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Chaser Zaks

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Posts posted by Chaser Zaks

    Does anyone agree the lighting/material system looks better in Sansar? Is it possible to apply it to Second Life?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by Chaser Zaks

    Now I could be wrong here, but my understanding is that PBR would be a separate shader program than Phong. It should, in theory, be possible to have a object flag to switch between "Phong" and "PBR" shader programs.

    However, while Phong uses 3 textures(Diffuse, Normal, and Specular), PBR can use 8 or more textures depending on implementation(Diffuse, Normal, Specular, Roughness, Displacement, Ambient Occlusion, Metalness, Emission, Translucency, Subsurface). With people already being inefficient with textures(EG: 1024x1024 D/N/S maps on ear rings, sometimes split into multiple faces such as one for a diamond and another for the metal), I personally would oppose to PBR, unless there was some serious checking, forced mipmapping or penalty for using high resolution textures on small objects, or other restrictions.

    Additionally, a new format would need to be in place because I don't think streaming 3x the amount of textures would be fun on some people's network connections. Perhaps some sort of packed "material" set that would contain all the textures(with redundant channels removed) + their parameters for each channel type.

    • Like 1

    .

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    I can symbols too! My favourite is this donut shaped C++ code that produces a donut: 

                 k;double sin()
         ,cos();main(){float A=
       0,B=0,i,j,z[1760];char b[
     1760];printf("\x1b[2J");for(;;
  ){memset(b,32,1760);memset(z,0,7040)
  ;for(j=0;6.28>j;j+=0.07)for(i=0;6.28
 >i;i+=0.02){float c=sin(i),d=cos(j),e=
 sin(A),f=sin(j),g=cos(A),h=d+2,D=1/(c*
 h*e+f*g+5),l=cos      (i),m=cos(B),n=s\
in(B),t=c*h*g-f*        e;int x=40+30*D*
(l*h*m-t*n),y=            12+15*D*(l*h*n
+t*m),o=x+80*y,          N=8*((f*e-c*d*g
 )*m-c*d*e-f*g-l        *d*n);if(22>y&&
 y>0&&x>0&&80>x&&D>z[o]){z[o]=D;;;b[o]=
 ".,-~:;=!*#$@"[N>0?N:0];}}/*#****!!-*/
  printf("\x1b[H");for(k=0;1761>k;k++)
   putchar(k%80?b[k]:10);A+=0.04;B+=
     0.02;}}/*****####*******!!=;:~
       ~::==!!!**********!!!==::-
         .,~~;;;========;;;:~-.
             ..,--------,*/

    Source: https://www.a1k0n.net/2006/09/15/obfuscated-c-donut.html

    Login to Dashboard is broken, still nada on Status!

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Sonia Yeu said:

     

     

    Hi Chaser, 

    where could I find that statistic?

    I used to follow https://e*****up.com/slstatistics/online-now-last-24hrs but it's gone from a long time. (e t i t s up dot com)

     

    That'd be my statistics page, which, unfortunately LL still has on a keyword blacklist to stop a specific spammer. You can find it here: https://tinyurl.com/AgniStats

    If you don't trust the tinyurl, you can use this to see where the URL goes: http://www.untinyurl.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi

    • Thanks 1

    Will I get in trouble for putting this up...?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    14 hours ago, Janet Voxel said:

    It’s a pedobear for Biden and I don’t know what the alien is, but the Trump drawing is a meme. The bigger question is what is it trying to say?

    The "alien" thing is a mashup of two things:

    The brainlet meme:

    664.jpg

    and pepe:

    0e9.jpg

    Brainlet is a spinoff of Wojak(Also known as "feels" guy, referring to emotional feelings), it is used in reference to say someone is dumb.

    Pepe is from a comic known as Boy's Club, which 4chan quickly adopted because of the "feels good man" quote from him. He had been popular for years on 4chan, but unfortunately pepe has been marked as a "hate symbol" by ADL because people on 4chan(particularly /b/) used it(Basically, "if hateful people like cookies, then cookies must be a hate symbol" logic). Pepe is a good boy that everyone can enjoy.

    As for what the sign is saying(This is my interpretation of the sign, this IS NOT my opinion!): "Trump supporters are morons, Biden supporters are pedophiles."

    And to answer op: Will it get you in trouble? Perhaps. If you are using it in a advertising manor, yes. If you are using it in private property(say, inside a building), most likely not.

    Number Puzzle

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by Chaser Zaks
    Clarification

    Answer: 10

    Solution: Go to the pie slice opposite of the one we are trying to solve (pie slice 6), multiply the two middles (5 times 12) to get 60, and divide it by outer number (6) to get 10.

    (Select the text to view solution)

    • Like 3
    • Thanks 4

    Login is not working

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    2 minutes ago, streler said:

    so we wont log in until they wake up?lol

    Sometimes the grid recovers. It can be anything from a server outage, router outage, or even ISP outage. If it is something to do with the ISP, it can block some people from logging in, but not others, and ISPs work 24/7 to fix things, especially in SF because a lot of big name businesses rely on those connections being up 24/7.

    Login is not working

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Just now, streler said:

    funny that in the grid status page they show that everything is operational lol

    That has to be manually updated. LL is typically asleep right now. Because they are based in San Fransisco, California, a majority of LL tends to be operating around that time. So SLT(the time you see at the top of your viewer) is the time that LL is mostly used to. Even then, most of the U.S. is at night, so those who work remote are also asleep. Only exception is if the grid severely breaks and doesn't recover, in which case, Soft Linden typically gets on and starts smacking things with a digital wrench.

    Sims and SL engines?

    in Second Life Viewer

    Posted

    No no, you have it mixed up! We use the Sim Ant engine.

    Really though, the "sim" in Second Life and "sims" in The Sims just happens to be the same shortened version of Simulation/Simulator. Second Life and The Sims use both drastically different engines.

    In Second Life's case, a "sim" is short for Simulator, which a simulator can run one or more regions. Simulators handle a majority of stuff you see in world, such as physics and scripts.

    What you use is known as the Viewer, which you can actually browse it's source code if you so please: https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer/src/master/

    It is only a coincidence that Electronic Arts and Linden Lab both use "sim" for a shortened word version of software. Sort of like how Orange can be the colour orange, or the fruit orange.

    • Like 2

    overlapping alphas do weird things

    in General Second Life Tech Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Chaser Zaks

    This can be fixed by using the cheaper method of alpha known as Alpha Masking. You can find this setting in the Build menu under the "Textures" tab.

    Blending is an expensive process, so often, assumptions are made on the calculations side of things. Alpha masking is much cheaper, as instead of comparing various ranges between 0 and 255(technically speaking, 0.0 to 1.0, but in floating points, which there will be way more than 256 values), alpha masking will use 1s and 0s. Computers love binary, not so much floating point math.

    You can also choose to use "None" as the alpha mode. This is specifically useful for when a solid texture(has no intended transparencies) has a alpha channel. Despite being fully opaque, some textures will still have the alpha channel, which can result in the issue you are seeing.

    • Like 3

    End of an Era, no more Pods.

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by Chaser Zaks

    I presume the issue is server related. While I cannot operate land(I don't have monies for much land, unless it is on already crowded zindra land), if she needs a web server, I would be more than willing to help out and offer the assistance of my server(it has no intents on going anywhere for decades, too many things plugged into it), free of charge. In my opinion, the pods are a historical significance in Second Life's history.

     

    • Like 8
    • Thanks 2

    Possible national satellite broadcast of Second Life?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Hey! Networking engineer here.

    Second Life uses a lot of bandwidth, particularly due to dynamic assets and physics streaming. Satellaview was primarily used to transmit games in a read only format, and those games were less than 2 MiB. While satellite technology has improved much since then, there is still the following issues:

    • Satellite rentals are not cheap
    • Satellaview only received broadcast, it didn't send them
    • Latency is a huge problem with satellite internet

    Honestly, if I worked for Linden Lab, I would not pursue this as, to put it bluntly, it would be a waste of time due to lack of potential users. Anyone who would be buying this technology for home use, would be much better off buying satellite internet such as Hughes net(Not sponsered/endorsed/etc). It is cheaper, the technology is much more refined, and there are much more uses other than being restricted to Second Life.

    Here is a feature comparison:

    Features Second Life "Satellaview" Satellite internet
    High Latency Yes Yes
    Platform locked Yes No
    Price Expensive Cheap-ish
    PCI Slot requirement Yes No
    Can access SL Yes Yes
    Can access WWW No Yes
    • Like 3
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