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animats

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Everything posted by animats

  1. Memory in use in scripts is reported before garbage collection. Until you run out and force a garbage collection, the heap just increases. If you really need an accurate memory usage, you can do this: integer memlimit = llGetMemoryLimit(); // how much are we allowed? llSetMemoryLimit(memlimit-1); // reduce by 1 to force GC llSetMemoryLimit(memlimit); // set it back integer freemem = llGetFreeMemory(); // get free memory left after GC, hopefully larger. Don't do this too often. I do this when free memory seems to be getting too small, to see if the problem is real or whether it's just time for a garbage collections. My NPCs do this to decide whether they can continue allocating memory or need to take some corrective action to conserve memory.
  2. You can just have particles fall from her wand under gravity while she does a twirl. That will get you a spiral.
  3. "Was" is appropriate. NFT sales seem to have dropped 90% since May. The next "metaverse" thing is branding. Gucci is in Roblox. Sothebys is is Decentraland. There's something new in avatars, the Wolf3d.io avatar creator. This creates an avatar based on a picture, usually a selfie. Sominium Space and VRChat, among many others, are using this. The consumer product is called "Ready Player Me". It's a clever bit of marketing. While the avatar appears in someone else's virtual world, it's fetched from a URL from Wolf3d each time it's used. Clothes changes are done via their site. So, once you have their avatar, you're tied to their clothing store. It's free. For now. SL once had an avatar from picture system. What happened to that?
  4. LL was able to hire some good graphics people, who are focusing on the graphics part of the system. Also, graphics is well understood, and some of the viewer problems were just from using old technology. We all had a good talk about this at the last Creator User Group. Server side is less well understood. It looks like Simon Linden gets stuck with all the hard bugs, and there's only one of him.
  5. Is it leaking open listeners? See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Listen.
  6. I'm looking for a set of walks and runs for my NPCs. I need a set much like an AO set, but with more speed options. Bento NPC, non-bento run. I have a set now, but they're non-bento. When the NPCs are not walking or running, they run various bento anims, and those leave some bento joints in the spine set. So I need some that drive all the bento spine joints. I'd like to get several speeds of walk and run that ease in and out from each other well. The NPCs change speed as they move, slowing for turns and obstacles, and I'm trying to make that look better. I've been looking, but I can't find a set that play well together. Full perm. Will pay appropriately.
  7. There's already the Outfit Gallery, which does something like that. But you have to upload a picture of the outfit yourself.
  8. Unfortunately, it's not in the MoleMart in Leafminer. They do have the wall textures for Corsica roads, though.
  9. Possibly SL's best large building. Go to NTBI region; you can't miss it. It's fully detailed inside. Lobby, offices, elevators, escalators, parking garage, mall, restaurant, restrooms, emergency stairs...
  10. Suppose we had "play mode", where there's a very clean screen with very few controls, as Luca suggests, and "create mode", where the 3D pane shrinks and toolbars appear at top, bottom, and sides?
  11. Turns out Kool Door doesn't do that, but Scobas does. This solved a problem for me. I'd built a bathroom in part of my Linden Traditional home in Bellessaria, but had trouble fitting in a door. This folding door worked out nicely. Open Closed Nice smooth folding action. There's also a 4-door version, and it's full perm, so you can change the art or doors if you want. All mesh. It does drop out at lowest LOD (it's mesh, and they could have used their 8 triangles at lowest LOD better.) So, not recommended for exterior doors, because it will become see-through at distance. The creator's web site seems to be gone, but their in-world store is present. So, no instructions. I could have read the scripts if I had to. I didn't have to. It's surprisingly robust. I made the doors narrower and thinner, and rotated them, and the script did the right thing automatically. Nice to see that.
  12. I'd make most of the graphics adjustments automatic. When frame rate drops below 20FPS, reduce LOD, draw distance, number of non-impostor avatars, etc. to get the frame rate back up.
  13. That's a really hard problem. SL allocates resources to land, permanently. The world continues to run even if nobody is nearby. This makes SL a living virtual world. But there's no way in the SL architecture to allocate more resources to an area that has lots of avatars in it. Still, the fact that regions choke at 40-50 avatars is probably a fixable problem. Getting to 200 avatars, now that's tough.
  14. I think that's an option with Kool Door. Find their in-world store, where they have all the options set up, and I think there's one there.
  15. I went to Firestorm Help Island yesterday, talked to the helpers, and visited all the teleport gates. Their new user experience is pretty good. Something LL could copy. They usually have live helpers on duty. They get people unstuck, and keep the place pleasant. While I was there, they got someone with an open microphone to mute it, for example. This avoids the hell of the Linden safe hubs. They have a small freebie store, and a portal to more freebie stores. So people can get out of their default. They have various portals - freebies, games, adventure, roleplay, adult - which send users to other curated locations. Each portal has a list of locations, and you get one at random. They have a social area, where people can just hang out and talk. It's within range of the helpers. That seems to work. It's not rocket science.
  16. I've likened entering SL to arriving in a new city. The city offers a broad range of things, gives you little guidance, and is indifferent to you. For some people, this is a challenge. (Famously, Madonna arrived in NYC at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, alone, and clawed her way up from there.) Others are totally overwhelmed. An easy path for the totally overwhelmed would help. There's the opposite approach. "Can you handle the Metaverse?" You start with a basic avatar and no money. Then it's all up to you. Second Life has the best looking avatars of any virtual world - if you can buy or make or find a good one. Second Life lets you build almost anything - if you can create objects in 3D. Second Life has roleplay - if you can meet the standards of the roleplay groups. Second Life has profitable businesses - if you can run a business. Second Life even has sex - if you can find someone who will have sex with you. Second Life. It's not just a game. It's a whole world. On hard mode.
  17. If you're a default, the big kids will beat you up and take your lunch money. That's a real thing in Fortnite. “ In a viral video with 3 million views, one kid describes how classmates would beat him up for not having any Fortnite skins." I have seen more than one unhappy new player at the Firestorm help island who got stuck with "70s Disco Guy With Radio". That's an insult to new players. The female default, "woman with big floppy hat and dog in purse" is at least good looking. Since many new SL users will have played Fortnite, and think of a "default" as being bad, that needs to be handled better at entry.
  18. You can just order a new one from Linden Lab. Contact Linden Estate Sales.
  19. There are probably a half dozen under-utilized Gorean sims still around.
  20. Metahuman Creator is out now. I've run it. It's free if the output goes into only Unreal Engine games. In any case, you can play with it. It's mostly a collection of premade heads and bodies you can tweak. The hair system is kind of nice; when you change hairstyles, the new hair fluffs out, and then the physics system lets it fall into place, not going through the skin. Then, once set, it become part of the head. So, not a full dynamic hair system, but some automation. I think clothing works the same way. One physics run during building, then it's just rigged mesh. SL should have that for clothing. As you get dressed, or appear in scene, clothing physics should run once, adjust all the offsets to avoid layers penetrating, and then lock in the rigging for fast running.
  21. Neither Unreal Engine nor Unity is a good match for SL. The big game engines are intended for a specific workflow. Level designers build a game map with objects offline. They optimize the assets. There's a huge amount of asset prepping that takes place before the game assets go into the game. This allows many performance optimizations SL cannot do. For example, in most games, houses are never see-through; even if they have transparent windows, you rarely can see in one side and out the other. So everything behind a building can be ignored when rendering. GTA, for example, uses this heavily. Second Life does not work like that. Everything is dynamic. Even terrain. This is extremely rare in gaming. Most user-modifiable worlds are either modified offline (Sansar, Decentraland, Sinespace) or are voxel-based and blocky (Minecraft, Roblox, Dual Universe). Some games let you have high-detail objects in world, but you can only use or combine the pre-optimized ones. (The Sims). There just isn't an off the shelf solution for SL-type worlds. Unreal Engine 5 is a bit more runtime-dynamic than Unreal Engine 4, but still relies extensively on offline asset prepping. (I've been looking at this pretty hard, and have been building some things over the last few months. Many of these problems can be overcome. Developers who want to discuss the technical details, IM me in or out of world.)
  22. Go for it! And report back how it's going. I loaded up UE5 Early Access and built some of the demos. I'm not a UE expert, though. There are people on SL who are, and I'd like to hear from them. The special cases in the Nanite demo are a little too special. Huge areas of rocks, and large numbers of instances of the same thing. LOD algorithms do great on rocks. I want to see some buildings. And a thousand instances of the same statue are easy, because you only need it in memory once with Nanite. SL has little instancing; most objects in a scene are unique. The UE5 lighting is very nice. Nice bounce lighting. The new animation system with "full body IK" is interesting. SL really needs an IK system. IK is a lot more interesting if you have info about where the nearby objects are, which would require some physical model in the viewer. UE5 has machinery for streaming large areas seamlessly. Let us know how that works.
  23. "I feel quite strongly that more hardware is not a viable path forward. In my experience a significant percentage of participants in SL do so on a shoestring RL budget. Their computers / graphics cards hobble along at the lowest of settings (Atmospheric shaders, longer draw distances, etc. are use selectively and cautiously if at all), their internet connections are slow, even intermittent, they have free accounts and what money they have in SL comes from some kind of job there. In short expecting these people and the many others who stretched their RL budgets for somewhat better hardware for a better SL to spend money on fancy sensors and trackers is naive at best." - Comment on Philip Rosedale speech in 2014. This is a good point. Since then, it's become worse. Graphics price/performance has decreased in recent years. The average Steam user has an NVidia 1060, which is a pretty good graphics card. Original retail price, in 2016, was $249. Today, it costs $549, used. NVidia's current entry level video card costs around US$330. The reasons for this include the move to thin laptops with cooling problems, the backlog at TSMC, the cryptocurrency mining community buying up a big fraction of graphics cards, 5nm fabs costing $20 billion each, and NVidia discovering that gamers would pay over US$1000 for a GPU card. Most people are using laptops, and they have to take whatever GPU the laptop manufacturer gives them. Unless you buy a "gamer laptop", something that starts around US$1350, you get a rather modest GPU. Compare that with typical US$200-$500 laptops. The effect is that the average consumer PC just does not have enough graphics power to run SL well. So, the mass-market virtual worlds look rather cartoony at the moment. See Facebook Horizons, Roblox, Minecraft, etc.
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