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animats

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    Could this new Tech be implemented in SL and solve lot of problems?

    in General Second Life Tech Discussion

    Posted · Edited by animats

    That's a displacement map, a standard technique. The next step up from "bump maps". You can do that in Blender and see the results in Blender,, but Second Life can't use a displacement map.

    render_materials_components_displacement

    Bump map, displacement map, both. See the difference? How often do you get that close? Examples from the Blender manual.

    The GPU does the work in systems which support this, and it slows down rendering.

    It's neat, but not near the top of the rendering improvements SL needs. My rendering list would be roughly 1) physically-based rendering, so shiny objects don't turn white, 2) subsurface scattering, so skin looks more like skin, 3) more accurate shadows, so avatars don't look like they're floating above the ground and walls don't leak light at the base.

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    Philip Rosedale is back as "Strategic Advisor"

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    8 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

    Or if walking in SL had the same feel as walking about in an MMO.

    Please go on. You may be on to something. How should walking be different in SL?

    45 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

    I decided to try driving through the mainland with my controller and noticed it had no effect no matter how slightly I used them. 

    Right. You can hook up a joystick, but all it does is operate the arrow keys. There's no proportional control.

    It would be tempting, as an experiment, to send joystick info. The "control" event sends 32 bits from viewer to simulator 30 times a second, and LSL can read all of them. But only 12 bits are used, leaving 20 free for expansion. If you sent 4 bits each from 4 axes of joystick, you could make a standard two-joystick game controller talk to SL. Each joystick would have 16 positions, so it would feel smooth. You'd have to script a vehicle to read that data. Someone should put that in a third party viewer and try it out. I'd like to see one of Kelly Shergood's helicopters set up for that, so you could operate cyclic, collective, and throttle properly.

    • Like 4

    Philip Rosedale is back as "Strategic Advisor"

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by animats

    7 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

    It's not helpful when he does that.

    It's not experiencing the platform the same way the rest of us experience it, he has no idea what we all do between fangirling, any feedback he may receive about anything is deeply skewed.

    Hm.

    I've watched some of Rosedale's videos, and I spoke to him in world once, but don't really know him. From his talks, he has a vision of SL. That vision does not scale much beyond present levels of engagement. It's a vision of a good virtual world built by users with a commitment to that world. We have that now.

    It's a niche. It's probably a bigger niche than SL occupies at present, but it's a niche. As Rosedale points out, it requires a commitment to the virtual world. As such, it appeals to people whose RL life is unsatisfactory. He doesn't go all the way to using the word "losers", but that's what he's edging around saying.

    This is a problem if you want to scale.

    Now, there are ways around this, but they have their own problems. One is a two-class system, where there are creators, who get revenue for what they do, and casual users, who just consume content. Roblox explicitly has that. Roblox is YouTube for junior game devs. Post a game, get viewers, profit. Fortnite has some of that, although it's a minor part of the user experience. Ready Player One has that - most of the protagonists are casual players, and Aech is a content creator.

    In all those examples, the content is a game, with a start, an end, a goal, and a winner. The world is open-ended to creators, but episodic to casual users.

    SL lacks an episodic component. Attempts to add one have been failures. From Paleoquest to Zenescope, they're just not that much fun. SL's tough onboarding means there are not many casual users. So this approach doesn't really work for SL.

    What could work? That's a hard problem. LL certainly doesn't have an answer.

     

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    List Limit

    in LSL Scripting

    Posted

    Don't force garbage collections unless you have to. They're slow. The idea is to wait until it looks like you're running out of memory, then force a GC and recheck before taking other actions to avoid running out of memory. Unless you have a script which really can do something useful when nearly out of memory, don't force a GC.

    A good use would be a greeter script that kept track of recent visitors. If llGetFreeMemory indicates it is close to running out of memory, it should remove the oldest entries.

    • Like 1

    How realistic should avatars be?

    in Mesh

    Posted

    Here's an essay on that topic. Yes, those people are trying to sell their avatar system. But what's worth noting is that they went all the way to working photorealism and backed off. They discuss why.

    This is relevant to Second  Life, where the avatars approach photorealistic, but don't quite get there. This puts them in the uncanny valley. With face tracking on the official SL roadmap for 2022, this becomes more relevant. If we have face tracking, what should avatars look like?

    uncanny_graph_blog.jpg

    The uncanny valley.

    The Polar Express movie (2004) was where Hollywood bottomed out on this scale. Facial motion capture was used in a mainstream movie for the first time. The result was considered creepy. The overall look was weird - too realistic to be a cartoon, not realistic enough to be live action.

    The lesson was that once you get deep into the uncanny valley, you have to up your game in all areas to get out. The rendering has to get better. Especially for skin, where you need subsurface scattering, the effect that makes skin glow slightly. Motion has to look right.

    Hollywood has managed, at great expense, to get out of the uncanny valley. Games are getting there. (See the Unreal Engine 5 Matrix demo.) SL is part-way into the valley. A question is whether facial motion capture moves it deeper down or starts to go up the other side to photorealism.

    I'm not against motion tracking. I think it would force LL to up their game in other areas as well, though.

    Comments?

     

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    It's the year 2022 and ............

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    4 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

    He opined that widespread adoption of meta personas would require some degree of portability.

    So far, the metaverse crowd that makes a lot of PR noise hasn't done much about portability. NFT portability is, so far, just talk.

    There is something called Ready Player Me, which you can look up. It's more outsourcing than portability. Game developers can outsource avatar appearance management to another company. All appearance changes happen on their web site, they have total control over avatar appearance, and own all clothing and models. It's mostly used by small game developers who don't want to build an avatar system.

    • Like 1

    Wanted: Urban sim builders with terraforming experience for an upcoming urban sim to be open.

    in Inworld Employment

    Posted · Edited by animats

    Terraforming takes some practice, but you can practice. There's a small terraforming practice area at Builder's Brewery. There's also an entire empty Linden sim for terraforming practice, but I don't remember where it is.

    Note that if you have a subway below ground, the rest of your ground has to be well above the water level, so you have to figure out how the shores of your region(s) are going to work. Go spend some time in New Babbage, which has this well worked out, with underground tunnels, docks, and canals.

    • Like 1

    Micro Parcels - Are they allowed?

    in Mainland

    Posted

    There used to be a thing for 4x4m parcels as bases for giant billboards along roads. The Circuit de Corse in Corsica, which is a popular drive, used to have several. I haven't seen those in a while. I ARd one of them years ago, and probably other people ARd the rest of them. As ads, they weren't working anyway. About half of them were "rent this billboard".

    There are still some little brightly colored ad things on 4x4 parcels. Some say "Taxi" on top, so maybe they have teleport links. Never clicked on one. Ugly, but harmless.

    • Like 1

    Valve Steam Deck first reviews are coming out and apparently wowing reviewers. Mobile Second Life anyone?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    I'd like to see an SL viewer on NVidia's GEForce Now service. There's a free tier that's usually busy, and you get kicked off after an hour. More useful is a $100/year tier that lets you stay on for four hours.  The viewer runs on one of their servers, and sends video to the client, which can be anything with enough power to stream movies.

    Why GEForce Now?

    - Minimal effort to convert a viewer to it. LL or Firestorm might be able to make ti happen.

    - Moderate cost.

    - NVidia doesn't get involved in payments, so Linden dollars will still work. Valve's Steam, Google's Stadia, and Apple's store insist on games using the store's payment system.

    Downsides:

    - Resolution is limited to 1080 lines.

    - It uses a lot of bandwidth. About 25Mb/s. If you use this on mobile and don't have unlimited bandwidth that's really unlimited, it will cost you too much.

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    It's the year 2022 and ............

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by animats

    On 2/6/2022 at 4:42 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

    UE5 & nanite are very impressive allowing developers an almost unlimited polygon budget for real time rendered content .. it is very good for very specific use cases and comes with a laundry list of technical considerations. It is not a magic one size fits all band-aid that can be applied to all content under all circumstances.

    If you want to understand Nanite, go watch this SIGGRAPH video. If you're into rendering theory, it's fascinating. If you have no idea how computer graphics really works, you'll just get frustrated watching this. So go watch the UE5 Matrix demo instead.

    Nanite is very clever, but relies on content having quite a bit of repetition. A key idea of Nanite is that a mesh can have submeshes which are replicated. You can model a chain link fence in Nanite and see every bend in every wire, plus the little bumps on the wires from the galvanizing. But there are only a few different parts. Miles of fencing will not result in a huge mesh file, because of that heavy replication. The replication happens at multiple scales - one wire bend, one vertical fence wire piece, one fence panel with post... That's how they get super detail without super file size. Great for terrain, roads, dirt, sidewalks, and repetitive buildings.

    Not so great for SL content. SL has little repetition. That's forced by the many-creator model - you mostly use your own parts, or pay others for theirs. Game development uses big, common asset libraries. I was looking at a walkthrough of the Cyberpunk 2077 world a while back. The same items keep showing up. The same railing and the same trash bags show up in quite different areas and contexts. Now look at New Babbage in SL. Every railing is different.

    SL has no LI penalty for having 10 different chairs instead of 10 copies of the same chair. SL content has maybe 10x the number of unique meshes as game content. This slows both rendering and downloading.

    Could SL use UE5? Probably not. Nanite requires heavy offline preprocessing. But I suspect that we will see UE6, Metaverse Edition, with better support for dynamic content, in a year or two. Game content goes through much preprocessing and optimization between artist and shipped content. Unreal Engine does all that in the development tools. Some of that could potentially be done in backend servers. Yes, everything can change in a dynamic environment, but in practice. most of it doesn't. That has to be exploited for performance. SL does a bit of this, with Bakes on Mesh, and needs to do more of that in the avatar area.

    Here, as I see it, are SL's biggest problems in development:

    • They have a big engine with a big problem and a small staff.
    • They have a huge legacy code problem in several dimensions. SL's code is all unique to SL. Few libraries are used. They have their own everything - their own vector and matrix math, their own networking, their own data formats. So new hires won't be productive for a year or so while they learn the innards of the system.
    • Going to work for Linden Lab can be career death for a good developer. Nothing learned at LL is directly transferable to a new job. They're not getting the buzzwords employers want to see on resumes. They won't have Kubernetes or UE5 or Unity or any of the web stuff. Anyone who can make real progress on LL's code is probably good enough to get a job at Google or Facebook or Amazon, make $350K a year, and have a future.
    • SL has a bad reputation for being obsolete, obscene, and full of losers. A worse reputation than the NFT clown car. This makes hiring tough.

    More of a people and money problem than a technical problem. Roblox and Unreal have dev budgets 10-100x bigger.

    • Like 4

    It's the year 2022 and ............

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    17 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

    AWS is EXPENSIVE for dedicated servers. It always has been and I am not arguing that it isn't. That is why any person using AWS tries to limit the amount of always on dedicated servers. LL however are not doing that and so it is costing them far more.

    Yes. The consensus is that for 24/7 servers, AWS costs about twice what colocation costs. (Colocation means you own your servers but rent space in someone else's data center building.) AWS is most useful for variable loads. Before the AWS transition, Oz Linden was saying it would reduce costs. After the AWS transition, he said it had increased costs. I won't speculate on why the move was done.

    • Like 4

    "Remember Second Life? It’s Now Taking On Big Tech’s Metaverse | WSJ"

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    16 hours ago, animats said:

    Systems which just host multiple little independent worlds are very niche. Sansar, SineSpace,  and High Fidelity were all like that, and they all had user counts in 2 digits. Big, explorable worlds with content from more than one user in the same space are a bigger niche.

    Sansar is still turned on. Here are its user stats:

    sansar2022.thumb.png.70cca229ef42a22ff2bb17aeeadabbd3.png

    Yes, what's left of Sansar has 11 concurrent users. Will the last one to leave please turn off the server?

    Here's Decentraland.

    decentraland2022.thumb.png.831cc9d179bd8de6db67b5f4afd7b401.png

    Decentraland has 1860 users right now.

    The servers all show the same world, but with different users. It's sharded. They seem to turn on more servers when the load is higher, although not sure about this. Yes, despite all the press coverage and all the NFT hype, Decentraland has a tiny user base.

    Here's VRchat:

    vrchat2022.thumb.png.79e8642e4bf3c51a5a1779529928a475.png

    VRchat has 24,857 users online right now. They've been showing growth for a while. They're getting to be serious competition.

    Second Life has 55,612 users online right now. About typical for a Saturday.

    Roblox has 1,407,058 users online right now. They were smaller than Second Life before the Sansar mistake. Market cap of US$37 billion right now, but not profitable.

    Nobody seems to have public user counts on Facebook/Meta's Horizon World.

    If Second Life were on Steamcharts, it would be in 17th place right now, behind "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege". That's pretty good.

    All of these are figures as of a few minutes before this post, mostly from third party sites.

      So that's a quick overview of the competition.
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    "Remember Second Life? It’s Now Taking On Big Tech’s Metaverse | WSJ"

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    2 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

    What LL needs to do is rebuild SL from the ground up. And then maybe we would have a shot at being a competitor in the virtual worlds/ metaverse race.

    Remember Sansar? LL tried that. All new, better graphics, totally incompatible, about 20 concurrent users.

    Systems which just host multiple little independent worlds are very niche. Sansar, SineSpace,  and High Fidelity were all like that, and they all had user counts in 2 digits. Big, explorable worlds with content from more than one user in the same space are a bigger niche.

    • Like 2

    "Remember Second Life? It’s Now Taking On Big Tech’s Metaverse | WSJ"

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Rosedale finishes with his "Second Life is for losers" talk.     

    "Most of us who have a comfortable existence in our real bodies, in the real world, are going to still tend to prefer that. Virtual worlds are a choice that you have to make. And it's a very substantial and considerate choice. And it's not necessarily something all of us are gonna want to do."

    He's said that before.

    Is that's what limits SL's growth, or is it just an excuse for underperforming on usability and fun?

    Nobody says that about Minecraft or Roblox.

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