Caitlin Loxingly

Gaia Clary wrote: 1024 * 2 = 2048 Triangles And maybe there is just a different interpretation here ? If you name Triangles also faces, then we are d'accord ;-) But still the whole sculptmesh needs 1089 vertices. BTW: The movie from my previous post is on Youtube and its not a flash movie but an MP4. If you prefer the youtube link, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsaYC0ThZUg And you say the Machinimatrix server is untrusted ? Is there an official way to get it to become trusted ? I would like to let it undergo any procedure that makes it trusted. Maybe that is why i do not get so many hits on it ? i was naming triangles faces since that is how they are they are actually rendered, as triangles, so we are d'accord as far as the mp4 it is handled by flash because of how it is imbedded and without looking at the source code for the forum page i am not able to see what the content type is beyond flash movie nor where it is hosted, i just guessed it would be the same host as the link listed above it. i consider any site i am not familiar with untrusted, even the forums here are untrusted as anyone who can post to them could place an image as an ip logger. yeah, its paranoid thinking but after certain events all my thinking is paranoid and adds to the reasons i am a shut in, that is part why i even found SL Drongle McMahon wrote: The reason the basic sculptmap is 64x64 pixels is an artefact of the use of the image streaming/compression system. The requirement for an unstitched planar map of 32x32 quads is 33x33 vertices, but the image system will handle only exact powers of two. Thus 64x64 is the minimum size for a 33x33 map. In fact odd-numbered pixels in either dimension are ignored*, except for the last (number 63) in each unstitched dimension, which is used for the 33rd vertex row/column. In the stitched dimensions, the 33rd row/column is implicitly copied from the first to achieve the stitching. *yes ... that's nearly 3/4 of the pixels! @Drongle i was referring to the data stored and sent, which is still a 64x64 image at 32 bits pixel depth (the x4294967296 reference in the post) 8 bits which are an alpha mask, an illusion of security for the creators but in reality easily bypassed, and as a lossless image format even if all the pixels were the same value the file size would remain the same. a text mesh of the same would not require a 32 bit number for all 4096 pieces of data (pixels) and could be compressed significantly, losslessly, so it would still be more efficient in those regards. it also requires more instructions (processor clock cycles) for OpenGL to convert an image to a usable geometry. images have no check for corruption whereas zip, rar, and gzip do, if an image is corrupted in transmission it will still be sent to OpenGL and possibly be the cause of a crash, with the compression routines mentioned a simple checksum can determine if a file was corrupted in transmission and set to not send corrupted data to OpenGL, giving an additional stability benefit of using meshes if coded properly.

thanks but the basics are not a problem understanding and if there is an attempt to convince me that OpenGL is able to render 1024 quadrilateral faces with less than 2048 vertices and less than 2048 actual faces in memory i would point you to OpenGL org for some reading. I'm not gonna touch a flash file hosted on an untrusted server with being logged in under my account name anyway.

@dogboat: i have used 3rd party viewers since shortly after i began SL, you can't judge how long by looking at my account age, add a few years and that's be about right. I changed to phoenix as soon as it came available and it was a great viewer. I saw was because since the last server patch for me it started to crash way too much to use, as in would no longer run for more than a minute no matter what i tried to get it stable again. i tried a couple other viewers and they were either as unstable or forced v2 on me anyway since they moved things around to become as nonsensical an interface as v2 but with lower stability. I ended up going to the v2 latest beta and though it surprised me it has, honestly, been more stable than phoenix ever was for me. i miss the tools carried over from emerald and i am still lost in the interface but it is nice to, for the first time in years, be able to be in SL for 12-16 hours in a crowded and over-textured sim without a single crash, i have even gone a little over 26 hours in SL in the same set of sims, busy and over-textured and full of scripted items and combat meters, and still i am more stable than i ever was in the past, even though it is a beta. i'm not saying people should switch but in my case i had no choice other than quitting SL or trying one of the text only viewers, but, as much as i hate to admit it, i have only crashed twice since i started using v2 beta over a week ago and i am on 12+ hours every day

Gaia Clary wrote: ortiga Waco wrote: arton sculpted prims allow a total of 1024 verticies, you would divide this number by 4 to get the number of poly's on a sculpt which is 256. 256x32 (the number of sculpts allowed on a vehicle not 30, that changed a few months ago with havok7) and you get 7680. AKA your suv there has twice as many poly's as a sculpt car would not vise versa. Sorry, but your calculation is wrong and i would like to give you a correction and allow me to add a bit more of background information: A standard Sculptie has always 1024 Faces (not vertices!) Due to the way how the underlaying mesh is constructed for sculpties (yes sculpties ARE meshes!) it can have at most 1089 vertices for planes (33*33 vertices) and at least 1024 vertices for torus (32*32 vertices). You can get smaller sculpties when you use viewer-2 for import. the smallest possible size for sculpties is 8*8 = 64 faces. But due to long (very long) standing bug in the used jpeg graphics libraries such small sculpties suffer from distortions and can not be uploaded lossless (even if the lossless checkmark is checked). Because sculpties use this very special mesh topology and because they use a fixed UV map they are very hard to texturize. Hence making sculpties IS a nightmare for 3D modellers. Face it. You just got used to them. 3D modellers outside of SL shake heads and run away screaming loud when i tell them what sculpties are about ;-) Meshes remove all constraints which are put on sculpties: You can have any number of verts/tris/quads/faces whatever you like most for your wording (ok, there is an upper limit of course). You can have your very own and special UV map which is mandatory to have if you want to make efficient(!) models. Thus constructing any model with meshes will in most cases be more efficient and in the absolute worst case be as efficient as a sculptie. The car example from earlier shows it exactly and its numbers are fully correct. Another very nice example has been shown to me a few months ago. It was a coffee mug made out of about 120 faces with meshes. And it looked better than its sculptie equivalent made out of 2 sculpties with 2048 faces in total. so in this case mesh was 20 times more efficient. Just a few numbers. there is still a problem with numbers there, if a sculptie has 1024 faces that would require 2048 vertices (4 vertices per face with 2 of the 4 being able to be used in the face adjacent) and becomes 2048 faces once it is passed into OpenGL and converted from quadrilaterals to triangles as OpenGL can not render quadrilaterals. a geometric solid sculptie can be made from a 63x64 mesh, which is 4032 vertices, effectively 4096 once stitching is taken into account, for a minimum of 3906 faces in a 64x64(x4294967296) sculptie map. You are absolutely right about shapes being able to be made better looking with less vertices than a sculpty, there are nearly endless numbers of shapes that can be made with numerically defined meshes that would use less vertices than the limitations imposed by sculpties. meshes also take up less hard drive space and less bandwidth to transmit than sculpties, a cvs text file compresses very well without lossiness, an image is limited in having to be lossless as well and lossless image compression algorithms are poor compression that make very little difference in the file size. That may not seem important at a cursory glance but smaller geometry files mean reduced bandwidth use

Servers should be upgraded to handle the addition of meshes imo, SL has more unique textures than other 3d worlds but a sim only being able to support 100 or so avatars has got to be pretty legacy hardware for a server. Consider other 3d worlds supporting 500+ in an area about the size of a sim. a big part of the problem is asset servers not being able to handle the loads because there are not enough. a sim does not need to load textures so it should not have to serve them, texture serving should be split between enough asset servers to actually handle them or separated from the asset servers and the sim servers and have texture servers that can handle the load of the full number of people who have payment information on file online at the same time. LL gets enough money they can upgrade to reasonable servers. A sun from 1998 would handle meshes just fine without the limits of Inel/AMD processors. Windows was never made to be a good server and if that is what they are using it is no surprise the problems, intel and amd processors were not made to be servers either, it simply dominates the market because of the money they can use to fool corporate customers because of the wide home user base feeding them. Even though not good as servers they could still suffice if there were enough with high enough bandwidth communication between them and the network topology designed to separate traffic and reduce collisions. LL just needs to put out the cost of upgrading and plan it well. Consider this, NWN was able to serve 50 clients from a pentium 2 with 256 megs of ram and only on a on a 56kbps modem, it did not have to serve textures but it did gave to compute pathing and collisions for custom meshes as well as a combat system and multiple zone chat separation. With the advances from the pentium 2 and 64 bit memory addressing, processing the meshes for 70 people in a sim would not be a strain for modern pc if the texture and asset serving is split off properly, even if it had to serve the textures it would not be a strain on a processor released in the past 2 years since it would not have to render them.

Caitlin, I'm pretty sure that at least some of the items you describe are already against the rules. See this page: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/listing_guidelines#adult-guidelines Particularly the part about "Banned Content". I'm sure that at least the part about rape you mentioned, is against the rules. Thank you for the link. Unfortunately even though it is banned rape is listed as forced sex, forced sex is just semantic wordplay for rape as if it is forced then the one being forced does not want it. Nothing consensual is forced so every mention of forced sex by the definition of rape is rape and not sexual. Rather it is a violent criminal act of hate that is patently offensive to sane people. This really belongs in another place except that web profiles are an addition of ways for predators to find victims for hate crimes. I am very outspoken about hate crime issues to speak for victims who are too afraid to even though it scares the bejeebes out of me too, and web profiles are a possible tool for predators in a place that is you look around is filled with rape under the semantic of forced sex and misclassifying it as BDSM, which by its own rules is consensual, meaning not forced. I have disabled my web profile under privacy and had it tested to see if it really is disabled and even my SL partner can not get a web profile for me, for which I am glad. But from what I have read in the comments people who have viewer 2.5 are having their web profiles made public again by the viewer. I have also turned off show in search inworld in SL and of course it did nothing, I still show up in a people search, which leads me to serious doubts that the privacy settings will actually work in the long run. I will not use Linden Labs viewer 2.anything and will stick to 3rd party viewers. The problem there is when SL decided to delete things or ruth you and get you stuck in the ruth state to the point an inventory reset has to be done by LL the first thing they tell you is to sign on with the current official viewer, claiming it works better. Watching things since the beta announcement for viewer 2 it will just be a matter of time before there will be banner ads at the top of the LL viewers.

I would like to add: if you are trying to update web profiles and make them accessable online .... provide a way to search for people by RL location (especially by city). IMVU does this quite well. There is a wonderful dating potential in Second Life, but by the time you fall in love, you realize they're in Croatia or something. Give us a reliable way to meet local singles! Nooooo!!! That is insanity. Have you seen some of the twisted shit in SL, items sold as BDSM that would kill someone, like guillotines that make the avatar headless, axe beheading and impaling "scenes," all combined with poseballs to "have sex" with the avatars that have been essentially made into corpses. I didn't even search for these, I was looking at XStreet the marketplace for medical items for a hospital, boots, a roleplay meter tachi, goth clothing and an ambulance with "adult" content set to show when these necrophilia items showed in the searches. I don't want someone who would buy those or any number of the rape and tentacle rape items (btw, rape is not sexual, it is a crime of violence and hatred, intercourse with a corpse is not sexual either and both rape and necrophilia are illegal in RL but many SL sims encourage them.) I would not want anyone who would buy such things or go to such sims to know if I was "local" or even in the same country for that matter. It is madness to enable people who are being encouraged to do hate crimes in SL to be able to tell if someone is local. Not all of them are rapists or murderers but who can tell how many are or would be given the opportunity. They definitely have some issues that are scary enough I don't want them to have any clue where I am from, let them think I am from Alpha Centari or somewhere even further away.

Hey all, Sounds like you have a lot of really great feedback. I encourage you to log the bugs in JIRA and/or to participate in the Viewer 2 User Groups. That way, you can discuss your experiences and recommendations directly with the product owners. Thanks! A problem with that is you can not put viewer 2.5 as the bug or problem on Jira and we have seen how much attention is paid to the Jira for anything that is not affecting LL being able to get more money. In general to the facebook thing, I don't want anything about me connected to facebook, I already had problems with a stalker from being on myspace, problems being a vast understatement that does not even start to say what happened and the medical costs incurred from "networking" sites being used target people for hate crimes. It is bad enough all the rape sims in sl encouraging people to think it is ok and women want to be raped. Adding an easier way to find people to target for hate crimes for things in their SL profile is beyond stupid and malicious even if it is not deliberately malicious.

I have learned numerous photo editing programs, 3d applications, cad applications, audio and video applications and rarely had to look at the manuals for the ones that have an interface that bears a resemblance to windows / mac os / x-windows / solaris / irix and the 1.2x and 3rd party viewers excluding kirsten's are very intuitive to anyone who understands the basics of the standard interface apis of any of these GUIs. Viewer 2 is not, it gets scathing reviews because it departs so much from intuitive it had to take an effort to figure out how to make it so cumbersome and use so many windows to clutter the screen even with the very unfriendly sidebar which make it much more difficult to do simple things like drag a texture from inventory to your profile or a group you want to add an image to. I don't care how much effort went into it if it was done to make it contrived and difficult to use for anyone who is used to software industry standard interface design elements. Alpha and tattoo layers and stacked attachments are a good improvement but have nothing to do with the poor interface and could have been more easily added to the 1.2x viewer interface and bugs in it could have been worked on instead of the wasted time spent mangling the interface.

Yeppers, typical internet company, try to attract new people but at the expense of the existing users. I don't want my profile searchable from google considering that then someone can redzone your IP or get it any number of ways considering content is http served from many places other than LL servers. It makes someone who is not mainstream society more vulnerable to hate crimes especially if someone can see what groups people are in from a web search.