User:Which Linden/Office Hours/2009 Dec 17

• [11:01] Which Linden: hi!
• [11:01] Patnad Babii: hi guys sorry was afk :)
• [11:01] Which Linden: just got in myself
• [11:02] Morgaine Dinova: Hi Which ... making breakfast, so intermittent here.
• [11:02] Which Linden: man I ate some cookies for breakfast
• [11:03] Which Linden: that was ... a bit overwhelming
• [11:04] Which Linden: hi aimee!
• [11:04] Aimee Trescothick: hey :)
• [11:05] Which Linden: is still waking up really
• [11:05] Aimee Trescothick: heh, me too and it's 7pm here lol
• [11:05] Which Linden: ha ha ha
• [11:05] Aimee Trescothick: I generally don't wake up properly till about 10pm
• [11:06] Which Linden: that sun's gotta be way down there, huh
• [11:06] Aimee Trescothick: what sun? LOL
• [11:07] Which Linden: yeah it's really weird how sometimes right when it becomes night there's a big boost of energy
• [11:07] Morgaine Dinova: I relate more to suns many light years away than to our local one. They're both just theories, when you're in the UK.
• [11:07] Which Linden: hah
• [11:07] Aimee Trescothick: :D
• [11:07] Patnad Babii: hoy, the script limitation seem to be a hot subject these days
• [11:07] Aimee Trescothick: actually it's been nice sunny weather here the past week or two
• [11:07] Which Linden: yeah, mostly cause of the lack of information it seems
• [11:07] Aimee Trescothick: but then I'm in about the only bit of the UK that gets any
• [11:08] Which Linden: (the script limits, not the sun)
• [11:08] Which Linden: what part is that?
• [11:08] Aimee Trescothick: yeah, I think the script limits are planned to work off moon phases
• [11:08] Aimee Trescothick: Cornwall, far SW tip
• [11:09] Which Linden: righto
• [11:09] Morgaine Dinova: I've never been to Cornwall, but I wrote an essay about the place as a kid (using info from National Geographic) and won a prize, lol.
• [11:09] Aimee Trescothick: :D nice
• [11:10] Which Linden: it's weird looking at a map of england and seeing place names that I'm familiar with from New England, but in a different arrangement
• [11:10] Aimee Trescothick: lol yeah
• [11:10] Which Linden: they didn't even both to call it "new plymouth", it's just "plymouth" v.2
• [11:10] Morgaine Dinova: I was born in the West Country though, so not all that far away from the south.
• [11:10] Aimee Trescothick: I think New York is a bit bigger then York too
• [11:13] Which Linden: so yeah.... script limits... I think the overall strategy is very good: make the limits visible before they're enforced
• [11:13] Which Linden: and try to make them understandable
• [11:14] Which Linden: I'm sure the particular implementation will want for some love, but it'll all get worked out in the end
• [11:14] Tillie Ariantho: It will cause several problems for the first few weeks then I fear.
• [11:14] Tillie Ariantho: Think of a fashion show... guests with tons of scripted hair kill the script memory ...
• [11:15] Tillie Ariantho: model crashes, gets back in, and none of her stuff is working anymore.
• [11:15] Tillie Ariantho: cause no more free script memory in the sim.
• [11:16] BlackLotus Swansong: Yes, hair is going to be the most effected item I think. Has there been any thought on how that is going to be solved with old objects that are multi-scripted like hair?
• [11:16] Tillie Ariantho: As long as there is no way to force people to unwear scripted stuff, it will be very very hard for all kind of events.
• [11:16] Which Linden: Depends if it's a hard limit or a soft limit, though Tillie
• [11:16] Dahlia Trimble: anyone want a santa hat? it's not scripted :)
• [11:17] Which Linden: Sure!
• [11:17] Dahlia Trimble: gave you Dahlia's Sculptie Santa Hat.
• [11:17] Which Linden: yay
• [11:17] Dahlia Trimble:  :)
• [11:17] Tillie Ariantho: I know one designer who changed to scripted hair but then went back because of caused lag etc. the only one I know of.
• [11:17] Dahlia Trimble: I know one also
• [11:18] Tillie Ariantho: b00n I mean.
• [11:18] Dahlia Trimble: then she quit because of the XStreet stuff
• [11:18] Which Linden: sad
• [11:18] Tillie Ariantho: yah sure, I removed about 75% of my stuff, too.
• [11:19] Dahlia Trimble: ya she used to geive me a lot of free stuff too :(
• [11:19] Dahlia Trimble: *give
• [11:19] Tillie Ariantho: And 20% LL removed cause you can hints of nipples in partially transparent shirts I sold. P
• [11:19] Tillie Ariantho: can see
• [11:20] Tillie Ariantho: Ok, if it is good done, the scripting limits might help.
• [11:20] Tillie Ariantho: We'll see.
• [11:20] Which Linden: hopefully only the most egregious of content has to be remade
• [11:21] Dahlia Trimble: most of my scripts are still the older LSL
• [11:21] Dahlia Trimble: I changed some to mono
• [11:21] Which Linden: probably a power law thing, 5% of content casues 95% of script-rlated lag
• [11:22] Tillie Ariantho: I switched my posing stand huds back to lsl, and the stand itself to mono, as you dont carry it around usually. ^^
• [11:23] Dahlia Trimble: woud it be an option to let scripts go over parcel limits but they could be swapped out if other parcels needed it back?
• [11:23] Which Linden: why back to lsl?
• [11:24] Which Linden: I'm sure thats one possible option
• [11:24] Dahlia Trimble: LSL seems to work better when there are a lot of linked messages
• [11:24] Tillie Ariantho: back to lsl so it doesnt cause lag spikes on sim entering.
• [11:24] Tillie Ariantho: Those are VERY annoying...
• [11:25] Morgaine Dinova: Which: all resources need to look after their usage, but I think script limits as you're implementing them are extremely bad, because they will result in continual breakage throughout the world as the limits are continually hit. What you should have designed is a progressive negative feedback mechanism by raising the cost as you use more resource. That's straight out of control theory. Wherever you have hard limits, you creat discontinuities that cause breakage.
• [11:25] Tillie Ariantho: There are many visitors to the latex shop on my sim, and when I am just working and someone enters.... everything halts for 1-8 seconds, that is just ridiculous.
• [11:25] Tillie Ariantho: Yes, that long sometimes.
• [11:25] Dahlia Trimble: there are limits now, they just aren't distributed fairly
• [11:26] Dahlia Trimble: hence the problems
• [11:26] Which Linden: wait what are you talking about? I wasn't aware that we'd even exposed the current script limits stuff
• [11:26] Tillie Ariantho: Sure you have. :P
• [11:26] Dahlia Trimble: whenever a region freezes, a limit has been reached :)
• [11:26] Tillie Ariantho: Ok, not the fingrained stuff...
• [11:27] Tillie Ariantho: fine...
• [11:27] Dahlia Trimble: or when scripts slow down
• [11:27] Which Linden: yeah teh freezing sounds like shite programming
• [11:27] Tillie Ariantho: but there is a hard discussion in the dev mailing list...
• [11:27] Morgaine Dinova: But there's already a sort of poor man's progressive negative feedback in place, in the sense that when the sim is slugged, everything slows down. What's going to happen when the limit come is is that you'll have continual breakage even when the sim is working fine.
• [11:28] Tillie Ariantho: I still think the most annoying limit of all is the one that forced you to split your script into like 8 pieces, which only makes the whole thingy way worse.
• [11:28] Which Linden: depends on how it's implemented, Morgaine, I think you're arguing against a strawman
• [11:28] Morgaine Dinova: Which: script limits have been discussed in a lot of detail by Babbage over many OHs.
• [11:28] Morgaine Dinova: Which: no I'm not. We know from Babbage that the limit is a simple cutoff. There's no progressive feedback.
• [11:29] Dahlia Trimble: there was once an effort to separate the script engine into another process in OpenSim but it kinda died
• [11:29] Which Linden: Ahhh...yeah
• [11:29] Which Linden: my bad, didn't see the office hours stuff
• [11:30] Which Linden: hm....yes it does seem like a hard-limi thing
• [11:31] Which Linden: though kelly seemed open to some sort of cap-and-trade thing
• [11:31] Morgaine Dinova: Babbage does excellent tech OHs, really detailed. In conjunction with his video presentations for lang.NET, that's a ton of great material.
• [11:33] Tillie Ariantho: Ok, already have to go again, fashion show wants to be photographed. :-)
• [11:33] Which Linden: great reason to leave!
• [11:33] Morgaine Dinova: Cyu later Tillie :-)
• [11:33] Which Linden: have fun!
• [11:33] Dahlia Trimble: tc :)
• [11:33] Tillie Ariantho: laters
• [11:35] Morgaine Dinova: They're fun, Tillie's fashion shows. Makes me want to try my and at clothes making ... but they'd undoubtedly look awful, given my zero artistic ability.
• [11:35] Morgaine Dinova: hand*
• [11:35] Dahlia Trimble: I've had products in a few before, they are a pain to deal with sometimes
• [11:35] Which Linden: I dunno.... my impression is that amateurs can achieve on the level of real artists, it just takes orders of magnitude more time
• [11:36] Which Linden: for example, I'm an amateur builder, and this semi-decent av took me three months
• [11:36] Dahlia Trimble: cool avie :)
• [11:36] Morgaine Dinova: We need to make things for Opensim anyway, so worth trying. The shelves are a bit bare there currently.
• [11:36] Which Linden: I'm sure that a real artist could do a better job in an hour
• [11:37] Dahlia Trimble: maybe a few hours ;)
• [11:37] Melchizedek Blauvelt: Nods, took me months to get a semi decent understanding of Blender, but it finally gave in
• [11:37] Dahlia Trimble: <3 blender :)
• [11:37] Which Linden: is belnder unintuitive in an absolute sense, or just relative to other 3D programs?
• [11:38] Morgaine Dinova: WTB Dahlia OH, on Blender :P
• [11:38] Dahlia Trimble: 3D is just difficult in general
• [11:38] Melchizedek Blauvelt: I guess mostly the vocabulary Which
• [11:38] Which Linden: the visual vocabulary?
• [11:39] Melchizedek Blauvelt: With a background in philosophy something like "ambient occlusion" doesn't tell you much
• [11:39] Dahlia Trimble: blender takes a while to learn but the UI is really a lot easier to use once you learn it
• [11:39] Morgaine Dinova: Why aren't there intermediate tools that encapsulate the "vocabulary" away? Eg. we build quite happily in SL despite it being 3D. Just needs the right human interfaces.
• [11:39] Melchizedek Blauvelt: Also the hundreds (or so) hotkeys are hard to master
• [11:39] Dahlia Trimble: SL™ is pretty easy compared to other platforms
• [11:40] Leslie Scribe: I want constructive solid geometry.
• [11:41] Which Linden: yeah CSG is pretty powerful
• [11:41] Morgaine Dinova: We're just missing the operators for CSG, right? Like intersections between prims, say
• [11:41] Which Linden: Yeah the other boolean operators
• [11:41] Dahlia Trimble: I want mesh import :)
• [11:41] Which Linden: we already have OR
• [11:41] Morgaine Dinova: Haha
• [11:41] Melchizedek Blauvelt: Another thing that is slightly misleading is that "Blender grid configuration for SL" is an advanced tutorial in most cases, while it should be the first thing to do
• [11:41] Which Linden: SL reminds me a bit of Bryce3D
• [11:42] Dahlia Trimble: never used bryce
• [11:43] Which Linden: it was an early "easy-to-use" tool
• [11:44] Which Linden: used only CSG, no meshes
• [11:44] Dahlia Trimble: was it for CAD applications?
• [11:45] Which Linden: no it was for...uh well I'm not sure what its market was
• [11:45] Which Linden: probably why it died out in the end
• [11:45] Which Linden: I used it at school
• [11:46] Which Linden: I gotta say that CSG was really limiting, especially for something that was clearly aiming to be photorealistic
• [11:47] Dahlia Trimble: I used to use "ME10" which was a CAD application by HP - you started with a primitive and performed virtual machining operations on it
• [11:47] Morgaine Dinova: Philip used to talk about photorealism being the target. Is that still the same inside LL, or did it go away when he "left".
• [11:47] Which Linden: I'm sure it's still a target...but it's a lot further off
• [11:48] Which Linden: I mean, Bryce was non-realtime so it was a lot more plausible then
• [11:48] Which Linden: Took that crap like 2 hours to render a scene and it wasn't even raytraced
• [11:48] Morgaine Dinova: ouch
• [11:49] Dahlia Trimble: heh
• [11:49] Which Linden: I really like CAD programs and think that more of their principles should be appliedto regular 3D programs (except for the crashing)
• [11:49] Morgaine Dinova: Well raising the max texture size is probably the next "baby step" towards photorealism.
• [11:49] Dahlia Trimble: I remember playing with painter's algorithm back in the C64 days, too a bit of time do draw a couple items
• [11:50] Morgaine Dinova: We need 2048x2048 minimum, simply because HD @ 1920x1200 is now a standard resolution, and it doesn't fit into today's texture limits.
• [11:51] Which Linden: Yeah, surely
• [11:51] Which Linden: Though how big a file is that?
• [11:51] Leslie Scribe: 16MB in RAM raw
• [11:51] Dahlia Trimble: ambient occlusion in real time :)
• [11:51] Dahlia Trimble: ducks...
• [11:51] Morgaine Dinova: Tomorrow's sizes always sound too big today. Come tomorrow, they suddenly become insignificant.
• [11:52] Which Linden: according to a medical images page, jpg2000 compression of a 2048x2048 images gets it ot 4 megs
• [11:52] Leslie Scribe: There are some 2048x2048 textures in the asset storage system.
• [11:52] Which Linden: orly...asset upload hole?
• [11:52] Leslie Scribe: Old textures.
• [11:53] Leslie Scribe: Not sure what happens if somebody tries to upload one of those now.
• [11:53] Morgaine Dinova: Can the viewer cope with larger textures, if we had them in Opensim?
• [11:53] Dahlia Trimble: there used to be a higher limit to texture size
• [11:53] Leslie Scribe: Seems like its up to the client to control that.
• [11:53] Leslie Scribe: You know what trusing the client gets you.
• [11:53] Morgaine Dinova: Leslie: what?
• [11:54] Dahlia Trimble: I doubt opensim has a limit. If it does, it can easily be defeated
• [11:54] Dahlia Trimble: but I dont think larger textures are really going to buy you that much
• [11:54] Leslie Scribe: Modified clients doing things that result in difficult situations.
• [11:54] Morgaine Dinova: Leslie: FUD
• [11:54] Dahlia Trimble: better lighting would help a lot more
• [11:54] Which Linden: we enforce those limits server-side now too
• [11:55] Which Linden: yeah...when's that deferred rendering branch coming out?
• [11:55] Leslie Scribe: The reason I know there are 2048x2048 textures in the asset storage system is I was trying to figure out why a particular fox tail was clobbering my framerate.
• [11:56] Which Linden: hah ... it had one of those textures?
• [11:56] Leslie Scribe: There were 3 of them applied to flexi prims.
• [11:57] Leslie Scribe: 3 different 16MB textures in RAM
• [11:57] Patnad Babii: uhm but we have already a hard time loading simple 512x512 texture why would we want larger ones
• [11:57] Which Linden: PIXEL LIMITS!!!
• [11:57] Patnad Babii: rez time used to be way more faster bak in the days
• [11:58] Morgaine Dinova: Well blame the cache for much of that. Sorry, I mean "the alleged cache".
• [11:59] Leslie Scribe: I don't know why a huge texture reduces frame rate. It just seems to and 3 on one object was vary objectionable.
• [11:59] Morgaine Dinova: It might be different in the new engine.
• [11:59] Dahlia Trimble: or a different computer
• [11:59] Patnad Babii: well its not only a cache thing, i mean even when you visit a place for the first time, it used to be much quicker
• [12:00] Leslie Scribe: Texture cache seems to work okay for me.
• [12:00] Dahlia Trimble: emerald seems to have the best texture performance for me
• [12:01] Dahlia Trimble: the SL™ viewer works pretty well too, but snowglobe still has problems
• [12:01] Which Linden: alright folks, time for me to eat some pumpkins
• [12:01] Which Linden: I mean turn into
• [12:02] Leslie Scribe: Media playing with Snowglobe still needs work. The "modules" seem to be crashing.
• [12:02] Which Linden: I mean, happy holidays!
• [12:02] Dahlia Trimble: tc :)
• [12:02] Morgaine Dinova: Cyu Which, Merry Xmas!
• [12:02] BlackLotus Swansong: Thank you for your time Which
• [12:02] Melchizedek Blauvelt: Have a nice Xmas Which :)
• [12:02] Which Linden: I'm not going to be here next week, so, see you in the new year!
• [12:02] Patnad Babii: eheh happy holidays Which and everyone
• [12:02] BlackLotus Swansong: And happy Holiidatys all arround
• [12:02] Leslie Scribe: Bye Which.