DanielRavenNest Noe
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Blog Comments posted by DanielRavenNest Noe
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Daniel: "Games are a subset of entertainment, but people use SL for education, training, and other purposes which have no game aspect, other than it shares technology with video games."
Ah but that's where the supposition fails. Because if you dared to call SL "entertainment"... people would be coming back at you with, "No, I make my living here!"
People who make Hollywood movies make their living at it too, but they are still part of the entertainment industry.
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I don't think "game" is the right word to use. Instead, I divide things into two categories. The first is "stuff necessary to live". Under that category goes food, shelter, basic clothes, etc and all the supporting work from providing seeds all the way to providing cookware so you can prepare the food to eat. The other category is "entertainment", which is all the stuff which is optional, and in which Second Life almost entirely falls. Games are a subset of entertainment, but people use SL for education, training, and other purposes which have no game aspect, other than it shares technology with video games.
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They are not "returning to the PC Platform", because they never left it. "Abandoning" is not the same as "putting most of their software development team on another project for a while".
Their outgoing CEO made some statements on his last day, the day he was being laid off. I think you can discount them. Henk Rogers, Kazuyuki Hashimoto (the two founders of the company) and the developer staff who are still there are the relevant people to talk to, which in fact I do.
You are correct that they are not charging for hosting service (ie tier) right now. That is compensation to us content creators/builders for the delay in completing the PC software. So I get to keep the 80 sim's worth of land I have there online at no cost. About 4 sim's worth is developed so far, and we are working on a roleplay area that will use up some more.
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Uh, you mean the PC platform that's been discontinued by Blue Mars? ; )
If it's discontinued, why did they update Beach City yesterday?
They stopped development of the PC software while they get the iOS version working, but intend to get back to the PC version afterwards. In the mean time it's still online and we can still build stuff there.
I seem to remember LL more or less halting viewer development for a year. That was one of the proximate causes of me looking elsewhere.
Quote: “Our company is now focused on not only enhancing the app with future updates, but also on improving the Blue Mars platform and the integrated experience between the two.” - Avatar Reality President and Co-Founder, Kazuyuki Hashimoto (that would be Rod Humble's counterpart at Blue Mars)
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Yes, by no means is Blue Mars Mobile 1.0 a finished product. The goal was just to get basic display functionality working on iOS. Later versions will add clothing and "room" environments sales and more ways to communicate. The clothing and room sales will bring in some revenue to content creators, and hopefully will attract some users to the PC version, where you can do much more. That's the plan anyway. They also plan to port the app to Android once the iOS one is more finished.
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IMO LL should stop any further development of the V2 viewer and let the TPV's run with it and produce their own versions, which we know will eventually dominate the market anyway. LL would be better off diverting their already thin workforce to other areas of SL that need improvement.
That's a silly statement. Only Linden Lab has access to the server code, and therefore only they can write the code for the viewer to keep it in sync with the server code. If you want new features, or fixes to broken ones that depend on the servers, they are the ones that have to do it.
Now, user interface stuff, which is between the user and the viewer, and not between the viewer and the server, is a different matter. Third party developers can and are making their own improvements to that, and some of those improvements are working their way into the official version. Viewer 2.6, which is not released as a public beta yet, but which is used for the Project Viewer - Mesh and Kirsten's S21, is a considerable improvement to the base version over previous 2.x ones. If we get a viewer with that core code, Kirsten's graphics features, and Phoenix/Firestorm's other features, I think you would satisfy a large percentage of the population.
No single viewer will satisfy everyone, because we think different and have different needs, so hopefully the current system of LL supplied core and a vibrant TPV community will take care of those diverse needs.
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The cache system is pretty simple no matter what size it is. Everything in SL has a "Universal ID number" or UUID. When you arrive somewhere, the server tells you what UUID's are needed to see things within your draw distance. Your PC looks at your cache, which is sorted by UUID numbers, and sees if you have it. If you do, great, it loads right away. If not, your PC requests it from the server. A bigger cache simply means you are more likely to find it already there, and not have to ask for it.
Any time you move (walk or TP), or any time an object moves, your "interest list" will change. That is the list of stuff within draw distance. Size of cache has no effect on updating the interest list. How often you move and how "live" your surroundings are does, and draw distance radius also does.
If you travel around a LOT, yes, no matter how large a cache is, it will fill up. But most people have favorite locations like their home, that they visit more often. In fact part of the proposal for a larger cache is the ability to mark certain places as favorites, and not to discard them when the cache fills up. If you *know* you will be at your SL home or some club regularly, there should be a way to tell the software to keep those items, and throw away the data from places you don't visit as much. The current cache system does not do this, it tosses out oldest data, even if its a place you have been to 100 times and will keep coming back. That is very inefficient.
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Regarding cached surroundings... no, to my understanding that's not how it will work. All graphics calculations will be made server-side and then streamed, video-style, to the mobile device. (At least, that's what was said in the Blue Mars discussion group). That means around a gig an hour.
You are talking about a different thing: the Blue Mars PC version delivered via OTOY graphics streaming. The Blue Mars Mobile app for iOS is a different product. It will download the avatar and starter clothes with the app, and additional clothes and room environments as needed. Clothing items max out at 512kB per item (I should know that as a clothing maker). Environments max out at 2 MB each. Both are one time downloads, then saved.
The standalone PC version by the way typically consumes 10kbps for small numbers of avatars except when you are downloading a new location or new items you have not seen before. All downloaded content is saved to disk, so after the first time, you don't have to download it again. That actually ends up being less data for heavy users than SL. SL has a limited cache size, and once it overflows, you have to download things again when you visit a favorite location.
There is a lesson there for SL. Hard drives these days are big and cheap. Using more of it to save stuff you have seen before would (a) make things rez faster, and (b) put less load on the servers and asset system. It's a mystery to me why they have not increased the max cache size from 1 GB, when my own hard drive space has increased 12x in the 5 years since I first joined SL.
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I have only seen a video of the Blue Mars client, but it takes operation a bit further where it renders the avatar in full 3D and you can animate it and dress/undress it. From their original posting they will build on that to be able to render the immediate surroundings and perhaps close by avatars later.
My understanding is the Blue Mars Mobile client will use the "Residence" interiors for the 3D environment. Those already exist in the PC version. They are essentially private instanced spaces you teleport to, usually the inside of a house or apartment. A residence interior is a different file download than the rest of a "city", much smaller, and private.
As for usability, phones are pretty small. I expect tablets will be the most common use. People like me who are older *need* bigger screens to see stuff.
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...I hang out at one of the three land marks that every noob (new account) gets in their inventory. And the rudeness there on the part of some of the regular scares away one day old newbies just starting out. I have IM from people who have been treated rudely and say they are done with second life. All because of the welcome areas, help areas and orientation areas that are landmarks in the folders of people starting out.
All you need is a LL staff person to randomly drop into those areas with an alt, identify who is beind rude, and then have them punished appropriately. You don't need someone there full time, just often enough, and unpredictably enough to scare away the idiots. The unpredictable part is important, the rude people should have no idea who might be a Linden alt, and when they might show up.
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The reason that places like There.com or Blue Mars have failed or cut back drastically is because they lack the dedicated communities of residents SL has.
Welcome Mr. Humble, as a builder myself, it's nice that you are getting that experience here.
As far as the quote, Blue Mars changing their development plan has more to do with not having funds to finish the PC version than anything to do with communities. The PC version is not finished, so it not had even begun to attract regular users, just a few beta testers and content creators.
I agree that avatars and customizability are critical, and the Blue Mars Mobile, which is about to start closed testing for the iOS version, is centered on the avatar. How well they do with it will determine the future of their platform.
How well the SL software lets people do what they want to do, without getting in the way, will determine it's success as a platform. That means things like Groups and teleports work like they are supposed to, you can reliably tell if your friends are online, search lets you find stuff you are looking for, etc. We cannot build a community if the tools to build it with are broken.
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Viewer 2.3 Beta Available Today With Display Names and More
A group blog by Secondlife in General
Actually, Linden Lab's competitors have it as well (IE: Blue Mars). Same song and dance, just the score is better written. Issue being that Blue Mars and other services REQUIRE real life information (by default) that LL does not ask for until there is cause (Age verification and payment information).
For a player account on Blue Mars you only need email address, date of birth, and country of origin. For a *developer* account they ask for more, akin to Payment Info on File for Second Life.
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Compared to uploading a 1024x1024 texture, which is typically several hundred kbytes as a jpg, then 10L per 4k is pretty stingy. My guess is they want to limit the impact on the grid to start with. They can always change the number later. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, it is also a deterrent to importing stolen 3D models from other sources. Those are typically high poly count, and so would be expensive to upload here.
For legitimate content creators, they will be encouraged by the cost to be efficient in their model making, and to test uploads on aditi before doing a final import to the main grid.
If I did the math right, these window shutters (the pair) would cost 9 prims or 90L to upload. Not negligible, but it won't break the bank:
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BM you have to download the region you go to before you can enter it ...
This is true, and SL you download the surroundings *after* you teleport. Either way you have to download it before you can see it. Two differences in how Blue Mars does it are that you can download a city in the background while you are doing other things, and the city is saved to disk. In SL if you travel around a lot, older locations get dumped from cache, because it's limited to about 800MB of useful data. So if you return to somewhere you have been before, you get to download it again. With Mars the data is kept until the next city update. And loading from disk is much faster than loading via the internet on later visits.
The downsides to their system is that changes to city contents don't happen instantly like in SL, and right now their update method sometimes causes you to download the whole city again, even if a small percentage of the actual content has changed. Note that the interiors of residences and shops are not part of the city files, so those can be changed any time by the respective owners.
Only time will tell which method of downloading and updating will be preferred by general users.
On the subject of mesh upload cost, there isn't much point to using a mesh to replace a single simple prim, and I expect a library of relatively simple meshes will get made for builders to use. A group of builders could share the upload cost and then pass around copies, or one builder can make a set and sell it the way textures are sold (those have a 10L minimum upload cost too, and it hasn't stopped people from uploading textures)
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Thank you for replying Vir, small problem though...what constitutes a vertex in relationship to a jacket? is it the length of the arm?.
In SL, type Ctrl-Shift-R to go to wireframe mode, and look at your avatar. The avatar shape is a mesh. The lines you see in wireframe mode are "edges". The points where edges join are "vertexes", ie points in 3d space. The area surrounded by edges is a "face", or "polygon". The simplest polygon is a triangle, defined by 3 edges and 3 vertexes. That is what is mostly used in making 3d models. So your jacket model will likely be made of hundreds to a couple thousand vertexes, and a similar number of edges and triangles.
Depending how you want the jacket to move, most vertexes will be tied to the bone they are closest to, except for around joints, where you would tie them to the two nearest ones to get a smooth motion as the arm bends.
As a clothing maker, I am sure you have seen the skin UV template. A template like that defines which part of the texture goes with which polygon on the mesh. One of the nice features of the coming mesh design is you can make your own custom template for clothing
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It's import, with the same capability to edit a mesh as a sculpt, ie stretch, once its in-world. Adding mesh will not make SL look like Blue Mars. In addition to being mesh based, it uses a modern graphics engine. SL has basically one texture map that defines color and optionally transparency. Blue Mars has about 8 texture map slots, so you can give it a lot more information on how to show things.
In this photo from a house kit I have been making for Mars, you notice the bricks are 3 dimensional? That's because I used a "displacement map", which tells the graphics engine which parts are raised brick and which parts are mortar. Other maps I use are specular (how shiny each part is), normal (gives surface roughness), and environment (whats around you to reflect).
Beyond multiple maps, it has multiple "shaders", which is the software that converts the maps into the finished image on the screen. There are different shaders for glass, metal, cloth, hair, fur, plant leaves, etc. The SL graphics has a long way to go to catch up with all that.
On the other hand, SL is way ahead still on user software, content, and number of users.
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I created a JIRA issue to add the capability to edit meshes in-world: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-23202 That will "democritize" the feature by removing the need to learn an outside program to do simple building with it.
There is a great 3D site I found for anyone who wants to start learning: http://www.3dlinks.com/
COLLADA stands for Collaborative Design Activity, and it is a file format specification embodied in the Digital Asset Exchange (.dae) file type. There are 110 programs that support that file format:
http://www.collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/Portal:Products_directory
Blender 2.54 is a free 3D program. I downloaded it, exported a box to COLLADA format, imported it to Blue Mars format, applied a texture, and took this photo, in 12 minutes total time, having never used it before. I do use 3ds Max, which is an advantage, but even so, 12 minutes is pretty damn fast to get a new program to work.
What you want is to go to Graphicall.org and look for the latest beta version for your operating system with Collada support. The one I loaded was " Blender 2.54 (trunk) rev32194 64bit + patches + contrib & external add-ons + API Doc since I use Windows 64 bit. It should say external addons or collada.
Then take a look at the video series listed here: http://create.bluemars.com/wiki/index.php/Blender to get started.
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It's not just mesh import, it's the wider creative possibilities overall for a builder like me:
* Cities (ie sims) can be any size from 128x128 to 8192x8192m
* Instancing of objects so you only count the data usage the first time you include an object (total data limit is their equivalent of prim limit)
* Multiple shaders and maps to make things look more realistic
* No arbitrary 10m size limit on objects
As far as quality of my work, even as a newbie to 3D modeling, I was producing better looking items than I ever did in SL after 4 years of building here.
@Ann - I respect the intelligence of individual Linden Lab staff. As a company though they have continually put out broken products (the server and viewer software, marketplace beta, this blog, etc). They may not have written the blog software, but they chose it and obviously some of it's function's dont work.
I do not work for Avatar Reality, I work for myself. I own land and have shops in both worlds. I write tutorials for both worlds, and once mesh import is available here, I will be building here because it will be fun again, which it stopped being fun in SL a while ago for me.
Although I don't particularly like Linden Lab as a company, I do care about all my friends and everyone else who uses SL, and have no desire to see it close. I want to see it improved so it can survive another decade, but it can't do that by sticking to the last decade's technology.
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despite Jennier's intriguing arguments the revelation that quality software costs up to 3500 was staggering...
the only reason Im back at all is because lindens cant make the email notification block for the forum operate correctly..
what price complex building systems ??
Quality software costs as little as free, including the Autodesk products if you are a student or unemployed. Quoting the highest priced 3D software on the planet is like saying some luxury cars cost US$ 750,000, therefore nobody can afford cars.
The same people who cannot make an email notification stop properly are the ones you want to program in a full 3D modeling tool into the viewer? That is one of the reasons I asked for only the minimum editing capability, that of moving vertices.
For those who are interested in learning, I posted a page with some basic concepts: http://www.tiriondesigns.co.cc/basic-concepts
Besides the definitions on that page, you can use the terms as google search words, like "bump map tutorial" to find tutorials on that subject.
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Applying 7zip file compression to that same file yields a 1379KB result. That's still 345 prim upload cost, or L$3.450. I think that is still a deterrent to casual content ripping of the "Steal a model from renderosity > convert to Collada > Upload to SL" type.
Now, a game asset that has already been optimized for realtime use is another matter, or someone who wants to take the time to modify a high poly model into a lower one. Cost of import alone will not stop people in that case, but if it costs more to import an item than to simply buy it from an SL creator, that makes it not worth doing unless you intend to sell multiple copies.
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I took a 50K triangle 3ds Max model and did a save to COLLADA with no changes. It came to 9125 KB. Assuming they use the 4KB per prim value, that means an import cost of 2,281 prims, or 22,810L$. (plus whatever for the texture maps). I think the greatest deterrent to rampant ripping of existing models will be the cost to import.
Optimizing a model to bring the polygon count down takes time, skills, and good 3D software. If you have those, you might as well be creating your own items rather then stealing other people's. Now, game optimized low poly models are another story, but the upload costs still will not be trivial.
@Toysoldier - unfortunately COLLADA is an XML schema, so the dae file format is a human readable and easily editable plain text file. Requiring payment info on file or other registration for mesh import would have some effect compared to anonymous alts.
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However the suggestion that there should be some in world mesh tool is a valid and important one. Even a basic tool would help. It doesn’t need all the bells and whistles in fact it would be helpful that it wasn’t to extensive.
I created a JIRA issue to "Add Ability to Edit Mesh in Viewer":
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-23202
This issue requests the simplest possible editing function, that of moving vertexes (corners) on an existing mesh object, using the same method we currently have to move a prim within a linkset. It does not include more advanced editing like changing the UV map. As simple as it is, it addresses two needs:
(1) Allowing people to adjust an existing mesh to fit better as clothing, landscaping, or a component in a more complex linked object. This would be useful both for end users buying a mesh object, and for builders who make their own custom meshes and import them.
(2) Assuming some starter shapes are available in the Inventory library, it would encourage new builders to try their hand at no cost, and make it possible to have one resident help another learn. When they are ready for more advanced projects, they can move to an external program. This is the same way people go from merely adjusting a texture on a prim to creating new textures from scratch with an outside program.
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I'll try, though, I just wonder how many will put their bragging where their charity is and help others along the way?
Read my basic sketchup tutorial to get the software and set it up, just ignore the last part about converting the files, since SL uses the COLLADA ,dae file directly, unlike Blue Mars: http://create.bluemars.com/wiki/index.php/SketchUp_Basic_Tutorial
Then watch the video series from Google: http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos/new_to_gsu.html
If you have questions contact me via IM.
I am not sure how well version 7.1 or 8 does exporting to Second Life. I know they mess up for Blue Mars, so the download links are to version 7.0.
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Just like sculpted prims before them meshes are in no way going to totally replace standard prim building. Will they most likely have a bigger impact on SL ...probably but anyone who solely relies on mesh for everything won't be building to their full potential in SL. SL was and still is built on the prim.
Indeed. Take a look at this modular house kit I made for Blue Mars, and plan to import to SL when allowed: http://picasaweb.google.com/danielleeberSL/BlueMarsHousesAndBuildings#5517001089295511250
It's made from 44 different parts designed to fit together. Essentially the parts are just fancy prims, with proper UV mapping so the textures tile across pieces. People will be able to build in-world with them just like they do with prims. You just will have a greater diversity of parts than the edit menu contains. I expect a lot more kits like that to appear, because some end users will want to customize their houses to fit their own preferences, rather than buy a complete house model in one piece they cannot easily modify.
If kit builders standardize their parts, then you can combine them from different makers and have even more diversity of choice. The obvious way to do that is to use multiples of the grid snap of 0.5m in sizing the parts. In my case I used 0.5 and 1.0 meters in the part dimensions horizontally, and 3.5 meters vertically per floor height (3.2m interior space + 30cm floor thickness).
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Getting Immersed in Second Life
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A group blog by Secondlife in General
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That being said let me state one fact to remember, You will not be able to please everyone all of the time nor should you try to.
Feliciana is very correct in that statement, so perhaps the goal is to have the software not get in the way of what we try to create. As a builder both in SL and in real life, I want good tools to work with, not broken or limited ones. And that includes having some options in how I get things done. There is no "one true way" that people like to do things, we are all different. On a practical software level, that means things like choices in preferences as to what to show and where to put them, or the ability to use a keyboard shortcut, a menu dropdown, OR a button to do a task.