New things in SL

Level of Detail Slider for Sculpties!

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-10173?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel

That would be great, but they seemed more to be talking about having you grab your hand with your mouse and wiggle it up and down to wave at someone. That's all the tests showed... nothing about using it as an animation editor.

And I'd still rather get script-controlled animations, using existing prim controls, than getting another animation editor for the same basic animation system.

For another example: imagine sitting on a chair and having your arms actually resting on the chair arms, even if your arms were shorter or longer than usual?

Voted

Nice, I wouldn't have wrote this as a needed feature but I couldn't find it in Jira as a work request already.

Thanks!

*Stands up and cheers*

Thank You. I refuse to go to JIRA, it is just too much bother for me, it makes my eyes bleed. I'm tired of being told how it is a gerat resource for programmers and techies. Not_all_ SL_ users_are_programmers_or_techies. Have a simple way for ALL users to report bugs and glitches, then if you want to have a triage system beore tackling them fine. And being able to vote, open, close, reopen issues is just ridiculous if you ask me.

Back in the day (jeez I sound old ) they used to have an awesome method for reporting and voting on new features.

It was located right on the main page and everything!

I guess for developers that was a pain to work with.

They need a newbie interface so all SL users can vote on new items and they need to use Jira for bug specific issues in my opinion. Jira is ok once you know it, but it is really overwhelming to those that dont and turn off a lot of peeps like you.

I tried out Shadows and they are pretty sweet. I have a kick @ss computer and it still hit my FPS really hard. I keep in mind that I was playing on a modded viewer so I assume this will be alot better upon release.

Pretty cool.

As Windlight was coming out, there was some feeback to questions asket at Windlight team office hours meetings, about LL implementing some way to replicate the Windlight water appearance and functionality on a prim. Haven't heard anything at all about that since then. *sighs* Would sure be nice if our resident-made prim lakes and rivers could once again look at least vaguely like Linden Water looks...

As for the shadows - Yeah, it's a shiny, sexy add-on. But totally beyond the hardware capabilities of the majority of SL Resident's computers. And Windows-only, to boot. Impossible, as implemented so far, on Mac or Linux platforms.

Shadows, true bump mapping (with uploaded bump map texture), shader textures (real 3D grass at no CPU), reflection maps and bloom lighting are just a few techniques used in videogames since Second Life was launched that should have been added years ago.

Animation settings for each action should be selectable in preferences, getting rid of the many Animation Override devices that conflict with animations set in chairs and other devices. Climbing, shimmying and other animations should be added with Havok support to detect when they are appropriate.

The simulator health system should be replaced with a minimal game object that the simulator controls to allow respawning, stat tracking and a damage system weapon manufacturers could opt into.

Havok properties should be supported on prims. Allowing only the "physical" option means most of Havok's features aren't being used.

The avatar mesh and LSL are garbage. MONO will one day put LSL in the grave where it belongs but the mesh has no fix on the horizon. Game avatar creators on the original Xbox were more sophisticated. Without avatars becoming bone-based creating simple things like handshakes will always be trial-and-error.

Why is there no align tool for prims? Why do we have to Take a Copy" and rez it back out rather than cloning a selected prim or group? Why is there no distribution command? With Havok 4 why can't linksets be further apart? Or Megaprims created and edited in the client?

Havok has a cloth module, it would create much better clothing than flexis. Sculpties were a nice bridge solution, but where is true mesh import?

When will the simulation engine become distributed? Region crossings would become a non-issue, far more avatars could exist in the same area, and the larger grid would provide power to active areas rather than sitting there waiting for occupants.

All of these I whined about in 2006 as Second Life was already half a decade behind other realtime 3D environments (games). It's sad how much better Second Life looks compared to There or Kaneva and how easily people will accept its current look. Windlight brought the first use of shaders to Second Life, years after they were the root of 3D game development. We're told tier is so high to pay for all the Linden Lab developers, but what have they been doing all these years? Entirely new engines like Unreal 3 and CryEngine 2 have been developed and deployed in less than half the time Second Life has been online.

So yes, where are the new things?

That is/was the materials project, I believe. From anythign I've heard, it is currently shelved. Would love to have it, though!



Shadows - slowly in process
True bump mapping - in process
shader textures - dunno
reflection maps - worked with a while back, seems to be shelved. Darn shame.
bloom lighting - I think also in process, but I'm not sure.



Good good ideas.



I'll take your word for it. Not someting I'm all that familiar with (I don't really do the weapon stuff here), but sounds interesting.



/me nods



Aligning - try shift dragging for this. There are also products like Skidz prims that supposedly help with that.
Distribution - good question?
Further apart linksets - I thought this was expanded. I know I linked up a skyscraper build of mine the other day with little trouble.
Megaprims - some in the lab are firmly opposed to them



From what I hear, mesh importing is in process.



I don't know a lot of these last things, but I suspect some of this comes into the troubles of a shared worls like SL, versus the world of game development.

The lack of good building functions for aligning, distribution, etc. is nearly criminal by now - I know that Skidz Primz and Prim Docker can do these, but since they're scripts, they suffer very badly from lag and awkward user interfacing. (I know scripters have been asking for an llGetSelected for years..)

I don't see why you say that MONO will bury LSL - are you thinking of something like a C# script running through the Mono VM? There are just too many custom unusual things about the SL environment for that, not least of which is the 64k memory limit. I wouldn't mind being allowed to script in "VM assembler" though...

You don't, look at the "Copy Selection" option in the editor.

Working their butts off making SL responsive in the face of thousands of incompetent builders.

So why haven't any of the people who use these engines made the slightest effort at producing anything even vaguely like a virtual world? Maybe there's more to it than the engine?

What I'd love to have is the ability to save certain groups of graphics settings, for quick access depending on what I'm doing. The specific settings I use when I have two avatars logged in at the same time for RP are completely different from those I would use for high-resolution SL photography, and different yet again from those I would use when at a very busy location (such as skin/hair fair).

Yes, I can set all of these by hand each time. but how much easier would it be to just be able to save, say, five graphics settings and know that setting #1 is my multiple-avatar RP setting, #2 is my photography setting, etc?

They are moving towards importing a couple of submitted patches that allow you to save personal Windlight settings.

For more than that, I think you would need to use multiple user accounts on your PC to give you multiple profile directories, and use fast user switching to move from one to another. This is easier in Linux, where you can just run SL with different profile directories.

4 pages and no mention of the fact that they are looking at doing a mesh import? If content creators become able to import any mesh, instead of using a sculpty, you will see an explosion of content because people will be free to really sculpt and do some amazing things. And they may even save on the polygon count.

/327/2e/292750/3.html#post2225461

"From what I hear, mesh importing is in process."

Ahhh I'm #66. I missed that...

No worries.

I'm still excited about the prospect of mesh imports. It will be nice to be able to extrude and do all kinds of neat things with shapes and have them show up in Second Life. I find sculpting from a cube or sphere to be a relative pain because of the need to manage vertices. And getting into LOD....oh my.

I wish they'd get flexi sculpties and animated sculpties before worrying about mesh.

You can animate your sculpty already, IIRC. I saw Vlad do it in a video. Basic texture switcher, except that it changes the sculpt texture.

I don't need to SEE it, I MADE an avatar using it over a year ago. It's been hanging fire because it STILL occasionally resets to the blob.

Plus this requires continually reloading the primitive parameters, which is laggy and bandwidth eating. And every time it resets to the blob that means it's redundantly downloading a texture, which is more lag and waste.

This needs to be a client side animation to be really useful, for all the same reasons that people use llSetTextureAnim for surface texture animation instead of reloading textures in real time.

True mesh importing is honestly not a feature I'd like to see.

It risks tearing the soul out of SL. There's no more meeting up with people in the sandboxes, chatting and learning from them, and similar - because everything is being done in 3D modelling packages.

I'm split on it. I look forward to all the cool stuff that will be made using it. At the same time, I know that'll be the end of my career as a builder in SL. :-/