Masami Kuramoto

16 wrote: lol is going to be really good when a unnoob awesome wonder codey like you can write the algo that can sychronise the deformation of two or more topologocial surfaces with disjoint vertices in real time the world is waiting. you going to be famous when you done it. and rich. you willl even get a Nobel Prize. and if you under 35 then we give you a Fields medal as well On August 31st, 2011, I wrote this in a post to the SLU forum: "I've seen the other proposal to shrink-wrap mesh attachments around the avatar, but my experience with similar functions in Blender tells me that it's not going to work. Mesh clothing is not just a simple layer that floats above the skin. It has wrinkles, folds, collars, appendices, rigid attachments. The idea that all these could be handled properly by a uniform deformer cage is unrealistic in my opinion. Deformer cages are meshes too, and they need to be tailor-made for the target mesh. Even worse, they need to be rigged as well. This is a very complex problem to solve, much more complex than mesh import itself, and the latter already took the Lab two years to complete." Fast forward 15 months, the deformer still hasn't been rolled out. People consider it not ready for prime time because it has trouble with wrinkles, folds, collars, appendices, and rigid attachments. The sound you are hearing now is the world's saddest song played on the world's smallest violin.

16 wrote: we already got buttons painted on mesh. has been that way since the beginning the whole point of mesh clothes is to not do painted on clothes Who said so? You? The whole point of normal maps is to make painted buttons appear like 3D geometry. If your game engine does not support normal mapping, you bake ambient occlusion and/or specular reflections into your texture to fake a 3D appearance of the buttons. Only complete noobs try to import high poly clothes with mesh buttons. These people deserve to get screwed by the mesh deformer, because they don't understand how to optimize mesh assets for realtime rendering.

The hypergrid _is_ the inexpensive countryside. An unlimited number of small grids, with avatars traveling between them, thanks to a common network protocol. Decentralization is the key.

You didn't pay attention. Linden Lab hired a contractor to develop that viewer. Many of the Lindens who developed the original viewer were laid off long ago. Addressing the question how the deformer will handle buttons: not at all! Objects of this size are supposed to be part of the texture. Modelling them is a stupid idea.

Cloud Party's business model isn't different from Linden Lab's in any way. They let you produce free content for their platform and then make you pay for the privilege of using it. You will be locked in again.

Phil Deakins wrote: >> "The point is that OS grid owners cannot create. They merely use the creation of other people - the OS creators." There is no such separation between OS grid owners and OS creators. OSgrid: run by OpenSim developers. Inworldz: maintaining a proprietary PhysX-enabled fork of OpenSim. Avination: founded by Melanie Thielker, OpenSim developer who contributed to the Hypergrid protocol. ScienceSim: run by Intel Labs, developer of OpenSim's Distributed Scene Graph. Kitely: created proprietary OpenSim extensions to improve performance for their cloud-based region hosting. Many OpenSim developers run their own grids, and any grid owner can make modifications to OpenSim's core or write extension modules. The fact that some grids are run by non-developers doesn't make your statement right. Every grid owner _can_ create if they so choose, and many of them do. That is the whole point of having an open source server. Linden Lab just made it very clear that they don't want to play a role in any of this any more. Their Architecture Working Group is dead. Their own technology is becoming irrelevant. The Phoenix team just took the crown in four categories: most popular SL viewer, most advanced SL viewer, most stable SL viewer, and most OpenSim-friendly SL viewer. LL is trying to restrain them by tightening the Third-Party Viewer Policy, but it doesn't work. LL keeps adding stuff that no one wants or needs (web profiles, pathfinding) or stuff that just plain doesn't work (direct delivery) while blocking the stuff that everyone is waiting for (e.g. the mesh deformer). LL's only remaining asset is the content that people have uploaded to their grid over the past eight years. This is what keeps their users locked in and paying tier through the nose, while the Lab packs more and more regions on less and less physical hardware. They will milk this cow until it runs dry, and then throw away all your "virtual property" in a heartbeat.

You said OpenSim grid owners "can't create." Not only is this wrong, considering the fact that the largest and oldest OpenSim grid is run by core developers and is the testbed for things such as BulletSim (using the Bullet physics engine) right now. You also misunderstood what I was pointing out: after laying off a significant number of key developers, the mothership is apparently losing the ability to create, as more and more features get contributed from outside the company. Hell, even their official viewer was not developed in-house but by a Ukrainian contractor. Their most popular viewer, on the other hand, is also being maintained by a third party. Which raises the question: What do we even need LL for? As a mere rackspace provider, they are damn expensive. As an innovator, they are becoming increasingly inept and useless. Worst of all, they seem to have lost their passion for the platform.

Innula Zenovka wrote: Your case, as far as I can see, appears to be that if SL were to vanish, taking everyone's inventories with it, and OpenSim were radically to change from what it is at the moment then OpenSim would be an attractive alternative to SL. No, it's OR, not AND. You are not paying attention.

Innula Zenovka wrote: Are you saying that Open Sim isn't a "community-driven virtual world"? It hasn't been, so far at least. Its stated goal has been to develop a server that is compatible with LL's official viewer. Whatever didn't work with that viewer, the developers didn't implement. Ultimately, LL was still calling the shots. Hopefully that will change, now that LL has burned the bridges and the Phoenix team has decided to fork the viewer in response. For example, they could go ahead and roll out the mesh deformer that Oz has been blocking for more than a year. They could replace the crappy Ruth avatar mesh with a proper one. And so on.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: Look at my gallery, in my sig - and recreate that in an Open Sim. That's how'd you'd get my attention. If I did, I would find it ripped, imported to SL, and sold on the marketplace in no time. Because SL, with its inworld currency redeemable to USD, is the mothership of content theft. There is a thread on SLU, currently 33 pages long, dedicated to SL mesh assets stolen from mainstream games. There is a prolific SL land baron and blogger openly encouraging people to violate Creative Commons licenses and selling OpenSim freebies on LL's grid. When that happens, how does one even prove that the items appeared on OpenSim first. The thieves will just claim to be the original creators, just as it happened in the Curio case. I'm ready to give away stuff for free, but not before the mothership has hit the metaphorical bottom of the ocean.

Phil Deakins wrote: They can't create. A quick list of things not created by Linden Lab: the hypergrid protocol (teleporting, messaging etc. between grids) megaregions (larger than 256x256 meters without region crossing lag) distributed scene graph (1000+ avatars in a single region) mesh (yes, you read that right, the first mesh-capable viewer came from RealXtend, years before LL picked up the idea) multiple attachment points the prim alignment tool the mesh deformer the upcoming materials extension hundreds of viewer patches and security fixes (e.g. the media filter) There is so much groundbreaking and useful stuff coming from sources outside LL these days, you have to wonder who is really running the show. It seems to me that a community-driven virtual world would be preferable.

16 wrote: Masami Kuramoto wrote: What do you think made Android more compelling than iOS, if not the lower price and more openness? you countering your own argument again when you say this I was asking a question.

Innula Zenovka wrote: Concurrency on the main LL grid, at the moment, seems to be anywhere between 30,000 to 60,000 people logged in at any one time, depending on the time of day (http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/sl-statistical-charts/). That number is ridiculously low if you consider that more than 10,000 new SL accounts are created every single day. At least OpenSim has the excuse of not being widely known. What is Linden Lab's excuse?

What do you think made Android more compelling than iOS, if not the lower price and more openness?

The crowd that OpenSim will be drawing is currently stuck in a walled garden. It is often said that OpenSim isn't popular because it doesn't have an economy. It is said that content creators have no incentive to go there. However, there is no evidence to support this claim. On the contrary, OpenSim is currently populated almost exclusively by content creators; in other words: its creators-per-consumer ratio is much higher than SL's. Those who go there do so for few other reasons than to create. SL merchants often complain about the fact that SL has a massive freeloader problem, i.e. a large percentage of its residents consume LL's network bandwidth and server capacity without ever participating in economic activity. However, you never hear those merchants suggest that freeloaders should be exiled to OpenSim. And the Lab never considered to drop the free basic account plan. How come? If freeloaders are such a burden, shouldn't the Lab be happy to drop them off to someone else's grid? Well, I guess you know the answer to that one as well as I do. There's a huge pink elephant in the room that few people dare to talk about: creators are not in it for the money, even if they claim to be. Most artists are attention seekers, and the worst thing they can imagine is a world where no one is looking at their stuff. They will go wherever there is an audience, even if it's a place without an economy. Most SL content creators don't even earn enough to offset the cost of their virtual land, yet they stay, and the freeloaders are part of the reason. So what exactly is holding back OpenSim, if not the artists and the freeloaders? It's the consumers, all the people who have spent years and dollars to grow their inventories. When they hear about OpenSim for the first time, most of them are very interested, but as soon as you mention that they can't take their inventories there, the initial enthusiasm fades quickly. Consumers cling to SL not because of the stuff they can buy but because of the stuff they have bought (and can't take elsewhere). That's the status quo, in a nutshell. It's a Mexican stand-off: everyone is waiting for the next guy to move. However, as you can tell from SL's shrinking land mass, the whole thing is coming apart at the seams. The "open source is a geek thing" argument is old, I've heard it hundreds of times before. For example, just a few years ago people told me that Linux will never draw a crowd. Today it owns 75% of the global smartphone market. As Mitch Kapor once said, the long run always favors the more open ecosystem.

Qie Niangao wrote: People still use webservers as much as ever before, so it's a relevant thing to commoditize with open source. Before web servers were commoditized with open source, people were very happy inside the walled gardens provided by CompuServe and AOL. Second Life is the AOL of virtual worlds. When it disappears, where else will people go if not to OpenSim? You think they will bury the idea of shared 3D environments altogether just because all the commercial attempts failed?

Qie Niangao wrote: Once the host is gone completely, OpenSim will have only itself to consume. I am looking forward to the day when LL shuts down SL and thousands of inventories disappear forever. Because it is precisely those inventories that keep SL residents firmly locked into LL's grid and force them to accept server rental fees that are obscenely high by today's standards. In my humble opinion, virtual property is fraud. Imagine you buy something at Walmart but cannot ever take it outside Walmart. Is it really yours? What exactly did you buy? It's taken no initiative to expand the Virtual World market--who ever starts there?--only taking what's left of Linden's. Its goal has never been to create or expand markets. Its goal is to become the virtual world equivalent of the Apache web server. That was once Linden Lab's goal, before they dropped the ball and transformed into a game company.

Innula Zenovka wrote: So, what's the mechanism precisely? http://metaverseink.com/blog/?p=459 TL;DR: OpenSim grid operators have complete control over the way their assets are exposed to other grids. They can run private (=firewalled) and public asset servers side by side. They can block the transfer of items from and to the suitcase folder (i.e. the hypergrid-accessible part of the inventory). They can block certain asset classes (e.g. scripts) from ever leaving their grids. They can require residents to change outfits before teleporting out. There are more features in the works, but they require changes to the viewer UI. In the past, viewer changes were an obstacle, because no one could expect LL to make OpenSim-specific changes to their viewer. But now, with compatibility concerns out of the way and an OpenSim-specific fork of Firestorm available, those changes may finally happen.

16 wrote: guess linden just fixed that then. like please make a non-SL clone of your TPV if you want to let your users access OpenSim Guess why I keep saying that this is an opportunity to OpenSim rather than a problem.

Innula Zenovka wrote: It's not a question of "the lack of inter-grid teleportation" stopping content theft. The point is that, inter-grid teleportation (assuming it's not simply a question of, in effect, transferring from one account to another without having to relog) means your inventory has to go with you, onto servers operated by anyone, where it can be copied and re-permed by whoever runs the server. I am, in point of fact, pretty sure you underestimate the difficulties facing someone who wants to steal one of my scripts, but even for items that are readily stolen, the relative ease with which people may steal would not, to my mind, justify LL unilaterally re-writing the terms under which people's content is stored and used on LL's grid so as to enable anyone who runs their own grid to make a copy of it. As I explained in my previous comment, inventories don't matter. Assets do, and these are not protected in any way. This is by design. OpenSim's hypergrid implementation already includes the ability to hide inventories from foreign grids. However, that doesn't stop anyone from copying every single item you wear or rez, uploading it to Linden Lab's grid, and selling it there. OpenSim's developers already do more to fight content theft than Linden Lab has ever done. Maybe you should take some time to familiarize yourself with the the details of the hypergrid protocol specification. The biggest hurdle the developers have to overcome is the lack of security in Linden Lab's own viewer.

Phil Deakins wrote: From what I've read, some stuff that was stolen from SL has been in OpenSim grids for some time. Most of the time it is the opposite: thieves take freebies from OpenSim grids and sell them in SL. The main reason why content creators are scared of OpenSim is because it is harder to prove that something was uploaded to OpenSim first. LL's datestamps are considered more trustworthy. But as you can see in the case of Curio skins, even the datestamps do not always stop the thieves. If inter-grid jumping, with inventories, was possible between SL and other grids, then stuff would be stolen by the owners of other grids, and jumped back into SL in inventories. No. The first thing you have to understand is that even in hypergrid teleports between OpenSim grids, assets never move from one grid to another. For example, if you teleport to grid #2 while wearing clothes from grid #1, the viewers of the people logged into grid #2 will download the assets straight from grid #1. Of course, once the assets are downloaded and displayed, they can also be copied. But teleports are not necessary for that. The people of grid #2 could do the same thing simply by logging directly into grid #1, because asset servers are not protected in any way. Assets get downloaded by viewers regardless of permissions, otherwise you would be unable to see the clothes and skins of your fellow avatars. Once you see them, they are already on your computer. The only thing you can't access without permission is scripts. As things stand, stealing stuff in SL, and selling it here, is relatively small scale You must be kidding.

Innula Zenovka wrote: The thought of having teleportation between grids fills me, as a content creator, with horror. That's interesting, considering the fact that LL's walled garden grid is the mothership of content theft. No other grid is so filled with stolen stuff. If the thieves wanted your content on other grids, it would already be there. The lack of inter-grid teleportation isn't stopping them. The lack of inter-grid currency is. SL has this thing called "virtual economy" where you can copy other people's stuff and then sell it for a profit. That's why most of the thieves are here and not on OpenSim. They don't really want your content, they just want to make money.

Mircea Lobo wrote: I am pissed to see what LL decided to throw us OpenSim users away for. LL's move should be seen as an opportunity for OpenSim. For example, due to compatibility no longer being a concern, OpenSim could roll out the mesh deformer ahead of LL.

Chosen Few wrote: Masami Kuramoto wrote: Not sure what that is good for since shadows always subtract from the base color, never add to it That's true if you're talkinga bout a real shadow, that is actually on the same surface that the base color is on. However, when you're just faking it by parking a translucent plane in front the colored surface, the effect isn't necessarily subtractive. It is always subtractive only if the shadow plane is black. Which was kind of my point there. Of course, if we had proper lightmapping on the shader level, colored shadow maps would make a lot of sense (as shown here). But that feature isn't coming to SL any time soon, and there is no way to fake it with tinted shadow planes.

Zak Kozlov wrote: You are right, i'm gonna paint it white Not sure what that is good for since shadows always subtract from the base color, never add to it, but then again, you can still do the same thing faster without leaving Blender: Create a material, set its diffuse color to white and enable the "shadeless" option. Create another material and enable its "shadows only" option. Connect the material nodes as shown in the picture below. Bake your texture.