I've been spending some time at the SL11B sims, looking around the various builds... the birthday celebration has been offering impressive sights and impressive lag in roughly equal proportions. I took some snapshots, and may well take more.
Of course, the question is, will there be an SL12B next year, give the latest Epic Controversy That Will Bring About The End Of The Grid, Ebbe Linden's announcement that a successor platform to Second Life is in development?
Well, my guess would be yes... over the past eleven years, SL has built up a heck of a lot of inertia. People have invested gigantic chunks of time, love, and actual money in it, and they won't easily let that go. And it's still the major source of revenue for the Lab, and they won't let that go.
However, the announcement that "SL2" won't necessarily be backwards-compatible with existing SL content gives me a little pause for thought. Like it or not, that positions SL2, in a way, as a [I]competitor[/I] for SL... it will compete with the existing virtual world for my time, my attention, my cash.
... possibly. We know, as yet, very little about the plans for SL2 - not even whether it will be called SL2. We know it's planned to be in beta some time next year, we know it won't necessarily be compatible with existing SL - hmm, I say. To what extent will it not be compatible?
I mean... will existing SL avatars automatically have, or be able to get, SL2 accounts in the same names? If so, that would be a major plus - the stuff I have in SL, I can happily leave behind: I'm a builder, I can always make more stuff. The existing relationships between people - groups, friendships, partnerships - are much more important, and if they can make the transition intact, then that's a major obstacle to adoption out of the way.
Of course, I say "I'm a builder", but so far we don't know what sort of inworld creation will be possible in SL2, or even if it will be possible at all! (But if it isn't... well, the creative aspect of SL is one thing that keeps me coming back. Losing that from SL2 would be fatal to my interest in the project.)
What won't they keep? Well, the inertia that will keep SL "classic" going also lumbers it with a lot of stuff that ought to change, but is now far too entrenched and too expensive to update. I'd expect, frankly, that SL2 would include the creation of an Avatar 2.0 - probably with lots more detail, and more extensive armatures for rigging. Which would mean that SL classic UV maps for clothing, all existing rigged mesh items, and possibly BVH animation files, would not necessarily be compatible with the new avatar - all that stuff would have to start from scratch.
Whatever build system gets implemented, I wouldn't expect sculpted prims to make the cut, either. As an interim form between prim-based builds and mesh imports, sculpted prims have their fascination... but, ultimately, the technology for them is a blind alley, and I wouldn't expect a new platform to explore it.
We're told that SL2 will have Linden dollars and a Marketplace, "but better". This implies to me that our account balances certainly won't transfer over, or be shareable between the two virtual worlds. That might be another negative, there, in that setting up payment details and making separate payments into the new world is a bit of a hassle.
We don't know much about the technology it'll be using. There's been talk of SL2 running on mobile devices, which implies a very "thin client" approach. That might, frankly, be preferable to total-immersion systems using tech like Oculus Rift. (Although fascinating, Oculus Rift has always struck me as one of those very nifty pieces of technology that are solutions desperately in search of a problem. Most of us don't have - or even particularly want - lifestyles which permit total immersion in a video game. I'm a lot happier being able to see the real world out of the corner of my eye, just in case my mother sets the house on fire.)
And we do know that, whatever sort of client is used, it won't be open source, so third party viewers won't be an option (or not easily at least). I can see the Lab's point of view, there... the benefits and insights gained from TPV development are almost certainly outweighed by the massive amounts of hassle the TPVs have caused over the years, whether from copybotting viewers, or one-off cases like the Emerald fiasco, or maintaining inworld consistency between different viewers, or the bullying behaviour of some TPV advocates... The temptation to have a very simple TPV policy of "no TPVs" must have been irresistible. (People who absolutely cannot do without the V1.23 interface and its annoying pie menus are cordially invited, here, to take the traditional virtual stepladder and use it for the traditional purpose.)
But, for the most part... we just don't know. We can speculate six ways from Sunday, and I just have. Perhaps there will be a glowing portal in the middle of the mainland that we can step through with our current SL identities intact, and the building system will make 1 Land Impact equal to a set blob of voxels that you can manipulate inworld with a Blender-like toolkit - in which case I will be diving through it with my hammer, chisel and blowlamp clutched eagerly in my little paws. Or perhaps it will be keyed off your RL Facebook or Google+ accounts, and all the creation will be done with mesh imports, in which case you couldn't pay me to touch it. We just don't know.
It's going to be interesting to find out, though.
Showing posts with label SL tech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SL tech. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Monday, July 16, 2012
More irritability
My feedback on the second support case I had to raise, to report that I couldn't access the first one.
You will notice that I don't feel my problem was solved, that I was very unsatisfied with the whole business, and - most damningly - that this was what I was expecting.
There are people who make unreasonable demands of LL on a technical level... but, come on, guys, I'm running Windows 7 and Internet Explorer, this is not some obscure custom system, and it is not unreasonable to expect the flippin' support web page to work!
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Belt and braces
A while back now I mentioned some problems we were running into with the keyframed movement system. While this is somewhat improved - possibly as a consequence of the impending arrival of pathfinding on the Grid as a whole - there are still issues, especially with region restarts. The lifts running up and down my tower in Burroughs still freeze when the region restarts, and are a little erratic in resuming function.
So, by way of experiment, I rigged one to sort itself out when the restart hits. Basically, this is run off the "changed" event, because one of the things it picks up is the starting up of the region. (I have an explosive device in Steam SkyCity, in fact, which counts the number of times the sim has restarted. And then explodes.) So, this one lift, now, when it detects a restart, shuts down keyframed movement, uses the old warpPos trick to go to its starting point, and then starts keyframing going again. In theory, then, the next time a restart hits, this thing should go right on moving as normal.
I mentioned all this to Tali, and she said, "WarpPos? You do know llSetRegionPos is live now, right?"
Well, this is why Tali is an accomplished creator and I am a dumb blonde; yes, I did know, but it had temporarily slipped what passes for my mind. So I turned back to the lift...
... and I thought to myself, hang on, this is an excellent moment to run some comparisons, here.
WarpPos is not an LSL function, it's a trick developed by sneaky programmer types; it works by calculating a number of steps between where you are and where you want to be, and using llSetPos to move an object along those steps - the trick being that, due to a quirk of the implementation, all these repeated calls to llSetPos are executed in the same physics frame, thus making the transition effectively instantaneous.
The newer llSetRegionPos actually does move an object, straightforwardly and simply, from point A to point B (if both points are in the same region). So there is not a lot of use for warpPos any more, unless you're going outside a sim... but...
The much-published warpPos user-defined function has an error margin of 0.01 meters. In the documentation, llSetRegionPos is given an error margin of 0.1 meters. Now, this may be simply LL covering their backsides with a generous allowance for errors, but - I thought - it might be interesting to see how the two compare in practice. So I edited a second lift and set that to use llSetRegionPos.
So, it will be interesting to see how the two compare. The ideal result would be for both lifts to handle the sim restarts normally - but it is possible that, with the wider margin for error, the llSetRegionPos one will drift, gradually, out of position over the course of weeks. (It is also possible, or even likely, that they will both hit an unsolved keyframing bug and fail to restart properly. Well, we shall see.)
An experiment in progress! I may have results in, oooh, a month or two.
So, by way of experiment, I rigged one to sort itself out when the restart hits. Basically, this is run off the "changed" event, because one of the things it picks up is the starting up of the region. (I have an explosive device in Steam SkyCity, in fact, which counts the number of times the sim has restarted. And then explodes.) So, this one lift, now, when it detects a restart, shuts down keyframed movement, uses the old warpPos trick to go to its starting point, and then starts keyframing going again. In theory, then, the next time a restart hits, this thing should go right on moving as normal.
I mentioned all this to Tali, and she said, "WarpPos? You do know llSetRegionPos is live now, right?"
Well, this is why Tali is an accomplished creator and I am a dumb blonde; yes, I did know, but it had temporarily slipped what passes for my mind. So I turned back to the lift...
... and I thought to myself, hang on, this is an excellent moment to run some comparisons, here.
WarpPos is not an LSL function, it's a trick developed by sneaky programmer types; it works by calculating a number of steps between where you are and where you want to be, and using llSetPos to move an object along those steps - the trick being that, due to a quirk of the implementation, all these repeated calls to llSetPos are executed in the same physics frame, thus making the transition effectively instantaneous.
The newer llSetRegionPos actually does move an object, straightforwardly and simply, from point A to point B (if both points are in the same region). So there is not a lot of use for warpPos any more, unless you're going outside a sim... but...
The much-published warpPos user-defined function has an error margin of 0.01 meters. In the documentation, llSetRegionPos is given an error margin of 0.1 meters. Now, this may be simply LL covering their backsides with a generous allowance for errors, but - I thought - it might be interesting to see how the two compare in practice. So I edited a second lift and set that to use llSetRegionPos.
So, it will be interesting to see how the two compare. The ideal result would be for both lifts to handle the sim restarts normally - but it is possible that, with the wider margin for error, the llSetRegionPos one will drift, gradually, out of position over the course of weeks. (It is also possible, or even likely, that they will both hit an unsolved keyframing bug and fail to restart properly. Well, we shall see.)
An experiment in progress! I may have results in, oooh, a month or two.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
A pox on "standard sizing"
The mesh clothes I picked up at the fundraiser yesterday will just have to be considered as donations to the cause, I fear. At least the shoes, makeup and motorbike seem OK!
The problem, of course, is that they were all made using the "Standard Sizing", against which I have inveighed before... and my shape, though not all that peculiar, especially in SL, is way outside the permitted variation allowed in the standard sizes.
It's not a question of being too tall, or too thin, because the existing adjustments along avatar bones work just fine to accommodate that. The problem lies in the subtler interplay of proportions - and, I suspect, in what's currently fashionable in SL.
The problem seems to exist mostly for those of us who want a vaguely trim-and-athletic look. I don't want exaggerated curves and a pair of Zeppelins moored to the front of my torso, thank you very much, so the larger sizes, which cater to the voluptuous amongst us, are out. So, no problem, right? I just use the small sizes, and they scale up to my height, right?... Wrong, because the smaller sizes don't seem to allow for any significant musculature, or breadth (I have narrow hips and comparatively broad shoulders). The S and XS sizes seem heavily biased towards what my friend and fellow blogger CC Creeggan describes here as "Tableau girls". It's a popular look among the waif-like and generally gamine. It's not my look, though, or anywhere near it. Of course, I can just hide everything under alpha layers...
... except those don't adjust at all for body proportions, they are painted over certain areas of your avatar's surface, and if the lines on your avatar's surface don't match up to the ones on the mesh item you're wearing... tough. So, with the best will in the world, I find myself clipping through mesh clothes in unexpected locations. Forearms seem to be the worst - my arms are longer than many avi's, even though they are actually too short to be well proportioned in RL. And, wearing a corsety-type top, I found that, in all the sizes available, the breadth of my shoulders made for a visible discontinuity between the mesh and me - I suddenly broaden out at the point the mesh's corresponding alpha ends.
At best, I can only hope to conceal my entire lower body beneath an alpha, leaving me looking as if I've stolen somebody else's legs. In size XXS trousers, the legs of someone in the terminal stages of some obscure wasting disease. In size XL, the legs of someone whose bottom needs its own postcode. In intermediate sizes, an unlovely combination of the two.
Let's consider the tops... Well, since I have small breasts, anything above XXS leaves vast echoing caverns around my chest. Selecting size XXS, though, generally means my breasts clip through the clothing whenever my av physics kicks in, and sometimes even when it doesn't. I can't win.
I would post some snapshots, but they are just too, too, depressing.
I am more and more convinced that the "standard sizing" was based on a sample of commercially available shapes.... and so reflects what's currently fashionable in SL. I will stand by my previously stated opinion: for those of us who exercise our own creativity and make our own shapes, it is effectively useless.
And since mesh clothes continue to be a growth area, can we please have all the wrangling over the mesh deformer tool sorted out, so that I can actually wear some?
The problem, of course, is that they were all made using the "Standard Sizing", against which I have inveighed before... and my shape, though not all that peculiar, especially in SL, is way outside the permitted variation allowed in the standard sizes.
It's not a question of being too tall, or too thin, because the existing adjustments along avatar bones work just fine to accommodate that. The problem lies in the subtler interplay of proportions - and, I suspect, in what's currently fashionable in SL.
The problem seems to exist mostly for those of us who want a vaguely trim-and-athletic look. I don't want exaggerated curves and a pair of Zeppelins moored to the front of my torso, thank you very much, so the larger sizes, which cater to the voluptuous amongst us, are out. So, no problem, right? I just use the small sizes, and they scale up to my height, right?... Wrong, because the smaller sizes don't seem to allow for any significant musculature, or breadth (I have narrow hips and comparatively broad shoulders). The S and XS sizes seem heavily biased towards what my friend and fellow blogger CC Creeggan describes here as "Tableau girls". It's a popular look among the waif-like and generally gamine. It's not my look, though, or anywhere near it. Of course, I can just hide everything under alpha layers...
... except those don't adjust at all for body proportions, they are painted over certain areas of your avatar's surface, and if the lines on your avatar's surface don't match up to the ones on the mesh item you're wearing... tough. So, with the best will in the world, I find myself clipping through mesh clothes in unexpected locations. Forearms seem to be the worst - my arms are longer than many avi's, even though they are actually too short to be well proportioned in RL. And, wearing a corsety-type top, I found that, in all the sizes available, the breadth of my shoulders made for a visible discontinuity between the mesh and me - I suddenly broaden out at the point the mesh's corresponding alpha ends.
At best, I can only hope to conceal my entire lower body beneath an alpha, leaving me looking as if I've stolen somebody else's legs. In size XXS trousers, the legs of someone in the terminal stages of some obscure wasting disease. In size XL, the legs of someone whose bottom needs its own postcode. In intermediate sizes, an unlovely combination of the two.
Let's consider the tops... Well, since I have small breasts, anything above XXS leaves vast echoing caverns around my chest. Selecting size XXS, though, generally means my breasts clip through the clothing whenever my av physics kicks in, and sometimes even when it doesn't. I can't win.
I would post some snapshots, but they are just too, too, depressing.
I am more and more convinced that the "standard sizing" was based on a sample of commercially available shapes.... and so reflects what's currently fashionable in SL. I will stand by my previously stated opinion: for those of us who exercise our own creativity and make our own shapes, it is effectively useless.
And since mesh clothes continue to be a growth area, can we please have all the wrangling over the mesh deformer tool sorted out, so that I can actually wear some?
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Breakthrough!
It doesn't actually get beyond "Loading...", but it's better than yesterday. At this rate, I might be able to see my support case as early as next week! No idea when or if it'll ever be resolved, of course.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Couldn't have put it better myself
I have been attempting to deal with LL's support system, submitting a ticket for that "logging in dumps me in a disconnected state" issue, which is back again with a vengeance.
The following screen shot shows just how far I'm getting.
Says it all, really, doesn't it? Ladies and gentlemen: LL's customer support.
The following screen shot shows just how far I'm getting.
Says it all, really, doesn't it? Ladies and gentlemen: LL's customer support.
Friday, July 6, 2012
The sincerest form of flattery
There has been, it seems, a sudden outbreak of copybotting, to which I was alerted by no less a presence than the august Dean of Caledon Oxbridge, Martini Discovolante, who was gratified to hear a newcomer compliment her appearance - and then mortified to see said newcomer assume it, instantly....
This is, of course, nothing new, and it's not easy to prevent. The simple truth is, if you are going to appear on other people's viewers, the information needed to construct your appearance has to be sent to their computers - and it is not at all difficult to intercept and record that information. All it took was one person malicious or clueless enough to write and release a tool for doing this, and imagination- and morality-challenged people everywhere could take advantage of it.
There are limitations, of course - copybotters can't duplicate content that's shared only between your client and LL's servers, so things like your inventory, and the contents of your items, are safe enough. And I'm inclined to wonder if the upcoming changes to the rendering pipeline will make life harder for the copyers; if your skin and clothing textures are pre-baked on the server side, it's not going to be easy to separate the layers out in someone else's client. I hope.
And, of course, copybotting is a violation of the Terms of Service and merits an immediate abuse report if you see it... not to mention, if it's content you've made being copied, the authority of the DMCA behind the complaint. LL can, and do, remove ripped-off content, replacing it with "generic" items of the same basic type.
Which is all to the good.... I am not a fan of the more strident interpretations of copyright law and intellectual property rights, but the basic principle is sound: people who create things have the right to distribute it the way they choose to, and to get paid for what they do. I may choose to give stuff away - I have, on some occasions - but it's my stuff, and I get to choose when and how I do it. I may be a techno-commie, and even a pixel-stained technopeasant wretch, but I draw the line at simply leeching off other people's creativity. And I hope all my readers do too!
This is, of course, nothing new, and it's not easy to prevent. The simple truth is, if you are going to appear on other people's viewers, the information needed to construct your appearance has to be sent to their computers - and it is not at all difficult to intercept and record that information. All it took was one person malicious or clueless enough to write and release a tool for doing this, and imagination- and morality-challenged people everywhere could take advantage of it.
There are limitations, of course - copybotters can't duplicate content that's shared only between your client and LL's servers, so things like your inventory, and the contents of your items, are safe enough. And I'm inclined to wonder if the upcoming changes to the rendering pipeline will make life harder for the copyers; if your skin and clothing textures are pre-baked on the server side, it's not going to be easy to separate the layers out in someone else's client. I hope.
And, of course, copybotting is a violation of the Terms of Service and merits an immediate abuse report if you see it... not to mention, if it's content you've made being copied, the authority of the DMCA behind the complaint. LL can, and do, remove ripped-off content, replacing it with "generic" items of the same basic type.
Which is all to the good.... I am not a fan of the more strident interpretations of copyright law and intellectual property rights, but the basic principle is sound: people who create things have the right to distribute it the way they choose to, and to get paid for what they do. I may choose to give stuff away - I have, on some occasions - but it's my stuff, and I get to choose when and how I do it. I may be a techno-commie, and even a pixel-stained technopeasant wretch, but I draw the line at simply leeching off other people's creativity. And I hope all my readers do too!
Friday, June 29, 2012
Wheels within wheels
So I logged in just now... which is not news to most people, I'd admit.
However, I was pleasantly surprised, because, for the past couple of weeks, I've been having an annoying problem, whereby I would log in to SL and find myself in a sort of limbo state, apparently in a region but disconnected from it - unable to move, TP, or communicate, with myself and the area around me loaded to a greater or lesser degree of completeness, and with a ping time pegged at 10000 ms. The only thing to do, it seemed, was log out, try to log in again, and hope that it worked. Sometimes it took up to four tries, and I was starting to get quite cross about it.
And, since about the middle of this week... that hasn't happened to me. I think it unlikely that this isn't connected to the server rollouts that always happen Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Whenever I am bitching about LL, I always try to remember how much the whole of SL is still a work in progress... they are meeting unique technical challenges, they are constantly expanding the capabilities of the system, they are operating, in many ways, at the cutting edge of virtual world technology. (There are virtual worlds out there with more impressive features, but not with SL's high concurrency levels... there are others with many more concurrent users, but not with SL's level of individual user freedom. SL operates in a niche which is far from completely explored.)
Of course, there are areas where LL deserves a thorough lambasting, and we can all think of six off the tops of our heads. But, sometimes, I think it wise to bear in mind just how much the technology is changing behind the scenes, and how hard it can be to predict the effects of those changes on the user experience. I would be very surprised if "Glorf's incomplete login problem" had appeared on a LL to-fix list at any time... but, something they've done seems to have fixed it.
However, I was pleasantly surprised, because, for the past couple of weeks, I've been having an annoying problem, whereby I would log in to SL and find myself in a sort of limbo state, apparently in a region but disconnected from it - unable to move, TP, or communicate, with myself and the area around me loaded to a greater or lesser degree of completeness, and with a ping time pegged at 10000 ms. The only thing to do, it seemed, was log out, try to log in again, and hope that it worked. Sometimes it took up to four tries, and I was starting to get quite cross about it.
And, since about the middle of this week... that hasn't happened to me. I think it unlikely that this isn't connected to the server rollouts that always happen Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Whenever I am bitching about LL, I always try to remember how much the whole of SL is still a work in progress... they are meeting unique technical challenges, they are constantly expanding the capabilities of the system, they are operating, in many ways, at the cutting edge of virtual world technology. (There are virtual worlds out there with more impressive features, but not with SL's high concurrency levels... there are others with many more concurrent users, but not with SL's level of individual user freedom. SL operates in a niche which is far from completely explored.)
Of course, there are areas where LL deserves a thorough lambasting, and we can all think of six off the tops of our heads. But, sometimes, I think it wise to bear in mind just how much the technology is changing behind the scenes, and how hard it can be to predict the effects of those changes on the user experience. I would be very surprised if "Glorf's incomplete login problem" had appeared on a LL to-fix list at any time... but, something they've done seems to have fixed it.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Journey from Babel
So, yesterday, things took a turn for the worse.... frame rates back to the old-computer days, everything took forever to load, I was persistently ruthed, teleports kept failing.... "Damn you, SL," I said to myself, "damn you and your unreliable technology... why, it is even making the battery indicator on my laptop drop, now what have LL done to cause that?"
Turns out, in fact, the new laptop actually works a fair bit better if you plug it in. Ahem. Never mind.
One of the things I needed to plug it in for was the latest dev version of the official viewer, because I like to keep abreast of the latest developments. In this case, the latest developments became apparent fairly swiftly, as soon as I started typing, in fact. Jaggy red lines appeared underneath my typos! Yes, folks, we have spellchecking. In both local chat and IMs, yet.
A few tests and fiddles established that, in fact, I have the option of both US and UK English, so I can spell things like "colour" and "theatre" correctly without some post-colonial reproof occurring... and there is a supplementary library of SL-isms, which allows the checker to ignore some common SL words and phrases (though not, apparently, "rezzing").
There are a couple of non-English libraries, too, including Portuguese, which is undoubtedly a boon, given the number of Portuguese and Brazilian visitors I see... and given that they are no better at spelling their language than most English speakers are at ours.
This is, of course, a barrier to communication... because, like a lot of people, I tend to rely on machine translation systems (my French and German are up to snuff, I can get by in Esperanto with luck and a fair wind... but there is little call for Latin in SL). And machine translators, balky, unreliable and dubiously effective at the best of times, fall utterly to pieces when they hit a word they can't recognize... which includes pretty much every typo that flows from one's unguarded fingers.
I have got to the point, now, where I can read Portuguese, even colloquial and badly spelled Portuguese, with some fluency... but I'm not yet confident enough to try talking it myself! So I depend on the translators, and watch my own output like a hawk to make sure they don't choke on any typos or grammatical solecisms. Being an old-fashioned sort of person, I try to avoid these in any case... but I don't always succeed. And many Portuguese speakers - the ones I run into, at least - take no more care with their language than the average English speaker. So... a spellchecker, with non-English options, may be a small step forward in overcoming barriers to understanding.
Turns out, in fact, the new laptop actually works a fair bit better if you plug it in. Ahem. Never mind.
One of the things I needed to plug it in for was the latest dev version of the official viewer, because I like to keep abreast of the latest developments. In this case, the latest developments became apparent fairly swiftly, as soon as I started typing, in fact. Jaggy red lines appeared underneath my typos! Yes, folks, we have spellchecking. In both local chat and IMs, yet.
A few tests and fiddles established that, in fact, I have the option of both US and UK English, so I can spell things like "colour" and "theatre" correctly without some post-colonial reproof occurring... and there is a supplementary library of SL-isms, which allows the checker to ignore some common SL words and phrases (though not, apparently, "rezzing").
There are a couple of non-English libraries, too, including Portuguese, which is undoubtedly a boon, given the number of Portuguese and Brazilian visitors I see... and given that they are no better at spelling their language than most English speakers are at ours.
This is, of course, a barrier to communication... because, like a lot of people, I tend to rely on machine translation systems (my French and German are up to snuff, I can get by in Esperanto with luck and a fair wind... but there is little call for Latin in SL). And machine translators, balky, unreliable and dubiously effective at the best of times, fall utterly to pieces when they hit a word they can't recognize... which includes pretty much every typo that flows from one's unguarded fingers.
I have got to the point, now, where I can read Portuguese, even colloquial and badly spelled Portuguese, with some fluency... but I'm not yet confident enough to try talking it myself! So I depend on the translators, and watch my own output like a hawk to make sure they don't choke on any typos or grammatical solecisms. Being an old-fashioned sort of person, I try to avoid these in any case... but I don't always succeed. And many Portuguese speakers - the ones I run into, at least - take no more care with their language than the average English speaker. So... a spellchecker, with non-English options, may be a small step forward in overcoming barriers to understanding.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Give me eyes that I might see
So, a few years back now, I bought a bottom-end-of-the-range laptop. It was OK, it did all the not-very-demanding things I asked of it... including, up to a point, running SL. It was never exactly the most wonderful machine in the world, but it, and I, got by.
As the regular readership-at-very-small knows by now, though, performance was increasingly becoming an issue, what with the technology moving on, the hard drive filling up with junk, and the ventilation holes filling up with fluff... So, yesterday, I bit the bullet and bought another bottom-end-of-the-range laptop.
And, of course, in the interim, the bottom end has moved up quite a fair way.
So, when I logged in to SL for the first time... "What is all this?" I said to myself. "Colours! Shades! Fluid movement! Oh my God, look at that water, see it sparkle in the sunlight!"
In short - for the first time I was getting a decent look at SL, the way it was meant to look. Instead of taking one look at my graphics setup and grudgingly allowing me slightly better than the minimum settings, the installer kicked me straight into "High" by default, and I have to say, it looked really good - at least, by comparison! I'm still at a level, I suspect, where the true purists would sniff at the jerkiness of my frame rate, but I'm honestly not bothered about it. To me, it looks amazing. I have been wandering around half-blind for the past two years, it seems!
So I spent most of my spare time, yesterday, wandering around squeeing at just about everything. Buildings more than eighty meters away! Reflections in the water! Lights and glow! - OK, so a confluence of facelights made me appreciate just how bright things can get, there. People - numbers of people, in full colour, and moving around! I went dancing at a crowded venue, and I could see everyone, and I didn't even crash when I moved my camera around!
Tali, bless her, has been very tolerant of my wide-eyed gushing, and even went so far as to provide an appropriate soundtrack ....
I got to see some of my usual haunts, and also some visually impressive places new to me... I've not even been to Burroughs yet, though, I am saving that up! At last I will be able to appreciate properly all the work Tali has put into the environment settings - not to mention getting a proper look at my own builds....
Hee! It's rather nice, this SL thing, isn't it? If it's all this pretty, I might stay for a while.
As the regular readership-at-very-small knows by now, though, performance was increasingly becoming an issue, what with the technology moving on, the hard drive filling up with junk, and the ventilation holes filling up with fluff... So, yesterday, I bit the bullet and bought another bottom-end-of-the-range laptop.
And, of course, in the interim, the bottom end has moved up quite a fair way.
So, when I logged in to SL for the first time... "What is all this?" I said to myself. "Colours! Shades! Fluid movement! Oh my God, look at that water, see it sparkle in the sunlight!"
In short - for the first time I was getting a decent look at SL, the way it was meant to look. Instead of taking one look at my graphics setup and grudgingly allowing me slightly better than the minimum settings, the installer kicked me straight into "High" by default, and I have to say, it looked really good - at least, by comparison! I'm still at a level, I suspect, where the true purists would sniff at the jerkiness of my frame rate, but I'm honestly not bothered about it. To me, it looks amazing. I have been wandering around half-blind for the past two years, it seems!
So I spent most of my spare time, yesterday, wandering around squeeing at just about everything. Buildings more than eighty meters away! Reflections in the water! Lights and glow! - OK, so a confluence of facelights made me appreciate just how bright things can get, there. People - numbers of people, in full colour, and moving around! I went dancing at a crowded venue, and I could see everyone, and I didn't even crash when I moved my camera around!
Tali, bless her, has been very tolerant of my wide-eyed gushing, and even went so far as to provide an appropriate soundtrack ....
I got to see some of my usual haunts, and also some visually impressive places new to me... I've not even been to Burroughs yet, though, I am saving that up! At last I will be able to appreciate properly all the work Tali has put into the environment settings - not to mention getting a proper look at my own builds....
Hee! It's rather nice, this SL thing, isn't it? If it's all this pretty, I might stay for a while.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Character ARCs
A conversation in Oxbridge group chat yesterday led me to turn on the Draw Weight feature for the first time in some months, and I was pleasantly surprised to see this had been fixed, at least in the dev version of V3 I have now.
Draw Weight, formerly Avatar Rendering Cost or ARC for short, is a measure of the visual complexity of your avi, or, roughly speaking, how much computational power it takes to put you on the screen. Turn on "Show Draw Weight for Avatars", and a number appears over everyone's head, or where their head would be if they had one. These days, that number starts at 1000, for an avi with no prim attachments or other complicating factors*, and that number is shown in a nice safe green... as the number increases, the green grows tinged with yellow, then shades to orange, and finally turns warning red to indicate that you really are getting a little complicated.
In addition to being a fine tool for self-appointed guardians of SL who will follow red-tinged numbers around accusing their possessors of wilfully creating lag, the Draw Weight metric does have some actual, legitimate uses, if you seriously want or need to keep your complexity down (example: if you are trying to do a low-lag look for hunting, which at the moment I am.) It's worth pointing out that the ARC metric has sort of grown out of outmoded assumptions, and many of the "lag-inducing" factors it measures don't matter any more on modern equipment, or even on my equipment. Still, it is useful to be able to see those numbers....
... or, at least, it was until V3 rolled out, because the numbering system changed (in V2, the base was 100, not 1000, and other numbers rolled up proportionately), but the colour coding didn't. So, even people wandering around in baseline avatars got a tinge of yellow to their names, and if you actually added some nice shoes and some prim hair - you know, basic necessities of life - you would go into the red zone pretty much immediately. As an example, all the humanoid starter avatars - the basic "newbie" looks - were red-numbered in this system.
Until recently. Now, the colour coding has swung back to being useful; my stock "hunting" look clocks in as weak yellow-green, as do a number of the starter avatars. 1000-point avis show up solid green again, and only the really complicated furry fashionistas have bright red scores. So, this metric is back to being almost useful, and you can play with your appearance, noting the effect of a pair of old invisiprim-based shoes (around 6,000) or new mesh boots (one pair clocks in at about 5,500), or a pretty brooch from Sparkle of Sound (165,000).
An additional feature, which is so stupid I heartily approve of it, is that the numbers also now come preceded by a message telling you whether the person you're looking at is "gray" or "textured", i.e. whether their textures have loaded yet. Because, clearly, you wouldn't be able to tell that just by looking at them, would you? Oh wait... (The idea of making a blank grey skin, with matching clothes, eyes and hair, just to mess with people's heads by being grey all over and still showing as "textured"... well, that is a fun one, isn't it?)
*You could, in fact, reduce your ARC by some complicating factors, such as wearing alpha layers that made some body parts invisible - if they can't be seen, the softwared doesn't have to work to render them, so - at least in the older system - your ARC was accordingly reduced. During an incident which I tend to refer to as the Plague of the Headless Noobs, you would see a number of people wandering around Oxbridge with no heads, and consequently an ARC of 60. I have no idea why this happened, but it was amusing while it lasted.
Draw Weight, formerly Avatar Rendering Cost or ARC for short, is a measure of the visual complexity of your avi, or, roughly speaking, how much computational power it takes to put you on the screen. Turn on "Show Draw Weight for Avatars", and a number appears over everyone's head, or where their head would be if they had one. These days, that number starts at 1000, for an avi with no prim attachments or other complicating factors*, and that number is shown in a nice safe green... as the number increases, the green grows tinged with yellow, then shades to orange, and finally turns warning red to indicate that you really are getting a little complicated.
In addition to being a fine tool for self-appointed guardians of SL who will follow red-tinged numbers around accusing their possessors of wilfully creating lag, the Draw Weight metric does have some actual, legitimate uses, if you seriously want or need to keep your complexity down (example: if you are trying to do a low-lag look for hunting, which at the moment I am.) It's worth pointing out that the ARC metric has sort of grown out of outmoded assumptions, and many of the "lag-inducing" factors it measures don't matter any more on modern equipment, or even on my equipment. Still, it is useful to be able to see those numbers....
... or, at least, it was until V3 rolled out, because the numbering system changed (in V2, the base was 100, not 1000, and other numbers rolled up proportionately), but the colour coding didn't. So, even people wandering around in baseline avatars got a tinge of yellow to their names, and if you actually added some nice shoes and some prim hair - you know, basic necessities of life - you would go into the red zone pretty much immediately. As an example, all the humanoid starter avatars - the basic "newbie" looks - were red-numbered in this system.
Until recently. Now, the colour coding has swung back to being useful; my stock "hunting" look clocks in as weak yellow-green, as do a number of the starter avatars. 1000-point avis show up solid green again, and only the really complicated furry fashionistas have bright red scores. So, this metric is back to being almost useful, and you can play with your appearance, noting the effect of a pair of old invisiprim-based shoes (around 6,000) or new mesh boots (one pair clocks in at about 5,500), or a pretty brooch from Sparkle of Sound (165,000).
An additional feature, which is so stupid I heartily approve of it, is that the numbers also now come preceded by a message telling you whether the person you're looking at is "gray" or "textured", i.e. whether their textures have loaded yet. Because, clearly, you wouldn't be able to tell that just by looking at them, would you? Oh wait... (The idea of making a blank grey skin, with matching clothes, eyes and hair, just to mess with people's heads by being grey all over and still showing as "textured"... well, that is a fun one, isn't it?)
*You could, in fact, reduce your ARC by some complicating factors, such as wearing alpha layers that made some body parts invisible - if they can't be seen, the softwared doesn't have to work to render them, so - at least in the older system - your ARC was accordingly reduced. During an incident which I tend to refer to as the Plague of the Headless Noobs, you would see a number of people wandering around Oxbridge with no heads, and consequently an ARC of 60. I have no idea why this happened, but it was amusing while it lasted.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
In praise of blacklisting
I was displeased, last night, to see a message from loup30 crop up in a group chat. I thought we'd seen the last of that one, but, no, s/he/it was back again.
This is the name (user name - s/he/it has one of those display names with fancied-up characters, which is another thing that annoys me) of a recurring spambot; s/he/it's modus operandi is to pop into a group chat, post an advert for a store, and then leave the group before the moderators can withdraw s/he/it's chat privileges and/or deliver a kick. S/he/it gets Abuse Reported for spam, of course - I've done that myself, when it involves a group I mod - but seems to keep soldiering on regardless. (Why do I keep saying "s/he/it"? Because I have no idea of this person's real or SL gender, and because if you say s/he/it fast, it expresses how I feel.)
Anyway. This is one of those ongoing irritations, but it highlights a problem with the group system as a whole... Really, with a serial spambot as active as this one, word gets around, and group mods should be able to take preventative action - but we can't. We can't, because there is no way to block a specific person from entering a group. The only way to keep people out is to raise barriers to everyone - by making the group closed-enrollment, or by putting in an entry fee. (Even a small entry fee eliminates the minuscule profit margin which spammers get, so they won't pay one.)
Obviously, with many groups - new-people help groups being the ones I know best, of course - this simply won't work; those groups need to be open access so new folks can join them without impediment. So it would really help if we could blacklist known spammers and other in-chat griefers, without raising barriers to entry for the innocent and bewildered.... There's a JIRA about it, I'm sure. But no signs of progress that I know of.
This is the name (user name - s/he/it has one of those display names with fancied-up characters, which is another thing that annoys me) of a recurring spambot; s/he/it's modus operandi is to pop into a group chat, post an advert for a store, and then leave the group before the moderators can withdraw s/he/it's chat privileges and/or deliver a kick. S/he/it gets Abuse Reported for spam, of course - I've done that myself, when it involves a group I mod - but seems to keep soldiering on regardless. (Why do I keep saying "s/he/it"? Because I have no idea of this person's real or SL gender, and because if you say s/he/it fast, it expresses how I feel.)
Anyway. This is one of those ongoing irritations, but it highlights a problem with the group system as a whole... Really, with a serial spambot as active as this one, word gets around, and group mods should be able to take preventative action - but we can't. We can't, because there is no way to block a specific person from entering a group. The only way to keep people out is to raise barriers to everyone - by making the group closed-enrollment, or by putting in an entry fee. (Even a small entry fee eliminates the minuscule profit margin which spammers get, so they won't pay one.)
Obviously, with many groups - new-people help groups being the ones I know best, of course - this simply won't work; those groups need to be open access so new folks can join them without impediment. So it would really help if we could blacklist known spammers and other in-chat griefers, without raising barriers to entry for the innocent and bewildered.... There's a JIRA about it, I'm sure. But no signs of progress that I know of.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Magic of the Marketplace
A post by Tali here sent us both off on a frenzy of speculation about Marketplace and stuff....
I've mentioned, before, the apparent effect the Marketplace is having on SL as merchants increasingly rely upon it and downgrade their inworld presence. (Found another instance of this only two days ago, actually, when I popped over to the Alruneia Sentry sim to browse their interesting selection of SF/fantasy gear, only to find nothing but an empty stretch of grassland with a rental notice on it. Store appears to be Marketplace only, now....)
It's hard to disagree with Tali's conclusion, that the Marketplace just offers too many advantages over an inworld store for a merchant not to prefer it. (I am not a serious merchant, so I have no Marketplace presence... and I have near as dammit no sales, and those facts are not unrelated.) Also, many of the pro-inworld arguments sort of fall to pieces when you look at them. It's all very well saying that you can't see what an item actually looks like inworld from Marketplace, but most often, you can't do that inworld either - no clothing designer maintains dozens of models to wear and display outfits, and furniture or gadget makers who spend hundreds of Land Impact to show off stock are the exception, not the rule.
So, everyone should just hightail it for Marketplace, yeah? But you have to consider the implications of that for SL as a whole.... as I've discussed before, changes in land usage, and a contraction in the size of the Grid, are already apparent as this trend starts to take hold. And fewer sims being rented means less income for LL, and I have voiced my concerns over whether their cut of increased Marketplace revenues will make up for the shortfall.
Besides, there is going to be a knock-on effect - indeed, has already been a knock-on effect - on people whose business models are predicated on serving inworld stores. When Direct Delivery came in, it effectively destroyed the revenue stream for people who rent out space for other people's Magic Boxes - you can easily think of other SL businesses that are going to be hit by a general retreat of business from inworld. Some of them, I grant you, I won't miss - no one will be greatly upset by a decline in the number of traffic-gaming or advertising bots clogging up sims. Others will be a sad loss - promotional things like Shep Korvin's Lucky Chairs and similar won't be much good if there aren't stores to put them in, even though Shep has managed to build a sort of SL subculture all his own around his product line (I am a Lucky Tribe member myself, and have delicious toffee to prove it). I would miss Lucky Tribe if it went. For that matter, there is that other well-known promotional tool, the hunt, that you might remember I do a bit of (Silk Road 3 starts tomorrow, eep eep eep!). It's going to be bloomin' hard to hunt if there are no hunting grounds... and another SL subculture comes under threat....
Mention of subcultures, though, leads me to another point... Shopping is a social activity, after all (note to gentlemen readers, if any: it is, seriously, even if you don't get it), and some of the big stores have their own communities which have grown up around them... and this sort of thing can keep a main store going, even when the bulk of the catalogue has moved over to Marketplace. However, this is an advantage for the big stores that already have a strong, established following... there is no chance of me developing anything like that. For the small-scale beginning merchant, the rational choice has clearly got to be to go with Marketplace from the outset - and it may even prove to be a rational choice from LL's viewpoint, too, as the "long tail" of low-level transactions generates an overall profit for them. (Admittedly, LL's commerce team have been actively dismissive of the whole "long tail" concept in the past, preferring to concentrate on a smaller core of "prestige" merchants... well, it would not be the first time LL have been clueless, would it?)
But, well, I don't do SL for economically rational reasons....
So, it occurs to me, is there some way to promote the inworld side of things and keep the efficiency advantages of Marketplace? At this point, the techy side of me comes to the fore, and I happily lose myself in an orgy of unbridled speculation.
First off, each Marketplace page can contain - if the merchant has an inworld store - a "see item inworld" link, a SLURL that will get you to the inworld location of your item. Suppose, to climb up on one of my hobby-horses, we had a better integrated version of that - an in-browser viewer that took you directly to the store, instead of doing all that fairly tedious SLURL-ing type stuff (I apologize if I'm getting too technical here, all that jargon, you know how it is)? Back when I was yapping about the proper uses of Basic Mode, I mentioned the idea of using it as an in-browser viewer... now, you would need inventory options, which Basic Mode didn't have, to shop this way... but LL are already working on their Simple Inventory project; would it be beyond their abilities to merge the two?
However, there are no immediate signs of a browser-based viewer coming up... But there are new developments in the pipeline that could be used inworld, namely the Experience Tools coming soon to a beta-release channel near you. If you want to see how something looks inworld, the temporary attachments feature - as Tali pointed out - offers an excellent opportunity to try before you buy. And you could envisage some sort of shop-catalogue HUD, too, which would help you to find stuff in the first place. (In fact, I can think of at least one shop that already offers a HUD for in-store navigation...) Couple this with a general beefing-up of the inworld search function - which still leaves me staring at a blank black panel one time in every three - and you might have some inworld functionality which approaches Marketplace's ease of use. Maybe.
Now, the techy side of me looks at the Experience Tools and makes loud squeeing "ooh shiny!" noises, but my more cynical side thinks of the possibilities of these things for abuse, especially in a commercial context, and hears a faint grinding and grating sound, as of several cans of worms being opened in the not too distant future.
But, of course, this is SL, and new cans of worms are opened every day. Still, it seems increasingly clear that a seismic shift in usage is taking place as a result of Marketplace... and we need to think about how it will play out, and what technical factors might influence it. This has been an awfully long blog post already, and yet I have a feeling I've hardly scratched the surface of this subject, yet! Does the readership-at-very-small have any ideas?
I've mentioned, before, the apparent effect the Marketplace is having on SL as merchants increasingly rely upon it and downgrade their inworld presence. (Found another instance of this only two days ago, actually, when I popped over to the Alruneia Sentry sim to browse their interesting selection of SF/fantasy gear, only to find nothing but an empty stretch of grassland with a rental notice on it. Store appears to be Marketplace only, now....)
It's hard to disagree with Tali's conclusion, that the Marketplace just offers too many advantages over an inworld store for a merchant not to prefer it. (I am not a serious merchant, so I have no Marketplace presence... and I have near as dammit no sales, and those facts are not unrelated.) Also, many of the pro-inworld arguments sort of fall to pieces when you look at them. It's all very well saying that you can't see what an item actually looks like inworld from Marketplace, but most often, you can't do that inworld either - no clothing designer maintains dozens of models to wear and display outfits, and furniture or gadget makers who spend hundreds of Land Impact to show off stock are the exception, not the rule.
So, everyone should just hightail it for Marketplace, yeah? But you have to consider the implications of that for SL as a whole.... as I've discussed before, changes in land usage, and a contraction in the size of the Grid, are already apparent as this trend starts to take hold. And fewer sims being rented means less income for LL, and I have voiced my concerns over whether their cut of increased Marketplace revenues will make up for the shortfall.
Besides, there is going to be a knock-on effect - indeed, has already been a knock-on effect - on people whose business models are predicated on serving inworld stores. When Direct Delivery came in, it effectively destroyed the revenue stream for people who rent out space for other people's Magic Boxes - you can easily think of other SL businesses that are going to be hit by a general retreat of business from inworld. Some of them, I grant you, I won't miss - no one will be greatly upset by a decline in the number of traffic-gaming or advertising bots clogging up sims. Others will be a sad loss - promotional things like Shep Korvin's Lucky Chairs and similar won't be much good if there aren't stores to put them in, even though Shep has managed to build a sort of SL subculture all his own around his product line (I am a Lucky Tribe member myself, and have delicious toffee to prove it). I would miss Lucky Tribe if it went. For that matter, there is that other well-known promotional tool, the hunt, that you might remember I do a bit of (Silk Road 3 starts tomorrow, eep eep eep!). It's going to be bloomin' hard to hunt if there are no hunting grounds... and another SL subculture comes under threat....
Mention of subcultures, though, leads me to another point... Shopping is a social activity, after all (note to gentlemen readers, if any: it is, seriously, even if you don't get it), and some of the big stores have their own communities which have grown up around them... and this sort of thing can keep a main store going, even when the bulk of the catalogue has moved over to Marketplace. However, this is an advantage for the big stores that already have a strong, established following... there is no chance of me developing anything like that. For the small-scale beginning merchant, the rational choice has clearly got to be to go with Marketplace from the outset - and it may even prove to be a rational choice from LL's viewpoint, too, as the "long tail" of low-level transactions generates an overall profit for them. (Admittedly, LL's commerce team have been actively dismissive of the whole "long tail" concept in the past, preferring to concentrate on a smaller core of "prestige" merchants... well, it would not be the first time LL have been clueless, would it?)
But, well, I don't do SL for economically rational reasons....
So, it occurs to me, is there some way to promote the inworld side of things and keep the efficiency advantages of Marketplace? At this point, the techy side of me comes to the fore, and I happily lose myself in an orgy of unbridled speculation.
First off, each Marketplace page can contain - if the merchant has an inworld store - a "see item inworld" link, a SLURL that will get you to the inworld location of your item. Suppose, to climb up on one of my hobby-horses, we had a better integrated version of that - an in-browser viewer that took you directly to the store, instead of doing all that fairly tedious SLURL-ing type stuff (I apologize if I'm getting too technical here, all that jargon, you know how it is)? Back when I was yapping about the proper uses of Basic Mode, I mentioned the idea of using it as an in-browser viewer... now, you would need inventory options, which Basic Mode didn't have, to shop this way... but LL are already working on their Simple Inventory project; would it be beyond their abilities to merge the two?
However, there are no immediate signs of a browser-based viewer coming up... But there are new developments in the pipeline that could be used inworld, namely the Experience Tools coming soon to a beta-release channel near you. If you want to see how something looks inworld, the temporary attachments feature - as Tali pointed out - offers an excellent opportunity to try before you buy. And you could envisage some sort of shop-catalogue HUD, too, which would help you to find stuff in the first place. (In fact, I can think of at least one shop that already offers a HUD for in-store navigation...) Couple this with a general beefing-up of the inworld search function - which still leaves me staring at a blank black panel one time in every three - and you might have some inworld functionality which approaches Marketplace's ease of use. Maybe.
Now, the techy side of me looks at the Experience Tools and makes loud squeeing "ooh shiny!" noises, but my more cynical side thinks of the possibilities of these things for abuse, especially in a commercial context, and hears a faint grinding and grating sound, as of several cans of worms being opened in the not too distant future.
But, of course, this is SL, and new cans of worms are opened every day. Still, it seems increasingly clear that a seismic shift in usage is taking place as a result of Marketplace... and we need to think about how it will play out, and what technical factors might influence it. This has been an awfully long blog post already, and yet I have a feeling I've hardly scratched the surface of this subject, yet! Does the readership-at-very-small have any ideas?
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Catznip is catnip?
Tried out the (fairly) new Catznip third party viewer last night... actually, I was pleasantly surprised.
I've always been a bit leery of the TPVs, for several reasons. The absolutely relentless promotion of Phoenix/Firestorm by their advocates evidently works, in terms of attracting "market share", but it is very wearisome to those of us who don't use it... frankly, the sheer rudeness of some of their more vocal supporters is offputting in itself; I've had otherwise reasonable people tell me I'm an "amateur" for not adopting their viewer. One of the reasons LL cited for eliminating that TPV feature that tells you what viewer people are in was that new users who hadn't switched to Phoenix/Firestorm were being verbally bullied and abused over their choice... and, you know what? I believe it.
I was also around for the whole Emerald fiasco, which doesn't help... and, besides, I want to keep up with the latest advances in viewer technology, and (as I think I've said before) these are more likely to come along in the official LL viewer than in a TPV - particularly a TPV whose main selling point is "basically, we are never going to change the interface". And, let me reiterate a point here, too; unless you're used to it, the old V1.23 interface sucks.
So, no Phoenix or Firestorm for me (actually, I did try Phoenix, once. Besides the overall suckiness of the old-style interface, the default colour scheme struck me as eye-bleedingly horrible. I know you can change it... or I could just, y'know, use something else, which I actually prefer!) But Catznip seemed to be interesting, and I decided to give it a little whirl. As I said, I was pleasantly surprised.
For a start, it is a V3 based viewer, none of the old (sucky. Did I mention it was sucky, yet?) interface about it. So, I have my outfits and my received items and my flexible toolbars, and niceties like legible fonts and menu bars that aren't a horrible clutter. Also, the big thing that Catznip's dev team seem to be touting, above everything else, is stability. This viewer clocks up enviably low crash rates, and the developers seem to be enthusiastic about that, and think it is something to aim for. I approve of this. I've said a few times that, had I the choice, I would happily declare a moratorium on new features for six months or so and put all LL's dev teams onto fixing the damn bugs already. Since my system is prone to falling over in a gentle breeze (I suppose my running the bleeding-edge dev version of V3 doesn't exactly help there), I am in favour of a dev team that regards Not Crashing as a priority goal.
I didn't explore all of Catznip's features last night (I only had a few hours, and most of that time was spent in traditional SL things rather than testing viewer features), but I formed a more or less positive impression. My frame rate was lousy (it always is) but it was slightly less lousy than usual, and I didn't crash. The IM interface was a bit more old-school that I would like... but that was offset by the profiles viewer also being old-school, and that I did like; as an inveterate profile perv, I have always found the new, slow-loading HTML profiles an irritation, and being able to get a quick view of people's groups and interests came as a welcome flash of nostalgia. (So, I couldn't read anyone'sFacebook wall profile feed that way... big deal. Does anyone have anything remotely interesting on their profile feed? I know I haven't, and I use the darn thing.) I didn't find some "standard" things in TPVs (area search, object derender); I don't know if they're not there at all, or if I just didn't look hard enough; either way, since I don't use them, I didn't miss them.
So, yes. Catznip. I think this one may well supplant Singularity as my go-to TPV of choice. When I choose to go to a TPV at all, of course, which will not be often. But I can live with this one, I think.
I've always been a bit leery of the TPVs, for several reasons. The absolutely relentless promotion of Phoenix/Firestorm by their advocates evidently works, in terms of attracting "market share", but it is very wearisome to those of us who don't use it... frankly, the sheer rudeness of some of their more vocal supporters is offputting in itself; I've had otherwise reasonable people tell me I'm an "amateur" for not adopting their viewer. One of the reasons LL cited for eliminating that TPV feature that tells you what viewer people are in was that new users who hadn't switched to Phoenix/Firestorm were being verbally bullied and abused over their choice... and, you know what? I believe it.
I was also around for the whole Emerald fiasco, which doesn't help... and, besides, I want to keep up with the latest advances in viewer technology, and (as I think I've said before) these are more likely to come along in the official LL viewer than in a TPV - particularly a TPV whose main selling point is "basically, we are never going to change the interface". And, let me reiterate a point here, too; unless you're used to it, the old V1.23 interface sucks.
So, no Phoenix or Firestorm for me (actually, I did try Phoenix, once. Besides the overall suckiness of the old-style interface, the default colour scheme struck me as eye-bleedingly horrible. I know you can change it... or I could just, y'know, use something else, which I actually prefer!) But Catznip seemed to be interesting, and I decided to give it a little whirl. As I said, I was pleasantly surprised.
For a start, it is a V3 based viewer, none of the old (sucky. Did I mention it was sucky, yet?) interface about it. So, I have my outfits and my received items and my flexible toolbars, and niceties like legible fonts and menu bars that aren't a horrible clutter. Also, the big thing that Catznip's dev team seem to be touting, above everything else, is stability. This viewer clocks up enviably low crash rates, and the developers seem to be enthusiastic about that, and think it is something to aim for. I approve of this. I've said a few times that, had I the choice, I would happily declare a moratorium on new features for six months or so and put all LL's dev teams onto fixing the damn bugs already. Since my system is prone to falling over in a gentle breeze (I suppose my running the bleeding-edge dev version of V3 doesn't exactly help there), I am in favour of a dev team that regards Not Crashing as a priority goal.
I didn't explore all of Catznip's features last night (I only had a few hours, and most of that time was spent in traditional SL things rather than testing viewer features), but I formed a more or less positive impression. My frame rate was lousy (it always is) but it was slightly less lousy than usual, and I didn't crash. The IM interface was a bit more old-school that I would like... but that was offset by the profiles viewer also being old-school, and that I did like; as an inveterate profile perv, I have always found the new, slow-loading HTML profiles an irritation, and being able to get a quick view of people's groups and interests came as a welcome flash of nostalgia. (So, I couldn't read anyone's
So, yes. Catznip. I think this one may well supplant Singularity as my go-to TPV of choice. When I choose to go to a TPV at all, of course, which will not be often. But I can live with this one, I think.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Key issues
My keyboard worries continue apace... really, I need at the very least to send this laptop in for a service. Unfortunately, I also need to use it on pretty much a daily basis; you can see where there is a conflict of needs, there....
This makes stuff like scripting so frustrating as to be darn near impossible... which means Tali, bless her, is currently doing all the work on the rebuilding of Caledon's ferries. And she - and I - have been running into some issues with the (relatively) new keyframed movement system.
Basically, this is a setup where you can feed an object a list of positions and rotations and times - all the details for a key frame, in fact - and SL will move it smoothly from one specified frame to the next, without all the faffing around you would normally have had to do with setting position and rotation (for non-physical objects) or applying impulses (for physical objects). It is neat, it is easy to script, and it gives a surprisingly smooth ride. When it works.
Tali is running into an intermittent but persistent bug where the first frame in a sequence gets ignored, which, naturally, throws all the rest out of whack. Meanwhile, I have found that region restarts are extremely bad news for anything that's executing a keyframed movement sequence when the restart happens. I have four "gravity lifts" running on keyframed loops up and down sections of my tower, and not only do they all freeze in place when the restart hits, they all behave in different ways once it's finished and I try to reset them. It's as if the sim is trying, in some rather patchy way, to preserve state in the keyframed sequence over the reset... and sometimes this takes precedence over any attempts I make to restore the things by hand! One of the lifts, in particular, simply won't respond to manual script resets, or even a complete recompile - I have to delete it and rez a fresh one from my inventory after each sim restart.
It's a nuisance, as we were kind of hoping to use the keyframed movement stuff on the new ferry system! - It really is good, when it works. And Tali's implementation of the Catmull-Rom algorithm to generate intermediate waypoints makes for a very smooth ride indeed. Now, all we need to do is get the damn bugs out, somehow!
This makes stuff like scripting so frustrating as to be darn near impossible... which means Tali, bless her, is currently doing all the work on the rebuilding of Caledon's ferries. And she - and I - have been running into some issues with the (relatively) new keyframed movement system.
Basically, this is a setup where you can feed an object a list of positions and rotations and times - all the details for a key frame, in fact - and SL will move it smoothly from one specified frame to the next, without all the faffing around you would normally have had to do with setting position and rotation (for non-physical objects) or applying impulses (for physical objects). It is neat, it is easy to script, and it gives a surprisingly smooth ride. When it works.
Tali is running into an intermittent but persistent bug where the first frame in a sequence gets ignored, which, naturally, throws all the rest out of whack. Meanwhile, I have found that region restarts are extremely bad news for anything that's executing a keyframed movement sequence when the restart happens. I have four "gravity lifts" running on keyframed loops up and down sections of my tower, and not only do they all freeze in place when the restart hits, they all behave in different ways once it's finished and I try to reset them. It's as if the sim is trying, in some rather patchy way, to preserve state in the keyframed sequence over the reset... and sometimes this takes precedence over any attempts I make to restore the things by hand! One of the lifts, in particular, simply won't respond to manual script resets, or even a complete recompile - I have to delete it and rez a fresh one from my inventory after each sim restart.
It's a nuisance, as we were kind of hoping to use the keyframed movement stuff on the new ferry system! - It really is good, when it works. And Tali's implementation of the Catmull-Rom algorithm to generate intermediate waypoints makes for a very smooth ride indeed. Now, all we need to do is get the damn bugs out, somehow!
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Bunnies in bondage
No, this is nothing to do with that suggestion I made for a tinies-Gorean crossover... that was just a piece of idle conversation... I absolutely haven't even thought about tiny slave gear or any such stuff... oh no. (Besides, I'm sure it's been done already.)
No, this is a more serious topic, the problem-plagued rollout of Direct Delivery for Marketplace items. I referred to this a while back, airily commented that "of course there are teething problems", and went on to talk about the effects on land usage.
However, those teething problems have, as it were, come back to bite me on the butt, because they are still in evidence and show every sign of being an intractable difficulty.
Basically, a number of products - how many? I really couldn't say, but more than enough to notice - in the process of swapping over from people's Magic Boxes to their Merchant Outboxes, have become confused. Names and images and descriptions are getting scrambled, leading to quite understandable confusion about what you might be buying and who you might be paying for it. Merchants are, equally understandably, up in arms about the whole business, and I for one don't blame them.
The reallocation is quite random, and it affects enough stuff that I, for example, noticed an "Ozimals bunny" in a search with an image and a description for some pretty exotic bondage equipment instead. (Was I searching for Ozimals bunnies, or for bondage gear?... I think I will just have to stay mum about that one.) Now, this means lost sales and/or angry customers for merchants, and a great deal of effort expended in sorting things out. The shift to Direct Delivery is already putting stress on merchants, some of whom have many, many items to convert.... and this mix-up is adding to the load.
And it is still going on, I notice as I trawl through Marketplace looking for shoes, as is my wont. And there is a deadline looming, now, in the form of the date when LL switch the magic boxes off for good and all. You have to think that they must get this issue addressed before that date (June 1st, last I heard, but I could be out of date myself on that one.)
One can't expect changes like this one to roll out with no problems at all, of course... sometimes we forget to what extent SL is operating in unknown territory (there are virtual worlds out there with more membership, but there are none with the combination of distributed assets, user-generated content, and numbers that SL can boast.) But we can judge LL, I think, by how effectively it rises to these challenges... and how it treats its users in the process.
We have a situation here, and LL is going to need to work with the merchants to resolve it - whether by postponing the deadline to make the changeover slower and easier, or by working hard to address the problems arising and set solutions in place. And it really, really needs to do one or other of them, I think, or it is going to have a whole host of legitimately annoyed users to deal with. Basically, LL has an opportunity, here, to not shoot itself in the foot. I do hope it has the wit to take it.
No, this is a more serious topic, the problem-plagued rollout of Direct Delivery for Marketplace items. I referred to this a while back, airily commented that "of course there are teething problems", and went on to talk about the effects on land usage.
However, those teething problems have, as it were, come back to bite me on the butt, because they are still in evidence and show every sign of being an intractable difficulty.
Basically, a number of products - how many? I really couldn't say, but more than enough to notice - in the process of swapping over from people's Magic Boxes to their Merchant Outboxes, have become confused. Names and images and descriptions are getting scrambled, leading to quite understandable confusion about what you might be buying and who you might be paying for it. Merchants are, equally understandably, up in arms about the whole business, and I for one don't blame them.
The reallocation is quite random, and it affects enough stuff that I, for example, noticed an "Ozimals bunny" in a search with an image and a description for some pretty exotic bondage equipment instead. (Was I searching for Ozimals bunnies, or for bondage gear?... I think I will just have to stay mum about that one.) Now, this means lost sales and/or angry customers for merchants, and a great deal of effort expended in sorting things out. The shift to Direct Delivery is already putting stress on merchants, some of whom have many, many items to convert.... and this mix-up is adding to the load.
And it is still going on, I notice as I trawl through Marketplace looking for shoes, as is my wont. And there is a deadline looming, now, in the form of the date when LL switch the magic boxes off for good and all. You have to think that they must get this issue addressed before that date (June 1st, last I heard, but I could be out of date myself on that one.)
One can't expect changes like this one to roll out with no problems at all, of course... sometimes we forget to what extent SL is operating in unknown territory (there are virtual worlds out there with more membership, but there are none with the combination of distributed assets, user-generated content, and numbers that SL can boast.) But we can judge LL, I think, by how effectively it rises to these challenges... and how it treats its users in the process.
We have a situation here, and LL is going to need to work with the merchants to resolve it - whether by postponing the deadline to make the changeover slower and easier, or by working hard to address the problems arising and set solutions in place. And it really, really needs to do one or other of them, I think, or it is going to have a whole host of legitimately annoyed users to deal with. Basically, LL has an opportunity, here, to not shoot itself in the foot. I do hope it has the wit to take it.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Basic Mode: how they could have done it
Following on from yesterday's post, and the comment on it (I have a reader? Wow!), I thought some more about how Basic Mode might have worked as intended.
The problem with it was, it was very much all-or-nothing - you either had Advanced Mode and full functionality, or you had Basic Mode and the restricted subset. If you wanted to do stuff that wasn't available in Basic Mode, you had to log out and change modes. (At first, changing modes from Basic to Advanced meant relogging twice, which made one more very sound reason to switch to Advanced as soon as possible and never look back.)
Inara's comment yesterday got me to thinking, though, about how they could have made the Basic Mode viewer the introduction to SL that it was meant to be. We all know, of course, that not every menu option is available by default - we are familiar with pressing Ctrl-Alt-D to get the Advanced menu up, and, if you're in V3, Ctrl-Alt-Q for the Develop menu. So, I said to myself, why not extend that concept?
You could start with a viewer that had the functionality of Basic Mode directly available, but which contained all the other features as "unlockable", just like the Advanced and Develop menus. So, say you realise that there are 5,271,009 other people running around in that stock vampire avi, and you want to look different from them - you find an information point or a more experienced resident somewhere (ideally, a welcome centre like NCI, Oxbridge, White Tiger, the Shelter, someplace civilized anyway) and instead of telling you to log out and log back in, they show you the keypress or whatever it takes to unlock the Appearance editor. You feel the urge to spray plywood cubes over the landscape, so you find someone who tells you how to unlock the Build editor. And so on.
Of course, you couldn't use a viewer like that as a thin client, like I was talking about yesterday - it'd need the full functionality set built in from the start. But, if you wanted a sort of "SL-with-training-wheels" approach, where you gradually grow into the full set of SL activities - or, if you like, stop at a level that makes you happy - then that is one approach you might go for.
The problem with it was, it was very much all-or-nothing - you either had Advanced Mode and full functionality, or you had Basic Mode and the restricted subset. If you wanted to do stuff that wasn't available in Basic Mode, you had to log out and change modes. (At first, changing modes from Basic to Advanced meant relogging twice, which made one more very sound reason to switch to Advanced as soon as possible and never look back.)
Inara's comment yesterday got me to thinking, though, about how they could have made the Basic Mode viewer the introduction to SL that it was meant to be. We all know, of course, that not every menu option is available by default - we are familiar with pressing Ctrl-Alt-D to get the Advanced menu up, and, if you're in V3, Ctrl-Alt-Q for the Develop menu. So, I said to myself, why not extend that concept?
You could start with a viewer that had the functionality of Basic Mode directly available, but which contained all the other features as "unlockable", just like the Advanced and Develop menus. So, say you realise that there are 5,271,009 other people running around in that stock vampire avi, and you want to look different from them - you find an information point or a more experienced resident somewhere (ideally, a welcome centre like NCI, Oxbridge, White Tiger, the Shelter, someplace civilized anyway) and instead of telling you to log out and log back in, they show you the keypress or whatever it takes to unlock the Appearance editor. You feel the urge to spray plywood cubes over the landscape, so you find someone who tells you how to unlock the Build editor. And so on.
Of course, you couldn't use a viewer like that as a thin client, like I was talking about yesterday - it'd need the full functionality set built in from the start. But, if you wanted a sort of "SL-with-training-wheels" approach, where you gradually grow into the full set of SL activities - or, if you like, stop at a level that makes you happy - then that is one approach you might go for.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Thin clients
An offhand comment in a NWN discussion thread - about how good it would be to be able to drop in to a sim via a web browser - got me to thinking about this.
It's not a new idea, of course - in fact, LL did trials on implementing it. I forget who it was who visited Oxbridge using an in-browser viewer; he had to log in under a throwaway test ID, and he wasn't able to do complicated things like move... but, there he was in the Oxbridge plaza, chatting away neat as you please, via a web browser.
Then there was Basic Mode, and it is hard to think of a more complete misapplication of a potentially useful idea. Basic Mode became the default for new sign-ups towards the end of V2 development; it was a viewer mode which deliberately made most of the menus and functions inaccessible - you couldn't change your look except by picking a different default avi, you couldn't TP except by going through the Destination Guide, you couldn't build or buy anything, period - and it was the bane of our lives at Oxbridge for a while, because new people kept on turning up, and they would want to know how to do things, and nine times out of ten whatever they wanted to do was something you couldn't do in Basic Mode. We had to set up gestures that told people how to log out and log back in again in Advanced (i.e. normal) mode. It was hellishly frustrating, and I'm sure it can't have been much of a welcome to SL for the new people. "Welcome to SL! Now get out, and don't come back until you can do it properly!"
Basic Mode was announced with much fanfare and hoopla in the SL official blogs; it died silently and unmourned a few months later... but. If you knew what you were doing, and had set up an avatar look that suited you, and didn't immediately need to build or buy anything, and had friends who could offer you TPs to social events... if you just needed an SL presence for a bit... Basic Mode was something you could live with; certainly a big step up from running in a text-only viewer. And, it always seemed to me, the reduced feature set of Basic Mode was something that might just squeeze into a browser plugin. In short; as a starter for SL for beginners, it sucked mightily, but as the basis for a thin client that would allow access to SL through the web, it just might have been some use.
I have no idea if the Lab is thinking along those lines, or even if they should be. Goodness knows there is plenty of stuff on their plates right now to keep them busy. But... it always struck me as a possibility, and a potentially interesting one. It'd do a fair bit to open up SL to the web-going public at large, I guess. That might not be a bad thing; let people come inworld via browsers and see what it's like, rather than getting their ideas from CSI or vampire-themed advertising campaigns.
Then again, these casual visitors would probably end up at an infohub, so....
It's not a new idea, of course - in fact, LL did trials on implementing it. I forget who it was who visited Oxbridge using an in-browser viewer; he had to log in under a throwaway test ID, and he wasn't able to do complicated things like move... but, there he was in the Oxbridge plaza, chatting away neat as you please, via a web browser.
Then there was Basic Mode, and it is hard to think of a more complete misapplication of a potentially useful idea. Basic Mode became the default for new sign-ups towards the end of V2 development; it was a viewer mode which deliberately made most of the menus and functions inaccessible - you couldn't change your look except by picking a different default avi, you couldn't TP except by going through the Destination Guide, you couldn't build or buy anything, period - and it was the bane of our lives at Oxbridge for a while, because new people kept on turning up, and they would want to know how to do things, and nine times out of ten whatever they wanted to do was something you couldn't do in Basic Mode. We had to set up gestures that told people how to log out and log back in again in Advanced (i.e. normal) mode. It was hellishly frustrating, and I'm sure it can't have been much of a welcome to SL for the new people. "Welcome to SL! Now get out, and don't come back until you can do it properly!"
Basic Mode was announced with much fanfare and hoopla in the SL official blogs; it died silently and unmourned a few months later... but. If you knew what you were doing, and had set up an avatar look that suited you, and didn't immediately need to build or buy anything, and had friends who could offer you TPs to social events... if you just needed an SL presence for a bit... Basic Mode was something you could live with; certainly a big step up from running in a text-only viewer. And, it always seemed to me, the reduced feature set of Basic Mode was something that might just squeeze into a browser plugin. In short; as a starter for SL for beginners, it sucked mightily, but as the basis for a thin client that would allow access to SL through the web, it just might have been some use.
I have no idea if the Lab is thinking along those lines, or even if they should be. Goodness knows there is plenty of stuff on their plates right now to keep them busy. But... it always struck me as a possibility, and a potentially interesting one. It'd do a fair bit to open up SL to the web-going public at large, I guess. That might not be a bad thing; let people come inworld via browsers and see what it's like, rather than getting their ideas from CSI or vampire-themed advertising campaigns.
Then again, these casual visitors would probably end up at an infohub, so....
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