animats
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Posts posted by animats
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1 hour ago, ChinRey said:
That's how it is already. I'm not sure if replacing all those dodgy LoD models with cubes would be a huge improvement but well, this does illustrate how ignorant the LoD butchers are about even the most fundamental principles of good SL mesh.
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.)
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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.
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On 2/3/2018 at 7:13 PM, Dee Linden said:
All kidding aside, this is on my list -- and I'm checking it twice! I cannot make any promises right now as to when, all I can say is -- stay tuned.
ChinRey, I really am not a fan of rush jobs, as I'm sure you understand.
Animats, if you will please submit a support case, and somewhere in it put "Attn Dee Linden" we will chat more about the area in general.
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.)
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9 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:
it's a boycott of things you can see more than 10 meters away.
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.)
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On 2/2/2018 at 10:15 PM, Chic Aeon said:
Yes, see the explanation by Aquila on that thread. You DO have to understand Blender fairly well to tackle the "simple" method. If not then the answer as far as I know is "no". What you are suggesting is what she showed how to do. You need to read :D.
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.
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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.
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You can resize your avatar, but you're already too big.
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8 hours ago, ChinRey said:
Oh yes, it's very noticeable. To me it looks more like it's the connection rather than the server though.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On 2/1/2018 at 4:02 PM, Prokofy Neva said:
So I ask myself: Why Has Second Life Fallen Under a Barrel of Molasses?
For a week, the game doesn't work, there are new patches, you are ground to a halt, you crash, you can't move, even to pay somebody $1 takes 15 minutes to "turn over"; you can't buy anything at a merchants' event even if the sim isn't that laggy -- the vendor won't turn over. You can't teleport, your items rez in odd places, you can't "see" things -- well the entire menu of annoyances all at once. Just sheer moving through molasses with lag and poor visibility and functionality.
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.
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57 minutes ago, Rachel1206 said:
Got inspired for a ride out - a bumpy ride but fun. Now the roads at Zindra are old prim roads and hence very slippery, so be sure to set resistance high on your vehicle, if you want to drive there. On the "dirt track" perfect grip.
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.
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33 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:
INB4 another "vehicle users should have complete supremacy/autonomy over any/all land settings" debate, your perceived inconvenience does not allow you declare any combination of land settings as griefing with intent. There are many reasons to not allow public scripts, primarily, resource control of worn scripts in high traffic areas/events.
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.
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23 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:
Without going into detail, it is a deterrent to griefing vectors.
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.
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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?
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Right. If you permit object entry and avatar entry, permit scripts. Otherwise, anything with a script dies on your parcel, including overflying aircraft. This is griefing.
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I get responses about the serious stuff, like someone putting up an invisible prim that blocks a road. Stuff like violations of advertising policy in the form of large, ugly, rotating, free-floating signs are not dealt with.
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Suddenly my packet loss rate went up to 10-20%, according to Firestorm. Tried on two different machines; one Linux, one Windows 7.
This seems bogus. My DSL stats show zero errors. Ping tests and speed tests show zero errors. I have 50mb/s down, 5 mb/s up, and speed tests right now show that.SL is using under 1% of the available bandwidth. This happens even in an empty sandbox. (132kb/s down, 4.7 kb/s up. That's kb, not mb.)
Anybody else seeing this?
(This has been a bad day for LL. First they let their TLS certificate expire, preventing web connections. Then there was about 15 minutes when logins to SL failed. Vallone sim is still lagging badly. Now this.)
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"Unfortunately, until December 2013, the continent (Zindra) is still unfinished. This means that an important road in South is not connected with the rest of road system." - SL wiki.
Proposed road connection in blue
It's tough to drive from the south part of Zindra to the north part. The sims south of Keranio and Cotehill, where the roads would have connected, were never built.
But there's a route available. It's just not paved.
It's a Linden-owned right of way from end to end, but plain grass, no pavement. Most of the adjacent properties are vacant LIFE Properties parcels. Is there any chance of getting LL to pave the road there? Should I ask someone at LIFE Properties to support this? If so, whom?
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Me too. Grid status says OK.
Tried Firestorm, SL viewer, Windows, Linux - "unable to connect to a simulator".
Connections to OpenSim's Metropolis Metaversium are working fine, so browser and net are good here.
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1 hour ago, animats said:
I agree. This is to demonstrate that it's possible to fix the problem. It would be much better if LL fixed it sim-side.
I've discovered that sometimes it takes more than one teleport to get the avatar unstuck.
The useful insight here is that a region crossing is just a forced teleport followed by a forced sit, minus the swirling animation and the "whoosh" sound. The things that go wrong with region crossings are the same things that could go wrong with a forced teleport and a forced sit.
What really seems to happen in a region crossing is this:
- Vehicle root prim goes outside the boundaries of a region. (Objects can temporarily be a little bit outside of their region.) This starts the region crossing process.
- The vehicle is teleported to the new sim, at the same global grid coordinates. That means if it was, say, at SIM A/-5/128, it moves to SIM B/251/128, which is the same location in global grid coordinates.
- The old sim tells all the avatars sitting on the vehicle to teleport to the new location of the vehicle in the new sim.
- The vehicle starts moving in the new sim, before all the avatars get there. (You can often see this happen on a fast region cross.)
- As each avatar arrives in the new sim, it is ordered to force sit on its old seat. But that seat is a moving target, because the vehicle is already moving. (Sometimes it takes a while to catch the target. You can sometimes see the avatar chasing after the vehicle and being re-seated.)
Trouble occurs when the avatar can't catch up to the vehicle. This is why double region crossings often fail. Vehicle is teleported from sim A to sim B, avatar starts teleport from sim A to sim B, vehicle moves out of region B into region C, vehicle starts teleport to region C, avatar arrives in region B, avatar is ordered to sit on a vehicle no longer in that sim, avatar gets stuck in sim B.
The bug is that the current sim side code just gives up when the sit fails, leaving the user with a stuck avatar. That's no good. It's necessary to detect that the avatar forced sit failed, find the vehicle, teleport the avatar there, and try to sit it again. I'm doing that with scripts and RLV, which is clunky, but indicates that the sim has all the information it needs to fix the problem. It's interesting that a script in the vehicle can do a llTeleportAgent on an avatar attached to the vehicle even though the avatar is in a different region. The vehicle script still has control over all the disconnected parts.
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2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
Sounds bad, not everyone uses RLV. I realize you are targeting FireStorm.
I agree. This is to demonstrate that it's possible to fix the problem. It would be much better if LL fixed it sim-side.
I've discovered that sometimes it takes more than one teleport to get the avatar unstuck. A region cross and an avatar teleport are much the same thing underneath, Oz Linden pointed out to me. The teleport just comes with an animation and sound effects. You know how sometimes teleports fail, and you have to try again? I now suspect that failed region crossings are the same failure. Maybe the answer is simply that sims need to retry region crossings a few times before giving up. That's what I'm doing here, with scripts and RLV, and it works.
This makes sense. A region crossing is a network operation between different computers. You have to assume those will fail some of the time, and be able to deal with that.
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And three weeks later, someone with a bigger, better plane carried the first passenger across the Atlantic.
Script state size is never more than 64K bytes. Number of prims seems to be a much bigger factor than script count. Each object apparently requires a database lookup. (It definitely works that way in OpenSim; for LL's implementation, the source code is proprietary.) The 10-second crossings reported for large ships are for ones with very complex geometry.
Try a free bike with most of this implemented. Take a copy of the yellow and black test bike here. This one, if you come off at a region crossing, will try to teleport you to the bike's location, but won't sit you back on it. You have to do that yourself. No RLV required, but it asks for teleport permission. It doesn't seem to have a region crossing delay problem. It carries a lot of debug and logging code the production version won't need, so this is a worst case.
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Vehicles vs. sim crossings, why it's so awful
in General Second Life Tech Discussion
Posted
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.