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Vesca Starlight

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  1. I flat out never stated arena owners would rapidly change settings, the point is more if the item on sale says or logically implies it does X which by all means it should script wise, but the sim settings means it does Y, now the product is not doing X as advertised or believed it should and people leave bad reviews which means people don't buy it and thus people don't make stuff for the system anymore because they get review bombed for stuff out of their control. The way around it would be to detect or for lack of ability to, default to just doing multiple hits every hit to compensate for any settings that make a product behave not as intended, this causes more problems than it fixes which was the point of my post to be wary of good ideas with bad ripple effects. Auditing tools are the biggest factor in all of this really, people will find ways around any coded/scripted barriers you put up so being able to simply see "oh hey person X is doing some funky stuff here" you can then deal with them appropriately. Damage cooldowns after teleport would actually be super cool because it would also prevent the classic issue of "I died while throwing a grenade and now my spawn is full of explosion", though yeah people shouldn't have damage on in spawn to begin with but some folks will always be silly.
  2. You missed my point, people WILL find a way around it plain and simple. LL limits rezzing objects via an enforced sleep and that doesn't stop people, literally any sort of scripted or coded system I can pretty well guarantee someone will be determined enough to eventually crack it and from there you'll see a spiral downwards if you rely solely on code enforced limits, on top of making it so closed down and locked up that it'll absolutely destroy the ability for creators to make fair and proper stuff too. Lets say you limit damage so nobody can one-shot-kill to enforce a partial damage combat, well now when John Newbie takes the tank he just paid $8-$12 for and the main gun doesn't kill someone like it says it should that creator needlessly gets a bad review. Optionally you can script in a system to detect the maximum allowed damage and adjust accordingly which adds more script load needlessly but protects the creator from bad reviews for stuff out of their control... however this also bypasses the scripted rules enforcement of the sim. Applying the same logic to a gun you just make every bullet do that check and now you have very bad things happening to the sim so someone can get away with something they aren't supposed to be able to do. Limit RoF, more nodes. Limit damage, more damage prims. etc. Life finds a way. I'm a huge fan of tools for users to moderate their own experiences like damage/hit reporting but putting up barriers so you don't have to moderate a sim will never work. Ultimately if users can put on a HUD/etc that reports whats going on like who is hitting them with what and how fast (on_damage event) it gives them tools to essentially pick up their toys and leave if they aren't happy, and sim owners generally try to cater to their users/visitors unless they like paying hundreds monthly for a sim that doesn't get any traffic which is their prerogative.
  3. Despite the fact I make stuff for it VICE is a crappy deprecated system that people keep trying to turn into things its not instead of just doing QoL stuff and has been abandoned by its devs for longer than I've been on SL, its good enough for what it is and pretty much carries on because nobody wants to buy a slew of new stuff for a new/unknown system or other reasons of social politic (most of the experienced folks who could make a good replacement without falling into the same pitfalls have been around long enough for detractors on principle). LLCS has a lot of communities built around it which all have different interpretations of what should and shouldn't be so I think wanting to reach a consensus is unrealistic at best, people in a zombie community probably aren't going to agree with people in the SLMC (both Military Community and Motorcycle Community) or internally within their own due to tribalism, simple differences is opinion/agenda, or my favorite the ages old superstitions that come from 07 when people didn't have a clue how SL worked but its been repeated enough to become law for some. In short a consensus is unrealistic at best, and each system often has a ton of small communities and ideals around it. Damage 1.0 wasn't perfect but nothing will be, the idea is to just give tools that allow as many communities as possible to flourish without breaking things too badly elsewhere. On the point of arms race, it can and will happen no matter how closed off a system is /someone/ will find a way to game it or get around it so its one of the main reasons I push for moderation/diagnostic tools more than trying to make a system more closed down. To prevent an arms race you essentially need a strong enough personal willingness or community backing for "hey no thats dumb don't do that" when someone makes a bunch of gear that does unfair things. Though it is important to still be open to ideas that could be beneficial so you don't end up in total stagnation and fear of improvement (see LBA). In LLCS as it is you can easily make a non-phys invulnerability chair that nukes the sim at the press of a button, but most sims will ban you for it because they often have rules against it even if the system technically allows it. Its a common rule in the LLCS areas I partake to see "you must be vulnerable at all times" with further clarification that armor systems should be realistic to damage, IE not requiring large negative values or such and working with most available launchers. TL:DR Childproofing never works, sim owners should and always will still have to actively moderate. I've literally never seen this as the cause, usually its because raycast is instantaneous so you don't really have to account for travel time and lead (at 200m/s or max speed a bullet still takes a second to go across sim, which means an avatar could have moved 3.25-5.12m roughly) which can have a huge impact on gameplay turning it into a point-and-click adventure while everyone else is having to shoot ahead of others or have a delay before hitting.
  4. In relation to damage limitations one major concern I have with hard-setting such limits at a regional/parcel level would be when things are supposed to one-hit, stuff like for instance a tank's main gun vs infantry or a point-blank grenade explosion. I'm unsure if there will ever be a good solution to the problem but its very much a concern since due to experience I don't like the idea of (current) SL combat being a purely twitch-shooter-rifles-only affair when the fact it isn't as controlled an environment as most AAA games means client graphics lag or a myriad of other problems severely disadvantages some players over others on a purely technical level in such instances. I've brought up the issue in the past including in the JIRA where such limits were proposed (and IIRC accepted by LL). A lot of my experience with combat in SL has been in combined arms gameplay (LLCS/VICE/etc), where vehicles are a major factor; and with the changes planned thats also a major section where myself and others are looking at potentially more commercial interests with making VICE vehicles and such functional in LLCS since we shouldn't need a full rescript and janky follower system just to make them work. One major concern I would have is someone limiting the damage cap for purely infantry-focus while still allowing vehicles, and the discouraging bad reviews or other matters from customers who are bothered their tank that rightfully should be effective is rendered ineffective by an abusive or just unaware combat area owner, a problem I've already seen simply by trying to balance things for fairness already. I'm not trying to be overly negative but I do think a proper cost-benefit analysis should be given for every implemented feature to avoid unintended ripples and effects that might end up bringing a small amount of positives while overall negatively affecting or preventing access for a larger amount of people. Edit: Fixed redundancy.
  5. This is true, and Thunder actually gave me an example of similar such things however I'd say an argument against that is overhead. To include checks for scriptless bullets you are now doing even more checks on /every/ object that hits you regardless of if its scripted or not and that adds a lot of function calls and script performance impact which somewhat dampens the positive impact of scriptless bullets to begin with, even if its a minor impact you have to multiply it by your number of actively moving players/combatants to which it does start to add up much like bullets do. So yeah making one thing more efficient at the cost of having to make other things less efficient isn't an ideal trade, and the on_damage event would be a massive benefit to the current changes being worked on even if we have workarounds currently.
  6. That was brought up during the last meeting, especially with scriptless bullets; as normally people just see if they've been hit by using a collision detector that filters for scripted objects (being that previously all damage sources were scripted) but having to check for unscripted does complicate that as you can't just raw output collisions or every object in a sim build will blow up your chat while you run around. The first suggestion was a function like llDetectedDamage() that would return the amount of damage dealt on collision but there was also some ideas floated of a much better damage event with info like how much, from who, etc. that would function similarly to a collision event.
  7. The appeal of the in-built linden damage system is how open and easy to use and/or make things for that it is compared to metered systems, even with all the hacky stuff needed to do vehicles currently the barrier to entry is far lower than what you need to learn to effectively use VICE and I imagine other systems which might limit one further. If its a project for only one person or a small group to make things for I feel like that would potentially be a lot of stuff to add on LL's end for what is honestly a better fit and role of a meter being inherently closed source and proprietary. Grief HUDs are pretty much universally disallowed in every combat sim I've been to with the exception of the more-or-less-unmoderated ones LL owns and even that might just be a matter of catching people doing it. I don't think the intention of the combat update(s) is to stop people from making/using those HUDs as that wouldn't really be possible without just disallowing making stuff in general. If you as an MC member are having issues with people using HUDs with crashers there is more than likely a larger community issue and people using those need to start being banned from participating by sim admins until changes in behavior are made, there is nothing bad about wanting to protect your physical hardware from damage by a GPU crasher but you need to be willing to use the tools you have. Edit: Ctrl+alt+shift+9 is your friend if someone uses a GPU crasher, it'll turn off rendering objects in firestorm and possibly other viewers which will make most of them ineffective long enough for you to ban someone. It however does not help from animation exploits or sim crashes but those are rarer/harder to do and LL is often on top of them fast, it just prevents the easiest to make and thus most common grief tool from working.
  8. @Love Zhaoying As Amalia clarified the concern is for the damage recipient. Randomly dying with no indicator of who/what killed you can be extremely jarring and detracts from gameplay aspects while also allowing for some less-than-fair things to go unnoticed. The issue is that using a raw collision event with no way to differentiate between a damage-enabled prim and say, the sim build or normal movement collisions is going to lead to some rather extensive chat spam for any sort of reasonable hit reporting; the workaround solution of checking name and/or velocity has its own caveats as well specific to linden damage combat or hazards. User made diagnostic tools essentially become the barrier to bad faith actors of which its guaranteed to encounter no matter what you do online, on top of anything even vaguely competitive such as games or SL combat. Due to how damage interacts with an agent (IE immediately deleting the prim) any sort of hit reporting on the sender's side is going to require a scripted projectile regardless that impacts the avatar before sending data back and deploying a damage prim on the target or enabling damage itself for that purpose.
  9. Looking at the function as listed on the wiki and from whats said here (having issues with beta grid so I can't play with it myself yet) I'm definitely liking what I see but one concern I have is that of detection. As it currently stands the routine way to detect damage prims is a check for whether an object is scripted, often times with no other checks as raycast damage (grenades, snipers, etc) often reports as 0m/s. The advent of script-less damage prims does introduce some new issues on detection which so far the only solutions I've been able to think of that don't add too much overhead is a name-prefix check like if(llGetSubString(detectedname,0,3)=="DMG.") which requires third party cooperation in naming the projectiles or an additional velocity check as suggested by a fellow scripter which I still need to test and find potential caveats for (whether being part of a linkset IE in a vehicle causes report spam, etc). It might be that some sort of detected damage function could be needed at a later date otherwise the overhead of detecting damage prims may negate at least some of the benefits of scriptless bullets. Do keep in mind that as its shown so far I actually really like the new function, I'm just trying to figure out how things may change and adapt with its implementation.
  10. I play mostly simulator type stuff outside of SL so I'm well aware of this fact, most things in SL tend to get "gamified" to some extent due to the limitations of both sim size and projectile speed. If you play ArmA or some other dedicated shooter you have literal kilometers to work with and generally ranges are in excess of a single sim (300m+ usually) with games like war thunder putting those ranges upwards of 2-3km for shots. Usually my thing to factor the dropped max speed and small arena size is to make different bullets have different prim gravity on top of it to include a somewhat exaggerated difference between calibers for gameplay sake ranging from 0 for flechette/sabot to 0.3 for pistol/SMG with LLCS stuff, while stuff like GLs I'll use the IRL speeds with full gravity but if they go over (like the XM25 at 210m/s) I just divide it by two and give it half gravity (so 105m/s at 0.5 gravity). I'll note though that in LLCS bullets are also generally one-hit-kill even to the toe unlike simulators or real world so slowing them down is also helpful for somewhat nerfing that a bit, in systems like VICE I actually find faster bullets on bolt actions helps balance them out of being totally irrelevant/redundant next to SMGs or such, and consequently is why most LLCS raycast guns are bolt action or sniper types. I actually tried asking LL for a function to return what damage a prim was set to so you could effectively moderate partial damage combat while not breaking things meant to one-shot like grenades and tank rounds but they said it was unactionable (though limiting damage values wasn't apparently?) so it is what it is.
  11. I'm not the most apt with forums but I'll try to give some insight... As someone who currently is developing content for both LLCS (the in-built system used by the SLMC) and VICE both commercially and for groups/commission I can pretty well say that the idea of "bullets are a problem" is kind of wrong if you script them properly. Perhaps if you follow conventions of 2008 or overload them with complexity you'll be having issues with lag and reliability but for the most part nowadays (and especially after the AWS switch) not even homesteads run into lag issues when 20 people are slinging prims, the exceptions being when folks are doing the former and using old poorly scripted/outdated things. Regarding raycast its also a matter of preference and backwards compatibility, like with VICE we can't effectively move to RC even to "wallsafe" explosives (so they don't kill through stuff) because its a closed system with its limitations and physical rounds are 100% needed, in LLCS wallsafe stuff is the norm. On the matter of preference RC is direct point-to-point (literally drawing a line and seeing what you hit) and has a few caveats such as an inability to simulate very minor drop in munitions due to line of sight (I personally give pistols a bit more drop to reduce effectiveness at range while rifles have a flatter trajectory) and the fact that the scripting for raycast guns is significantly more complicated due to the need for clamping your end point to the sim edge or it will fail 90% of the time, which requires a lot more math than basically anything you are doing on a prim gun. Combined with the other caveats Wulfie mentioned its a good idea on paper but in practice it will gatekeep even harder than the current need-to-knows are with scripting for the community today. Lastly I will point out that most scripters in the SLMC and SL in general tend to be a clever lot and a lot of the issues have been resolved in one way or another, better scripting practices means bullets reliably delete and the sim doesn't lag, I personally do a velocity factored rez offset so I can rez under one meter ahead and not run into my bullets by just increasing the distance based on my current speed so that tends to also a non-issue. Also fun fact bullets are usually at least 4.5-5 meters long because of some fun math revolving around simulator framerates and collisions, you need 1 meter of bullet for every 50m/s of speed with a little over just for reliability sake. This is because a bullet at 200m/s will travel 4.4-ish meters (200 divided by the simulator FPS of 45) per frame and thus check to see if its collided with an object, its also why you should never press your avatar against cover unless its at least that thick.
  12. 100% this. I always stress this with selling products that you need to find a sweet spot of not putting 48+ hours of work up for 50L but also not making it so prohibitively expensive that nobody can afford it. Make it cheap enough that a lot of people won't think twice about buying it but expensive enough that when their friends see the cool new toy they got you'll make some money. You do also always make money off a product as long as it sells, extra copies don't cost you money so you always have a trickle income at worst. Freebies also help with this, I'm a huge advocate for making good decent/high quality freebies as a means of letting people sample your work. Lots of people make freebies these crappy things (which is why freebies have that stigma) when really it should be a way to show what you can do for potential customers. It has the added effect of also bolstering the community you make them for by letting new or poor players get into it without the risk of spending money. If your freebies show off your superb quality products you can generally sell them at a bit higher price.
  13. They actually very much are, which is why systems are in place so people can report issues and they can handle them. It would be unreasonable to say LL is liable for things they don't know about but you could make the argument that they would be if there was no way to report things to them. There is however a way to report things to them so if stuff is going on and no residents are reporting it (as LL can't realistically monitor everything 24/7) then the liability falls on the residents not reporting it. Its kind of weird but makes sense if you think about it, and is pretty much how every social media platform handles things too. I should also point out that not everything that you might personally disagree with is illegal, and even then you get into a bit of a gray area due to how many old laws are still on the books in various states that might not apply now and a bunch of other things. I also don't think LL wants to police how people interact because there is a lot of cultural and societal differences around its userbase, so its safe to just enforce what is illegal or not. Its complicated and I don't want to write a book, nor am I a lawyer I just pay attention to why people do things and ask enough questions.
  14. Probably because they are predatory and take advantage of people? I mean selling drugs probably makes people a lot of money but it plays on addiction and ends up hurting people for real, which is why so many countries and states started to really give lootboxes a good look over because we had the same problem in other games on other platforms. Kudos to you for the fundraising stuff though, but intentions still don't really change the underlying problems in the bigger picture. I think that is a strawman? I could have the term wrong. Regardless its an extreme that likely will never be the case, especially since governments have tried to get rid of or regulate many things in video games and media to that extent and failed, violent videogames don't cause violence, drinking in a video game doesn't make you a drunk, etc.
  15. @Patch LindenThank you for taking the time to answer questions as best and quickly as you can. I do have a concern regarding what another user said however about people who might not be able to log in or are no longer actively involved in SL, are there any plans to "grandfather" or treat such cases in a sort of way, not to allow them to continue sales but to prevent people from losing their accounts over it if they can't log in or don't see the message for some reason. I'm mostly concerned due to the very real issues that have been affecting everyone for the past year or so, people might have lost their house/internet or be in hospital, or other real-world issues that could affect the removal of listings in a timely manner or attentiveness to SL. The use of the abuse report system does cause a little concern of this to me.
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