Kyrah Abattoir

Script to script communication within the same object is definitely an overhead I wish i could avoid. But at the same time most scripts don't need 128k and without a reasonable incentive, it will go exactly the same way priority 4 anims and 1024x1024 textures did: "why use less?"

It is outdated yes, the old, old renderer that literally doesn't exist anymore used vertex shading and those extra verrtices where important back then. When windlight was rolled out it replaced the previous lighting code completely (and brought the shimmering water material you get even without ALM)

You do have a point, the transition from prims to sculpts, to mesh was painful for a lot of people I knew who ended up just leaving. We also did lose something big with mesh, and that's that collaborative vibe we had, and that insurance that any object you made was made by residents, for residents.

Is it the official devkit?

You should be using prepared statements if possible.

It is, I'd even argue that at the lowest lod, the texture almost doesn't matter anymore, what matters is that you can still barely recognize the outline so that when a higher lod switches on it doesn't look like that object just popped into existence. It has to give a vague impression that the object was there all along, if possible. It's just managing the suspension of disbelief.

Funny enough this has already been a thing before. I have a few folders of "alpha masks" made by generous creators to help SL users with their clothes.

Just giving you an example that, yes, you sometimes will have to obey to a government that isn't yours because their "stick" simply reaches that far.

The reason alpha cuts on meshs are even needed is because otherwise it's impossible to hide a portion of a mesh avatar the same way you would with alpha layers on the classic avatar. Using BoM with alpha mask would be a lot more flexible in this regard, and cost a lot less to render on screen. My understanding is that BoM doesn't require scripts/appliers, all you need is for the content creator to provide their skins/makeup parts using the old classic avatar clothing layers, simply wearing them will cause the BoM texture on your mesh body to update with the new composition.

I'm more thinking about them just releasing a free update, "body X, BOM/light version, use the one you prefer!" with no mesh slices or onion skins. So much more efficient in the draw call department.

I don't get why people don't put more informations on their marketplace listings beside the minimum required by the system.

Not really, I'd want nothing more than spending less time on the boring aspects of modeling. I've tried a bunch of automatic lod solutions, and some of them do a pretty good job but i tend to prefer using them in a "semi automatic" fashion. Where I'll do a rough "by hand" simplification pass and remove things that I don't want the generator to worry about. Most garments for instance, do not benefit from having "backfaces" outside of the highest lod because you won't be zoomed in close enough to notice its absence, but if you leave them in, a lod generator will dutifully try to preserve them at the expense of the outside surfaces. I don't think it's so much that "professionals" are "nervous" about some of the gritty work being automated. But it is frustrating to see how much SL suffers from bad modeling practices when the experience could be so much better for the end user. Modeling is something you only get better at through practice, a lot of it. And the same way students aren't given calculators until they learned basic calculus, you shouldn't rely on a tool to do something because you are bad at it or don't know how to do it, but because it saves you time from a process that you have assimilated and understand. Making your own lod models teaches you a lot more than just being a manual decimator. It teaches you how to determinate what is important and what is not. It tells you what defines your model, what identifies it visually vs what is a pointless detail. It teaches you how to make your future models better.

I figured I'd put out one of mines. It's umm... some kind of collar/neck stump thing I made for halloween with a few vents. Highpoly ~3.2M polygons, it's really the welds that push it up so high because I used displacement for them. Low poly: 2007 triangles, if this was a model for an actual game I'd have been a lot more aggressive because you'd never seen it at that size. Textured low poly And here is the entire UVmap.

You could argue that the territorial borders are a slightly simplistic view on the limits of government reach. A country's power reaches as far as the stick can reach. To give you a little story as an example, I've had a USA domain broker tell a Canadian domain name provider that someone from the French government requested that one of my domain names had to stop pointing to their web server without permission. There is no law in any of those 3 countries against pointing a humorous domain name to an existing server. It did not matter one bit.

Bar the few exceptions where some assets end up lost or removed due to copyright violations, the asset server is "Add Only". Everything you upload, everytime you save a notecard, a skin, or a script, a new asset is created. For fun i've been running a little project that tries to randomly access hypothetical notecards, but the UUID address space is so large that it's unlikely that my script will ever land on a valid notecard for as long as I will live.

That's the thing, avatars offer no way to personally identifiable their user, they are only relevant within SecondLife and their online status is not an indication that their user is indeed at the keyboard (In the hypothesis that this could be considered a personal information).

There is always some sort of packing being done, and yes it is sometimes needed to split across multiple maps for many reason, but there is no excuse for a texture to be 80% unused, it's gonna be loaded in full anyway, so you should use the space or reduce it. I agree that Animesh's approach is a little better because at the very least you don't get penalized anymore for making mod models, but I don't think it goes far enough. Sansar is a bad examples as it doesn't use lods at all and all meshs are at full resolution, I believe.

In what universe?

It looks about right, what is the issue?

My hope for actan is a formula that doesn't feature exploitable loophole anymore, if your item has a high cost to render for the user or for the simulator to simulate, the cost to rez or wear this item should be high, period. And this is not a war against amateur content creators either, we've all started somewhere. It's a war agains the mindset of "if unsure, cram more polygons/textures on it" and "UV packing and LOD meshs are a waste of my time". I'm not looking to enact revenge, but If the deterrent to use/create bad content has no "teeth" to speak of, then it will offer no incentive to change anything. Also to clarify, by "breaking" I mean: "Popular item X has such a high LI/complexity (because it is objectively bad) that it's useless to everyone who bought it." I don't mean actually breaking content.

And how does that relate in any way to the question asked by the OP? Oh right, it doesnt. OP was asking if staking an avatar counts as stalking "them" as a person. Given that a person can have multiple avatars, and that multiple people can use the same avatar. The answer is no. Avatars are linden lab's property and their online status is public information for any secondlife script.

I wasn't refering to the age of your avatar. And i'm also not your pal.

Why do you always try to lecture people, when you are the only newbie in the discussion?

Lets hope big mesh body creators will release BoM versions of their bodies, that is, without onion layers or slices.

@animats usually I agree with you, but sometimes I just want to slap you so much. Linden Labs is not responsible for making your content. As much as you hate making lod meshs, that is very much your job as the artist. And I'd wager things could actually have been better if the uploader did not contain a lod generator at all. That being said. The one thing I can really throw at them is that complexity/LI where designed in a very naive fashion and generally aren't promoting the creation of good content. The two metrics judging completely different things create a massive fracture between content designed to be rezzed and content designed to be worn and there is no reason for that. In addition, LI is the only one that enforces a real "limit" on content, complexity is still a mere "guideline" that begs to be taken in account, but is ultimately ignored by most. You probably know by now I'm a big supporter of the arctan project, but for it is to be effective, it is going to break a lot of content. If it doesn't? It will be useless.