Metareality 2013-15

There is a Metareality podcast for this week (15): What is the Problem?!?. I have indexed it. There is a a new bit of information from Karl on the Mesh Deformer at 13:00.

Metareality Podcasts

Metareality Podcasts

I suggest you have this index up while you listen. There are some parts of the cast you’ll likely get bored with.

Also the first link on the Metarealit article about Cloud Party leads to the article on EA’s screw up not Cloud Party. I covered Cloud Party’s new building blocks thing last week: Cloud Party Block Building Contest

01:00 Cloud Party (CP) – Better building blocks. Karl thinks it looks easy to use. These are the tools for ‘manipulating mesh’ as blocks. Reed thinks CP has won the competitive battle over SL because if the tools don’t suck and they run in a browser it is a hands down win. Karl thinks the tools and CP is not enough better to pull people from SL, which seems to be the case.

01:45 Karl says the Lab has decided not to add mesh-editing tools to the viewer. That is not what Rod says in his 2011 SLCC speech. I have always believed the Lab would not add any tool like Blender to the viewer. However, having seen the tools in CP, at least the video of them, I can see how a simplified mesh-editing might be done in SL. Since Rod is slowly getting items from that 2011 speech implemented, this too might happen. I won’t be holding my breath.

03:30 Reed, may be CP doesn’t want SL people and is targeting new users. There is some confusion about which demographic CP is targeting. There are lots of comments about how the Lab has given up on new users, which I’m not buying.

04:00 CP targeting SL people – trying to improve on what SL does. I have seen where some from SL have worked with the CP people to fix things that are annoying in SL. I can see this as direct targeting of SL. I suspect the CP people are more about how to make a better virtual world and less about specifically competing with SL.

05:00 Karl seems to think CP might target their advertising at SL users because when Hamlet or Torley say something about CP they get a rush of people coming in. So, they advertise to SL users.

07:00 Why is CP better than Unity? Reed no answer. Gianna, CP is hardly fast at rendering, CP is slow rendering stuff.

08:15 CP Scripting? API Scripting Reference. None of them seem to know about scripting in CP. (Cloud Party Scripting Overview) CP is not revolutionary.

09:00 Botgirl posted: Two years later is Rod one of us?

10:00 Reed, how much funding does LL have to work with?

11:00 Materials System – Gianna’s understanding is Geenz Spad has done most of the Materials System and the Lab is just plugging it into the viewer. From my listening to Geenz, Oz, and Maestro, Geenz wrote the proposal, the Lab did the server side based on that, Geenz has rebuilt the render engine. So, Geenz has done the major share of the work which goes  into the open source viewer.

12:00 Karl thinks the Materials System is an embarrassment and their is nothing good about materials. I suspect he is more on about how the materials system was brought about than the system itself.

13:00 Mesh Deformer – Discussion about how the Lab messed it up…

14:15 Karl thinks that if it had been put in 3rd party viewers a year ago and people were allowed to play with it, it would have moved ahead like a real open source project. That kind of confuses me. Back in February of 2012 I wrote about the Deformer being in Niran’s viewer (reference) and over a 2 or 3 week period being added to 2 or 3 others. It has been in an SL Project viewer since before November 2011. (reference)

There has been discussion for some weeks in the JIRA 1716 about caching the Mesh Deformer calc’s on the server. Some have found there can be as much as a 2 to 4 minute delay in the Deformer starting up when a new mesh garment is rezzed. That is reported to happen on older computers when putting on high polygon count clothes.

Karl says those talking about caching the calc’s don’t know what they are talking about. The quote of Karl from the audio is: “With a little bit of effort the viewer side could be made faster. And it wouldn’t be an issue at all. Where as if you store it on the server that is a huge amount of data. It is more than the mesh data itself.

So caching the calc’s is a bad idea. Since the amount of data is huge, Karl’s word, it is way faster to generate on the fly than; calc, store, upload to the server, and then download to everyone seeing the avatar. The calc’s or process could apparently be improved a little bit to reduce the viewer side load, but it is not really an issue and certainly a far smaller issue than caching.

16:10 Gianna asks what is the problem that is holding up the Deformer?

17:00 Karl believes that if the Deformer had gone the free market kind of way and been left to open source peeps we would have it now. In a rather derisive way he says it is the decision in the Lab that is the hold up. I agree it is the decision process that is hanging things up. I would not phrase it as Karl did, but that is the bottom line.

17:20 Gianna is talking about the time it has taken for the Materials approval process. She remembers when that proposal was on the desk of Phillip Rosedale for some time before his talking with the community around the time of SL9B (9? – I am guessing that it was an earlier SLxB), when he asked what would SL users wanted to add to SL? Her answer, a materials system… Phillip’s response, what’s that?

19:00 Turning 30. Going to the gym.

Boring stuff

22:30 Griefing – Gianna gets email and Plurked about this subject. Seems people can’t get into mainland regions to clean it up griefing attacks. In mainland regions attacks may last for hours before the Lab does anything. Their conclusion is the Lab doesn’t care about the mainland. There is some attack that takes over objects at 0,0 corner of regions. …I think that has been fixed. But, possibly not completely.

26:00 LEAP Motion – nobody on the panel really knew what it was… See: New Second Life Controller Experiment, from January 2013.

28:00 More making more fun of the Lab’s decision process.

29:00 Does LEAP change shared experience? The answer to this question should be: No.

30:00 Oculus Rift discussion

36:00 Why doesn’t the Lab get excited about Oculus? From my point of viewer I only see it as a screen replacement. If you have ever played with VR headsets, you know they are a pain. Reed points out what I see as the main problem with them. Imagine you are navigating through SL with them. If you have to move the headset forward to move you forward, how far can you go? To turn 360? You need a VR room in which to play a game. Sound like a lot of banged up shins and walking into RL walls to me.

37:00 Gianna answers those asking her why she is so down with SL that problems discussed in the audio is what has happened to disenchant her.

38:00 A little discussion about; Fantasy Fair Poster, Neva River sim, and The Garden.

40:00 SL10B – Applications are open and regions are online. Designing Worlds has a video about it up in Treet.TV.

41:00 Creatorverse now free, was $5 on iOS. Reed doesn’t know what it is. Karl, it has probably run its course.

42:10 Patterns, multiplayer coming.

42:40 Reed playing Battlefield

43:40 Karl is playing Bitcoin.

46:15 Drax Files: Episode #3.

46:40 End – Sponsor info. More on Materials next week.

2 thoughts on “Metareality 2013-15

  1. “CP is hardly fast at rendering, CP is slow rendering stuff.”

    Whoever claimed that really should spend more time with Cloud Party. It’s hard to compare scene complexities of Second Life vs. Cloud Party even under the most controlled of conditions like ensuring being all alone and using the exact same assets, but I’ve never had Cloud Party slow to a crawl on me the way Second Life does even in light conditions.

    I also found it odd qarl didn’t know Cloud Party had a scripting language (Javascript, by the way). It’s probably not his idea to put Cloud Party in the topics week to week, but as many times as they’ve discussed it and as technical minded qarl is I believe he should take a deeper look at Cloud Party since he’s greatly qualified to offer opinions on its pros and cons, and its viability as either a compliment or competitor to Second Life.

    • I agree with you. While you are surprised at Karl’s poor knowledge of CP, I’m not.His current interests are in other directions and he is busy with other things. While Reed is opinionated, he too doesn’t bring much knowledge to the discussion, especially regarding CP.

      In all I found it a frustrating podcast. But, there was some valuable information on the Deformer, thanks to Karl.

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