Oct Oyen

Ok, thanks for the confirming it. When it comes to GPU driver, I avoid to update it unless it's a security issue. I'll wait a bit since I'm not actively creating contents and can live without the advanced lighting.

It has been a few days since I logged in to the grid, then I updated the latest Nvidia Game Ready driver 516.40 (released 6/15/2022). Now I get these contour lines on everything, the spacing between the line changes based on zoom level. The closer the camera is to the objects, the less spacing between the lines. Another thing is that objects well within the draw distance flickers and sometime disappear completely. All these issues go away when Advanced Lighting Model is turned off. The viewer settings hasn't been changed in ages...I'm pretty sure this has something to do with the driver as it only happens in SL viewers, Firestorm and the official one. Computer is running fine, I ran MS Flight Sim 2020 on 3 x 2K monitors for hours without any issue. I also ruled out hardware issues as 1080 ti is liquid cooled and all sensors are reporting normal stats. Anyone else is experiencing this?

In the 2000s, all textures uploaded into SL would be converted by LL's optimization process (basically slightly compressed, even with PNG) and I think that is still the case today. What happen if a texture is already optimized to the max, will LL's conversion makes it less optimized? For example, I use a 8 colors PNG-8 for specular texture which has the smallest file size of all formats. But if LL is going to convert it back to standard PNG, then it's not worth the time to optimize it.

Throwback 2007

Stumbled upon these albums https://www.flickr.com/photos/23172511@N07/albums

Thank you for the solidify modifier suggestion. It works, but in a strange way. When I created the double sided mesh with 0 thickness in solidify modifier, LI went up even more to 39. But with 1 mm thickness (basically adding unnecessary poly), the LI is 1. I guess SL just doesn't like absolute zero thickness double sided mesh. Hey, whatever works, thanks again for the tip.

I'm making a simple house plant with leaves that are double sided in Blender by duplicate the leaf mesh and flip normal. When the plant uploaded into SL as one object, the LI goes crazy high 19LI. With the exact same model, I separate it into two objects 1. Top leaves mesh (normal upward) and stems. 2. Down side leaves mesh (normal downward). Each object is about 0.5 LI and when they are linked together in SL the LI is 1. So why double-sided mesh in one object's LI goes crazy like that?

I look forward playing with them. The point is that the current default setting is so old, it was designed when entry level GPU couldn't handle the advanced lighting/shadow. Even today, a good portion of population is using old computers that can't handle it. BTW, all textures on Collada are baked. I'm talking about diffuse property whereas some of you are thinking about light baking.

The default environment settings ( midday, sunset, midnight..etc) have not changed since...forever? 2007? Today I spent a good hour trying to figure out as why my baked textures look so dark in SL, it turned out that is because I'm using the default midday setting, which I imagine most of people (excluding people on this forum ) including the new residents are using. Then I played around with the environment presets that came with the viewer and was surprised how much better some of these presets are. The preset [AnaLu] AvatarOptimal renders baked textures much more accurately. LL, please update the default environment settings, or at least have options to change the keyboard shortcut to a preset instead of default one. For new residents who are exploring SL on their own, they are missing out a lot of well textured contents by using the current default environment settings.

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/6233ecafdc551a002089fb15/lessons-from-19-years-in-the-metaverse/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Majority of NFT arts is going to be worthless when the bubble burst, some will remain valuable to a group of rich fools. Just like some modern abstract paintings, I would not want to hang it in my bathroom and yet super rich are paying big money to collect them. To some degrees, it's about ego within the group. NFT solves the digital ownership issue. We'll see NFT ID cards and other legal documents issue by the government in a few years. Crypto currency is suppose to get rid of banks, it's already happening in small scale. In the US, migrant workers used to pay outrageous bank fee to send money home. Now they send Bitcoin home. Whoever is in control of money has to power to control and regulate, crypto currency will face challenges from people who wants to staying power. Fun fact, in the US, a bank can loan out $100 for every $1 it holds. If 20% of people withdraw their money all at once, the banking system will collapse. This is why crypto currency was created, stop the cheating.

Opensea stores the media on its own servers. But more and more NFT medias are been stored on IPFS, a blockchain file storage. You can say the same thing about the US government, or any governments really. Any organizations will die eventually, history has proven that over and over. Yet everyone still treats the US paper fiat like gold, it's all about trust, trusting the org will be around long enough for your investments to increase in value before you get rid of it or kick the bucket.

NFT is backed by the original minter, if the original minter has a large fan base then the NFT has value among them. Take NBA (US pro basketball league) for example, it has millions of fans around the world. Its official NFTs are worth a lot of money to the fan base. It's all about consent value. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

For sure a lot of hypes now are from crypto-rich companies and people who got into it early on, a thousand dollars of ETH today costed them a few pennies back then. But I would not call blockchain based metaverses a ponzi scheme. Majority NFT tradings on Opensea are those get-rich-quick ponzi, they are small groups of people who truly appreciate the artistry. Digital contents creators have been asking for copyright protection since day one of digital era, it couldn't be enforced automatically until NFT came along. With these blockchain based metaverses, pirated contents can be deleted automatically. The biggest issue now is the environment impact from minting all these tokens. Some metaverses have switched over to a side chain network which uses very little energy. I think LL should definitely consider get on the blockchain, not for the hype (while it does drive traffics to SL) but for the sake of copyright protection.

If I remember it correctly, teen sims back in 2007 were off limit to everyone except for the teen members.

NFT doesn't contain the actual media, its code points to a storage where media is kept. In Opensea's case, it only stores media on their owner servers. The better way to store NFT media is to use IPSF, a decentralized storage blockchain.

SL had a teen and education membership back in 2007. I recent met a girl who was a part of the SL Teen program. According to her, teen members can't leave the designated sims and she says her perviness has nothing to do been SL Teen program lol. LL could do the family oriented sims again, but the problem is the physics engine sucks! No physic based inworld games can created with this ancient engine. Without it, it's just a 3D chat room.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/13/22881864/metaverse-second-life-decentralized-moderation-patent-virtual-reality

I think it has a lot to do with SL's ancient engine, Windwright ...or whatever it's called. SL was designed in 2003, it was state of art back then and LL has done a great job pushing the ancient engine beyond its expiration day, by adapting standard gaming asset format. But the physic part of it remains in 2000s, the experience of driving a car in SL today is the same as it was 2007, unplayable. Also all these talks about web 3.0 is basically describing OpenSims.

People were saying that about online payment networks at the dawn of internet. Elon Musk was like hmmm... I'm all in! Rest is history.

Ever since Facebook announced it's all in on metaverses, it has been on a hype along the hype of crypto and NFT. As I'm looking at these blockchain based metaverse, it was like time traveling back to SL in 2007. Everything these metaverses are doing now has been done in SL15 years ago, except for the blockchain part. Yet all these metaverse buzz from tech articles have no mention of SL. Is LL missing a golden opportunity?

Newer crypto currencies have already scaled up to and surpassed the speed of credit card transactions. BTW, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of computer processing credit cards transaction. They only use fraction of energy compare to crypto minting. It's just matter of time governments around to world to create its own blockchains. In the US, FED is already planning the roadmap to replace paper money with crypto currency. I was in Shanghai before pandemic, it was crazy to see everyone uses phone to pay for everything, including buying cars and houses. I got a dirty look from some punk ass clerk at the store "Oh man, you're still using cash? I have to open the register..." she said. lol Environmental impact from mining crypto is a big issue now. Fusion power will be a reality in 10-15 years.

NFT is not blockchain exclusive. It's a piece of code inside of a smart contract, it verifies the authenticity of the smart contract. Ethereum was the 1st and ONLY blockchain to incorporate smart contracts into its blockchain. That's why most of NFTs today are on Ethereum. But now there are many other blockchains with smart contracts, some target niche market like indie musicians for example. In short, any blockchain with smart contract can create its own NFT.

Environmental impact from blockchain is definitely an issue needs to be addressed, which the industrial has been working on it. Next gen of blockchain will be much more efficient and will be out by end of this year. NFT is a certificate of authenticity for anything that is in digital form and it's virtually unhackable (for now). Currently, trading digital arts happens to be the most well known usage of NFT. But soon NFT will be used for everyday legal documents in real estate, healthcare and many others as paper documents are been replaced by digital documents. NFT is here to stay. As for NFT "arts", currently 90% of them been traded by day traders who are in for the quick bucks. They don't care about the art, all they care about is the stats and tradablility of it. The rest of 10% are those who actually appreciate the arts and want to support the artists.