is. (I've played around with open source RASA a bit. That's a chatbot engine. I loaded it up with the GTFO FAQ. It works, but isn't that useful. You need a really thorough FAQ for those things to work, with questions ranging from the more general to very specific.)

Arguably, that's a feature. Look at Fortnite. Free to play, and all you can get by spending money is a better look. Fortnite gross income for 2020 should be about US$5 billion.

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Exactly. I've been saying that for a while, phrased as "look like Strawberry Linden's blog". I've said that each new user should leave orientation with a good mesh avatar and one good outfit. It's a strength of SL that you and your stuff can look really good. Far better than any other virtual world. It's a problem that putting it all together is almost as hard as it is in real life.

OnUpUp isn't bad. It more or less fits mesh clothing that fits classic avatars, although you have to turn down some of the appearance sliders for ordinary rigged mesh. (The default torso and butt are too big.) Have to try some fitmesh. Much better fit to standard clothing than Roth. The elbow angle may be off, and the hands keep going through the body with the default AO. A different AO might help. The groups and Facebook page mentioned in the notecard are gone.

That reflects SL's rather weak level of detail system. It's fine to have high detail when you're really close. That's one of SL's great strengths. We see that on most of Strawberry Linden's posts of cluttered rooms. But below "High" level of detail, most of the levels of detail range from poor to terrible. Chin puts effort into lower levels of detail. Most creators don't. Go to stores where non-clothing mesh items are on sale, and set your LOD factor to 0. It looks awful. Level of detail has to be automated somehow. That's common for games today. Sansar had it. UE5 has a new system for that, as can be seen in their demo, and the first release of UE5 is supposed to be out next year. I've tried some schemes for generating impostors for SL. There are ways to deal with this problem. It's hard, but possible. (Clothing is a special case. None of the mesh reduction algorithms out there do a good job on thin objects with folds in them, which is SL clothing. SL already has avatar impostors, though.)

Yes. There are too many big user-modifiable worlds out there now. It's no longer credible to claim that it's impossible to have a high-performing Second Life. Yes, it's hard. But not impossible. Many of SL's performance problems are simply bugs: About half of simulator time goes down the drain because scripts that are idle still use CPU time. Not a lot per script, but enough that 5000 to 6000 scripts just sitting there uses 100% of script time for a full region. Region crossing failures. Years of work, and they're still not reliable. Part of this is a protocol problem. The avatar's viewer is involved in one handshake that holds up the whole region crossing. And double region crossings, at corners, are simply broken. The system cannot handle entering as second region before the first region crossing completes. Even in "the cloud". (Hit a corner in that test Blake Sea region within 1m of the corner at moderate speed, and you're out. Corners in the middle of roads are not rare. Kama City has one on every intersection.) But nothing prevents a double region crossing. There's a huge load on a sim as as an avatar enters. Watch the "nearby users" window while walking in a crowded sim. Watch walking stall when a new avatar appears. Fix those three, and SL sim-side would work much better. They're all hard problems, but those are the big three. Viewer side, there's a longer list. But the viewer isn't that different from a modern big-world MMO client where content comes in from the network.

Blender files for Roth (left) from GitHub. SL reference avatar (right), from the wiki. Resized for equal height. Clothing for "classic" SL avatars is made to fit the model on the right. There's why the clothing doesn't fit. The classic avatar form has a hollow between the shoulders, and Roth doesn't. Which is why skin peeks through the jacket just below the collar on both sides. Roth's arms are much longer, which is why there's trouble at the wrist. Roth also has a smaller head. As someone said, Roth is a good base for Gollum. Ruth seems to be able to wear SL classic mesh clothing, but Roth can't. That's why. I suspect someone made Roth from the Ruth model, not from the SL male reference model. Is there a mesh body that's just the SL male reference model?

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I knew they were bad, but not how bad. I got into this mess by doing the Ruth tutorial. Ruth worked fine. Since Roth is the male version of Ruth, I expected it would work fine out of the box. No. Roth, with skin and shape from Boris, the classic avatar from above. Now the arms and shoulders are bigger, more in proportion to the rest of the body. This is not too bad. I like this body. But it has clothing problems. But not quite. Although the classic Boris can wear that jacket with that alpha, Roth is just enough different for it not to fit. Those shoulders are too high above the collarbone. OK, so patching up Roth mesh with the Boris shape is not going to work, short of going into Photoshop and creating custom alpha layers. I tried some rigged mesh. Doesn't help the troubles in the wrist area. SL clothing has to be designed to fit some specific skin envelope, and this isn't it. Is there a reference male mesh skin for classic avatars, used for sizing? Ruth maps more or less to the classic female avatar, but Roth is a bit off, as you can see. I've looked at various male bodies, but I want something that isn't locked in to some very limited (and probably overpriced) clothing line.

I got Roth to look better by using the shape from the classic avatar with the mesh skin. That bulks up the arms and legs a bit. But then the positions for clothing are a bit off, and skin keeps peeking through above the wrist and behind the neck, despite the clothing alphas. Any idea why rebaking the mesh for a BOM avatar takes two minutes? It's compositing a few 2D images. That takes a small fraction of a second. If they're going to take that long, something should be running a mesh analysis of what's inside what and adjusting the meshes so clothes layer properly without alphas. Like Sansar did.

Yes, and that's about what you get with the appearance sliders in the default positions.

I do that with my animesh NPCs. All movement of the center is prim motion. Walk, run, and turn animations are triggered by a script that monitors velocity and turns on the appropriate animations. The animation starting sometimes lags the prim motion; you'll see the NPCs start to move in a slide, and then the animation kicks in and changes to a walk. You could do that for a seated avatar, although it might lag a bit. It would be useful when you wanted an avatar to walk across a room and then do something. Or place themselves relative to another avatar before starting an animation. You'd probably have to code this yourself, though.

Yes, I get that there are alternatives. I wanted to try the open source body. Open source Ruth isn't bad. Open source Roth looks like someone took Ruth and tried to turn it into a male body, badly. Hence the skinny ankles. One can do worse. A Slink demo. Default settings. The jutting chin is easily fixed, but I have no idea where the stripey pattern on the arms is coming from.

How does that work? There must be some huge texture with the font.

That's a bit too control-oriented. But having tutorials for specific goals which involve doing various steps is useful. Like the one at the top of this topic, "Your First Mesh Body". Each tutorial should give the user something upon completion. Think carrot, not stick. One of the Caledon helpers made a similar remark as we watched some people running through the Caledon tutorial at high speed. When they hit a problem, though, you can get their attention. What passes for "context sensitive help" in the viewer is not all that helpful to users with clothing problems.

On the left, classic avatar. On the right, mesh avatar. I've been trying to duplicate my non-mesh look, which I rather like, in mesh. Here's what I have so far. The avatar on the right is built from the open-source Roth, the "BOM 2000" version. You can buy this on Marketplace for L$10. Roth is the male counterpart of Ruth. Ruth is used often; Roth not so much. (The version on Marketplace is not ready to use. Out of the box, there's a see-through section at the neck and the head and body don't match, even with with the same skin. After fixing the see-through section (one face is 30% transparent for no good reason) and setting the alpha mode consistently (body was "alpha masking", head was "alpha blending") for body and head, it looks OK.) Biggest problem with Roth is skinny lower legs. I have to turn up "leg muscles" to get a big enough leg size down at the boots. Roth's thigh to ankle ratio is more female than male. (There's no separate adjustment for lower leg size, is there?) I should bulk up the arms a bit, which is an option. Other than that, not too bad. Alphas are a problem. The supplied "alpha HUD" only lets you blank out areas at the level of "lower leg", "upper leg", etc. No fine adjustments. No good reason for that; the HUD for Open Simulator has more control. You also don't get any of the fancy stuff like nail color adjustment. I have a non-rigged leather jacket that fits, but it takes some fussing because the alpha layer it comes with doesn't hide some shoulder areas just below the neck.

This is bikeshedding. My point is that the new user experience can be improved, but new users are being sent to some limbo place from SL ancient history by mistake. What I hear from talking to new users are two big questions. 1) What do I do now? 2) How do I fix this $$#%* &%! clothing problem. #1 is inherent in what SL is, but #2 is mostly an onboarding problem. Some people get really upset at a broken appearance. Their whole self-image is damaged. As I've said in another topic, the single biggest thing I've found it useful to tell new users is that once they get a reasonable look, save it. Then they can go back, and the risk of appearance disaster is much reduced. They can then try things without fear. Somehow, none of the tutorials emphasize this.

They did a modern mesh tutorial. NRI's text and graphics could use some polishing, but they're doing good work. I've been after the Caledon people to do something like this. It expresses the idea well, too. With classic avatars, you had all those system clothing layers other than skin (dress, coat, etc.). With BOM mesh, the classic stuff is applied (I think) only to the bare skin. Dresses and coats must be separate rigged mesh. So it's simpler now. You layer the skintight stuff on the bare body, then put on some clothes. And it's good to see it expressed that way. Much of the BOM info is "how to bang on your existing mesh avatars and wardrobe to make them play with bakes on mesh", which gets complicated. For a new user, that's unnecessary.

Ah. A picture is starting to emerge of how those lost souls end up in limbo.