Jump to content

Macrocosm Draegonne

Resident
  • Posts

    446
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Reputation

178 Excellent

1 Follower

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

  1. I am always optimistic, so there's that, I much prefer the feeling to the alternative. That said, im open to whatever outcomes as well. I think overall these are positive developments and could mean all sorts of different things will evolve and change for the better. In times of shifting and evolution, things are ripe for innovation and advancement, waves that can be quite positive & expansive, if rode well enough.
  2. Oof, I totally missed all this until now. Well... I checked and my land is fine, and all this news seems potentially positive for growth and good stuff, also more wooky people in the mix seems nice too. I hope this will become another epic leap for SL growing into the future, its been going a long time, longer than most other games by far, I suspect it still has a lot of life in it to go for sure.
  3. Brilliant, not only potential speed optimizations, but dramatic visual upgrades too. I'd bet removing the pre Ogl-4 stuff makes future transitioning into vulkan smoother as well. Im looking forward to see what more you come up with here, the examples are impressive so far. 🤩
  4. Read around, you can see in the blog they're working on the transition to cloud based servers, which has been a big task. You can also go to community public meetings to see things discussed, they keep a schedule of those. Then theres the Jira tech management site, where you can see whats being working on, proposed, etcetera, theres lots.
  5. Oh ok, thats the first time ive heard of that, though i've not gotten the chance to do it myself yet and see. I almost bought a server last year, but the person disappeared in the middle of the transaction, so we didn't close, which is probably for the best anyway, considering how tumultuous life has been for me since then lol. I would inspect the assets you're using and hunt for things that cause lag, you may find its a handful of specific things causing the majority of issues, either because of texture abuse, way too many triangles in the main mesh, and even in the LOD's, or all of the above on a single item, which tends to happen. You might find you can create a lot more headroom to breath by swapping them out for more optimized things. There's a lot of other performance tips on the forums as well that may be of help. Good luck on your sim hunt!
  6. Perhaps if you made rules about how many prims allowed on the ground you could get around the 30k prim issue? (is that really an issue?) Then dont allow renters to build above say 1,500m, then you can create something different up around 2500+ so people wont load things from either when entering those different zones. Or simply just limit the prims allowance to reflect what you think will perform best at ground level. Im not sure of your situation, but the 30k prims allowance comes with more server resources, it shouldn't really drag any extra, its more about what are people putting down, texture density/reuse can help a lot, especially in a themed place, a lot of decor/nature things may be using the same textures/mesh anyhow, being sure LOD is proper on things, and mesh density isnt overboard are important too.
  7. There is no "shortage", they're simply not adding NEW sims capacity... all the existing sims are fully functional, as are the ones they keep on the side for swapping. Going forward they only want to add new sims on the new infrastructure, which makes sense, since continuing to add hardware to the depreciating system is rather pointless. Moving the older sims to the new infrastructure should not be much trouble, and seamless to users as well, because they're priming the old servers with new code it seems. lol technical stuff can always have snafu's, though I suspect they'll work out most kinks before migrating existing servers. Oh, and You can generally find full sims for sale in the real estate forums here, or contact in-world realtors, private sales and transfers of the full sims is allowed.
  8. Kyrah is right, its the variations we'd get. Indeed though, it would be amazing to have PBR in SL, and those variations made available to creators would be rather epic when you consider how that would transform new creations going forward, and of course they'd need some legacy shaders for whats available now, those using plain textures, those with advanced materials, and the auto-normal/specular settings. Could still maintain the 1024 size limit, but those shaders could have masks, detail maps, blend multiple textures, sub surface scattering, etcetera, etcetera. 😍
  9. Thats looking pretty fabulous, great progress! I wish I could finish something myself... 🥴 I keep starting different things and bouncing around, life distractions & work tend to pull me away, but I love 3d arts and have been consistently learning & tinkering at least. Its such a massive array of skill sets, and I cannot settle into just one area,. I have finally started some SL projects I think I'll complete this time though. If I could only keep myself from drifting around in all the complexities and what ifs, planning, iterating and such. Not sure I can do that anyway lol, "its an INFJ thing" they say. I have become far better at meshing/texturing/lod and scripting though, so hopefully my creations will be decent enough to inspire me forward on to more. At least im having fun, thats the most important part by far. I just need to keep in mind that 'art is never finished, only abandoned' as DaVinci said. Good luck on your other projects, and crystal developments. 💚
  10. Yeah, it will take lots of iterations and experiments, seems like one of the more difficult things to pull off, but you're making good progress. The translucent effect they used does look quite nice, im sure they tinkered for a long time to achieve it. On the Vulkan front, well im sure that will take a bunch of time, who knows though, they've already placed detection code in the viewers to ascertain whom among users already have a vulkan capable machine. Given that Vulkan was created by the same folks who created openGL (which SL is based on) there are a lot of useful ways to transition, keeping older stuff workable as its evolved and such. Who knows how long it could take, im sure they've got their sights set on a timeline, but wont release such info until its solid and certain. I always like to hope for the best, and be pleased with whatever is, this way im not often disappointed. Given the unique nature of SL and mega data transfer concerns, I would wager using vulkan to bring in more shaders would be high on the list, this way far more texture/appearance variations can be made using less and even smaller actual texture files, depending on the effect. The other biggie is the lighting IMO, that has a huge potential to make things look quite amazing with less resources. Ex. I put a request on Jira a while back for underwater caustics lighting (the way light goes thru the water surface and dances on things below), so people dont have to put up tons of spinning projection light-prims, you'd get a better effect, using far less resources. Anyhow, im rambling on again lol, I wish you good luck in your crystal making adventure!
  11. Nice setup! I bet some geeks had loads of fun putting that together haha! Oh btw "bare-metal hypervisor" is a thing & quite popular in virtualization now, the reason they call it that is the main host OS is so tiny that it takes basically nothing from the other os's running virtualized concurrently, and that host os is installed at the hardware level, above everything else. I always thought it'd be cool to have one as a workstation to run multiple OS, because I love linux but require windows as my main OS. Windows basically remedied this though, at least in the win-10 pro version, you can enable a linux os to always be there running, command line and all, I believe its a debian/ubuntu variant, works great.
  12. Bare metal hypervisor? I want one for a personal pc someday. I've heard certain types of SL regions are clustered onto servers, where the main heavyweight type gets a box to themselves, however, thats how the cloud works too, if you want dedicated hardware per application, its there to turn on, even on amazons AWS. Linden likely has data servers, chat servers, cache servers, and all sorts of various things in their mix and connected together, only difference is they're responsible for all the hardware, since they've built and maintain their own stuff. With the "cloud" they dont have to plug things in and maintain all that hardware, and can more easily load balance, moving things around, upgrade, etcetera, virtually on a nice UI & CLI.
  13. AFAICT they've been running their own personal "cloud" for SL, virtualization has been around a very long time, its "mostly" hardware agnostic other than the brute force it can bring to bare, the cloud is more a marketing term than some modern tech. I'd argue its the considerably wide availability/access to mega data centers, with dwindling prices (as big fish monopolize & compete), thats what the cloud brings. There is a lot of great software that leverages it though, I love it and for many years have used the cloud for webservers. Its not that sl is old really, especially not as businesses go, whats more true is it has lasted longer than most games tend to do. They have kept up with upgrades, improvements, and code the whole way thru, constantly developing. Sure, they didnt jump head on into huge overhauls at every turn, thats expensive, and risky, both of which gets laid on a userbase in games, for good or bad. I'd argue that the choices they've made have been both lucky and solid steps. Given all this cloud power they can ease into the mix for infrastructure, to the software side with a Vulcan powered viewer 😜 ,and core code dev (you can be sure their code is no mystery to them, just read in Jira, they know it well). Anyhow.... im rambling on again lol damnit! ...what I mean to say is there's not really a limit, other than what they choose as the best speed and approach for things, its a conscious choice, always. Time has told they do that quite well IMO, otherwise SL would not have survived and thrived so long, or even have this chance to expand into a new era of offerings. Of course, things take time and effort, with legacy code you have a lot to bring along & evolve, but also a lot of refinement, braintrust, and awareness, thats something someone just flipping all the defaults on of the standard fare most games are made with do not have.
  14. Looking good so far, I've thought about this myself, i bought some crystals from Candle & Cauldron a while back that are nice, their salt lamps are sweet too. She seemed to use copies of the mesh shrunken inside to create more depth, having the outermost layers be a bit more transparent stepping inward to inner sections adding more opaqueness. Looking at your final resulting test there, perhaps make the black area inside more transparent, and your specular map conform to the texture of the normal, or at least not a solid gradient on the inner shines, then on the outer flat "carved & polished" layer, have the solid gradient shine, but less pronounced, so it doesn't wash things out as much. Not sure if that helps any... lol... but it was something i was thinking about recently myself, so I thought I'd share. Maybe we will get more shaders to work with once the transition to vulkan happens? Probably. Side note: this reminds me of the bling craze that swept SL many years ago lol, people went overboard with it. 😂 Not saying you are, or even that it matters, just a funny memory.
  15. Sweet thanks Whirly! Im glad it was fixed. Of course... my internet went down Wednesday, they were doing road work nearby and tore up our underground utilities, didnt get fully repaired until today. 😳 I know buddy, i've used it for many moons, but this time was different, I've never seen it go out for so long without notice. Of course I tried different viewers, and went to all the different sandboxes that were alive to test. If you see Whirly's timely JIRA above, the CDN went out for Aditi, and took most functionality with it, which makes sense given what effects we were getting. Disenchanted floating eyes with teeth people, shirtless headless boob people hunched over in despair....and nothing rezzing lol.
×
×
  • Create New...