Second Inventory

So with the whole OpenSpaces aka Void Sim debacle I started looking at options, one of the open sim places I looked at was fairly good but I'll talk about that another time and it's still not ready for primetime. But in the course of looking for alternative building areas I came across the question we all have... how do I move items back and forth? The only real solution I found was Second Inventory. It has it's quirks but it does work. For a legitimate use of moving your own creations to other worlds this is a legitimate tool, though it takes a long time to work for each item. More info is available on their site but I managed to move a full copy of my house to my OpenSim sandbox and it looked just like it did in SL. Pretty neat, if you can put up with the headaches. It also has the side benefit of being able to perform batch uploads of textures, something I've been wanting in SL client for ages.

Photoshop Tools - Alpha Transparencies - Robin Wood

Robin Wood does amazing tutorials, you really should check them out here. The one I find most helpful is how to make transparencies, make sure you read and do it, but make sure you grab the actions that do it for you! I use them all the time. That tutorial is here.

Photoshop Tools - Ryker's Brushes

Sensual, originally uploaded by Ryker Beck.

Photoshop is really an invaluable tool if you create in Second Life, I'm not that good with it and I use it every day, if you're designing clothing or skins you absolutely must have it. (Alright, maybe GIMP will work but I get a headache with that and I'm a techy guy.) Ryker graciously shared her brushes with the SL community and it's a bookmark of mine. So now I'm sharing it with you. Go get them here.

Asaf Outpost ~ Arabian Fort!

So I promised a look at the other texture of the Maero Arcis, this is it, the Asaf Outpost, exactly the same prims, but a layout for Gorean or Arabian sims, not much more of a story other then that someone wanted the look of the Arabian Dreams in this layout, so not going into full build details. Here's the picture and brochure:

Brochure: Asaf Outpost is a direct descendant of my most popular build, the DarkRayne Fortress. It's slightly smaller in length and is much more intimate with a layout that includes a master suite on the second floor, a see through dance floor, a dining area downstairs. And best of all a fully secure wine cellar with lockable storage for those special vintages. This isn't a small build at 30x40 but it does fit on a relatively medium sized parcel and is beautifully textured. When you tell people it's 159 prims they will be shocked. As always it is mod/copy so you can change textures as you wish. If you prefer a more gothic look then check out the Maero Arcis, same layout, different textures.

Visit my site to see my other designs: http://ingmanndesign.com

Test your Color IQ!

I scored a 49, lower is better, see how you do and tell me in the comments.

Go here.

Shadows! An experiment.

So, my thanks to Vint Falken for pointing me towards the open source version of the viewer created by Kirstenlee Cinquetti. (She didn't do this personally, it's on her blog.) I personally have two very good video cards in SLI in my rig and so I was pretty sure it would work. But I'm thrilled.... take a look....

Neit's Treehouse... those shadows are done by the client, not 'drawn' as part of the build!

Neit's Treehouse but look at the detail on the stairs.

Proof that it's fairly dynamic as you can see my shadow on the wall of my store.

Trees and my shadow on the hill.

Kirsten's viewer is very nice, it's like the dazzle version but with a darker blue to the buttons which has made all the difference to me as the aqua color makes my eyes water. I highly recommend it if you've the hardware to run it.

Now, what this means as a builder, I'm not quite sure, I've not been one to incorporate a ton of drawn shadows into my builds, but I could easily see building a shadow version and a non shadow version using this to point out where I should put the 'drawn' shadows as oppossed to the dynamic ones that this edition of the viewer provides. I'm not sure that's a well constructed sentence, but I'm off in search of more eye-candy.

Low Lag - Efficiency - and Endless Nights.

So I promised you some talking about how I designed and built a full combat/rp sim and managed to keep the lag to levels very low. It's helpful to have some background information and Gwyn has of course spoken my thoughts in a more elegant way then I ever could. First go read her post here.

Now Gwyn is talking about the absence of limits, but the important thing to remember is that we do have limits and that the basis of low lag design currently will always produce lower lag design in the future. The math is stated in Gwyn's paragraphs here...

Let’s take a simple example. A cube has one polygon per face; 15.000 cubes would be 90.000 polygons to be rendered, assuming that all cubes are not tortured prims. The higher the prim torture, the higher the number of polygons on that prim; as a rule of thumb, worse-case scenarios are torii and sculpties, which can quickly get to a thousand polygons each. But avatars are even worse — they count almost 7.500 polygons each (not counting attachments, of course)! Now do your math: one scene with 15.000 prims, all of them sculpties, and a hundred avatars (not to count attachments) will quickly have about 16 million polygons to render.

Is that a lot?

Well, low-end graphics cards — the ones that power perhaps 80-90% of all computers in the world — tend to be able to render about 5 million polygons. Per second. So the scene just described above — all 15.000 prims in front of your screen with a 100 avatars dancing in front of them — would be rendered at 0.3 FPS. Now you know why.

So how do other virtual worlds deal with this nightmare? They do the maths the other way round: knowing that the low-end cards can render 5 million polygons per second, they know they can, at most, have scenes with 200.000 polygons in sight (so that the card can easily do 25 FPS without stress), but possibly even less. That’s why World of Warcraft’s avatars just have 1.500 polygons (and most of the MMORPGs do the same). They rely on insanely good graphic designers to get the most out of those 1.500 polygons — and get some help from the current generation of graphics cards to do a lot of special effects without any extra “cost” in GPU processing. These games look awesome because the graphic designers and 3D modellers can figure out beforehand what path your avatar will take, and make sure that all scenes are rendered with just 200.000 polygons. Granted, sometimes you get hundreds of avatars in a raid or so, and your graphic card will start to skip frames due to the extra polygons that suddenly require to be drawn, so lag exists elsewhere in the Metaverse, too!

So, how do we as sim designers deal with this in an intelligent way that keeps the dual seemingly opposing natures of good art and good programming? There are lots and lots of answers to that very complex question. For me and my designers here are a few things we did on Endless Nights.

First, talk to your client very clearly about what is important: Feeling of the Art, Efficiency of the Lag, or Detail of the Design.

These aren't opposing concepts, rather complimentary ones... If you can find out how people rank these then you can determine what's truly important to them. You never want to sacrafice one for the other, but it gives you a priority. Using Endless Nights as an example, the clients determined that the Feeling and Efficiency were the top two things they wanted. The detail was important as well, but it was third on the list. This gave us the freedom to not be concerned that they wouldn't like the 'look' of low prim design as long as we textured and constructed it well and kept the 'feeling' of the sim in place.

As a result we ended up creating all the major builds of the sim and the infrastructure of paths and trees and such in under 3100 prims, most of which were cubes. So using the math above:

7 * 3100 = 21700 polygons

That's being efficient. Then we start to look at the textures that we used. A technique if you are building an homogeonous sim is to use a very low number of textures and strategically offset or color them to make each build look different. The difficulty with this for Endless Nights is that we had several different 'regions' for the hybrid nature of the sim. We have a medieval setting, a semi-modern but rundown city, a more natural area... You see the issue. So we use the same idea in a localized way. Each area uses around 10-20 textures. The benefit is that once the texture is downloaded into the cache of the client, it dosen't have to request it again from the server. So if you are in the city, the city will load quickly from then on, if you move to the medieval portion of the sim, it may slow for a few seconds but it won't have to reload every time you have to go around in that area and look at a new building. So, knowing this I made sure that all my textures were 512x512. So again, this is about the efficiency of getting the client to perform quickly and not mess up the ability of the avatar to run or shoot or enjoy the roleplay.

So I hear some of you thinking, "How do you do a whole sim in 3100 prims? That's gotta look horrid!" The answer to that is that it's a tradeoff. My personal machine has two SLI top of the line video cards in it. So I can see everything anytime, it's very rare that I lag in SL. However, for a mass audience you have to design correctly... We design low prim because we're good at it and we don't see the point of wasting the resource limit that we currently live under. Believe me, we can be prim wasters if we are told to or want to. I made a plate of onion rings in Endless Nights that is over 60 prims, that's more then some of the buildings. We just don't do it as standard operating procedure. We start from a point of optimization and move towards the unoptimal as discussions with the client indicate we should. The majority of people seem to find our builds 'pretty' or 'beautiful' and don't notice the techniques that are different,

We like our low prim designs, we think they add charm and that the tradeoffs are worth it. But again, our job is pleasing the client. Don't hesitate to get ahold of us and let us please you, by doing something low prim like Endless Nights, or by using every single prim on a sim in one massive castle.

Ipod Upgrade - Cool trick - Video Link Love

Just found out about one of the coolest new features of the upgrade to the ipod in the latest update purely by experimentation. You can now click on an embedded youtube video from a site and it'll take you to it and play it. This was always frustrating when i was using my feedreader and saw video because I'd have to remember to go watch it later. Now I can just watch it. Very nice little upgrade. In honor of that here's some of what I've been watching:

Temerity Jane - She makes me chuckle every day, I'm a TJ fan and this is link love, completely un-Second Life related.


This is an old one but a good one, I watched it when first learning to build hoping to be as smooth and fast as this, it isn't a tutorial but if you watch closely you can take alot from it. Robbie Dingo is the builder in this one and he makes a beautiful piece of virtual art for a great musician.



Finally we have another tutorial from Torley, this is another excellent introduction to the subject of tiny prims, something absolutely nessecary if you want to make jewelry or avatar attachments. I myself am not incredibly proficient in them but being familiar with all the aspects of building is always good.



So, there you go, if you have an ipod or iphone, watch them, if not, watch them anyway.

Noel.

IDG Brag Session - Endless Nights

So, we just finished the first full sim build we're allowed to talk about other then our main store location of Natalis. If you are one of my smart dedicated readers, one of the select few, then you know I've mentioned it before. But now you can read what one of the principal clients has to say about it. Neit has talked about how pleased she is with the results here.

A couple of fast quotes from her gushing praise:

"What he's created is an amazing sim full of surprises. He took his prefab buildings and did some modifications - some minor, some major - and finished the entire build in just over 3000 prims. The whole sim (minus furnishings and some landscaping) could fit on an open space sim!"

And...

"On top of only taking 3000 prims to build all of this, the lag is amazingly low - even with a tournament in progress. I've seldom seen the script performance on the sim go over 50K, and it usually stays between 10K and 15K, with a number of avatars on it. Now THIS is what most RP sims are lacking - or rather, have too much of."

I want to spend some time talking about the process and how it came about, some design decisions we made with our client and why things work as well as they do, but this is probably a multiple post type of situation. Suffice it to say that I love the feel of the sim, I enjoyed working on it and I and my crew enjoy playing there. I've gotten the ok to talk about the process from the principals involved and I plan to do a bit of a series on what it takes to do a full sim with a group of people. It's interesting and has lots of lessons inside it. So stay tuned.... meanwhile check out Endless Nights here.

Primficiency Design Contest Winners!

Here you have the two top builds in our contest for efficient prim design, on the left is the winner done by Ainee Kohime is absolutely beautiful at exactly 25 prims it's a build she calls the Fanese Pavillion. It's truly a wonderful little house that you can see in the following pics, it has a fireplace and chandalier for heaven's sakes! The Asian build is one of three that Kessa Corvale sent to me, after saying she dosen't do houses! Each of them is darling in it's own right but this is the one I love the textures on most. She recieves second place and honorable mention for being the most prolific, she's truly a talent to watch. Both designers have been offered the chance to sell under the IDG label but those discussions are continuing and either way you should look both these talented ladies up. More pics of the winner below. Stay tuned to this space for our next contest, later this month.