animats
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Posts posted by animats
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28 minutes ago, Quistess Alpha said:
SL has no real mechanism for "put me in a smallish lobby with 4-8 strangers" but that's the main mechanic of that style of social game. and to get that mechanic to really work, you'd need to have at least 20~30 small rooms for a newcomer to switch between before they find one that 'clicks'.
You could easily make a system like that inside SL (You'd just need some social-networking a teleporter and a set of skyboxes), but it would (probably) be very unpopular, unless perhaps it was directly backed by LL and placed prominently in the destination guide.
SL does. That's what the Linden-run social islands are for.
What I'm getting at is that they don't work very well socially. I'm not sure why.
From the system side, the key is making it so that the most annoying person does not dominate the space.
Better spatial audio might help. Check out High Fidelity's new spatial audio system, which is what Rosedale is doing now. He's trying to make crowded rooms with everybody talking at once work. Breakroom uses that system. SL already has spatial audio with Vivox, although I think it's just volume, not stereo direction.
It might be helpful to exaggerate some audio distance effects to get better social spaces. Suppose there are 5 people in a room, and one of them is yelling a lot. If the other four get closer together, and further from the yeller, the yeller should not just fade out. They should fade out more than distance alone indicates. This is a really hard problem, but if gotten right, meetings and parties in SL would work much better.
This has to be totally automatic. Additional buttons are not the answer.
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Here's the real problem:
"VRChat is a social platform at its core. You have a virtual body in a virtual space, but you're encouraged to meet new people and hang out with your friends here. You can talk through a microphone, and hear your friends through your computer's speaker, or a headset. ... Not long after logging into a public server, you'll quickly encounter any number of other players — to you, though, they'll look like anime girls, superheroes, Star Wars characters ..."
SL is not that good as a social space. You can have the above experience in Second Life. Just go to Social Island 10. It's awful.
Something is fundamentally wrong with group conversational interaction in SL. Discuss.
(Search for "meeting in VRchat" to see what it's like over there. It's much more lively.)
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1 minute ago, Prokofy Neva said:
The Lego people in Roblox are a turn-off and not because I'm hung up, but because they're for kids. And the company's trailer shows you that it is for mainly boys, mainly shooting, mainly chasing. Not for us.
Roblox has more adult users than SL does. (It's in their S-1 filing with the SEC.)
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1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:
SL needs to tailor the experience to be more in line with the shared language common to all video games. It can then depend on new users already knowing those basic expected mechanics.
That's worth some serious thought. More later.
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10 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:
Roblox is kicking ass.
That looks like awesome fun.
Remember fun ?
Exactly. The Fantasy Faire video is B-O-R-I-N-G. It starts out with 2 1/2 minutes of a slow scrolling transcript of paragraph roleplay. Then there's a slow flythrough of a steampunk medieval build. At 5 FPS. At, for some reason, second floor level. But there's no sense of what you do there. Other than admire the architecture. The builder really likes flying buttresses, even where they don't belong.
Here's a more fun SL video, from Luca Grabacr.
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1 hour ago, Exavor Diesel said:
I think the next best thing (and most practical) would be for SL to be web browser based and do much of the rendering on their servers.
It's a good idea, but the cost of doing that is high.
None of the big-name players, like NVidia and Google, seem to support SL. Because LL would have to make a deal with them.
There are several services where you rent a remote gamer PC by the hour and can upload your own software, so you can install a SL viewer yourself. There are several services like that. Paperspace, LoudCloud, Shadow, etc. Cost varies, but seems to be around $1/hr. If you use one, create a throwaway alt with a unique password. Best not to trust those services too much.
This is not a good way to onboard new users. You get to start with an empty virtual machine and configure it. But it's something experienced users might want to have available. If LL did a deal with NVidia or Stadia, so the LL viewer was available from the "load game" menu, this would be a viable option.
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LL has done a good job of filling in some of the more important voids. I'd like to see a few more spots filled in, but not all that many. More navigable water on the south side of Sansara would be nice. The unfinished section on the east edge of Zindra, where the land ends with a raw edge, not even a proper shore, needs work. But we're way ahead of where we were a year ago. You can go all the way from Satori to Sansara via Bellessaria, and I've made that trip twice, once in a plane and once in a boat.
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14 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:
It hasn't been updated in any form of relevance to the modern person and that is the issue.
Yes. I was just checking out Decentraland. Beards are mandatory for male avatars. You can pick a beard style, but "none" is not an option. That's keeping up with the times! But Decentraland, despite all the press coverage, only has 200-300 concurrent users. Decentraland is a sideshow. It's Roblox that's the real threat to SL.
The things to realize about Roblox is that 1) their CEO wants to build a better metaverse, 2) they've done very well with the one they have, with 1.8 million concurrent users, and 3) they have a market cap of $43 billion dollars.
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That article is from 2018. There are lots of those "buy virtual real estate" things now. Upland, which supposedly uses Tilia for payout, is one. ("Supposedly", because only certain privileged Upland users can take money out. Is it a scam? Good question.)
The linked article is about Decentraland, which has parcels that sell for over US$100,000. There's even a virtual real estate investment trust.
You can visit Decentraland now, if you like. It's not very big, it has only 200 to 300 logged in users, and it looks like a cartoon world. But it has good onboarding and works in a browser.
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6 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:
Which leads into the final final catch .. and this one is a real deal breaker. The average computer in use for SL is a laptop with integrated graphics or an APU. How will those, especially older or more business orientated ones, handle this new beast of a client?
Which is a big problem.
If we required the machine an average Steam user has, with an NVidia 1080, we could do pretty well on frame rate.
I'm working on an experimental rendering part of an SL viewer, using the latest and greatest technologies.Some TPV developers and graphics Lindens know what I'm trying and have seen video, but I'm not showing anything publicly. If you're seriously interested and understand this kind of thing, send me a message and we can talk. This is a high risk approach; it might work, or it might not. So far, frame rates are great because the GPU and a refresh thread are doing all the work. Update rates not so much because the asset fetch and LOD system are still very basic. It's just move and view; you can't do anything in world yet.
At this point I can say that yes, it is possible to do a higher performance viewer. It's a big job, it has technical risk, it won't support some older hardware, the minimum hardware requirement is higher than for existing viewers, and it requires a full rewrite of the code. I'm doing a proof of concept, not a full viewer, to see what performance i can get.
On 7/6/2021 at 1:26 PM, Coffee Pancake said:For the same reasons SL doesn't and can't make use of other game engines like Unreal, Unity or Godot (also open source).
The problem with the big game engines is that they have their own built-in ideas of how game assets are supposed to be created, optimized, staged, and rendered. Those approaches are quite different from the way SL does things. Nobody even has an off the shelf game engine that can do a big, seamless, user-modifiable, near-photorealistic world out of the box, let alone do it the SL way. Which is why SL doesn't have a dozen competitors in the big, seamless. user-modifiable, near-photorealistic world business. (Yet. With all the money being thrown at "metaverse" stuff lately, that may change.)
You can get close if you give up one of those requirements. If you give up "user modifiable", you get Red Dead Redemption, which has a huge world and looks really good. If you give up "near-photorealistic", you get a voxel world like Roblox or Dual Universe, where the avatars look awful. If you give up "big, seamless" you get Sansar or Sinespace or Breakroom. Those have a big loading delay when you go somewhere, and then you're mostly running everything locally.
Now, what you can use is a good low-level cross-platform graphics library. Something that efficiently handles the differences between Vulkan, DX12, and Metal. That's almost available. I'm using WGPU and Rend3, neither of which is finished, and I'm in regular contact with their developers. That handles the low level stuff. I provide a mesh, material info, texture info, and position/rotation/size, and say to Rend3, "put this on screen", and it does that part of the job.
The rest involves a huge amount of SL specific stuff. SL has its own mesh format, its own material format, its own message format, its own marshaling format, its own network protocol, its own prim format ... (Those are just the parts I've rewritten so far. There's more.) Nothing in UE5, Unity, or Godot will help there. They all have ways of doing those things, but they're not compatible with SL servers.
It has to be SL-server compatible, or you have to develop a new set of users. That's far harder than advancing the technology compatibly. See Sansar, Sinespace, Facebook Horizons, etc., all of which failed to grow a user base. However, we do have flexibility on how to do things viewer side. As long as the viewer talks to the servers compatibility and it looks about the same to the user, what's under the hood can be quite different.
There's another, longer-term performance issue. In a way, we're doing this all wrong, rendering on the user's machine. It takes more bandwidth to send high-quality assets to the user's machine than it does to send video. 4K video is only 15-32 Mb/s, while an aggressive SL viewer would happily suck assets from the asset server at well over 50Mb/s if allowed to do so. We really should be running SL clients on machines in a data center, one per user, and sending video to the client, which could be anything capable of showing video. You could do that now on some "gaming cloud". Use SL from your 5G phone. But the per-hour cost! Companies have been starting up cloud gaming startups and going bust for the last 4 years or so. Set the price realistically, and nobody buys, set it low enough to get customers, and go broke or drop out of the business.
OK, more than most people wanted to know.
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A few minor mainland norms. These are not mandatory, but are suggested.
- It's sort of a norm that gas stations are rez zones. You can repair your vehicle, or switch vehicles, or rez a vehicle. It's not required, but most of the time, it's followed.
- Commercial buildings with a parking lot usually allow allow object entry and some time before object return, so you can stop and shop. A "30 minute parking" sign is a nice touch. Allowing rezzing in your parking lot is optional. Totally unusable parking lots are allowed, but pointless.
- If you have a ban line up against a public road or waterway, put up a physical fence or wall on roads, and keep out buoys on waterways. Nobody wants to hit your ban line by accident.
- Before putting up large FOR RENT signs, read LL ad policy. Floating, rotating, glowing, or more than 8 meters above ground are reportable. This is much less of a problem than it was 2 years ago.
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With a road there, development has begun.
No idea what this is going to be, but it's big, impressive looking, and looks like it will be open to the public.
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Yes. It's a nice drive, too. You can start in Kama City, in northwest Zindra, and cover about half the continent.
At last, a road connection between north and south Zindra.
North of the river is Kama City, which is urban, and then things open out as you reach the Southern Bypass and go diagonally southeast.
The northeast part of Zindra has a good road system and some nice large builds you can visit. The northwest part, west of Kama City, is water-oriented, with boat slips, yachts, and a ocean large enough for sailing. You can go around the northwest edge in a boat and all along the north coast. You can even get to Horizons that way.
You'll need a rez zone map. None of the public rez zones in Zindra are marked.
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Now, here's an interesting feature of VRM avatars. They have a useful but limited standard set of facial expressions. These could be adapted to SL.
VRM Blendshape Group Name
Triggered by
Asymmetry support
Observations
NEUTRAL
No other expression active
Not applicable
A
Open mouth neutral
Not applicable
not triggered if JOY, SORROW or O expressions are active
JOY
Open mouth while smiling or eyebrows up
Not applicable
JOY has priority over SORROW
SORROW
Open mouth while frowning or eyebrows down
Not applicable
JOY has priority over SORROW
O
Open mouth while lips are pursed (lips funnel)
Not applicable
JOY and SORROW have priority over O
SURPRISED
Open mouth while eyes wide open
Not applicable
not triggered if JOY, SORROW or O expressions are active
FUN
Smile with mouth closed
No
FUN has priority over ANGRY
ANGRY
Frown with mouth closed
No
FUN has priority over ANGRY
U
Purse lips with mouth closed
No
FUN and ANGRY have priority over U
BLINK_L
Blink left eye neutral
Yes
BLINK_R
Blink right eye neutral
Yes
Visemes (Audio Based Lipsync)
A
Visemes AA and AH
Not applicable
I
Visemes IH, Y and FV
Not applicable
U
Visemes OY
Not applicable
E
Visemes EY and EH
Not applicable
O
Visemes AO and AW
Not applicable
SL bento heads can do all that. But trying to do all that from a HUD is too much work. But seven buttons and some voice analysis, and you've got that capability. This is why VRchat groups of avatars look alive, while SL groups look dead.
My point here is that somebody came up with a workable standard, something that seems to work in practice.
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2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:
Single model avatars with baked in clothing runs counter to SL's dress up culture and can't be translated the other way without significant compromise. We are not one rigged mesh, we are a dozen or more independently rigged & animated meshes rendered over the top of each other.
Right. What other systems call "avatar creation", we in SL call "getting dressed". However the case for that approach would be better if it worked properly, without tweaking of shapes and alpha layers to deal with layer problems.
Animesh in SL are usually one piece, yet look like avatars. I have some of the very few animesh who wear separate mesh clothes, and I had to have those custom made. Turning VRM avatars into animesh would be a useful way to get some fresh animesh that aren't game rips.
2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:Single mesh body outfit combinations do result in very performant avatars and would resolve all the performance problems caused by avatars in a single stroke, but it wouldn't be SL anymore.
Yes. VRM avatars typically have 25,000 triangles or less. SL avatars have shoes with that many triangles.
2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:It would be like trying to take a character from one MMO into another. Even if it could be done, the result would be socially and culturally out of place.
One would think so, but crossplay is a thing. Fortnite licenses Iron Man, for example. The Batman/Fortnite crossover set is scheduled for this fall. Look on the SL marketplace for Star [Trek|Gate|Wars|Craft] items.
2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:The true future metaverse is a single platform into which both SL and Minecraft (and everything else) are created, more like an operating system based around the notion of avatars rather than a desktop.
Facebook may be trying to go there. The hardware for that is probably a decade away. Today I'm looking at what's possible in the near term.
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There's a lot happening with "the Metaverse", but much of it is just talk so far. One idea seems to be actually happening - avatar portability. You can have the same avatar in different virtual worlds run by different companies.
So far, there are two systems for this. One is a portable humanoid avatar format, called VRM.
T
Typical VRM avatar. Many VRM avatars tend to have an anime look, but that's a style, not something built into the format.
The standard comes from Kronos, which sells middleware for graphics. Kronos provides the JPEG 2000 decoder used in Second Life viewers, for example. VRM avatars can be used in VRChat, and in most virtual worlds that use Unity. There are avatar editing tools which make VRM avatar creation and modding accessible to the average user. So this is catching on as a standard cross-platform avatar format.
Getting a VRM avatar into Second Life is probably possible at this point, but not yet automatic. Blender can now read VRM files. VRM avatars can be animated with BVH files, which SL uses. The skeletons won't quite match, so some renaming and joint conversion is going to be required. Some things won't convert - VRM has a hair system, which SL lacks.
Worth looking at. More on this later.
The second stage is portals - walk through a portal from one virtual world into another. Minecraft to Roblox portals been demonstrated. This is hard, but it's mostly viewer side. You're logging out of one world and into another, but that's hidden from the user as much as possible. The servers don't need to know you're doing this. If you have matching avatars on both sides, it looks like a teleport.
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4 hours ago, JusticeBo said:
Location Social Island 10
That's the problem. Social Island 10 is Second Life's equivalent of purgatory. It's like the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City, the losers entrance to the city. You meet the same kind of jerks there you meet at a big bus station. It's a transit point; you're sent there by the new user onboarding process, and you're supposed to move on from there.
Go somewhere else. Anywhere else in SL will be better. Try Firestorm Support Gateway. New Resident Island. New Citizens Inc. Oxbridge Caledon. London City.
Like a big city, Second Life is indifferent to you. This world sets you no goals and doesn't force you to do anything. You can stand at Social Island 10 forever if you want. Second Life doesn't care. Your experience will suck, but that's not Second Life's problem. This is hard on some people. This really is a virtual world, not a game, and has most of the minor problems of real life. When you enter, you're not starting a game. You've been dumped into a big city and have to figure it out. There are good places in SL, but you have to find them.
Open the Destinations Guide in the Viewer and pick some place from there.
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2 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:
With Facebook investing billions into it’s own metaverse it might be better to figure out how to link SL to that new metaverse.
The ability to move your avatar from one world to another is starting to catch on. There's now an open portable avatar format, called VRM, and a commercial system called Ready Player Me. Both produce rather cartoon-looking avatars, mostly because they enforce low triangle counts.
It's reportedly possible to bring VRM avatars into SL, but it involves using both the Unity editor and Blender. It's done by converting from .vrm to .fbx to .dae, with tweaks along the way. The end result is a game-type model; you can't change the clothes. This would be worth streamlining into a service. Upload your VRM avatar to a web site, have it appear in SL, pay in Lindens.
This would be a nice migration feature to SL. People would come in with their cartoony avatars and see that everyone else has a nicer avatar.
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Here's the status of viewers on Linux, as I see it:
LL viewer:
- Windows version will run under Wine 6.0, but the updater will report "Failed to execute script SLVersionChecker". The viewer will still run. The installer may crash but the installation succeeds anyway. LL refused to handle bug reports on this because Linux is not supported.
Firestorm viewer:
- Firestorm 6.4.21.64531 for Linux runs fine on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This version does not include the ability to upload meshes, because that's Havok code. However, voice works, provided that Wine 6.0 is installed. There may be problems with DLL files being needed to get voice to work. (Firestorm doesn't know what Vivox's dependencies are, so the error messages are poor.)
- Firestorm 6.4.21.64531 for Windows mostly runs fine under Wine 6.0 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Random crashes on teleports. Region crossings work. This version can upload meshes. Firestorm support refuses to handle bug reports on this because Firestorm under Wine is not supported. (Any help on this would be appreciated. I don't have a Windows development tool set, so I can't build Firestorm with debug symbols and run it under a debugger. Someone who has all the MSVC tools could probably diagnose this quickly.)
So it's still possible to run on LInux. Everything almost works. If anybody cared, this could work perfectly.
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Facebook's chief financial officer has been heard from. He says Facebook expects to spend $5 billion on this. There are already 700 job openings.
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1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:
Secondlife has patents
Linden Research holds 11 patents. The classic Philip Rosedale patent is
8,612,196 
How SL works, in general terms. Expires early next year.
There are more recent patents, which mostly describe technology that never made it into SL. Recent patents have to do with tracking provenance of items, recognizing unauthorized copies.
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2 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:
Did they ever?
Was it ever?
They haven't been perpetually 10 years behind the standards ever since they introduced mesh?
LL is behind video game technology, but still ahead in virtual worlds. Because nobody big was doing virtual worlds.
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I've been making somewhat similar points in the topic "The Metaverse and All That" for some time. More to raise awareness among SL users and LL staff.
Key points:
- Four big companies, Facebook, Roblox, Epic, and Nvidia, each with billions of dollars and millions of users, have announced their intention to build "metaverses." All are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than Linden Lab and have track records of making large systems work.
- There's also the NFT branch of "metaverses". That is, so far, a sideshow, but might go somewhere.
My main point has been that LL management no longer controls the pace of progress in this area. The relaxed pace of SL development may not be good enough any more. Linden Lab may be Left Behind.
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1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:
Also a little leery when it comes to valve and hardware support, they have a track record of releasing something awesome, leaving it up to the community to make functional, forgetting it exists and then dumping the excess stock.
Um, yes. Same reason you don't want to use a Google service for anything that has to run for years.
SL on Google Stadia comes to mind. (The basic problem with running games on remote clients, i.e. "game streaming" is that either it costs too much, or it's being sold at a loss to get market share until the price can be raised so that it costs too much. Although having SL on GeForce Now would be nice. There's a free tier, which lets you get an hour of connect time before you're kicked off and go to the end of the line. For those times when you really need to log in from a phone.)
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The Drivers of SL HUDs get past that. Their NPCs are partially driven by a HUD you wear, so you get a personalized experience. It can be done, and it should be easier to do.
These forums should have a "game dev" group, where people interested in doing that can talk.
Yes. This is especially bad if you're far from the Western US, where the servers are. Europe is about 200ms away, round trip. However, SL is laggier than speed of light lag requires. This deserves more discussion, but not in this topic.
Shooter games use tricks to create the illusion of less lag for targeting purposes. There's a lot of special casing around bullets. SL has no built-in notion of "bullet". Bolting that on is probably not that great an idea. It adds constraints around other things.
I've struggled with that, with my NPCs, Keyframe motion has some problems. The motion you ask for is only approximately what you get, especially under load. Although my NPCs move about as well as avatars.
I'm looking forward to seeing who LL gets as new CTO and CEO. That will tell us if there will be forward progress. Or not.