animats

Not what you'd expect in a region called "Hellish". I wonder what the history of that sim is like.

I started this because I'm running the Firestorm EEP beta viewer, and it's too dark most of the time. Some of that is a bug. When EEP was rolled out, the default settings for mainland had diffuse lighting set too low. That's been fixed, but not pushed out to all the mainland regions. Apparently there's no automated way to do that yet. With darker nights, lighting matters more. If you own mainland and have something open to the public, take a look at your parcel with midnight settings, advanced lighting, and shadows on. If it's a store, and it looks closed, or you can't see the merchandise, it needs more lighting. I want the range on light projectors increased from 20m so we can have longer range headlights. It's now too dark to drive without them.

Uploading in "surface" mode. This, too, generates convex hulls. This time, 6 instead of 7. It's followed the original geometry more closely. The joints between the sides are beveled, and the hulls match that. That's as good as it can get for this model. Incidentally, the image above has been contrast-enhanced so you can see what's going on. The upload window is trying to show the convex hull pieces as translucent, and the image is just too dim. In world. 2 LI. Getting from 7 hulls to 6 brought us down by one LI, as it should. 0.360 LI per hull, as Chin Rey points out. So this is the "house and door" problem done in a straightforward way. One big mesh for the whole object, with correct geometry in Blender. No duplicate vertices, no interior faces. Given clean geometry, the uploader seems to be able to do the right thing. Files for this example: http://www.animats.com/sl/misc/basichouse04a.blend http://www.animats.com/sl/misc/basichouse04a.dae

Basic house, in Blender. One mesh piece. No trickery at all. Solid walls, beveled connection at the corners, door cutout. Convex decomposition. Extra contrast in the display window. Now, this is almost perfect. The convex decomposer got all the right hulls, except for the left side, which was split into two triangles. Exported with Blender SL static defaults. Same model used for all LODs and physics. Analyzed "solid" physics, no "simplify". 3 LI. Next, analyzed "surface" physics.

What NPCs should be doing is an useful discussion. There are several NPC systems in SL already. SmartBots remote controls avatars with external servers. It's pretty good, but expensive, because it requires a sizable chunk of a server 24/7 to drive the avatar. There are some scripting systems that take NPCs through canned sequences and paths. There are pathfinding-based systems. There's Virtual Kennel Club. Any other good examples? The practical problem with NPCs and automated vehicles is complex setup. The end user needs to spend too much time filling out obscure notecards, fussing with obstacles on their parcels, and learning about fine details of SL pathfinding few should have to worry about. Then they have to monitor operation and adjust things until the NPCs run reliably without attention. Same problem with automated vehicles. Someone has to pre-record the route. Someone has to monitor their behavior and deal with problems. It's not just a sell and forget product, it takes administration. A support organization is needed. Like the SLRR, or the Virtual Kennel Club's approved trainers.

Try the adult forum. It's obvious what you have in mind. You can do animations to give the illusion of what you want. Actual physical simulation, no. SL physics doesn't offer springs. Useful hint: if you want an animation to not look repetitive, get four slightly different animations of the same thing and use them in random order, never doing the same one twice in a row. This works for audio clips, too. Drum machines use that trick.

I don't know why or by whom it was done, but if you go to the Ungren safe hub now, the biggest political signs are gone. There's now a 150m black monolith with no signage.

I tend to agree, which is what got me into making NPCs that can really move. The trick is to make them interesting without being annoying. That's hard. Dani, at GTFO De Campion This is one of my experimental NPCs. She's a security monitor for a GTFO hub, by arrangement with GTFO management. First decision was that she's not dressed as a cop or guard. Her t-shirt has a GTFO logo on the front, and Hub Loss Prevention on the back. So she clearly works there, but isn't intimidating. Making her interesting while not interfering with what else is going on was tough. She has a number of goal points, and walks from one to another, picking the next one randomly. At each goal point, she stops and waits for a while. She goes up and down stairs and avoids obstacles, including avatars and vehicles. She's not just running on a fixed track. When a new avatar, not seen in the last 15 minutes, shows up, she approaches them, faces them, and says hello. She's aware of which way you're facing and tries to get in front of you at a proper conversational distance. If that's not possible, she'll get a few meters away and say "Hello there". Right now, that's all the conversational ability she has. She's not doing all that much, but it's enough. Anyone who visits the hub gets the feeling that it's not a dead place. There's someone there, and the place is in active use. That alone seems to cut down griefing. There's a feeling that someone is watching. She's not a phantom; she's keyframe animated and can bump into avatars. She tries to avoid avatars, and will stop and say "Excuse me" if she bumps into someone, then move on. Phantom NPCs get no respect; people go right through them like they're not there. It turned out that wasn't enough for a GTFO hub with heavy truck traffic. She was getting in the way of people trying to park trucks. There were some annoyed people. So I added an additional behavior. She tracks vehicles, and tries to avoid the space they will occupy in the near future, based on their velocity. That wasn't enough. One day she knocked over a semitrailer truck! Turned out that the trailer had a physics model with holes in it, and the ray casts didn't see it. There was also the problem of standing in front of a stationary truck, keeping the truck from moving. So the next behavior was to simply stay 5m clear of the bounding box of any active vehicle. (Active means physics on, avatar on board. Stop the engine and the vehicle becomes approachable). That worked. Now she can be active in a busy hub with large trucks moving around, and there have been no complaints for months. So that gives a sense of what automated vehicles need to be like. Either phantom and ignorable, like Yava pods, or very aware of their environment and competent at driving. Getting this right was a lot of work.

Interestingly, homeowner associations and planned unit development operators used to think that. They'd forbid yard signs. Many states now prohibit them from doing that. California is such a state. We're about to have a big debate in Congress on how much censorship private social networks can, should, or must do. No legislative action is likely this session, but we may see something next session.

Welcome to the Ungren safe hub. Many points of view represented, including others not in this picture. OK, which ones are now prohibited as "political"? You see the problem. LL should have taken those monster ad boards down years ago for being over-height. Maximum allowed is 8m. Those boards go up over 200m. That's the right way to go at this. Time, place, and manner restrictions, as they're called in First Amendment jurisprudence. Restrictions should be content-neutral. Someone previously mentioned objects place on the land of others being used for political signs. That should be addressed as object littering and griefing, not political speech. The LL terms of service say that a sign on your own house or business in SL is not "networked advertising". LL terms: "Networked advertising", means the use of multiple parcels on multiple regions for the primary purpose of advertising, usually on behalf of other inworld businesses or organizations outside of Second Life. The political sign restriction, as written, applies only to networked advertising. You should still be able to put a Trump 2020 or Black Lives Matter sign at your own house or business. Just not in bulk on ad sign parcels. LL management, don't get into the censorship business. Not only will it annoy the customer base, your main asset, but you'll have to hire censors and pay them. Besides, we only have another 70 days of election season. Wait this out.

Oh, about the mesh upload window. It has some undocumented controls. None of these affect the upload; they just let you see what you're doing. Left mouse button - pivot view about Z CNTL-left mouse button - pivot view about X CNTL-shift left mouse button - pan in view plane, but not very far. Mouse wheel - zoom view Preview spread slider - move the convex hull pieces apart so you can see them. Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A - 30 extra lives.

I've seen that more with surface models. It's associated with using tiny triangles to stretch the physics model to match the visible model. The uploader forces the physics model and the visible model have the same bounding box, which can cause troubles. People work around the problem by adding dummy objects in the physics model. That creates another set of problems. I have test cases for this, if anyone really wants to work on it. I don't actually build all that much in SL. It's just that the stuff I do build - moving sidewalks, escalators, motorcycles, and NPCs - all relies heavily on the physics engine. So I've had to explore that area more throroughly than most. Also, I used to write physics engines, so I have some idea of what's going on inside.

I'm trying this, too. So, we start with a cube in Blender, and make it 5m x 5m x 0.2m. That's the floor object. Then create a second cube, 2m x 2m x 2m as a cutter, and use a Boolean modifier to have the cutter punch a square hole in the floor. Apply scale to the mesh, so the scale is 1 and the vertices are where they should be. To have some usable UVs, use "Smart Unwrap" to get a UV layout. Floor with hole, in Blender. Then log into the beta grid. I'm on Linux, so I have to run Firestorm under Wine to do uploads with Havok. That's kind of weird, but it works. Standard Firestorm 6.3.2.58052. Uploading the mesh. Beta grid, Morris sandbox. In the cloud, even; this sim is on AWS. High, medium, low, lowest, and physics are all the same model here. "Solid" mode, then "Analyze" with default settings, so the convex hull decomposer gets to do its thing. Surprisingly, it gets it right. It decomposes the floor with a hole into four rectangular solids. Can't do better than that. The display here is the usual Firestorm upload window, but you can stretch that now and make it big enough to be useful. You can also pan, zoom, and tilt. Use the mouse in that window, with CTRL to shift to rotate mode. The "explode hulls" slider moves the image of the hulls out from the center of the object, so you can see them. This has no effect on the upload; it's just to help you see what happened. This window is where you adjust things until you have a working physics model with reasonable LI. Play with the settings and watch the display change. Here, I didn't have to set anything to a non-default value. The object in-world. Physics set to "prim". Standing in the hole. Physics model works as expected. Land impact: 1. Not seeing any problems. Can even sit in the hole. Blender file: http://www.animats.com/sl/misc/floorwithhole01.blend Exported DAE file: http://www.animats.com/sl/misc/floorwithhole01.dae Enjoy.

Do most users actually stay with the SL day cycle (a 4 hour day, with one hour totally dark) or set their viewer to Midday and stay there? Has that changed since EEP?

Things like that are great. But they need to be day cycle aware and turn off. Someone near me has a "god rays" object which looks great during day but is an ugly glowing thing at night.

Please try a test case where people know what it's supposed to look like in real life. No basis for comparison on the example. The layers of Principled BDSF. Those 10 layers are enough for Hollywood. Few materials need more than 4 or 5 layers. Blender can edit and render those right now. Newer GPUs can render them in real time. This is becoming the new standard for materials. It might not be that hard to convert SL content to Principled BDSF, because not that many objects really need manual conversion. Humanoid skins, mostly. They need some extra layers, such as subsurface reflection, that make skin look real. Few other materials need that. There are also layers used mostly for automotive paint jobs. Vehicle builders could get a supply of auto paint colors with "clearcoat" and "clearcoat gloss" values, and we would have GTA V grade shinyness. (If you want to see what a retrofit looks like in practice, look up "GTA V photorealistic mod") "Physically based shading means we approximate what light actually does as opposed to approximating what we intuitively think it should do." - UE4 manual.

The Firestorm viewer problem with "cube physics" mentioned in the video has been fixed. Use Firestorm for uploads if you can. Beq Janus has been fixing the uploader, and it's better. Firestorm now has a resizable window in the uploader, and you can make it big enough to see what's going on. This is a big help. The "preview spread" slider causes the objects in the preview window to be moved outward so you can see the parts better. Also, you can pan, zoom and rotate the preview window with the mouse. So you can see what's going on as you adjust things. Play with the various options in "Analyze" and "Simplify". The best model is one in "Solid" mode, with the fewest number of hulls, that does what you want. You can see all that in the uploader before you do the upload. Usually, you join all the mesh objects in the physics model together into one mesh object before uploading, with small gaps between the parts. The reason for the small gaps is that the uploader tries to cut the model apart into convex pieces. (Convex means "dentless" - no inward surface dents.) The part of the system (the convex hull decomposer, from Havok) which does that is not very smart about choosing where to cut, and tends to do things like break a cube into tetrahedrons. So you have to help it by putting small gaps in your model where you want the cuts. The physics engine itself, in the simulator, understands only convex solids and surfaces. Convex solids are handled better. The physics engine knows what's "inside" for a convex solid. It's hard to get your avatar stuck inside a "solid" physics model; the physics engine knows you're where you shouldn't be and pushes you out. For "Surface" models, the physics engine knows if you're in contact with the surface, but it's possible to get stuck inside, if you're going fast or the object isn't watertight. In general, don't set objects that are thicker than an avatar to "surface" mode if you can possibly avoid it. That mistake is the source of those "I'm stuck inside a rock" problems you get in some terrain builds. After uploading with a physics model, set the object physics type to "prim", rather than "convex hull". "Convex hull" there means to shrink-wrap the entire object and use that as a physics model, ignoring the model you uploaded. If shrink-wrapping the entire model would work, you don't need a hand-built physics model. Many objects work fine with an overall convex hull. Not doorways, though; a wall with a doorway is a "dent", and not convex. Or anything that's hollow inside, like a house. Small decorative objects, non-sittable furniture, and some sittable furniture work fine in overall convex hull mode.

I've seen a few of those, but they're rare. There's one large, irregular parcel that's been under construction for most of this year. There's an unfinished build a few sims north of the Ungren infohub that's had an "under construction" barrier for years. Someone should sell an automatic parcel boundary marker that looks like a real-world construction fence.

Havok is just a physics engine. Viewer side, it doesn't do much. It's used by the mesh uploader to preprocess the physics models; that's it. Sim side, it's responsible for in-world physics. Unreal Engine is a huge, comprehensive game engine. UE5 is interesting because it has a dynamic level of detail system, something Second Life badly needs. A reveal of UE5 was expected at this year's Game Developer Conference, but the conference went virtual, shrank, and Epic didn't participate.

OK, passed Aquarium. Try The Valley. That's a tougher test.

It's all very simple. See?

"System Manufacturer: To be filled in by OEM"? By "Shuts down" do you mean the viewer exits, or the machine powers off?

Thanks. Sorry, meant "Bruissac", GTFO HQ.

That looks like a broken GPU. Quick check: visit the WebGL Aquarium Demo page. If you get a nice picture of an aquarium with fish swimming around, good. If not, your computer has graphics problems that have nothing to do with Second Life. (There are tougher tests. For intermittent problems, try The Valley, a test for Unreal Engine. It looks like a game world, but there's no gameplay - it's a test program. You can explore the valley if you want, but if you just let the program run, it shows views on its own. If that will run for half an hour, SL should run fine. It displays GPU temperature, so it's good for checking for cooling problems. The Valley is a big download, so try the Aquarium first.)

At 5:37 AM today, in Brussiac, llCastRay stopped working. Three of four NPCs there started getting a status of -2 from llCastRay, indicating the sim was out of ray cast resources.This persisted for several minutes. I've never seen that happen before. A second or two, yes, but not minutes. The fourth NPC reported trouble at 5:39 AM. (It may have been stationary and not doing ray casts at 5:37.) All NPCs tripped their stall timers, reported trouble, reset all scripts, and restarted OK. I've never seen a drain on ray cast resources like that before. Is someone trying a land survey bot or something that makes vast numbers of llCastRay calls? It takes a lot of llCastRay calls to overload a sim; it's hard to do from one object. Or is there some other kind of resource drain that could do this?