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Gavin Hird

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Everything posted by Gavin Hird

  1. Gavin Hird
    The most important is backend for it to be in place on the main grid before anyone can use it. Not sure if it is a MUST CHANGE for all users, as going to the demo regions with the regular viewer only produce black textures on surfaces with PBR materials.
  2. Gavin Hird
    This is rendered in good old Windlight. Does not look too shabby
  3. Gavin Hird
    My main objection to most of the 3D stuff churned out by Substance Painters is, it is overdone. The closer we get to reality, the more complicated it is to get it right, because the difference between fake and real is very often subtle, and both the tools and the renderers have a hard time to recreate subtle. The reason why I say Xbox is that we have a chief technologist at the Lab who is a Microsoftie. Note the announcement video and the focus on Kronos "standards" like Vulkan. – Guess who don't support Vulkan at all: Apple and Apple will turn off OpenGL when the lights goes out on the last Intel Mac in marketing; the Mac Pro. With the Lab failing to write a Metal renderer, the current Mac users in Second Life will be toast, but more important they miss completely out on the iOS market with now 1.5 billion active users. So putting the SL Viewer on the Xbox can compensate for both the loss of the Mac users and also provide for moderate growth. – All Microsoft style of course.
  4. Gavin Hird
    Lots of reflection bling, otherwise underwhelmed...
  5. Gavin Hird
    SL on Xbox is my 10 cents
  6. Gavin Hird
    No what?
  7. Gavin Hird
    While PBR can be used to create both lifelike and beautiful content, it is another rev on removing content creation from inside of SecondLife to subscription based software that is beyond the reach of many residents; both for financial and technical reason. SecondLife becomes more and more the doll house where you place your shiny things and puppets, and not the collective building experience that enticed so many in the beginning.
  8. Gavin Hird
    It is not in the current source tree, but is the current source exactly what is in the released version? In any case, it might also be worthwhile to check the value of RenderGLContextCoreProfile in the users settings.xml, if it exist, and if it differs from the default setting.
  9. Gavin Hird
    There was a code change: "SL-16717 Rename RenderGLCoreProfile to prevent compatibility issues", but the code never cleaned it out of the user's settings.xml file, so if it is present the viewer gets stuck in some limbo displaying the "Initializing Texture Cache" message.
  10. Gavin Hird
    No that key shall be there, but if the one I mentioned is present it never manages to start the graphics system.
  11. Gavin Hird
    See if you have an entry of <key>RenderGLCoreProfile</key> in AppData\Roaming\<the name of the viewer>\user_settings\settings.xml. (for Windows) ~/Library/Application Support/<viewer name>/user_settings/settings.xml (for macOS) If you do, delete it and see if it will start.
  12. Gavin Hird
    How about going back to US railroad time, with each region setting the time as the owner please? Then each teleport would be a new adventure going back or jumping forward in time. It would add to the immersiveness, and add the sense of time travel to the teleports. Come to think about it, setting date and year per region would be even wilder
  13. Gavin Hird
    Open terminal and type tccutil reset Microphone The next time you start Firestorm it should ask you for permission use of the Mac microphone. Make sure you allow, if not the viewer will deactivate voice support. The SL viewer will also ask you for permission again, as will other apps that needs use the microphone. If that does not work, you can try my viewer builds that can be downloaded at here.
  14. Gavin Hird
    If there is outstanding IO for a thread that is orderly shut down, the OS will commit those transactions before the thread itself is finally terminated. I guess most of that activity actually handles in the kernel so it will only show as kernel activity, while the process ID that created the thread is gone, or at least not visible in user space. If the thread is abruptly terminated, then there will be write inconsistencies almost guaranteed and file corruption.
  15. Gavin Hird
    I don't think that is the motivation at all. I believe the real motivation is to be able to run the viewer on Xbox.
  16. Gavin Hird
    Supporting arbitrary rigs would unleash a flood of creativity. I'd rather have that than PBR.
  17. Gavin Hird
    It is actually fantastic the renderer does as good as it does with all the random content that is thrown at it. 👍
  18. Gavin Hird
    Which is not what I said. I specifically mentioned the collective effort of building where everyone could participate because all the build tools were inside SL. There was a long period of 10 years where this was the driving force of the participants. This has been replaced by snotty consumers who complain about everything not being cheap enough, or good enough or me, me, me.
  19. Gavin Hird
    Don't be fatuous. Try and explain how easy it is to game studios that use months on end to create game props and meshes that both look good and have as little budget as possible both in mesh size and rendering time.
  20. Gavin Hird
    You did not make a counter argument, only confirmed that mesh cannot be made inside SL. Also, low poly mesh creation with proper materials and texturing is not straightforward. Sure you can take a typical creation tools for static rendering and whip out a medium to high poly model with half decent texturing, but try deploy that in any numbers in a region and everything grinds to a halt, whether it is the viewer or region that crashes first.
  21. Gavin Hird
    TBH Henri, SL is the product of a commercial company and they need to develop it as they see fit. – Sure we may not agree, but IMO too often has the company been hampered by TPV creators sperging over their particular feature or take on how things shall work. I am much more concerned about, on the viewer side, the complete lack of (visible) work to support future Mac users, something that will abruptly cut out 15% of the user base and up to 25% of all creators from staying in-world.
  22. Gavin Hird
    I think the key to understanding the lack of enthusiasm in SL is twofold: a) The moving of creator tools outside of SL. Sure, all the old creator tools are still there, but unless you use them for anything but very basic build elements, you are basically laughed out of the place. In the Marketplace any such creation would be doa. Mesh creation requires a completely new level of skills and a much more complicated creation process before anyone sees the result. – Even then, you often compete with professional creators with models that has been repurposed from other environments. PBR materials dials the complexity even higher, and most likely requires the creator to subscribe to tools with a monthly cost that exceeds the willingness or ability to pay for a hobbyist. The consequence of this is the collective build and creation effort where everyone could watch and participate, and which characterized the first 10 years of SL, is more or less gone. b) The centering of the SL event calendar around US holidays and "shopping seasons" is not very exciting for the rest of the world. In addition there is a language barrier to participation outside of the Anglosphere. The message being, SL is for Americans primarily. The consequence for that is recruitment outside the US is slim to none.
  23. Gavin Hird
    Just show them the right flags and Apple is all in 😉 You probably know that Tumblr tried to clean up its act a few years back, but the new business model did not work very well and they have drifted back to the old mode throughout this year, to the extent Apple required a warning to view certain content. But apart from that you can dig in to your heart's content. I suppose the G,M,A settings and filters for SL in the same manner would satisfy Apple. I suppose they also have slapped a 17+ limit on the App, but then again since you cannot use the App store without registering a credit card, they (presumably) know your age.
  24. Gavin Hird
    I have no idea Arielle, but I believe it had more to do with the technical requirements for iOS and iPad apps that deviated too far for comfort from the current mainly C++ base. It would be interesting though to find out what they actually would say about "the service" for a submission of the desktop viewer.
  25. Gavin Hird
    As I said, only submission can reveal their objections and if some, if they can be resolved. There are lots of strange apps and services out there already accepted. Personally I would not bother with the desktop apps, and time works against Apple for the other devices. Both the EU and the US Congress will most likely break Apple's monopoly on app distribution within the next year or so.
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