I'm having WindLight withdrawal. It just ain't the same, taking snapshots of an old sky that looks so dull…
compared to the evolution of the First Look: WindLight viewer. And not just that, but the ambient lighting on everything else is absent. As blogged earlier by Zen Linden, WindLight's gone "heads-down" for awhile to add new features and fix bugs, and while I've fancied the thought of building a viewer — or maybe snatching a more readily-accessible internal build if that becomes available — I don't really get great pleasure out of experiences that can't easily be shared.
I love being able to tell Residents, "Give it a spin and show me what you come up with!" which is exactly what I did with WindLight, and will do again, in several weeks' time or so. But until then, my attentions will be focused elsewhere — like helping triage First Look: Voice feedback on our Issue Tracker.
I'm looking forward to creating an ample collection of skies to share; I've already had a fair amount of hands-on experience with WindLight and I want more. When taking snapshots like these:
I often used tweaked or extensively modified sky settings. There are so many shades and nuances and more extreme effects you can pull off; it's rich. I want to believe that in the future, designing killer skies will be regarded in a similar capacity to being a skillful landscaper, well-trained in the terraforming tools.
What's particularly cool is, even though WindLight has many sliders (and these will change in further iterations), the changes you make are live — one of my qualms with the old-skool "Move Moves Sun" is that the sky takes a few moments to reflect its actual state, which allows for fancy trickage like black suns, but at the same time, the delays are irritating when trying to setup a photo shoot. Not to mention if you're clumsy with the mouse, it can be difficult. I'd love to literally paint in the sun, moon, stars, and other astral bodies, tho. Even some sort of pressure-sensitivity would be grand, like I'm used to in ArtRage.
Regardless of what happens next, right now, many ideas have flushed forth from this opening of the heavens. Some of them are recapitulations of classics. Remember when ripple water came out and Resis said the terrain should be updated to match? That wish is even more pressing now. I'd love to be able to even paint on terrain textures and have greater control over crossfading; the current height-based system, while it's lasted us this long, isn't the most intuitive. Expect even sexier ripple water to be enjoyed in elemental tandem too.
Another observation I have is that through innovations like WindLight and sculpties, Second Life is looking more a game, and I don't mean in its social mechanics, but its visual quality. People used to eye candy expect the same here, coupled with the flexibility of user-created content. Sound continues to be overlooked, however, and I've hardly heard any requests for better built-in support for ambient sounds. That's what I'm here for, to highlight and showcase those opportunities, so those who can, will.
Let's combat myndopia together — in addition to the much-mentioned obvious, what overlooked stagnation desperately needs a makeover?
I miss windlight as well. I eagerly await its return.
I thought I would hate voice, especially with me being one of those girls who is not a girl in rl. However thanks to MorphVox, my voice can match my av. My rl voice would be very disturbing coming out of my cute little avatar. I just want voice to come out in more places. It is so much fun to hear everyone!
Torley,
If I am half way right Gwyneth just did a recompile of Windlight under XCode (Mac Only), albeit using a non-custom JPEG2000 library (slower).
You may want to give it a try.
I'm sorry to go completely off-topic, but that tower in the main picture made me think of this thread: http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1268&category=Environment
Me three.
My hold build at SL4B was made with 'Windlight' lightning in the back of my head. Now… well.. it sucks.
I was able to log in with the WindLight viewer yesterday. I hadn't even tried it since the 1.17 update as I just assumed it wouldn't work, but I noticed someone had posted an image on flickr saying they could still log in with the 1.16 FirstLook viewer.
Not sure if it causes any problems (I did buy a painting at "Mill Pond" and never received it, but I think that was an unrelated problem).
I was a bit distraught (!) at not being able to use WindLight any more so was very happy to see it working after a few days of using the regular viewer. Give it a try. It crashed several times which I don't normally experience, but again I think that may have been due to grid issues, not sure.
Cheers
ps. I meant to add that I posted some photos on flickr taken yesterday at the "Maximum Minimum" sim, using the WindLight viewer and Vint Falken's excellent "Pirate" settings. Great stuff Vint btw.
Well, something I like to see implemented/changed one day is to have more input controls. In vehicle scripting, the input controls are used, forward, back, left, right, up, down, 'strafe' left and 'strafe' right. And of course mouseclicks.
While that may be sufficient for vehicles, there are lots of other potential uses, if you could use the whole keyboard. Think of a synthesizer where each key represents a pattern or chord for example, or think a multiple choice device, which will accept answers a-z by simple pressing them, rather than chatting them.
Well, when watching a video of PSHome the physics really grabbed me. Can you imagine physics being so stable that you can give your trust to a physics-based pool table? Wow (:
Hey, Torley
I was really glad to see Windlight show up, even though my old system isn't up to supporting it. I remember talking with you about getting better control of skies and environmental effects months ago, especially for islands.
You recall what else was on the list of things that have stagnated for too long? Hehe.
Mini-islands: Smaller sized private spaces with low prim and av counts, in a price range more affordable to the average resident. SL has developed for way too long as a corporate fuedalism. It sure would be nice to give a wider variety of people the control and privacy options that Estate Owners have.
Mega-sized sims: Andrew wasn't happy about this one, and explained why arbitrarily large dimensions messed with the physics model. Except his suggestion was this became a big problem on the 100-km scale! Surely 1-km-square sims are possible…
Concurrency-optimized spaces: any possibility of creating a stripped-down physics and rendering model for guest avatars that would allow hundreds or eventually thousands access to the same event? It would be interesting to play around with subtle "sharding" effects such as designating the stage and immediate zone around an av fully visible while fading the audience further away into gray outlines, for instance. Part of that would be an adjustment of chat and voice settings - stage amplified, but you could only "hear" people within a couple meters of your av's position.
I could go on, but I'm sure you already knew that.
-Ana
@Grizzy: You alluded to this earlier at one of my Office Hours. Are you finding MorphVox does well for you? I tried it awhile ago and found the results for my male-to-female voice to be unsatisfactory. The TC Helicon boxes are serious voice modeling power, but overkill for my budget.
@starcomber: I may try that on my Mac but I mainly use Windows… thx for the heads-up!
@Patrick: For all the talk about flying saucers, that looks like some sort of flying chandelier… what a highly original design unlike sci-fi cliches. Reading on, it does look like a horseshoe crab. Bizarre. I wonder if Cubey Terra took some of his design cues from pages like that.
@Vint: Awe! I can almost think of an ad jingle, that everything tastes better with WindLight…
@Simondo: It didn't work for me and I just tried it. You still having luck? URLs to your Flickr piccies please?
@Daedalus: I agree, you have a very strong analogy there, I feel largely the same way. Also, you prolly know how higher-end synths have aftertouch, which means you can press a key, then press it further for even more expressiveness. Interestingly, there are alternative alphanumeric keyboards like the FrogPad which have chording principles… I'd also like to use analogue joysticks, with a greater range of variable motion.
@Day: Yeah, c'monnnn Havok 4!
I won't hype it beyond what it actually is (which I don't know, since I haven't used any internal builds with it yet), but it reminds me of how some old gambling devices in SL used physics, and of course, were unreliable and very easy to "cheat the dealer", as odd as that sounds.
@Ana: heyhey! Those are great points which need super-refreshes. Hmmm… re: mini-islands, would that be similar to the current "Openspaces" offered by Concierge — those need to be bought in blocks of 4 and have 1875 prims a region (due to various overhead) — but more targeted at the audience you suggested?
And is Andrew's info re: mega-sized regions like what he mentioned @ http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=337 ?
Also re: concurrency-optimized spaces, I remember this coming up before too in different sorts of threads, but sharing the same ideas. Whenever we have large events in Second Life, I hear this. There's certainly such a demand for it. What's interesting is potentially with voice, you can "listen in" to a place while not fully being there, there was a Studio Blacklight dev meeting this morning where Don Linden crashed out and he was still talking to all of us!
I'd love a seemingly limitless, seamless sort of grassy field to run through, and feel sooo free!
Torley yes it was still working last night for me (Monday morning SL time). I didn't bend or twist anything to make it work. I just hadn't 'uninstalled' the FirstLook build after the 1.17 update, and had been using the regular 1.17 viewer, and just tried starting up and logging in thru the 1.16 FirstLook viewer.. and voila it worked! It wasn't crashing for me like it was on the weekend, but then I only stayed in for an hour or so. (ps. the very kind artist at Mill Pond, Kristauf McDunnough, resent my painting & actually refunded me half the price for the trouble!)
I run on an Intel P4 with an nVidia 8600GTS card if that makes any difference? I was expecting messages like "you are using an old version, please update" or something like that, but no it just logs me in no problems. I'm at work now so can't check again for a few hours.
The pics are the first three (the "Farnsworth House" ones), taken on Sunday. hehe as I write this I'm realising I can't prove I took them on Sunday (not that you're asking me to!) but from what I've read I think that sim only opened late last week? Not quite sure tho.
Thanks Torley
wow I am not good with the html skillz
..but I think it still makes sense somehow.
Cheers
Some other things I wanted to add:
Hierarchy in primsets. You now have one root prim and everything follows that. If an avatar for example sits on a child prim and you move the child prim, the avatar remains where it is relative to the root prim.
Texture offset in pixels. To keep textures down, I like to put several textures on one larger texture. Or I put numbers 0-9 on a texture for a counter. That often results in weird percentages, I once tried making a box with dimensions 4×3x1, but it was hard to texture, because the sides then were 1/8th of the full texture width and to position it correctly, I had to work in 1/16th measures. It would be nice if I could just say, the left-most pixel here is 0, 32 and the width is 32 pixels and use square pixels.
To be honest, these three things were how I expected them to work when I first came to SL and started some building and scripting.
Torley,
So far MorphVox has been working great. People who do not know me or have not read my profile, usually do not suspect it is not my actual voice. Did you run the Voice Doctor when you used it? That helps learn your speech patterns and optimize the voices to work with yours.
Also unless you were using MorphVox Junior which is the free version, (the others have trials) you can make adjustments to the pre-existing voices. There is pitch and timbre, but also things about the way the voice sounds such as growl, breathiness, nasalness, harmonics etc. I spent about 30 minutes tweaking my voice to get it to sound like I wanted and have been using it since.
I've also found by talking with another friend who has an av of a different gender that it also depends a bit on what your voice sounds like in rl. I think your voice may be a bit deeper than mine. I am a baritone in rl while you seem to be more of a bass from what I've heard on your videos.
This is what I have found using it so far. I liked it enough to purchase it after I figured out how to adjust my voice. I have still been making minor tweaks, but am mostly happy with it.
Grizzy
Heyhey Tor, hope you don't mind if this became sort of an alternative feature discussion. I was never satisfied with Andrew's explanation. Perhaps it would have been better if he simply said "it's been tried on a larger cubical space and failed to meet performance standards". Has it been tried?
@Grizzy:
There's really that many options? I may have to check it out again. I shied off before because even the marketing sample voices were unconvincing. In fact MorphVox's samples seemed blatantly misleading - like on the "male-to-female" sample it sounded distinctly like they took a woman's natural voice and lowered it to sound male, rather than the other way around.
The trouble with all these products is they simply can't take a voice full of one gender's mannerisms and suddenly convert those to mannerisms of the opposite gender. Think about it - you probably know an older lady whose voice is at least as deep as most younger men, but no one mistakes her for male, do they? I think this simply won't work for most people unless they are already practiced in opposite gender mannerisms - varying vs. steadying tone, chest resonance vs. nose resonance, hissing vs. grunting, etc.
I will have to check it out again and see what of these they have accomplished some semblance of.
-Ana
Of course when I said "simply can't" I meant "technically formidable". To really thoroughly convert your inner avatar voice and share it in a virtual world, you'd need an AIS capable of subvocal recognition (or even a direct read of the brain's verbal centers), parsing the meaning of natural language, and synthesis of a custom, natural sounding voice, all in near-realtime.
The parts are coming together but near-realtime is a ways off yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis
Ananda,
I appreciate your comments. I'm one of the developers who works on MorphVOX and plays in Second Life. I'm a male in real life and I made the male-to-female samples for MorphVOX. The source voice is my own and the target voice is direct conversion of the source file without any touch-ups or makeovers. So the samples shouldn't be misleading
I agree that much of the quality you can get out of voice changing software depends on the speaker — source resonance, diction, accent, etc. So it isn't completely cut and dry to get someone to sound the opposite gender naturally. You need to work at it. The software only provides a mechanism for reducing the work it takes to change your pitch and timbre. And it does add some additional effects like Grizzy has mentioned.
We do quite a bit of customized voices adjustments for anyone who would like a unique voice for their character. Anyone who is interested in that can just contact voiceclinic[@]screamingbee.com for voice optimization.
We're also planning on creating custom voice packs specific for Second Life and I would invite any suggestions on what people might be interested in. So far we've talked to the Luskwood folks to get their help in designing voices to match the avatars they create.
Regards,
Gwygory
I have tried just about every voice changing program I could find and of all of them I think MorphVOX is the best. I even use MorphVOX when roleplaying as a guy on world of warcraft and everyone really thinks I’m a guy and they all trip out when I get on my gnome and change the voice on MorphVOX to the gnome. You have to remember that everyone had a diff voice so depending on your type of voice and the clarity of your voice recording during voice Dr at the start of the program you will need to tweak your voice a bit with the pitch and timbre to get it just right. Also if MorphVOX is acting funny or whatever you may need to update your system get every up to date update for everything on your computer will help it run better there for MorphVOX will work better and faster the only problem I ever had with morphvox was about a 3 second delay as I chat.
Lindens are sadists, right? Why else would we still see the WindLight startup screen on the Voice FirstLook? *sobs*
PS. Where can we admire some Torley stuff at SL4B?
Oops,
when I went to the MorphVOX page again I realized I misidentified it with the other major product that comes up again on searches. Sorry about the slam.
And Torley,
Ask Andrew what kind of SL simulators he might be able to host on one of these babies:
NVidia Tesla GPU
http://www.techshout.com/hardware/2007/21/nvidia-tesla-gpu-computing-processors-unveiled-ushering-in-a-new-era-of-supercomputing/
I've seen price points already as low as $1,500 for the single-chip configuration and $27,000 for the 8-teraflops design. How many simulator spaces could one of these handle?
On the subject of mega-sims, I'd love to see a long highway-type sim, say, 8 meters wide and 8192 meters long, that would create a strip of 32 regular sims long, and the total size is the same as a normal sim (because it's so narrow). You coulld use that to transport from one side of the grid to another with a higher speed vehicle, without worrying about sim crossings or no entry lines. Have two of those strips next to eachother (so you'd need the equivalent of 2 sims) to make separate lanes, each having only one travel direction.
Though of course vehicles aren't so widely used now, but that is also due to said problems you now encounter.
I had forgot to drop in this page. o.O It's eye candy.
OK, getting back on topic - I didn't download the Voice FLV (not sure if I want people to laugh at my accent o.o) and I'm using WL FLV, like, right now. o.O
Actually, I just moved the Sky Settings. O.o I'm lost now, I think.
I tried it in Foobar Salad (TG), Katharine Berry's sim, and I saw a funny glitch when I used one of the 12AM. Wanted to send a copy of this to Snapzilla to finally begin using my account, but it crashed before I could take the second one. Anyway, it is on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/faeriedevilish/585162882/
I'm not sure if that glitch is specific of WL or if it was anything else. After I crashed, I logged back in and the water was icy blue again. ^^
Personally, I *love* WL not only foor the lovely skies, but also for the mad effects. Walking around in mad colours is amazing, I think. Also, even if no one else did ._., I loved being able to use overexposition for snapshots in-world.
I think that WL will be fine for most people if there is a sort of 'tutorial' on the settings. Many complained about the effects that lightning has on skins and builds, and I personally found it very challenging to find balance outside the defaults, so perhaps a few lessons for those of us with less developed visual skills would help.
I'm off to take more snaps and try Snapzilla. Keep up the amazing work, Torley ^^
Well, like starcomber said, if you're having serious WindLight withdrawals, after much pain and sweat, I managed to get a working compiled version of SL for the Intel Macs:
WindLight First Look Viewer for 1.17.0.12 (Mac OS X Intel only)
However, it's painfully slow, ie. about a fifth of the performance of the regular viewer. Avatars also don't get their eyes rendered, who knows why, lol — and the "fullbright" setting makes things "overglow". Still, it works, and is as stable as the regular SL viewer hehe (noooo I didn't fix any bugs, but very likely added a few ones by mistake when trying SL to compile
).
It's good enough to take a quick picture of a scene in all WindLight glory but not much else. Also, you'll have to be quick, since very likely, with the two upgrades promised for the week starting on the 25th, this version will very likely not work any more, and I'll have to see if I can compile everything again… hopefully with more luck this time and hitting the right setting to have it run faster
One truly appreciates the developers at LL that can so-very-quickly launch a new version if something goes wrong, sometimes even in the middle of a grid shutdown (this has been quite rare recently, but it used to happen) — I took almost 20 hours to figure out how to compile it
*waves to Gwygory* Good luck on fine-tuning MorphVOX for use in SL, I'm really glad that Screaming Bee allows you to "be around" in SL and give so many helpful tips to the overall community and also take feedback on what they'd like to have as new voice packs. Oh, well, I guess you're also "addicted" by now — LOL
And let me know when you've got a Mac version available that turns my hoarse, smoker's voice with a Kyrgystan accent (or so they tell me!) into something recognisable as English 
haha
Heh, well I consider 20 hours still fast. For over 7 years, I am stil trying to figure out how to compile "Hello World". I sort of gave up though, it's faster just typing "Hello World" in OpenOffice
Whoa comments here! Posts seem to really take on different lives in the comments, this one has rendered itself conducive to a lot of thoughtful feature suggestions and other ideas.
I'd better learn to build a viewer so I'm not left behind in the dust.
@Simondo: Thanks for sharing, Maximilian Milosz does such nice builds; I like the glass textures he chooses. Haha, nice to see the Metal Slug reference too.
@Daedalus: OTTOMH, I remember asking for "Hierarchy in primsets" and "Texture offset in pixels" too. It's been deja vu lately, I see a lot of Issue Tracker requests I once wished for once upon a time. Here's to hoping more come true.
@Grizzy: When I tried MorphVOX, I didn't know there was a Voice Doctor (or that it even existed). Thanks for your experiences, that's great to hear that it gives you more flexibility with voice in SL; I'll remain cautious-yet-openminded until the next time I try it again.
@Ananda: I don't mind! I don't know if it's ever been tried. Andrew & Co. are neck-deep in Havok 4 work right now, but when they resurface, that'd be a curious thing to ask. In the meantime, if you have more technical questions, I'd recommend seeing if you can make it to our devs' Office Hours.
Ana also makes a good point about "mannerisms", which comes into play when doing voice acting — I was watching a lot of impersonations on YouTube the other day, and beyond changing pitch and formant, there are a lot of things which can't be electronically emulated, so you have to provide a good basis for "translation". However, I do know that higher-end audio processing units like the TC Helicon ones can approach things like raspiness (e.g., smoked too many ciggys).
@Gwyggory: Thanks for coming here and giving your opinion firsthand! Really cool to hear you're already in Second Life and are also "planning on creating custom voice packs"; from what I've heard, there's clearly an interest in doing this. I'd be curious to learn what our Luskwood furs wanted too. Hmm… I wonder if there's a way to automatically change MorphVOX settings when changing avs too.
That and, any plans for a Mac version of MorphVOX?
@Allatu: Good to know, and about the latency, too!
@Vint: Awwwwe, yeah, I was concerned that the WindLight screen for Voice: First Look would be confusing. I didn't put any Torley-specific stuff up at SL4B, but Iridium got my WindLight materials to setup. (I haven't had a chance to really explore the site yet.)
@Mariel: Yeah, that's a known glitch, where ripple water doesn't change color with the sky setting. I think that's already been fixed internally. WindLight will definitely look different than "the old way" and "better" is agreeably subjective, but I hope it looks generally better for most Residents. We're continuing to tweak the presets, thanks for dropping by!
@Gwyneth: Wow, you went through all that trouble. Good learning experience at the very least, I think! And like I mentioned before, I want to learn how to compile a viewer too.