Qie Niangao

I'd start with https://avsitter.github.io/avsitter2_prop.html AVsitter props can be used without the multi-sitting/animation system, but if the objective is to have them disappear when the sitter stands up, it's probably easiest to just use the seating stuff too. Setting it up based on examples isn't exactly scripting but it's a bit of a discipline unto itself. (The source for the AVsitter scripts themselves is all free on github or grab a copy from somebody who has one already.)

Yeah, I think this whole discussion of needing AO at object-scale in addition to material-scale is heresy, but it's already in the suggestion box: If SSAO did what I thought it was supposed to, it would do all this automatically. As it stands, I'm really not sure it's doing anything at all.

That might be one option, and TPVs could feasibly do that much themselves, reading the parcel description as they did for altitude-specific Windlight and doing whatever rendering magic it would take to suppress out-of-parcel items. I assume, though, it would actually be easier to derender a tractable list of specific items if there were some way of communicating that list to viewers that already know how to derender a tractable list of specific items. I'm afraid I'd much prefer keeping most of the environment intact, just suppressing the parcel-surrounding walls, the low-hanging skyboxes, etc. Personally, I'm not looking for that private space—it's not as if that's unachievable if I did want it—rather I just want a better Mainland.

I'm still trying to understand. Clem also said this: … which was always the intent: a viewer setting to enable or override parcel-scope derendering, same as EEP. But I get the sense that even so there's some way they're considered not comparable, and I'm just not understanding it. Being a viewer option, it would offer the visitor the choice of temporarily hiding some objects, which seems distinct from removing them because they'd all be restored with a click, so I'm not really seeing how a censorship analogy works here. A library doesn't censor all the books that aren't on the top shelf. Should a neighbor's ability to erect walls that diminish a landowner's parcel be favored over that landowner's ability to offer parcel visitors a view without those walls? I'm not seeing the business value of that asymmetry (unless to drive more Mainland customers to Belli or Estates). Whether it should be "opt-in" or "opt-out" doesn't seem significant as long as it's a "sticky" setting the way the EEP "shared environment" setting works. (I'm not sure now whether that's the default or not, I've changed it so many times.) Also, I guess band-aid solutions are the very nature of social problems. It's certainly true that somebody who really wants an isolated, private setting will only get from this a sucky substitute for a void-surrounded Estate island. But those who want to contribute with other residents to something more expansive, complex, and diverse than any one person's vision are not looking for that private setting, they're looking for a Mainland where their contributions can be seen by those who want to share them. By its very nature that takes some band-aids.

Yeah, that's what I was mumbling about with this:

Tried retesting and had to add this to the Canny report: Or maybe it was just a fluke somehow? But it's not like I imagined it: there were easily a dozen distinct surfaces with different modifications that were ignored until I cleared cache. Currently, the Ferrari channel region is running the same simulator version as the Main channel, but I couldn't replicate the problem on either channel today. The Ferrari region where it happened before hasn't (yet) been restarted for six days, long before the problem appeared, so that's not a factor in the failure to replicate there today.

I agree, unless the person wants to, because for example they want to enjoy a mainland area that the person who owns it specifically set up. I wonder if that couldn't be done through something like Experiences which does ask the visitor if they want it. I could imagine it being part of a land-scope Experience, but I'm genuinely puzzled by the reactions that this would somehow "control" what visitors see, any more than what EEP already does. Understanding that both are just choices of viewer options, do folks who would have a problem with a parcel-scope derender list also have problems with parcel-scope EEP? If not, why does derender seem problematic if EEP doesn't?

The cache is a black box to me. It's clear that the viewer did a fine job of populating the cache and using what was in there, but somehow it didn't know to get a replacement from the region. I imagine that could be the fault of the viewer or the region or even the foundational SL implementation of glTF Materials. I filed the bug report under viewer and supplied only viewer versions as "Platform" info but later changed that to include server version when regions were restarting and I remembered that for some reason the region is on the "Ferrari" release channel, which I've never actually seen anywhere else.

In case these are referring to the situation I described in my original post, to reiterate, the problem was not that the different viewer caches interacted in any way but rather that the viewer relied on cached Materials information long after it was no longer valid in the sim. The only relevance of there being another viewer involved at all was that I used that other viewer to make the changes in the sim, unbeknownst to the viewer that had cached an earlier version of those Materials settings. If that was all obvious, sorry for the redundancy.

You know the Mean Girls meme about making fetch happen, right? I only meant the whole Social Casino concept is impossible to sell: it predictably started desolate and subsequently faded. I guess in the SL context, it's parallel to the Lab's predictably doomed "Enterprise" team that M set up under… was it Glen Linden? Just a thing that, no matter how much is invested in making it a success, "it's not going to happen." (To be clear, this is not a critique of the build, which I rather like. It's just in service of such an ill-conceived business idea, which was even forgivable as a kind of trial balloon, but… Oh, fine, I guess there's no telling how eager a fresh crop of Mobile viewer users might be to flush L$s into the void.)

Hmm. I suppose some folks who put up walls would stop doing that if they could instead define their parcel to be a Virtual Private Space and that might help some, but otherwise it's really not what I wanted to achieve with parcel-level derendering. As I understand VPS, it seems like a parcel-scale void-surrounded private island, and I guess I can see some Mainlanders would want that, but my objective was to improve the existing, expansive Mainland experience by offering visitors a somewhat curated view, removing the worst eyesores, the way individuals use derender in their viewers for specific problematic content. Of course maintaining parcel derendering lists could be a burden for large-scale landholdings, but so is everything else about owning a bunch of Mainland.

Oh certainly, the same way EEP has "Use Shared Environment" and all the personal Environment options. The parcel derendering list would just be the "Shared" view of the parcel surroundings, but anyone could travel everywhere and see all the walls and floating skyboxes from every parcel, regardless of what the landowner suggests. But again, if a landowner didn't need to put up the walls to fix the view from their parcel, there'd be a lot fewer walls to derender.

It took me a few readings to understand the "narrow alpha blended border with it's occluded edge" but yeah, if this were my own model, I can see how that would solve the problem. As a one-off, the best compromise I can concoct is essentially a shadow prim on top of the pretty tiled-Material surfaces on those that need the high resolution detail but lack structure-scale occlusion. It's horridly inelegant but actually looks pretty good so far.

That's actually the first thing I'd suggest, too. That and nuking the "social casino". If it really must still exist at all, it really shouldn't be anywhere near the Welcome Hub: it's an embarrassment and its very presence will drive away a significant share of those who encounter it. Has nobody told the Lab to stop trying to make fetch happen?

Right, but so was altitude-specific Windlight until it wasn't: Firestorm (I think; some TPV anyway) started using parcel descriptions to define Windlights for different altitudes… and eventually the Lab built it into parcel properties that could be efficiently and uniformly shared by all viewers. (Granted, the history of EEP had its "troubles", but not because per-parcel viewer tweaking was so difficult.) This could work the same way, except it could need more per-parcel information than a TPV could smuggle into spare data fields without the Lab getting involved. Probably on average less than a unique EEP at each altitude, though. You should have seen the first draft of my post—not that I've completely ruled out a secret conspiracy of land-selling Lindens and their useful idiot viral wall-builders.

Yeah, it can't be completely free, so that reduces its usefulness for the newest residents who must first cross the barrier into putting payment info on file and dropping a few cents into the L$ balance. The hurdle has to be high enough to deter rampant alt/griefer account creation, but low enough to have some appeal for legitimate new users. Does such a number exist? I can't seem to convince myself either way. This is why there are Marketing Departments, huh? If there's any there there, one could imagine a gradual transition to Plus membership which would let them stay indefinitely in their existing home or choose another 512 in Belli or on Mainland. And of course they can always graduate to Premium, a Mainland rental, or Estate living, same as always.

At the risk of pushing this idea further off-topic, I'll choose to interpret "tons on old prim houses in premium area, those with 512 land" as referring to first-gen Linden Homes, and consider there may be something here more beneficial to SL than just sinking those regions into the sea. Something less than Linden Homes, something much less than First Land, something not requiring Premium membership, but something temporary to whet the appetite for having one's own place at bargain-basement entry level pricing. It can't be completely free because everything free is gamed to oblivion, but it's not intended to "pay for itself" from rental income, but rather from longer term conversion to Premium or Estate housing. But would it so undercut the low end of the non-Premium rental market that it would end up losing too much revenue from tier previously paid by those landlords. The almost-free rentals would be very short term, though, like 15 or 30 days, so the temp tenants would need to graduate to some other housing, give up on land (and maybe on SL?), or make a new alt and get a new temp-rental. I can't decide if there could be anything here or not.

This is probably off-topic, but I guess I need some remedial PBR training, having finally used some PBR materials on a complex structure and realizing I don't know "best practices" and I'm a little fuzzy on the tech, too. It starts simple: I want to tile PBR materials on walls and floors. The walls in particular have real 3D features (columns, alcoves, etc.) that should naturally have an occlusive effect. For the life of me, I see no effect of enabling SSAO regardless of viewer or driver settings, so I guess I have to bake that occlusion into the red channel of the metallic-roughness-occlusion map. It's easy enough to do by subtracting the blackness of a greyscale AO-map from whatever occlusion is in the tiled Materials… … so I do that and it looks pretty good, but doing it this way means I have lost the resolution advantage of tiling those source PBR materials: I had to tile them onto a final-resolution image before I could apply the structure-level occlusion, so a 3x3 tiling reduces effective resolution by a factor of nine. Worse, if the same tiled materials are used on different walls with different structural occlusion effects, I have to make a separate high rez material for each of them, a reversion to the download and memory bloat of unique per-face textures. So I went to Scarlett Creative to inspect the two PBR models I found (search aided by highlighting reflection probes 😛 ) and from superficial inspection it appears they, too, use the baked occlusion approach along with other adjustments to the tiled textures. I really hope there's a better way to do this.

Mentor chatbots could be a big win. It's important they make it clear they're chatbots, not some uncanny valley NPCs presenting in the style of orientation role-play "personalities", just dutiful sources of the kinds of information newbies will want, presented however it has been most readily absorbed. The introvert in me would rather talk to a chatbot than to bother a real human mentor, but I'm sure others will find it all too impersonal for a "social" virtual world. The most tricky bit, seems to me, is training data. There's the knowledge base and wiki and forums and whatever chatlogs they've collected from previous mentoring sessions. Problem is, the half-life of truth is pretty short, as SL's tech, interface, and venues evolve.

Okay, I submitted https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/pbr-materials-in-cache-used-long-after-object-has-changed on the theory that I won't be the only one finding this behavior "unexpected" when they encounter it.

How hard could it be to give landowners the ability to de-render specific content outside their parcel for the default view of all visitors to their parcel, rather than each viewer having to specify the de-render list individually? Applying that parcel-specific view could hardly be worse than the massive effects EEP imposes every time we cross parcel borders—which is gated to a minimum of 128 m² parcels, so this could be too, or make it a 512 or 1024 m² gate, or even larger if it's really a concern. It's not only that this would give Mainland more value to its owners by letting them block off ugly walls, but it would also reduce the number of those ugly walls, made unnecessary when whatever they were trying to hide could instead be hidden on command, no prims required. This came up ages ago and as I recall it was rejected because Philip thought it would break continuity of the Mainland experience, with objects vanishing and reappearing as residents crossed parcel borders. As if huge walls contribute to continuity. 🙄 (To be honest, Philip had many bad takes, including portal-phobia and the bizarre notion that nature abhors a hierarchy.)

Just to be clear, I certainly use different cache locations for each viewer which is only prudent—although in this particular case using the same cache might have prevented the problem I'm describing, although I'd still never try it. There's nothing here to suggest a problem with the Firestorm beta; the problem was the Linden viewer was relying on its cache for information I'd never expect it to continue to use long after the objects' actual Materials properties had changed. (My hunch is, though, the same would have happened in the opposite direction too. Pretty unlikely Firestorm devs have gotten 'round to changing how PBR Materials caching works.) I'll probably file a Linden bug report eventually, on the theory that changed PBR Materials are somehow overlooked in determining whether a cache entry is valid. But I'm kinda waiting in case somebody explains that this is all behavior everyone should expect so no need for a bug report.

Yesterday I was trying the Firestorm beta (mostly to see if those devs happened to do anything about my currently most annoying PBR misfeature) and took maybe an hour to tweak some PBR scales and offsets and correct a misapplied metallic-roughness map on a few surfaces. This morning I logged in with the Linden viewer, flew and teleported around other regions for like an hour, teleported back to that build and everything I'd fixed yesterday had reverted completely! They showed the old, pre-edited scales and offsets in the editor, and the wrong metallic-roughness map I'd corrected yesterday. Puzzled and distraught, I logged off and switched back to Firestorm, and everything was un-reverted, my fixes still applied. That's a relief, for sure, but it means the Linden viewer was using cached copies of all that PBR Materials information, which I confirmed by clearing cache and restarting the viewer. Is this caching behavior normal? Would I see the same thing if I tweaked Blinn-Phong textures and switched viewers? I've been doing that for many years and don't think I've ever seen this.

Right, I think that works, and re-reading the OP it may be exactly what's wanted. Somehow instead I understood that the goal was asymmetrical, that one of the parcels, call it "Parcel A", should be able to hear voice from the other, "Parcel B", but that B wouldn't hear voice originating in A.

As @Rowan Amore explained, you can certainly subdivide land (assuming the necessary permissions as you say), and you can assign each to have voice or not, but I'm not sure it's possible to have voice from one parcel go into the other but not vice versa. But I'm no expert on voice. I'm basing this on the way "parcel privacy" is necessarily reciprocal, and that may have nothing to do with how voice works. But even if you can't do it with voice, there may be a workaround, depending on the objective. Maybe the sound sending parcel could just use a parcel audio stream that both parcels are set to hear, with voice handled separately on each parcel. Or that may not be what you had in mind. (Your objects wont come back to you because of subdividing land, as along as ownership remains the same and nobody turns on Auto Return, which should turn off automatically when the land is divided but I always do it manually first anyway, just to be paranoid.)