Jump to content

Jenni Darkwatch

Resident
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,703

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by Jenni Darkwatch

    **bleep**ty Spam!!!!!

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Yours is the way to go, Pussycat. We have a similar system on ours (roughly 10k "real" users, less than 500 posts a day - not very big).

    In addition we also limit the number of NEW posts someone can do after joining to one post in one hour. Forgot what the exact setting is, but only after x days _and_ y posts does that restriction get lifted. Last but not least we gave trusted users the ability to flag stuff as spam. If 5 trusted users do that, it gets de-listed and the user gets put on moderation (and reported). If it turns out to be legit, the user is history. If it's not... there's 5 trusted users with very good explaining to do.

    We get maybe one spam post a day, and it's typically gone within minutes.

    Land Impact for detailed bike parts.

    in Mesh

    Posted

    Thanks for the excellent (as always) clarification Drongle :)

    I can shed some light on the math behind normalmaps vs. "real" geometry. It's been a while though, things likely progressed since the late '90s :)

    For geometry, you'll always need per-pixel Z-order calculations (ignoring transparent surfaces for a moment). Depending on optimizations, this at least needs to figure out which triangles are close enough to be either in front or behind the surface in question. That calculation at least used to be o^n, i.e. pretty bad. In addition, since the Z-order changes with camera angle changes, you get into some very fun performance territory. If you notice FPS drops when turning, that's why.

    Normalmaps on the other hand are merely a simple vector calculation performed on each _visible_ pixel. For each pixel you'd use the normalmaps' offset to the triangle normal, then calculate the angle between viewer and nearby light sources and their distance/falloff and you're done (ignoring any additional shader operations). IIRC normalmaps are merely a shader operation on a GPU.

    If you're curious, displacement maps are more or less treated like actual, existing geometry as far as I know, i.e. the same drawbacks as "real" geometry apply.

    Land Impact for detailed bike parts.

    in Mesh

    Posted

    LI is a frustratingly complex beast. I'm not the best to explain it, but here we go:

    If you're talking a bike, you should be able to get insanely detailed for the highest LOD, but you'll have to compromise with the lower LODs. Plenty of creators are stuck in the "sculpty" mode: Do one high LOD, cannibalize the low LODs. The result? Looks good close up, looks like crap at a distance. You can honestly keep the LI at 1 for _most_ small objects, even if they have a lot of detail. Just make sure you have nice low tri models for the lower LODs. At the lowest, you might just want a sort of "impostor", i.e. flat panes with a very VERY rough approximation of the actual model.

    Another important thing is of course physics. You're practically always better off creating a custom physics shape. For a bike, I'd say it's mor or less something like a hexagon for the wheels and a box for the body.

    Last but not least: Use materials to display fine details.

    Oh and welcome to the world of game-ready modeling... it's by necessity low poly, unless render-ready models.

    chat box

    in Second Life Viewer

    Posted

    For me it remembers the placement of the CHUI window... I have it on bottom left too (using the LL Viewer). If you use another viewer, you may be better off asking in their support forums or in-world group if they have one.

    Video capture

    in Machinima Forum

    Posted

    There's a few available for Linux, I tend to stick with VLC myself for capturing. There's also recordmydesktop and Kazam.

    For editing there's also a plethora of tools for Linux. Kino, OpenShot, KDEnlive, a few others which I forgot the names of. I don't need video editing all that often, but if I do I tend to use KDEnlive because it's pretty simplistic.

    From NVIDIA Blog: "NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15X Performance Gains"

    in Second Life Viewer

    Posted

    Yes the engine has been updated continuously. The issue I have with the engine is that it's bound by old bugs that became "features" and can't be fixed without breaking content. Then there's the issue that from a programmatic point of view you can update to a point, but eventually you'd have to do an entire rewrite - with the associated slew of new bugs.

    Personally, I'd make many advanced features available - for people who fulfil certain criteria. The "Experience Permissions" system I'd imagine may end up as such a filter. One thing I'd expect is being held responsible for ones creations, among other things.

    On the topic of shaders: If LL would just provide some simple common configurable shaders, that would be plenty fine with me. Water would be a prime candidate, obviously.

    Granted, that does not take the entire User Generated Content issue out of the equation, but it should help. As you know very well as a respected creator, a very large percentage of worn mesh currently on the grid is utterly disastrous in quality - because there's no penalty for running around as a walking lag monster. People with old obsolete hardware should be fine if it's possible to turn off all the bells and whistles.

    Around All Continents

    in Favorite Destinations

    Posted

    You can sail around much of the Corsica continent, and entirely around the island to the east of Corsica. Thanks to a kind resident you can currently also sail down to Blake Sea using the east channel but that's pretty much subject to change whenever the renter on Rollo leaves. The company that has all those red hearts up pretty much puts up banlines as a policy.

    Unfortunately there's also plenty of regular residents who block off protected water channels. I do what I can to regularly go around every few months and IM/NC people who blocked off the channels, sending an AR when necessary. On my own sim I provide buoys to clearly mark channels.

    Facebook to Buy Oculus VR

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    To be honest, I've wondered if Oculus would go anywhere at all. I've used VR for nearly two decades now (approximately since the Forte VFX1 if anyone remembers that - I still have mine) and while it's cool, it's unusable for the majority of the population:

    * You can't see the keyboard. Most people can't touch-type.

    * A fairly significant percentage of people gets very nauseated by VR (even more than the 10% or so that get nauseated by 3D movies)

    * VR practically requires a different UI. Nearly no software that I know of supports that.

    * Most VR hardware, including Oculus Rift, requires driver support of some kind.

    FB buying Oculus just means Oculus is going down the drain. Nothing new, they haven't been going anywhere to begin with, aside from burning money left and right.

    VR hasn't been "the next great thing", ever. Nor will it ever be. Augmented Reality maybe, but even there I highly doubt it. Look at Google Glass. That too is going absolutely nowhere.

    From NVIDIA Blog: "NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15X Performance Gains"

    in Second Life Viewer

    Posted

    The answer to that would be "no, you can't really see any benefit from that".

    SL has been hamstrung in many ways, the graphics engine is pretty oooooooold. Look at materials: That stuff has been basic for computer game graphics since around the time SL launched. Yet we barely got support for it. And we still have no support for shaders, no support for displacement/heighmaps, no support for a lot of things computer games have taken for granted for years. And with the new-ish LI system LL would now have the tools to allow creators some fairly amazing things - true mirrors for example - at a cost.

×
×
  • Create New...