Balancing act

Moving through some sims is like wading underwater

There's been a bit of discussion on the SL Universe forum about pathfinding and whether it adversely affects sims, and it reminded me that I have been meaning to have a five minute rant on the theme that everything in Second Life is a balancing act... you have to balance what you want to achieve visually and interactively with the performance you want to achieve.

Unlike games, where the background and a lot of the objects in a scene will be fixed and pre-downloaded to your computer, and where you may be prevented from moving into a different area, in Second Life currently everything is dynamically streamed to the user's computer.  This means that the size of textures, complexity of objects, number of avatars, amount of scripting all have an effect on how fast things render and how well the region performs.

It's tricky because the visitors to a sim will have different computers, graphics cards and nternet connections, and all of those may affect the rate at which things stream or render in world.  There is a world of difference in how quickly a scene renders if you have your settings on Ultra and if you have them set low - and how pretty or otherwise things will appear to you.  Many aspects of the user experience are not under the control of a sim owner or designer.

However, certain things have always helped.  If you use a limited set of textures and make them as small as possible, if you reduce the complexity of the physics for the mesh objects in a sim, if you use as few scripts and make them as elegant as possible, all these will help to make things as fast as possible.  Only you can judge whether having big beautiful textures is more important than being able to load the sim environment quickly.  It's all a question of balancing your priorities, and it requires thought and planning to make it work for you.

As I posted on that thread on the SLU boards, articulation of prims seems to me to be a pretty big sim killer.  It's one of the reasons that it is hard to use pathfinding in a realistic way, as there aren't a lot of animals which can be made to move around naturally without articulation. 

A few years ago I helped to build the Linden Homes sims, which included trees with (non-pathfind, scripted) birds and squirrels in them.  I pretty soon realised that these had quite a negative impact on the sims and so removed them in the sims I was dressing.  We later had a general squirrel strangling effort as the impact became clear. 

For those who haven't used it, pathfinding is a simple way to make animals and objects move around a sim without having to program the locations.  The idea is that the system makes a navmesh - this was explained to me as being like a tablecloth laid over the sim terrain and objects - which gives a pathfinding creature information about where the terrain and objects in a sim are placed.

This navmesh is what a pathfinding creature will navigate automatically if set up to pathfind.  Thus a creature set to follow avatars, will automatically follow anyone who comes close enough to it, and will automatically avoid obstacles and shouldn't disappear into the terrain.  You should always be careful about having objects penetrating the navmesh, especially those which have physical attributes. 

However, I think that a lot of the negative impacts reported for pathfinding are actually attributable to the articulation used for creatures which pathfind.  It's the reason I cheated with flexi-fur for the goats and creatures I made for the Wilderness sims.  Avoid articulation if possible.  Or at least, be aware of the impact that these things may have on performance and only rezz creatures which have it when necessary - don't leave them going in empty sims if you can avoid it.

I'm sure it sounds like I am a killjoy when I say that you have to be prepared to balance your need for impact and interactivity with the need for a sim to be usable, but much like a web page which takes too long to load, if you make a beautiful sim with interesting interactive content, which takes too long to rezz or is painfully slow to use, people will simply teleport to somewhere more comfortable.

Misty's Goodbye

I was fired as a mole last Friday.  I've probably already written more than I should have done about that.  I made a video, whilst regretting the many photographs trapped in my inaccessible mole account.




At the moment I wnt to hide in the wardrobe and wait for everything to pass. It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't spent a lot of time in virtual worlds, but it's a shock being suddenly cut off from an avatar which has become part of your identity. There's a general sadness at losing something that was part of my life for five years.

I'm going to do a tour of some of the places I built but didn't have photographs for, and maybe I'll make another video when I have time. Currently I am mostly trapped in the real world, packing boxes and cleaning up the house before it's sold.

I'm lucky to have made such a lot of friends in Second Life. I didn't have images of a number of moles who left some time ago - Igneous, Earthy, Macho, and Abnor were all missing from the list. All will be well. It's obviously a time for changes in my life - in every life.

YouTube web on a prim

I've been using web on a prim for some time, but recently needed to display a YouTube video on a prim. Of course, I wantedthe video and not all the comments and other stuff on the page. I knew that there was a way to do this, but forgot, and it took some searching to find the very simple information I needed.

Some people though it was necessary to edit the prim to "cut off" the parts not needed, and some people thought a script would be needed. No. This is how to display just the video on your prim. All you need to do, in step-by-step form:
Create a prim by right clicking, choosing create and left clicking. Texture it as you wish.

Whilst in the edit menu, choose the texture tab.

Click select face in the upper part of the edit menu, and select the face which is the one you want to display the video.

Click the plus button at the bottom of the texture page of the edit menu, to add media to the prim. The edit menu changes and there is an input bar at the top of the page with a preview screen beneath it.

Copy the URL of the video you want to screen into this input bar, but where the URL says watch?, add in an underscore and the word popup. Thus where you once had watch? you will now have watch_popup? This is all you have to do in order to have just the video pane appearing rather than the whole page from YouTube.

Click reset, apply, OK.

If you wish, you *can* use slice to cut off the border which still may appear above and below your video pane.

Petites and Tinies

There are some very cute petite avatars available at the moment, and some people have been asking me the difference between Tinies and Petites.  A petite is a small-scale avatar which is proportionally the same as a full-scale human avatar.  The normal avatar is hidden and the mesh petite avatar is rigged to move like the original avatar... this means that petites can use human-scale animations.  I am wearing my full-size animation override HUD with this fairy avatar, and it works just fine.

Of course, petites don't fit human-scale furniture or clothing, so if a petite sits on a human-scale chair she will probably sit in the right pose, but be buried in the chair or floating above it.  Petites can't wear system clothing, they have to have special mesh clothes, shoes, attachments, and hair.  You can adjust skins for use with modable petites, and there are instructions on how to do that here.

Petite Yabu fairy with a various attachments

Tinies are generally little furries, chunky and small.  They have the main avatar folded up inside them, and therefore they need special animations to be able to move correctly. 

If a petite sits on a tiny chair, she gets folded up in a bizarre way, floating above the chair, as seen below.  If a tiny sits on a petite or human chair, his body will be scrambled, too.

This is what happens if a petite sits on a tiny chair....

 

 

 

 

 

Alirium garden centre

I haven't been doing too much exploring recently, but in the course of taking photographs for a job, I came across a very well put together tree by Alirium Gardens.  It was so good I decided to search them out and have a look at the rest of their products - and I am so glad that I did.

The centre itself has rather annoying navigation.  You arrive 1000 metres in the air and have a choice of teleports.  It means that you are transported down past a wintry frost layer, to a glowy place with enormous rabbits, and eventually down the ground floor, where there is a shop.

The work by Alirium lends an impressionistic quality to the planting, as you can see from the photographs.  Having done some unnatural plantings myself, I appreciate how well they have made their grasses and flowers.

Not everything is for sale, and so you may see plants and trees which can't be seen in the shop.

I like the overall design of the shop and signage, and the products, but the prices are a bit eye watering... the trees I admired as copyables were $1999... and copyable flowers $699.

Clicking the teleport board to see the summer products used in a build meant that I couldn't find my way back to the shop easily - I had to teleport out of the sim and come back again via the 1000 metre landing spot, which was a bit annoying.  But the stuff is so beautiful, you can forgive them almost anything.

My two criticisms are the teleports - dumping customers elsewhere in the sim with no way back to the shop doesn't seem commercially advisable, and the use of glow/full bright - in places I couldn't see anything because of the glow... it should be used very sparingly.

 

Help Domenic Johanssen

I'm taking the unusual step of posting the same blog to all my blogs, no matter what their subject.

Domenic Johanssen was a happy child of two loving parents.  His parents were taking him to India from Sweden where they had been living, when officials boarded the plane and took Domenic away.  People who are told the story cannot believe that Domenic was removed from his parents on such flimsy grounds:  the Johanssens were planning to home educate (which was legal in Sweden at that time), they hadn't allowed him to have all the vaccinations, and he had two cavities in his baby teeth.

He has been in the care of the Swedish authorities since then, and repeated attempts to get him back have failed.  The separation has adversely affected the health of his mother and father, and the photograps of the child now compared to the child then make it obvious that he is far less happy in the care of the authorities than he was at home.

Th Swedish system seems to be a heartless and inhumane system which ignore human bonding and puts the interests of the family last in any decision.  I find it absolutely incomprehensible that a state in a civilised country could be allowed to behave like this.

I don't know what can be done.  I have written to judges and officials over the past two years.  In a place where home educating seems to be considered abuse, it is very very hard to know how to communicate with these people.

Everyone to whom I have told this story have been suspicious that there must have been another, hidden, reason for taking Domenic away from his parents, but that truly isn't the case.  If you can think of a way to publicise, or to put pressure on the Swedish authorities, please please let me know.

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Kitely launches Virtual Worlds on demand

Kitely have launched their Virtual Worlds on demand service.  No, this isn't an April Fool's joke!  What you will need to take advantage of their free beta, is a facebook account and an SL client.  And, to take advantage of their free credits offer, 20 friends.  Once you get to their website, you can sign in using your Facebook account, and then choose to visit their sample sim, or create your own world.

I found it a little confusing at the very beginning, finding myself in the sample sim, when I had expected to be in my own sim, but I soon worked out that one needs to go to the "my worlds" tab to create your own world... if you simply click to enter world once you have logged in, you will find yourself on a sample sim world with some empty exhibition spaces.

Having made your own world, and logged in using the SL client, you will find yourself on your own version of an SL sim.  This only persists while there are avatars online inside it... it shuts down and goes into cold storage once everyone has left. 

A word:  if avatars come to your world and haven't been anywhere else in Kitely, the creator of the world gets 200 kitely credits.  You only have this ability the first time you go into Kitely.  My world is here.  Kitely advertise free credits if you link Kitely with your facebook... but you only get these if you have a picture on your account and at least 20 friends.

It seems that it isn't currently possible to teleport from world to world, so you have to log out to go anywhere else.  Also, it doesn't give you a chance to use the viewer of your choice - it will use the SL viewer unless you choose another as your default.  Imprudence should allow importation and export of objects.