#simbuilding — Public Fediverse posts

I guess this is many OpenSim users' wet dream:

One click of a button, maybe a bit of configuration first, and within a split-second, your flat and barren land turns into a meticulously AI-crafted sim. No matter how big your land may be, even if it's a 16x16 varsim (that's 256 standard regions for you Second Life users; for those of you who don't know either, that's a square of 4x4 km or 2.5x2.5 miles) which is not the biggest you can have, but the biggest you should have. The land is neatly, sensibly and precisely organised in parcels.

Of course, it isn't just one non-functional textured blob of mesh that's nice to behold. It's actually built like a typical sim in OpenSim, namely out of single assets with neatly terraformed land underneath. The vast majority of these assets were created on-the-fly specifically for this sim.

All objects have perfectly optimised meshes with LODs and support for both BulletSim and ubODE physics, regardless of what physics you have on the sim. All of them have super-realistic PBR textures at whatever resolution makes the most sense with Blinn-Phong fallbacks that look as close to the PBR textures as Blinn-Phong can possibly look to PBR. Optionally, the non-PBR textures don't even feature Blinn-Phong normal and specular maps; instead, they have highlights, shadows, reflections etc. baked on for people on toasters with on-board graphics.

The quality of everything is beyond anything you can buy in Second Life nowadays, it's also beyond any free or commercial content available in OpenSim, and still, it lacks any AI-typical quirks.

All doors have the same lightweight script that still provides realistic motion, including individual opening and closing sounds for each kind of door. The same goes even for windows, curtains and blinds where it makes sense. Certain doors can even be configured to limit access.

Also, everything that's made to sit or lie on is scripted. You can even choose the script: either by default an improved version of SFposer that makes it possible to save individual positions and orientations or, if you prefer that because you're more familiar with it, AVsitter with a bunch of plug-ins. Likewise, lots of other objects are scripted to be interactive if it makes sense.

Many things that would be light sources in real life are light sources in-world. They're mostly point light sources, but a very few ones are projectors. They all emit realistic tones of light and not white #FFFFFF. Some light sources may be controlled by scripts to turn on and off depending on the position of the Sun. Others may be timer-controlled. In residential buildings, lights can be switched between off, on and a configurable timer with individual default values. All light control scripts also change full-bright and glowing settings or even replace entire textures if necessary. Still, they're all very lightweight.

The AI also takes care of EEP. At the very least, it generates a custom EEP daycycle for the sim with realistic Sun and Moon movements, depending on where the sim is supposed to be located. But it can also define a whole number of daycycles and add a script that switches between them monthly, weekly or even daily. If you want to, even the weather can change. Sunny, cloudy, overcast, you can optionally even have rain or snow all over the whole sim.

Speaking of which, if the EEP daycycles change over the year, so do the objects on the sim. Most objects outside have at least one snowy version. Snowdrifts and piles of snow pop up in winter. While we're at it, plants change over the year. Flowers start and stop blooming, trees gradually change the colours of their leaves in autumn and shed them in late autumn, not to have any leaves on them until well into spring. That is, of course, everything depending on where you want your sim to be located.

The sim in general and certain parcels individually can be configured to rez and de-rez decoration for certain holidays at certain times in the year. Holidays from all over the world are supported. This can go all the way to a whole German-style Christmas market rezzing in a certain area and de-rezzing after Christmas.

You want public transit? Buses? Streetcars? Trains? Ferries? No problem: The AI crafts the vehicles, it builds the tracks if necessary, it defines the keyframes for vehicle motion, and it puts custom scripts into the vehicles that control not only vehicle motion, but also doors, sounds, even lights and rezzing and de-rezzing personnel if necessary.

Speaking of which, the AI can bring the sim to life with animesh and, where they work better, NPCs. The latter can even be interactive. Of course, there can be scripted sources of various ambient noises all over the place to make it more immersive.

If you want your sim listed on OpenSimWorld, the AI can do that for you. It can install one of the current official beacons, an older-style beacon running up-to-date code or a completely custom beacon running up-to-date code. In this case, it also assumes control over your OpenSimWorld account, or it creates one if you don't have one, it generates the entry on the website, it configures it correctly and even writes a description. It either matches the rating in the listing with that on your sim, or it figures out which rating the sim should have and adjusts it both in-world an in the listing.

By the way: AI means "Artificial Intelligence". If you don't want child avatars on your sim, the AI will put up signs that say that child avatars are not allowed or even install an improved, optimised childgate script. But it will not rate your sim Adult just to keep kids out even though the sim itself would work perfectly well with a Moderate or even General rating.

Things really get interesting if you want the AI to build a freebie sim for you. A fully stocked one, of course, no matter if you want some small boutiques on a town sim or a sim that's nothing else than a huge mall.

For starters, there'll be avatar stuff. The AI can stock your body shop with

• what few actually legal mesh bodies there are
• the usual full-perm suspects in their most recent versions
• bodies, heads and other things that are exclusive to another sim, copybotted and god-moded by the AI for your convenience and hung up either full-perm or no-transfer
• any of the above, but improved and optimised by the AI with a remark on the box art, either full-perm or no-transfer, optionally even re-branded as your original creation with all-new box art (the AI will resist being asked to do so with legal, open-source bodies)
• scratch-made mesh bodies, heads etc. that outclass all of the above, and again, no-transfer by default and optionally full-perm

Any of these are supplied with all accessory boxes if there are any.

Most items are probably clothes. The AI can whip up more boxes of these than even Grimm offers. The clothes are rigged for whichever bodies you have in your body shop. And they're rigged so perfectly for all of them that nobody will ever need alphas for these clothes in combination with the bodies from this sim. The same clothes come in several variants; for example, certain female clothes in particular are rigged skin-tight, with enough room for mesh underwear, with enough room for mesh bodysuits and even with enough room for mesh hosiery. Styles can range from practical to retro to historical to futuristic to cosplay to badass to formal to partywear to bridalwear to chic to bling-bling to sexy to racy to fetishwear and outright NSFW, depending on what avatars they're for, and they're all optional.

Of course, all clothes, footwear, jewellery, accessories etc. support PBR with a fallback that you can choose, either Blinn-Phong or everything baked on.

The original, AI-generated decoration on the sim, the buildings, the streets and paths, the plants etc. and the scripts can optionally be boxed up and offered in stores itself. If you want to, the AI can generate even more similar content to fill up the stores some more.

The wholly original content in the stores can be offered

• for free and copy/transfer
• for free, but no-transfer
• for in-game currencies, if available, and no-transfer (the prices will be calculated from prices in other payware stores, the Kitely Market and the Second Life Marketplace, and they can be adjusted within a small margin prior to generation)
• in all three cases, optionally no-modify or with loose textures
• free and full-perm content can optionally come with full dev kits including raw meshes and UV maps

The AI puts all original content under a license of your choice, even helping you choose. Copyright/all rights reserved is an option as well as the public domain. Notecards with license texts and, if applicable, links to the original license definitions are added to all assets.

It optionally adds all original content to your inventory, neatly organised into folders. You can choose to get

• everything boxed
• everything unboxed
• both
• plus boxes with the loose parts (meshes, textures and maps, scripts, license notecards etc.)

The AI can also download all the loose components to your computer if you choose so, all the way to raw development files (meshes as Blender files, textures as Photoshop and GIMP files etc.).

And it can even generate git repositories and upload all loose components to these if the license allows, and if you have a git account somewhere, and be it on your own machine.

The AI can do all this within the blink of an eye. All that takes time are the downloads to your computer, the uploads to your computer and/or a git server and, of course, the sim rezzing around you.


By the way, there used to be a time when building your own sim and even crafting your own stuff was part of the fun. Nowadays, not only does using the same mostly ripped buildings as everyone else beat making your own ones, but downloading OARs and leaving them largely unmodified save for the OSW beacon beats building your own sim. And ready-made mesh skyboxes stolen from Second Life beat decorating sims.


heise online English wrote the following post Sun, 13 Oct 2024 23:32:00 +0200 New GPU technology creates dynamic 3D worlds

In cooperation with AMD, the Coburg University of Applied Sciences has developed a GPU technology that generates complex virtual scenes in milliseconds.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/New-GPU-technology-creates-dynamic-3D-worlds-9979465.html?wt_mc=sm.red.ho.mastodon.mastodon.md_beitraege.md_beitraege&utm_source=mastodon

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There are two things that I keep noticing when exploring the Hypergrid: One, many many sims lack illumination in any shape or form. It is as if many sim builders are completely unaware of the concept of in-world objects shining a light on something else. Basically, when it's dark, the sims are actually dark. It actually pays off for the sims to have the default EEP or Windlight settings with their unnaturally bright nightly ambient light.

Two, however: They still aren't really that dark everywhere. Some things glow in the dark although they shouldn't. Entire buildings, plants, street segments, what-have-you.

I've got a few possible explanations for this phenomenon.

The first one is that the builders simply don't care or even notice when something that isn't a building is glowing. If it's a plant, they don't pay attention to such small details. If it's a building, it might be more of a case of convenience: It's easier to make the interior of a building, furniture included, full bright than to go find and install lamps which, in turn, is easier than making your own working lamps. And it's even easier to make the whole building full bright.

The other two are based on my suspicion that the sim builders have their viewers permanently set to midday. But why would they?

Either if they find their sims too dark at night, switching to midday is even easier and more convenient than making anything glow, let along educating yourself about full bright first.

Or they simply use OpenSim on absolute toasters. In order to have FPS beyond a slideshow, they have to turn everything in the graphics settings off that they possibly can. I'm not just talking about shadows, normal/specular maps and water reflections. I'm also taking about transparent water, atmospheric shaders and all light sources that can possibly be turned off, i.e. everything except the Sun, the Moon and ambient.

They may actually have tried installing light sources on sims before, but they didn't see a difference. Or if they did see a difference, the FPS took a nose dive at the same time.

So if they justify the lack of illumination on their sims with, "Nobody else has lights on their sims either," it's either because illumination is so rare in OpenSim that they genuinely only ever end up on sims with no light sources. Or it's because they can't see the light sources after having turned them off in the viewer.

Those who are simply too lazy and who don't care while having a powerful enough machine will end up having a hard time with PBR. It'll simply look drab to them in-doors. That's because PBR heavily relies on light sources that are not ambient. But if you don't install any lights in building, and you have shadows on, ambient light is the only light you have.

I guess the only way to mitigate this would be if all those super-popular freebie sims that see more visitors than Lbsa Plaza only offered lamps that actually act as light sources and buildings with already built-in lamps. If sensible, these lamps would have to be scripted and emit light by default, otherwise they'd have to emit light permanently.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #SimBuilding #PetPeeve

It's a pity that so many sim owners apparently can't be bothered to ever test what they have on their sims. And I'm not even talking about fixing what's obviously broken.

Some two years ago, I've already mentioned sims that can't be navigated because the builder and owner has never tested the ways that mere mortals are supposed to get around the sim. This can range from footpaths that are unusuable because something is blocking them to teleporters that are necessary but non-functional or misconfigured.

In general, anything scripted may be failure-prone. It can be because the scripts need to be reset but weren't. It can be because the scripts are hopelessly outdated, especially if objects with stone-old scripts from the 2000s end up on a sim running YEngine. Or it can be because a script is written in OSSL, but OSSL is deactivated on the sim.

Or, better yet, objects that ought to be scripted, that everyone would expected to be scripted, but that aren't scripted for some reason. And be it because the sim builder has unknowingly picked up an empty copy.

All issues that could have been discovered and ideally fixed if the sim owner had taken some time and effort to test them. Instead, they just drop stuff on their land, and they're done with it. Or they load an entire OAR, blindly assuming it works perfectly out of the box.

Experience from travelling around the Hypergrid should bring with it the realisation that not exactly few OARs are buggy, ranging from Linda Kellie sales boxes of which no intact copies exist anymore to the bathroom door in her Freebie Mall 2.0 which I've only ever seen fixed once to Clarice Alelaria's Avataria sim in which the majority of sales boxes have mangled permissions and can't be acquired. And I'm not even talking about dropping old OARs that heavily rely on advanced scripts, made in times when there was only XEngine, onto a sim running YEngine.

The common lack of feedback doesn't help. Some visitors prefer to downrate entire sims on OpenSimWorld because scripted stuff doesn't work over letting the sim owners know so that they could go and fix the issue. But sadly, some sim owners take each bug report concerning any of their sims as a personal attack, or at least they completely ignore bug reports. No wonder nobody ever reports bugs.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #PetPeeve #SimBuilding #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost

On some sims, you have to "cheat" to get around the place, either fly (if that's allowed) or use the map to teleport around (if you can see anything on the map). The reason is because the interesting and/or important places on the sim can't be walked to, nor are there teleporters that'd take you there.

Usually, the sim owner doesn't know because they only ever teleport everywhere with their personal TP list or by use of the map. Or they simply fly everywhere. They've never walked anywhere on their own sims, so they don't know that it's impossible. And if they don't need a network of teleporters, they don't notice that everyone else does if walking is already impossible.

Seriously, please build your sims in such a way that at least all important places can be walked to. If there's water in the way, either build a bridge. If that's impossible for whichever reason, install two boat rezzers, one on each side. If you build pathways and bridges, walk them to be sure that they can be walked. If they can't, fix that.

You may also want to install a network of teleporters. They're useful for the impatient, for those with no sense of orientation and, of course, if places on your sim absolutely can't be reached by foot.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Sim #SimBuilding #PetPeeve