animats

Hardware upgrade time.

On a vaguely relevant note, I'm looking for a chair. Requirements: Usable as cafe chair for outdoor cafe. LOD model that looks like a chair from a distance. Full perms. I'm going to put some scripts in and make more of them. 1-2 prim land impact. Physics model that works with chair set to "physical" - sits stably on ground, if it falls over, it doesn't go through the floor. I put a script in chairs so that you can move them around or even knock them over, as well as sit on them. When nobody is around, they all go back to their home positions. Up to L$250 or so. I've been using the classic free Linden plastic chair, which meets all the criteria except land impact. The Linden chair is 15 LI, and that adds up fast for a cafe. I've bought about a half dozen cheap chairs that look good on Marketplace, but they all have problems. There's no way to try the physics model before you buy.

There are glowing lines as neon signs, and then there's this. It holds up on close examination. You can get right up to the sign and see the tubes and standoffs. The pigeon is animated, too. This is near Tralala's Diner, at secondlife://PINE%20LAKE/108/85/28

Level of detail fail of the week. Elaborate vault door to hide what's inside. Back off a little, and you can see into the vault. Back off a bit more and the whole vault door and frame disappear. This is why blindly using "Decimate Triangle" in Blender to create lower level of detail models with very small numbers of triangles is a big mistake. (This vault is for sale on Marketplace for L$3,990.)

A joystick isn't that useful, because scripts can't read the joystick values. You can't fly an airplane or drive a car any better with a joystick than you can with the arrow keys. Joystick motion is just turned into arrow key pushes, so you still have poor control. I have a joystick hooked up and configured in SL, but seldom touch it.

Are high-lag sims considered distressed real estate? Does lag drive prices down? Does someone track lag for that purpose?

On the impostor front, in-world editing tools would be a big help. Put something in the Edit UI for automatically creating a lower level impostor. Select a level of detail below the top one, select "Impostor", select "Box", "Cylinder", "Cross", or "Sphere", select "Texture resolution" (16x16 through 512x512), and click "Generate". A server then generates an enclosing prim, renders the most detailed LOD in isolation from each viewpoint needed, and pastes the resulting texture on the prim. Instant impostor.

This is precious. Experience all the hassles of high school again. Getting into the right clique. Trying to keep up with people who have a bigger clothing budget. Dealing with bullies. Getting a date for the prom before its too late. They have a football field, but do they have actual games? Now that would have some appeal.

Still working on region crossings. If you took a copy of the test bike, please take another one; there have been improvements. You can get one at the Animats bike shop in Vallone. Just do a "take copy" on the bike with yellow and black stripes, and take a copy of the crate nearby for a compatible RLV relay. There are instructions on a note card in the crate. This is still experimental; no guarantees, and it's all free. I and some friends go riding around on these bikes regularly and we don't slow down for region crossings. IM me if something funny happens. Video and a copy of the messages in the chat window helps. If the recovery can't get the avatar back on the bike, I need to know where the bike was (this is printed in chat) and where the avatar ended up (from the top bar in the viewer). I've been testing more around that troublesome SLRR sim crossing near Aglia/143/151/84. My recovery system won't work there, because that Linden Labs owned parcel has a teleport landing point set on the SLRR right of way. When the bike uses RLV to teleport the avatar back to the bike, the avatar goes to the landing point, Agila (62,211, 83), instead of the bike's location at Aglia (1,253,85). The avatar is then too far from the bike and can't be re-seated. No idea why somebody set the parcel's landing point there. It's not a station or point of interest, just a spot on the tracks. The track sections on both sides have no landing point. These bikes show that recovery from bad sim crossings is possible. A permanent fix for this has to be sim-side. What you can do with scripting is limited; there are many permissions problems. If you have trouble at a sim crossing on a parcel that doesn't allow object entry, your bike can be ejected by the parcel while you're being re-seated. You end up standing where the bike was, but without a bike. And there's the hassle of having to wear an RLV relay. It still beats being stuck in the air at a region crossing.

That's good to know. So where did Linden Labs document that? (Most of the SL documentation that goes into details was written by users who reverse-engineered the system. Of course people use it badly.)

What might help is is for SL to modify the land impact computation so that 12 triangles or less (a box) have the minimal land weight at any level of detail. Then there's be no temptation to shave triangle counts below useful impostor level.

I don't want to have too many support cases open at once. I'm waiting for resolution on my support case #204301 for the huge lag in Vallone sim which appears regularly every 10-15 seconds. That's been pending for weeks. (There's a huge periodic script load coming from someplace, possibly another sim on the same server, and support can't find it.)

Should that be "can't see"? Part of the problem is that SL's land impact system rewards you for crappy level of detail. Mesh furniture is expected to have a land impact of about 1 prim. To get that, you have to have a really low triangle count in the LOD models below "high". SL has a reward metric which rewards the wrong thing. From a graphics card point of view, everything within 10 meters could easily have a few hundred triangles, and probably should. That's not going to choke any decent graphics chip from the last five years. That's about where medium level of detail should be. Around 25 meters, an impostor should replace the real object for furniture-sized objects. Triangle reduction, at least as Blender does it with Decimate Geometry, is for reducing a curved surface of 20,000 triangles to 2,000. Not for reducing 200 to 20. That's where all those awful long thin spiky triangles come from. Reducing a surface to one triangle is a terrible thing. Now if triangle reduction used quads, it wouldn't be so bad. Objects that were more or less rectangular would stay rectangular. Extreme mesh reduction needs a better tool than Decimate. (Now if LL was really on the ball, they'd have parcel-level impostors and sim-level impostors generated in background by their own systems. Around 100m, parcel-level impostors would kick in, and around 250m, sim-level impostors. You'd be able to see for kilometers. No more water where land should be. All the big-world games have something like that.)

She already has a Blender model of the object to work on. What I want to do is take some object of which I am not the creator but for which I have full perms, and create an impostor. I realize I can't download the mesh. But I can render it in-world against a green screen, and get views from six sides. I'd like to turn those images into a texture, paste them on a rectangular block, and import that back into SL as the lower levels of detail. Why? To solve problems like this. Chair from Marketplace, full perms, high and medium level of detail. High model is fine. Medium model is crap, and kicks in at 3.9 meters. To see the high model, you have to be in mouselook. Don't even ask about the lower level models. Of course, it looks great until you buy it, because the marketplace only shows the high res model. Some semi-automated process to generate and import simple block-like impostors would allow upgrading many existing models.

Typical real-world size information for objects in Second Life All dimensions in meters. Data from various architectural sources. Rounded off to 0.005m. Furniture Dining table height 0.750 Chair height 0.460 Kitchen counter height 0.915 Bar height 1.010 Buildings Door height 2.135 Door width 0.920 Brick dimensions 0.100 × 0.070 × 0.200 Cinderblock dimensions 0.410 × 0.200 × 0.200 Stair tread height 0.180 Stair tread spacing 0.280 (Brick and cinderblock dimensions include mortar, so these values are suitable for repeating textures.) (Stair tread spacing is a minimum.) If you're too big, you can't get through some doors. Some sims, especially historical and steampunk ones, are scaled to real world size. Most of SL runs a bit big. A SL joke is that women are 6 feet tall, men are 7 feet tall. Beyond 7 feet, expect door problems. Chair problems.

You can resize your avatar, but you're already too big.

I keep seeing the load monitor report high packet loss and long ping times. I'm on Sonic.net - no smart middleboxes, net-neutral, 50mb/s, no big network usage at my end other than SL. SL is using less than 1mb/s when it's complaining.

There are a few videos from Second Life on Twitch.tv. Not enough. Some DJs, pointless because Twitch detects copyrighted music and mutes it. An elaborate mech combat sim. A panther girl raid in Gor. They have a a combat system which brings SL up to the level of a good combat game of a decade ago. Oregon Territory A sports car demo. The car looks great. It drives badly. A jerk visits a strip club. What shows up on Twitch.tv is totally different from the place recommendations in SL. Interesting.

Test motorcycle with automatic region crossing recovery This is an experimental bike and may have problems. After all the discussions of region crossing problems, here's the solution, now in test. This bike has all the fixes. We usually leave a free motorcycle with these fixes parked at Vallone/209/23/36. Look for a bike with yellow and black angled stripes. This identifies our current test bike. Feel free to take a copy.This bike deals with both half-unsits and the animation and camera problems mentioned previously.It's been driven all over Heterocera and Kama City, usually around 20m/s, or 45mph. Don't bother slowing down for region crossings. Use of this bike requires wearing an RLV relay which will allow a forced sit to get fully automatic recovery from a half-unsit. We use "DM2-Meter V3.027", which is intended for combat games. (There's usually a crate next to the parked bike which can be copied to get one. Once worn, it brings up a HUD display at top center, allowing the RLV features to be turned on and off. When that display is red, the RLV features are available. Note that this allows others to exercise RLV control over your avatar, but you can turn this relay off easily.) If you don't bother with the RLV relay, you can still ride the bike, and a half-unsit will teleport you back to the bike. But you don't get re-seated. When you get on the bike, it will ask for teleport permission. It uses that to teleport you back to the bike if you come off at a region crossing. Pressing PAGE DOWN will trigger a test of the teleport/resit sequence. It will be triggered automatically should a half-unsit occur. Re-sitting is not yet reliable, but if it doesn't work, get off the bike and get back on to reset. Report problems to "animats" in Second Life. Video of problems would be appreciated. This a test vehicle. That's why the yellow and black stripes. It tends to go airborne at high speeds, and isn't useful for racing. But it will get you around Second Life. Try it and go drive around. This is a workaround. It would be better if LL fixed this on their side. We have a paper on what's needed. While we're waiting for Linden Labs, have some fun driving.

Is there some simple way to generate a low LOD model by rendering an image of the object, making that a low-resolution texture, and pasting that onto a flat surface? For anything that's mostly flat, that would be better than triangle-reduction LOD.

Something seems to have slowed things down in the last two weeks. Sims that didn't used to lag now lag badly. I have a suspicion it's "server consolidation" - LL is saving money by putting more sim processes on fewer servers. I have a support ticket open for excessive lag on rarely-visited Vallone sim in Kama City. Every 10-15 seconds, there's a huge load from somewhere. LL support has restarted the sim several times, without much success. I kept posting pictures of a lag meter all the way down at zero. The latest suggestion from support is to remove the lag meter as it may be causing the problem. Removed the lag meter. It didn't help. As many of you know, I've been working on improving region crossings, so I drive instrumented motorcycles around SL. I'm seeing more laggy sims in the last two weeks. I record video of much of this so I can review problems, so it's not just opinion.

Many off-road vehicles can go through there now, but there's a ditch at the south end that stops some low-slung cars. It needs a paved road. The Linden Labs right of way was clearly laid out as a future road. It was just never built.

I see this problem mostly in near-abandoned areas, where someone set the permissions long ago and left. At least the big landowners tend to set their permissions reasonably. If LIFE Properties had ban lines around all their properties or turned scripts off, flying would be impossible.

Hm. If you can build and rez, you can grief. Not clear how preventing object entry where you can build helps. I'm thinking of the big sandboxes such as http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sandbox Colborne/3/136/27 (Adult, premium, griefing not a problem) http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sandbox Pristina/9/144/27 (General, all users) each of which is four sims in a square isolated from other land. I do vehicle testing there, and if I get out of the vehicle to edit it, the vehicle goes away.

Some Linden Labs sandboxes have Build enabled for everyone, but have Object Entry disabled. This is a strange combination. You can create prims and rez existing objects. You can rez a vehicle and drive it. But if you get out of the vehicle, it immediately disappears and is returned to the owner, because it's now considered an "entering object". Is there some good reason for this, or is it just a bad permission setting?