[Making the big world look big - some progress]

4 hours ago, Maitimo said:

How does it handle alpha glitching?

Good question. What I want to try is taking pictures that have a depth channel. Then, when they're composited into the world, real world objects appear in front of or in back of the backdrop, depending on distance. This isn't a perfect illusion, but it beats looking off into emptyness.

GTA V distant impostors. That's the goal here.

In games, levels are designed to make impostors like that work. If you look at GTA V images, you can often find the break between 3D foreground and 2D background.

Notice where fog starts.

Notice how the scenery behind the dark freeway ramp from left to right looks different.

It's a trick of design and technical art to bring this off well. Parts of SL are designed to help, by not having long sightlines. A hill, or a turn in the road, and the transition from detail to background (for SL, nothingness) is hidden.

The stuff I'm looking into is standard game technology and has been for a decade.

[Making the big world look big - some progress]

I've talked about sim-scale impostors in the past. Here's what I'm talking about.

Beyond draw distance, the world would look like this. You'd have a sense of place, more immersion, and the world would feel big.

The idea is to show a 2D image, sort of like a skydome surround, showing the SL world beyond the draw limit. See for miles and miles. Something I'm working on for my experimental viewer, which is  still a long way from usability, but can take pictures like this.

Technical details:

• Near objects would rendered normally. This only shows objects that would normally be out of range.
• Connected regions only, of course. If your region is isolated, there are no distant sims to see.
• The image is blurred on purpose, as sort of a depth of focus effect, and partly because the illusion is not perfect, as with a skydome.
• In actual use, the image would be warped a bit to adjust for the viewpoint. When you're flying, you'd see the "above" images. Imagine it looking like Google Earth, for SL.
• These images would be taken once a week or so by a land survey bot, so they'd often be a little out of date.
• Take a day image and a night image.
• Only ground level pictures will be saved. Sky platforms would not get this effect.
• The above image was made with my own experimental viewer. It's Vallone region, rendered in isolation, as seen from the east.

The un-blurred version.

To blur, or not to blur, that is a question.

Another viewpoint. 45 degrees to the left of the previous one.

This needs to be taken with a isometric camera to get the clipping right. One image every 45 degrees, plus one from above, probably.

Comments?

 

[Does Second Life plan to get into NFTs ?]

NFTs are over.

[New "Community Pages" for Second Life]

I dunno.

It's a mouth to feed. If you have politically correct forums, you soon need moderators to enforce correctness. Which is an operating cost, even though most social network companies outsource that to some low-wage country. Plus people get annoyed with the moderators, the moderators get annoyed with criticism, and the result is either ineffective, or a Thought Police.

The strength of SL's 3D world is that space and land ownership vastly reduces the need for an army of low-cost moderators. In-world, a jerk only has an annoyance radius of about 100 meters, and SL is the size of Los Angeles. Any place that has owners active enough to draw a crowd usually has people to ban jerks. The main places that have a serious ongoing jerk problem are the Linden-run social islands, which may say something about something.

I'd prefer to see LL concentrating on the SL world. Too much attention to the web forums or the payment system distracts from the core business.

["Can't enable physics for object -- insufficient land resources."]

I'm not sure what the limit is. Is there some limit on the total physics weight per region, and thus per parcel? It's not in "limits".

[Planar texture mapping]

Prim cylinder, planar mapping, highest LOD.

 

Prim cylinder, planar mapping, lowest LOD. The low LOD is shown by setting Firestorm LOD factor to 0. (Which is why most of my avatar is gone.)

The cylinder has been reduced to 6 sides, which is normal prim behavior at low LOD. That worked fine.

The texture has flipped and torn. Now, that's totally wrong.

Planar mapping was apparently documented in SNOW-586, written by Patch Linden, but that's gone from the JIRA.

A 2008 video tutorial indicates that planar projection on non-flat surfaces is "funky", and shows similar distortions.

So, planar mapping for non-rectangular objects seems to be undefined behavior. In other words, don't try to do that, because it will render very strangely.

[Can I mark a point on the map and use as a reference when traveling in-world? Not a landmark.]

On 2/22/2022 at 7:06 AM, Theresa Tennyson said:

When you click a location on a map you'll create a "beacon" that's a vertical red and blue bar,

Single click. Double click will do a teleport, with no confirmation dialog.

[Planar texture mapping]

42 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I'm not sure if this helps but planar mapping is entirely client side so it's all hidden somewhere in the open source code.

Right.

What has me puzzled is the vertical distortion of the texture. The normals on the cylinders are fine for lighting purposes. There's no vertical distortion.

Does anybody actually use planar UV mapping on non-flat surfaces?

[Planar texture mapping]

Four cylinders with planar mapping.

Left to right, 1) Mesh, Blender-generated normals, 2) Mesh, uploader-generated normals, no UVs, 3) Mesh, uploader generated normals, Blender UVs. 4) Prim cylinder. Texture scales 1,1.

Planar mapping is somewhat obscure, and because I'm working on rendering, I need to understand how it's supposed to behave.

it turns out that UVs are totally ignored for planar mapping. It's the normals that matter. This sort of make sense. For a flat surface, you want the texture to map perpendicular to the flat surface. For curved surface, though, the effects are wierd.

One side effect is that there are objects in world with no UVs, or junk UVs. They have to be used in planar mapping mode. I have a mesh signboard like that. If you set it to default mapping, one pixel of the texture gets picked to fill the whole sign, instead of the texture being displayed.

I need to know the function you apply to a mesh coordinate and a normal to get a UV.

Anyone really understand this?

[Second Life on nVidia Geforce NOW or similar?]

I'd like to see SL on NVidia's GeForce Now. It's a moderate-priced service ($9/month for 6 hours a day access) that should be able to run a viewer. There's even a free tier, although you have to wait to get in and get kicked off after an hour. But the end user can't load a new game; a developer has to set that up.

There are other services, such as Shadow ($30/month) that let you rent a computer in a data center, but you have to do some sysadmin work to upload a viewer and get it running. Other cloud gaming services have come and gone. Most of them were reselling Amazon Web Services, and the pricing was too high or they were running at a loss to get market share and went bust.

Google Stadia is no good; they insist on payments going through Google Pay. Stadia is probably going to shut down soon, anyway.

Not sure about Vortex, which is new.

 

[voice morphing]

Voice morphing is included with premium accounts, or you can pay for it by the month. With a premium account, you have to make a monthly pilgrimage to Premium Voice Morph Island, north of Orville, to turn it on for another month.

It's mostly useful for kids who want a deep voice, or people role playing animals or aliens.

[Refund due to me]

4 hours ago, lxfinniganxl said:

Is this Talia Pulling a Scam? Or committing Fraud? At this point I wonder. This needs to be looked into and my money deposited into my Pay Pal Account. Immediately.

Tilia is legitimate, but does not seem to be well set up for identifying people outside of the United States. This has come up a few times in the past.

["Gateway to the Mainland" in Bellisseria is now open.]

Lindall Kidd used to give a land course at Oxbridge Caledon, and it was very good. But she seems to be taking a break from that.

[Is it possible to do something in-world when you are in an active IM?]

I've wanted that in the past. Although there's a privacy issue if others can see that you're IMing. "Who are you talking to while I'm talking to you?"

[Pool with water reflections]

Water reflections for a pool! Kama City city center monument

This is a nice effect. It's in downtown Kama City, which is several meters above the surrounding ocean.

You need region powers to do this, though. This was done by raising the water level for the entire region to just below the surface, then terraforming a pool. Unfortunately, land owners in Zindra can't terraform, so the nearby nightclub with a pool can't use this effect. It's swimmable water, of course.

(Incidentally, if you bought the ZiSwim swim HUD, get the new version redelivered. The old one is frantically trying to phone home to some server too many times and getting HTTP 500 errors. The new one works better.)

[Is this SL survey legitimate or is it spam?]

Uh oh. Check the US Federal Trade Commission's Sweepstakes Rule.

If you have to do something of value to the sweepstakes operator to enter, it's a lottery. There are a whole series of specific rules for a sweepstakes in the US. California is even tougher.

This has been coming up a lot lately with "promote us on social media for a chance to win" schemes.

Is this really from Linden Lab? They have all those compliance people they hired for Tilia. Did no one look at this?

The legit way to do this is to just send every responder something. A SL T-shirt or coffee mug. I just received an unexpected coffee mug from a game development conference, and all I did was sign up for a free virtual event.

[SSOC Action Movie "under caster"]

Is this the same "SSOC" that has the big Japanese urban sim near Mopire?

[Article about SL fashion week with no mention of SL]

39 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Is the point to enable transfers of assets across grids? I.e., you can wear something from one grid in another, but with the proviso that it "disappears" from the first grid?

That's the only real justification for going through all the headaches of using a blockchain. While you could do this for SL only, it's pointless, except that you get to shout "NFT" a lot and maybe charge way too much for stuff.

[Article about SL fashion week with no mention of SL]

57 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

but once you sold the NFT I imagine all objects related to it in your inventory or spawned in the world would vanish.  

I've mentioned before that someone could implement this in LSL. The object would check on rez, or once a day or so, to see if the blockchain ownership info matched the in-world info. If not, you'd get a warning, and it would return to inventory or be deleted. Then you could have something like an inter-grid version of CasperVend that would allow you to get redelivery of your objects on OpenSimulator, and mailboxes where you could send your objects to other grids. Then you could move unique objects between grids.

I don't see much of a use case for this, but if someone really wanted NFTs in Second Life, they could implement that without LL help.

[Really great cyber/new-Asian outfits?]

Go to Cocoon when Japan is awake and see what people are wearing.

[What in the hello-kitty is Fitmesh?]

The concept of "fitmesh" is that it Just Works. The clothing responds to all the avatar sliders. With regular mesh, the customer has to fiddle with the sliders to get clothing to fit.

If fitmesh doesn't fit perfectly, it's the creator's fault. Thus, it's unpopular with creators.

["The Second Life Status Feed is down."]

"The Second Life Status Feed is down." - from https://support.secondlife.com/?lang=en-US

No indication of outages on the status page.

Will check tomorrow to see if this clears up.

 

[Account hold and support ticket will not go through]

First, deal with the RL problem. If you're in the United States, the The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.

They also have a web site at https://www.thehotline.org/.

 

[I've tried SL in virtual reality and it is not bad at all]

1 hour ago, Persephone Emerald said:

have you tried riding a roller coaster or going on a theme-park style ride in SL?  I'd be curious how that experience would feel to someone using a VR headset.

Good point. SL motion needs a lot of cleanup for VR to be tolerable.

[I've tried SL in virtual reality and it is not bad at all]

This is encouraging. It's not impossible to make VR work for SL, just hard. And expensive. If you could get a viewer running at a solid 60 FPS, and then use a headset's GPU hardware to shift, rotate, and interpolate to 120 FPS, it could work out.