Examples of the broken viewer land impact calculations of OS 0.9

 With Opensim 0.9, we got a change in physics engine to ubODE. This has made a number of noticeable improvements (linksets not moving around slightly when you link them anymore is so nice!), but it also broke a lot of mesh content that was made prior to the change.

Most noticeably, mesh with a hole through it (such as doorways and arches) got broken, making them impossible to move past unless you unlink them and make the offending pieces phantom, or re-upload them. 

But arguably the worst change was the total breaking of land impact values shown in the build menu. It seems that now the land impact value shown is inflated by around 3-5 times. The physically larger the mesh becomes, the wider the discrepancy. 

For example, this piece of terrain mesh in Second life is 7 PE/LI. As you can see from me standing on it, it is rather large, so 7PE with full physics is reasonable. 

But in Opensim, it now shows as an eye-watering value of 31. An over-estimate of nearly 4.5 times (7x4.5=31.5)!

As you can see, the LOD settings are exactly the same. The scale is the same. You'll have to take my word that the physics model is too as that info is not shown in the build menu.

But that is not all. Although the number shown is wildly inflated, it does not actually impact on the number of prims used on your sim. Your real land impact will still only count each physical part in a linkset or group of objects. Just as previously.

So......understandably, people are confused. This is also not great for attracting merchants to the space for obvious reasons.

I hope this can be addressed in future OS releases but from what I hear, it wont be. So.....

I think the following example best sums up how well you can trust the land impact calculations as shown in the build menu.....

Here we have a humble mesh plane, subdivided once. 1 LI. And next to it its twin brother, also 1 LI....

So....together, that would be two LI, right?

Dont be foolish! That would make too much sense. Its three, you idiot. (Bear in mind that in SL, each plane would be 0.5 PE = 1 PE total when linked)

Except when it IS two, like those other physically larger, more complex planes that you subdivided THREE times right behind the smaller ones.....

And the problem seems to get more acute the bigger the mesh is. This example shows a dune from my new "world in a box" kit. According to Opensim, its a whopping 239 LI! 

And here it is in SL, where we can see the ACTUAL impact is 20. Which I think is fine for such  huge mesh object with physics. Look how tiny I am on top! :)

So yeah. My new way of explaining Land Impact to people is to look at the data under the "Mesh information" in the "object" tab. 

1 sculpted prim = 256 tris. I think that gives most people at least a vague calculus to judge if a mesh is "worth it" or not. 

Better Sim design in Opensim - some tips and tricks

Opensim has some particular quirks that sometimes make it hard to build responsive environments. More controlled environments such as games or pre-designed experiences have ways of mitigating these issues that are not available to us. That said, there are ways of building and ways of thinking about sim design that will help you deliver a more responsive experience.

This is aimed at people who want their regions to be visited and care about the user experience. This is for people who want a world they can confidently use VR goggles and not throw up. They are good tips for anyone to follow but if your a hobbyist/casual users its probably of less interest.

1. Build small
I know in Opensim its really really tempting to go for the biggest amount of land you can get, then proceed to cram it with as much stuff as you can find. if this is your private space and you have a great computer and/or you dont care about framerates and load times then fine. But if you are expecting visitors, this is a BAD move.

The larger the space you have, the more sparse it needs to be. This is because issues like LOD, LOS and Overdraw (which you will read more about below) conspire against you in larger environments. In a game situation for example, objects that are on your screen are pre-loaded and rendered and anything not on your screen (Line Of Sight/Field Of View) is "culled" essentially meaning it does not exist and will not place burden on your CPU. Not so in Opensim.

You can easily test this in any moderately full sim with Firestorms Phototools. Bring up the FPS monitor and cam to the corner of the sim. You will notice your frame rate jump and your camera and avatar movements will become more responsive.

Now, slowly cam or turn from the outer corner into the center of the sim. See the drop in the numbers? If you do this in a 1x1 sim, the effect is barely noticeable, but try it in a dense 2x2 or 3x3 and I am SURE you will see what I am talking about. Its common to loose 25+% of your FPS when staring inland as opposed to looking out to sea. Even system terrain with no objects rezzed will effect this.

I want to stress that this is normal behavior. Something is not "wrong". Its just something to consider. Every object that you rez has a rendering cost. Rez a lot of objects and your CPU struggles. Designers (like myself) can only help customers so far by designing low poly and trying to make effective LOD models (but this can be a crapshoot as LOD models can be very context specific, more below). The rest is down to the sim designer and how they choose to use objects within the chosen space.

Therefore if you want to build a "dense" environment such as a city or large, thick forest I strongly recommend using nothing bigger than 2x2 (4 Regions). If your going for high detail/density, its much better to build a series of smaller worlds rather than try to cram it all into one big worldspace.


2. Dense on the outside, sparse on the inside
If you MUST build in a larger area than 2x2, consider building the densest parts of the build on the outer sims and trying to leave the center relatively sparse. This way, when users are looking towards the center of the world, the CPU will not suddenly get hit by looking at 3-4 regions of dense geometry all at once. if you want two densely built up areas, separate them by as much distance as possible and make the other areas/sims less dense.


3. Think LOD, think LOS
LOS - Line Of Sight (also called FOV or Field of View). Related to point two. Say you are building a roleplay sim and somewhere you want a large settlement. its more beneficial to build this settlement to the corner or side of the sim rather than the center.

As I mentioned before, in games anything not in your direct FOV/LOS is culled and effectively ceases to exist. In Opensim if you are in a house with your draw distance at full and there is a huge forest behind you outside, that forest is still there, being calculated and sucking up your computational power even though you cant actually see it.

Say you have a 3x3 region and build in the center sim. Now, no matter which direction the user looks there is an extra sim full of geometry to render in every direction on top of whatever is actually in the sim your standing in. Those sims are not very far away, and so probably 90% of objects will be at the Med/Low LOD stages (depending on scale as mentioned above). Also conversely, if your user is in ANY other sim, they have to render the entire settlement too!

Build in the corner then you have empty ocean to one side, 3 sims at Med/Low LOD on the other side and the rest of the sims so far away most objects should be culled completely or at the lowest LOD stage. This will result in improved framerates both inside and outside your "built up" area.
LOD - Level Of Detail. If you are a designer and in control of this aspect, you can greatly reduce the burden on users computers by designing effective LOD. The problem with LOD as I eluded to above is that it is often very context specific. Items need a different LOD if they will be placed inside or outside for example. If placed outside the object will need multiple, fairly accurate models, as they will possibly be viewed from far away. An object inside probably only needs 1 LOD stage and can then be culled completely after that, as they will never be seen by anyone not directly in the house/castle/whatever. But that depends how big the building is, of course.

LOD is also effected by scale. So somewhere between distance and scale is the "sweet spot". Getting it right is a matter of practice, observation and adjustment. It can be like pulling teeth at times. Not exactly my favorite part of the process, in case you cant tell.



4. Be aware of Overdraw
Overdraw is a thing which happens when too many alpha textures are present on screen and your computer cant decide which is the correct order to display them. So it displays all of them at once. You may have looked at a tree or plant and noticed a strange effect where you can see the leaves both in front and behind at the same time and the object seems in a weird semi-solid semi-transparent state. Happens with grass most commonly. That is overdraw. It hurts your brain to look at it and it hurts your computers brain too! If you build big areas full of plants, I can almost promise you this is why you are experiencing lag.

Alpha textures are most often found on plants and trees. Most plants and trees use "alpha blending" which causes overdraw. But we now have the option of changing that. Select the face of the plant in the build menu, go to the textures tab and select "Alpha Masking". Then type a number between 10 and 100 into the box below.

Alpha Blending allows pixels to have both transparency and colour. Alpha masking does not allow this. Pixes must be transparent OR coloured. The number you just entered above is the threshold ratio. The higher the number, the more pixels are moved from "colour" over to "transparent". This saves your computer from having to calculate this aspect and eliminates overdraw. Leading to significant performance benefits for most users. The downside is it makes lighting look harsher and as Opensim has pretty crappy shaders it can make some things look ugly. If only we had shadow maps.

More on overdraw here: SL forums: Grass Lag


5. Stay away from sculpties
I know, I know. I sell mesh so I would say that right? But its pretty hard to defend sculpties these days. You can nearly always do it better with mesh both in terms of beauty and efficiency. Consider that EVERY sculpty has 1024 Tris no matter what it is, large or small. Most sculpted items can be made with significantly less than this. Rez 10 sculpties and thats 10,000+ tris! You can build a small mansion with that.

If your still working with sculptie tools do yourself and your users a favor and stop it right now and learn Blender. It isnt that hard, if you can "get" sculpties, you can "get" mesh. and there are plenty of resources for education out there these days.

Start with:
*Camera control and interface
*Mesh editing and manipulation
*UV mapping

Then spice it up with rigging and baking once you get the hang of those 3 key areas.

Sculpties are fine for hobbyists but if your making a world designed to be visited then leave the sculpties at home!


6. Recyle
ALWAYS reuse objects and textures wherever you can. The Kitely Evergreen Island is a good example of this. Break that whole island down and I would guestimate (I didnt keep  exact count) no more than a few dozen meshes and textures were used to create it. Whatever the number it is LOW. Thats why it loads fast and responds well.


7. Tiny Textures
Just as the best meshes use the fewest number of polygons possible, the best builds and objects also use the smallest texture size to get the job done. Its easy when designing to "not see the forest for the trees" and make every texture surface super crisp and high definition. When your working on a single object its easy to get lost in the detail. But texture size has a bigger effect on load times and lag than mesh complexity.

It is also a bad trend set in Second Life (both users and designers are equally to blame here). People should understand that higher texture quality comes at a significant cost. People have developed bad habits of expecting textures to be super crisp at every zoom level. Which is ridiculous.

If you spend all day with your cam zoomed into tiny details and grumbling that the textures dont stay sharp, sorry to tell you but you should probably get outside more. Just dont put your face too close to anything or you might get cranky at the poor resolution of RL ;).

Ideally, only textures that cover large areas (such as terrain or main areas of brick/and stonework on buildings) should have 1024x1024 textures. Everything smaller can usually be done with 512x512 or smaller. In the process of designing anything, you should always ask yourself if the textures could be smaller.

Another great thread from the SL Forum archives on this issue right here. Note in particular the very useful chart on page 1, second post.

8. Know your Viewer
While all of the above is well and good, it can all get thrown out of the window when it comes to viewers. Settings in your users viewers such as LOD Level, Draw Distance and Shadows/Materials can have a drastic impact on how your users see your worlds and the performance they experience.

The only way to ensure your users see your world as intended is to recommend the viewer settings you used while building. Try not to stray too far from the default settings of whichever viewer you use to make life easier for your end users.

Many users do not realize how much control they can have via the viewers settings and it is best to recommend what you feel is essential via your website, world page and/or in-world.

I hope that was a helpful rant and I have given you some ideas for better world building!

Why opening a store in Kitely makes more sense now than ever before!

Its probably no secret by now that I am a bit of a Kitely fanboy.

At the recent OSCC2014 (OpenSim Community Conference, for the uninitiated) Ilan Tochner, CEO of Kitely laid out his case for the Kitely Hypergrid Market 1 year on from its opening. Besides this presentation containing a quote from a rather hansome, rooty looking green fellow, it also made some fantastic points that I think it is valuable to distill somewhere for reference.

You can see the full presentation here:

Ilan Tochner - Kitely Hypergrid Market - one year later....

My main take-away points:

1. Growth on all fronts - Listings, sales and interest are all on the increase. 3000+ unique items, 6000+ variations, serving 49 of the 204 "known" grids. Its pretty impressive.

As Ilan noted in his presentation, my sales have eclipsed my SL takings twice now once in May and more recently, last month. Obviously, not every month is that strong, and in the long run, my main income still comes from SL. But I have made close to 2500USD in my first year, and that's not counting takings in KC, which I use to pay my featured item fees, membership and land fees, and sales are not slowing down. They are growing. Slowly. But steadily. Which brings us to.....

2. Export = Win! - My export sales account for over 50% of my trade in OS, and contrary to what may be expected by most, I have plenty of repeat sales. In fact, some of my "older" items are still my strongest sellers. It has always been my opinion that DRM is not beneficial for sellers or consumers, and it feels good to be vindicated somewhat in this regard by the facts. I also have many repeat customers, and new ones turning up weekly.

3. Kitely and High Fidelity - I am very excited by this. Kitely market can and will deliver to HiFi and possibly many other virtual platforms as they come online. Anyone thinking that a store in Opensim means taking a step backward should think again. Kitely Market is poised and ready to take advantage of new virtual worlds and potential markets in a way that nobody else out there is.

Demystifying Kitely in 2016!! (UPDATED) - busting some common misconceptions.....

Kitelys pricing structure is confusing.

2016 - Kitelys price model has been greatly simplified in recent years and now a starter world is just 14.95! A Standard world is 19.95 and a full, 16 region world is just 39.95! The whole "time based" concept has been withdrawn.

You can also find very inexpensive rentals at my new Worlds End Estates sim. Parcels start from just 1USD per month for 1000 prims! The area is beautifully landscaped and a great place for users to start out or have a small home.

Worlds End Estates - Oakwoods

Kitely is empty.

Kitelys decentralized model can certainly make it seem like there is nobody around. Possibly my biggest criticism of Kitely is its lack of sense of "place". It would be nice to see the welcome center expanded to a 4 or 9 region mega with welcome area, shops and maybe a few residentials. A small mainland, if you will. It would also make sense that this was the main hypergrid portal once that is switched on.

There is no denying we are a small community right now, mostly consisting of builders. As anyone who has ever attempted to fill even just a single region with compelling content will know, its not a quick or easy job. I predicted last year that 2014 would be the year Kitely users come out of their cocoons and though it is still early days we are starting to see signs of the social element coming together. Residential sims are starting to open and the April Hunt is in full swing. However, there is no denying Kitely is a builders paradise right now which brings me to my next point. Why should you bother coming at all?

2016 - Kitely is feeling a lot less desolate these days. With plenty of events and meetups going on each week. If your lost. Join the inworld group Kitely Community and you will likely find someone to help you or to chat with. Might even be me :).

Why should I come to Kitely (as a Merchant)

Kitely has a small market now and a small userbase. However, its marketplace is configured so that you can sell to any avatar on any opensim grid (if you want to). Not only this, but as the marketplace is fairly new, it is easy to get in and establish your brand right from the early stages. How many of us wish we were there right at the beginning of SL? All those businesses with thousands of great reviews of their crappy 10,000 prim tea-pot. How I envy them. They still do well because they were there first. They have a higher prestige because of that.

Bringing your brand not only gives you the oportunity to embed yourself as an established hypergrid merchant, the act of more creators setting up naturally brings more interest and therefore more customers. Second Life is saturated and the market is flat and/or contracting. Kitely is much smaller but the market is wide open and growing. If nothing else, Kitely market can be seen as a minimum investment platform for your business growth strategy.  Fact is you never know where it might lead you.

The Kitely Market itself is impressive, much less painful to work with than its SL counterpart and has some pretty nifty features. A lot of merchants are scared that they can only sell “Export” items. That is, items without perm limitations. The truth is that you as creator are in TOTAL control. Perms work as normal, but Kitely market also has a 4^th perm – Export. Check this box as you create your listing to allow export….or not. Your choice.

2016 - All above is still true. I have switched to export only and my sales still continue to grow more than two years after this article was first published.

Why should I come to Kitely as a “resident”?

This is a harder question to answer, as generally every resident has widely varying agenda and expectations. Generally speaking, Kitely has a lot to offer. From Entertainment venues to educational areas. Cheap land means you will never be short of a home, and recently the first residential and roleplay projects (my own included) are starting to spring up. I can only speak for myself here but the next phase has to be finding some people who share the vision of what I am doing to take it forward. Any disgruntled fantasy/medieval roleplayers should head over to The Township of Llanfarian to see what I am cooking up there.

The Marketplace is a source of quality content that is growing at a steady click (EDIT 2016 - Nearly 6500 individual listings, not counting the myriad of variations). I am confident some of the best premium content in OS can be found there. 

If you are the kind of person who likes getting in on the ground level, helping out and building something cool….I would say Kitely is at the right phase for you now. If you are a “social butterfly” who wants a great avi, great venues and great social scene with minimal effort on your part……well sorry. We are not quite there yet. Some people what to be part of whats going on now, some want to be part of the future.

Plenty to get involved with

My creations are not safe in Opensim/on Kitely

Well....yes and no. As a point of fact, your creations are only safe when you do not upload them to any service. Once you put it out there, people can and will steal it from you. People like to point the finger at Opensim and say how everything there is stolen. Seemingly missing the point: Where did all that content come from in the first place? Exactly. "Fortress" SL.

Of course, lets also not kid ourselves that everyone in SL is running around fully paid up. Wherever you have commerce, you also have counterfitting. So, we have established that your pretties are not safe in SL and that those pretties often get exported to opensim. Glad your with me so far. 

This is the part where a lot of creators hit a cognitive wall. So if your stuff is getting stolen anyway, can it be reasonably assumed that if the opportunity was available, at least a percentage of those people would pay up for legitimate content if it was available? I think so, and the balance of my store seems to back that assertion up. That is money I would not have made otherwise.

Of course to some, the time invested will not be worth the income received. I certainly am not in this primarily for the money. I like to build and being able to sell my work is a happy bonus. Many people feel cooped up in SL and I can honestly say that recently I was in SL looking for shop space again and the whole deal with parcels and primcounts just made me give up. Many of us "creators" are artists first and business people second.  To truly see the benefit of moving to Kitely, you have to look at the creative possibilities as well as the financial aspects. But to come back to point, if you build it "they" will steal it, so why not maximize your earnings by reaching as many honest people as possible?

Before Kitely Marketplace this was not possible. Now it is.

Small grid owners are fly-by-night ....or wackos .....or technically inept. Or ALL THREE!

Plenty of small Opensim Grids come and go, but Kitely is different. Both Ilan and Oren are experts in their fields. They are responsive, attentive and open for new ideas. They have a clear vision (a BIG one) of where they want to go and a plan to achieve it. They have always been as good as their word.

2016 - Kitely has hypergrid. Told you so :P lol

Just getting the Hypergrid market off the boards is a remarkable achievement and should speak volumes to how serious these chaps are about what they do. 

Well, that's about it. Hopefully this post will be useful to point a few people at the next time you run into these kind of questions. 

Do you think I missed something? Is there some other question you always get that breaks a little piece of your sanity every time you hear it? Or perhaps you have another take on an issue? Feel free to comment :)

Why Kitely? - A Merchants Perspective

2013 was not a good year for merchants in Second Life. There were points this year where I could have sworn that Linden Labs were actively trying to drive people away. I wont go into the meat of the matter here, but my main peeve points last year were:

1. The New TOS - All your prims are belong to us!
2. The Digital Taxman - I live in Europe, why the heck should I give my details to the IRS?
3. Marketplace Madness - Listings disappearing and reappearing, merchants not getting the funds from sales, not being able to cancel featured items, or being billed for them each hour, every hour.

I have always had a foot out in the open metaverse, but more as a traveler and casual builder, for as much the reason that there was never a platform for merchants to sell their creations for opensim anyway. But it was about the time that all this was going on in SL, that I heard Kitely were launching their Hypergrid Marketplace.

I had been in Kitely previously, but drifted away from it as my store gained in popularity in SL. I decided to come back and list a few items and its been about 6 months now and to be honest, I only log into SL these days to answer customer queries and chat to the odd old friend.

Kitely ticks so many boxes with me that its going to be hard for me to explain why without coming off as some kind of gushy fan-boy.....but I will do my best.

Firstly, if your in it for the money at this stage......you will probably be disappointed. Hypergrid delivery has not been rolled out yet and sales are from within the Kitely community mostly. Don't get me wrong. Though I have done surprisingly well, the takings are still dwarfed by my SL sales. But in my opinion, if your looking at it this way then you are missing the best part.

You love to build right? I mean, I do, so I cant imagine your in the creation business if you hate the act of creation. In SL, I could at best afford a whole region IF I was prepared to fork over my entire takings back to the lab for the privilege, and occasionally take a hit in the pocket on a bad month.

In Kitely, my takings are lower but at the incredibly low price for a starter region I can easily cover my costs for a region for the next 8-9 months with just my takings in KC. Anything paid for in USD is money in the bank, and now I have no region in SL, that's money in the bank too.

The effect of this is that I no longer feel under "commercial pressure". What I mean by this is I don't feel the same compulsion to monetize my sim in the way I am forced in SL in order to pay the bills. In fact, I am starting a residential medieval sim and relegating my commercial store to a skybox. I feel free to create what I want rather than trying to find niches and "hot" ideas.

So I started trying to convince you by saying "don't come for the money" but lets review my position.

Before Kitely

• 1 region in SL that is paid for just this month
• Some burger money each month

After Kitely

• 1 Region in Kitely that is paid for this year.
• more burger money + all that wasted tier

Of course when I closed my store in SL, my sales dropped. But so did my expenses, which left me at a substantial net gain.

So forget it, come for the money! But come for the freedom too.