OfficeHours:ProbablePrime:2022-09-20
Audio
Description
In this Office Hours, Probable Prime talks about:
- New Hardware
- World Optimizations
- A side tangent about RTS Games
- A side tangent about CAVE systems and underwater pipelines
- Custom Shaders
Transcription
(Please note that the transcriptions will not be 100% accurate)
So for those on the recording, I forgot to hit record for like half a minute, I'm sorry
for those hearing on the recording, please, please do forgive me.
Let's get started with questions.
Tronas asks, I haven't played a good RTS in like forever.
I used to play Red Bullet 2 a lot with some friends, and my friend had this ability where
it was just sort of, I don't know, he spawned tanks, like some sort of insect or something.
Tanks just appeared out of everywhere and I could never keep up.
I don't like playing RTS games with other players, like I don't really like PvP games
in general, particularly with friends, and the reason behind that is someone is always
having a bad time when I play PvP, at least I find that.
So someone is not doing well, and they're losing, and then therefore they are sad.
And so I don't like that.
So I tend to only play cooperative games.
I can play with, you know, like player versus player games if there's a team, but if there's
a team, all the people I'm in communication with, all the people I'm playing with have
to be on the same team, otherwise I get a bit, I don't know, it just feels weird.
Another RTS game which I really, really wish that someone would own and understand and
try and play with me, because I don't know, like no one plays the game and it's kind of
weird, but I have a time traveling RTS game in my library.
It is an RTS game where you can time travel, and it is insane.
To list the sort of ways that time travel play out, you can do things, for example,
build a tank creator, so a vehicle factory, spawn a tank, the tank comes out of the vehicle
factory, send the tank into the past before the tank was created, and explode the tank
factory.
At that point, a regular game engine would just be like, what the hell is going on?
But this particular time traveling RTS engine figures it out, and it will propagate what's
called the grandfather paradox through the game until one of the states resolves sort
of randomly.
The two states being the tank factory doesn't exist, or the tank doesn't exist, or both
don't exist, and it will figure it all out, and it's multiplayer as well, and so in a
multiplayer game, you might be trying to do the usual red alert 2 style thing and build
up your base, but someone has time traveled their entire attack force back in time and
is attacking you before you had any units, so you always have to be sending units forwards
and backwards.
Acron is the name of the game.
It is incredibly confusing.
I have not been able to win a match or even survive.
It is painfully overcomplicated, yes, but it is very, I don't know, I want to learn
it, and it died, right, no one wants to play it, but I would love it if there had been
a little pro series, even if it was just a season, and then we'll be able to take a look
at pro players doing it.
Similar to a game called Splitgate, Splitgate's an FPS game where you can make portals, similar
to the game Portal.
I think they originally called it like Portal Shooter or something, but they couldn't due
to branding and terms of trademarks, et cetera, but Splitgate you can portal, and the pro
players are just constantly portaling, and for Splitgate, I never portal, but Splitgate
is dead now as well, he does announce that they're not doing updates for anyone.
Anyway, we should get back on track, we're four minutes in and we've just been talking
about video games that are not Neos, so let's go ahead and take a look at the next question.
Waffler, the protogen, says, so I'm trying to make an avatar complete with a Neos, it
is made up of precisely placed boxes and such.
I glue it together with a glue tool, but then rotating the thing makes it rotate around
the center of the world instead of its own center.
Yeah, don't glue it, the glue tool is not the tool you want to use for that.
There are a bunch of people inside Neos that do this activity, so speak to Rusty and Sloppy
McFloppy and they'll be able to help you out, they make avatars entirely inside Neos.
Origins are very important, so don't glue them, manually pair them together and then
you won't lose those origin datas, datatars, datutus, daties, what's the plural of data?
I don't know.
Anyway, Yoho asks, are there any cool things you can tell us about the work that's happening
while we wait for this Neos issue to take the time to pass?
No.
Moving onwards, Waffler says, much more general question, I'm interested in being a world
creator and logic user, what other steps I should go through on this journey to be a
good creator in Neos?
Do it.
I know that's a sort of brash and harsh answer, but that's the answer.
So even the statement, I want to be a world creator, you are a world creator, Waffler,
I know that you haven't built a world yet, but you are a world creator, there isn't really
anything that you need to do to become a world creator except to do it.
There are a bunch of tutorials on my channel and a few other channels that will get you
started with world creation, I have a full world creation series, it is a little bit
on the old side now, uses the old UI, but still should be mappable to the new UI, so
go ahead and take a look at that.
My advice is start small, in that series we make a world, we put a picnic table and some
trees in and we save it, and that just gets you around the loader world, add something
to the world, save the world, teach you to do that.
As for logics, I don't have a beginner logics tutorial, I do need to fill that gap at some
point, but Basement Node has a really good one, and then once you do know logic, I have
a lot more sort of how to create specific thing tutorials.
Its original name was Puddle Wars or something, they are not, Splitgate is not doing updates,
they released their final update recently, and they are no longer doing updates.
They'll do like bug fixes or exploit fixes, but they're not doing any more content.
What's annoying is the cash shop is still up, so they'll still be doing cash stuff.
You know, you can still buy whatever their equivalent of e-books is.
Splitgate coins or something like that, I don't know, who knows.
Split coins, says Aaron.
Thank you Mr. Aaron.
With that, all of the questions have been answered, that we currently have, so if you
have any more questions, do get them typed up, otherwise we're going to sit here in unimaginable
silence.
I'll just scroll up and down the list looking for any questions I might have missed.
There are no questions which I have missed.
Are there any other Neos tutorial channels you would like to add to the list?
Uh, yeah, there's actually a bunch, so Basement Node is doing a bunch now, even June is.
Check the tutorials channel and scroll up recently, like I haven't posted that much
because I've been away for a bit, but you'll see Paddy done one, doesn't sound like a correct
sentence.
Paddy did one, I think they've done a couple.
And then, this is exactly what I was looking for, is Alex from Alaska has this amazing
list which does need translating, so if you are not technical, please wait for someone
slightly more technical to translate it.
But this list here is a list of playlist IDs, and you can put those into YouTube by just
expanding the URL a little bit, and that will get you to tutorial channels that do exist.
So yeah, me, Jax did a few back in the day, Fruxy of course has a lot, Coffee, Turk, Circuitry,
even Alex has done a few, June, NG, Nicole did a few, I forgot Nicole did a few, of course
that's great.
And then Svekin did a bunch as well, I like those ones.
I love this question from Rock and Nook, because it's sometimes difficult to speak about.
I am not aware of what the Quest Pro is, now of course I am, I've seen the leaks, but as
a company we can't do anything about the leaks.
For us to make, integrate new hardware, we need the hardware to be released and given
to us in some form.
Now in some cases I'm happy buying the hardware and just integrating it, but if it's not out
yet, we don't have any plans, it needs to be out before we have plans.
The general statement on hardware though is that we'll try and integrate as much as we
can, it does depend on development priorities, hashtag announcements, and like the actual
hardware itself.
For example the HP Omnicept, whatchamacallit2, has a mouth tracking camera, but it only provides
a black and white camera feed, it doesn't do any of the AI that the HTC face tracker
does which converts those mouth movements into actual data we can use.
So if we wanted to use the HP Doodaddy, we would have to write our own AI, which is something
that we probably wouldn't want to do, because at that point we have to maintain it and we
turn it into basically machine and learning engineers, which is a very complicated Doodaddy
to do.
So once the Quest 2 Pro is officially released and has information about how developers can
access it, and has developer documentation or integration, then we can go ahead and take
a look at it.
Same goes with any hardware, if you read on the bus in a newspaper, LEAK, amazing headset
costs 50 bucks, does everything, works as well as a Quest Pro and an Index all combined
into one, and it's got a battery and it lasts infinity.
It's useless to us until there's actually in our hands details about it out in the world
that are not leaked.
Right, moving onwards, I've got a long question here, I will read it out for the purposes
of the recording from Zygmuntz.
Zygmuntz says, many users have voiced concern about the state of Neos and the uncertainty
of its future, with tentative inte-te-te, with tentative inte-te, I'll get through that,
with tentative interest in continuing to use the platform as normal despite the closed
nature of ongoing negotiations behind the scenes, I and some others have unfortunately
been met with much resistance getting news of something on the platform, not only due
to obvious UX issues, but also the observance of dismissive and sometimes overtly rude behaviour
of Neos mentors, moderators and Neos team members when addressing these other concerns
directly, including yourself, oh no, what message can you give to potential Neos players
to give them hope the platform is in good hands and to give them a platform chance to,
right, the top-down opacity of the current situation, I don't know, we are doing our
best to exist in this current scenario, we don't have any additional news about that,
if you have any complaints about the behaviour of mentors, moderators and the Neos team members,
please feel free to file a moderation ticket, I will move on.
Tiki, is there a quick way to layer a second emissive texture to a zyxy material, like
pile up another material on top, if I have a texture as a pen apparent, you might have
to add another mesh renderer to do that to like material stack things, I'd have to look
at the zyxy one again, no, like material stack in the good way, not the bad way, if you duplicate
the mesh renderer and add a different material to the mesh renderer, that's okay, if you
put another material on top of the same material in the same mesh renderer, that's material
stacking, which is on the things to avoid list, has asks, I know this isn't really supported,
but I heard you could possibly do cloud spawning with our record URLs, Neos rec, Neos DB links,
which is apparently better, I don't support cloud spawning because it's on the things
to avoid list, so I won't be answering that, however, Neos rec, Neos DB, we don't care,
neither of them are better, so if you do it with one, you do it with the other one, as
it's an unsupported feature, I can't provide support, you can check the things to avoid
list for that.
Anadiya says, since we spoke about the facial tracker, do you know if the vive focus 3 facial
tracker has the idea to work with Neos or does it work, I don't know, because it's vive
stroke htc, it might use the same library, I don't know, I haven't looked into it yet,
when new hardware comes out, it takes a little bit to take a look at, so Zlinka says that
they have information that they're dropping sr-anypal, which is great, because I don't
like sr-anypal, and they'll use some other format, so that will take longer to integrate,
and of course, because the current stuffs, we can't integrate, so we'll take a look at
it when we can take a look at it.
Let's make sure there's a github issue open with this new hardware coming out.
If the hardware is released and you would like to see it integrated, please make one
github issue, please don't make 17 for the same headset, but maybe collate with some
other people that are interested in it, or if you have your hands on it, let me know.
For example, I have the EttVR controllers coming, I preordered them back when I had
an opinion on them, and it's got to the point where it's like, what are those preorders
where I just want them, like I don't even care if they're good at this point, I just
want them.
I stopped subscribing to any kickstarters for that same reason, it was just like, at
the time I back a kickstarter project, I like it, and by the time it arrives, I've almost
forgotten what it even is, but seeing as I do have eddy controllers arriving at some
point in the future, I will get those up to date and integrated, because they'll be in
my hands.
It's not, like, it's not Eddy's fault, they've had to contend with the pandemic and also
some circuit board shortage, not circuit board shortage, component shortage that occurs over
in China.
They also had some quality issues with their manufacturers, they had to swap to a different
manufacturer, I mean, keeping eye on that.
If there's a standard, that's great, Link, as well, they've updated their link to have
the Cronus OpenXR standard for face tracking, which is great.
Moving forwards, Neosmotic says, is there any government to help users optimize worlds
in Neosmotic?
There is not an official guide, there is a wiki page that was written, I don't remember
if I wrote it or some other people did, I could look at the history, but I was on a
plane when I found it the other day.
But that's usually for avatars, but it does have some hints that might help.
I could go through, like, a bunch, but I would be missing a bunch, so don't take anything
I say as sort of, like, gospel, I actually don't know where I'd even start, I'll have
to pass on that one and collect my thoughts and actually do a video update that page to
include some map or world information.
And then, Neosmotic also asks about screen sharing, are there any hacks available to
get screen sharing working in Neosmotic?
I would use the coco.live that the Japanese community are using a lot, that makes it really
easy to do.
I think it's in one of their folders, I'll get you the tweet, I know I can find the tweet,
and if anyone knows the folder, they can go ahead and post that down, is it coco or kovo
or k-something?
That's probably the easiest way to do it right now.
Yeah, delay's gonna be a thing, strangely I'm a little bit of an expert in video streaming,
for historical reasons, how?
Anyway, yeah, coco, it would be my recommendation simply for ease of use right now.
Moving forwards to harmonica-fennacat, is there any way to check the cloud storage that
we have used up, as in knowing what's using up the storage space?
Yes, there are a bunch of commands you can use, they are on the Neos bot command, I just
typed bepis instead of Neos, I have no idea why, into my search to find this bot page.
Neos bot, Neos wiki, that should get me out.
Okay.
So there is the request usage report, ah yes, I think it's got me covered there, so I type
in bepis, which I know is like a meme phrase, I didn't intend to type bepis, and sometimes
the keyboard just explodes with stuff that doesn't make any sense.
Moving forwards to iMarin's question says, speaking of new VR stuff, what's an upcoming
VR thing, physical or not, that you're very most excited for?
I'm excited to see this next generation of headsets and sort of innovation that exists,
I'm liking the fact that all of the headsets coming out now don't have Vive ones, I still
have no idea what Vive were thinking when they made the Vive ones, I've used them a
couple of times and hated them, I think that Vive ones probably actually put VR back like
maybe a year, maybe six months in terms of design simply by existing, and they will also
have some inertia as VR continues to improve from people that like the ones, or have only
used the ones to play VR, and now suddenly have to use a more regular controller, I know
some people like them, if you like them, nothing against you, but seriously, try some other
controllers.
Now I get the index controllers are basically a piece of cardboard, if you look at them
they'll fall apart, but look at every other headset that exists does not use giant donut
stick controllers, yeah I don't want the sword controllers either, I did see the PS PlayStation
VR 2 controllers the other day, because I was watching a video about them, and they
look kind of identical to the Quest controllers except they'd added more guards, it almost
looked like again a sword, but wasn't a sword, it's probably better tracking fidelity because
the additional plastic on those, the electronic says Vive needs to share whatever they were
on when making those, I can tell you, so when Vive originally made the VR headset they were
thinking more about business and educational uses, where a pointing device similar to what
you would point at for like a PowerPoint presentation made more sense, it seems odd as a sort of
random anecdote, but like that's what these office hours turn into sometimes, I was watching
a documentary about megastructures and how they were built, and it was a documentary
about how they laid a pipeline from I think it was Norway down to the UK for natural gas,
and I was just watching it and like fascinated about how they were doing it from an engineering
perspective, and then there was a guy in a cave system holding something similar to a
Vive wand, now when I say cave someone's like a cave, like cave is an earlier version of
virtual reality where you kind of go into a room and it projects on all walls and so
you feel like you're in the room, it's called CAVE, it stands for something, it's an abbreviation
I don't know, I'll get you a picture so you can understand why the hell I'm repeatedly
saying the word cave, like it makes sense, it does if you know what it is, I just Google
image search cave system and got lots of pictures of cave, of caves, I don't want a picture
of a cave, there's a cave system, so it's basically like a cube map that you stand in
and then you point, and the person was using that as a tool to figure out the route for
the undersea pipe, it was like amazing documentary, I'll try and link it, I watched it late at
night and I was just sort of blown away by like how complicated that was, I knew that
pipelines existed, I just didn't know there were A so many and B that it was so complicated,
as an example here there is a pipe laying ship, and there's only three of them in the
world, and so if you want a pipeline laid in water you need one of the pipeline ships
and there are three, and they will load segments on, I don't know how long they are, let's
just say they're 20 minutes long, they will weld the segments to the pipeline as they're
coming off the back of the ship, so it's almost like, similar to a spider, I was gonna say
similar to pooping but that's kind of gross, similar to a spider, it's generating as it's
going and just like pulling pipe out of its back whilst it's welding them, it's crazy,
anyway they were planning that with a cave system and it was using a pointing device
and that reminded me, gadgets are fun yo, let's move forwards, Fecken says, so I think
Neos can import HDR textures but does Neo support HDR displays work in HDR, I don't
know, it's kind of a graphics-y rendering question which I'm not very good at, mostly
because of the color-blind-ish, so I think the better question there is to ask what headset
or display you're talking about and then we can take a look, we do have HDR in the color
spaces etc, but I don't know depending on which display you mean, alright next, actually
do I miss any more, we've got Cocoa, yes, Colza sums it up, Vibe ones were fine for
one of the first VR systems, agreed, but everyone decided a better direction and Vibe just kept
selling them, yep, they just kept selling them, they did try I guess with the Cosmos
controllers, you know the ones that look like the tribal Gameboy SP that everyone had, but
those are just eight batteries, I remember speaking to Engie about that, they're just
eight batteries, Lex says there are multiple questions, these tangents are getting out
of hand, you think, nah, it's my office hours, I'll tangent as much as I like, I'm still
staying over the time, we've still got four minutes and we'll probably get through them.
Alright, moving forwards to Zigman's follow up question, file moderation ticket has been
considered in multiple times to be a cop-out answer to this question, are there any comments
you can provide to hesitant new users beyond immediately filing complaint to existing users
concerned about this as well, especially after reserving conversion rate after the VRCEAC
update, so the file moderation ticket is not a cop-out, the file moderation ticket is,
if you have behaviour that you don't like, it is inappropriate to talk about it in a
public setting, and so file moderation ticket isn't a cop-out, it takes that behavioural
complaint to the appropriate authorities who can then enact on that, I'll also take behavioural
complaints in direct messages, but if they are about players inside NES, I need them
to be a ticket, that is just a thing that occurs at companies, you go to any company,
any sort of behavioural based thing, rural breachy thing, needs to either go in modmail,
go to a popular community, let's just say path of exile community, everything there
is done through modmail, take any popular reddit, it's all done through modmail over
there, and the reason is you take it out of the public eye, it's just standard operating
procedure for many things, if there is a problem with behaviour, we take it to a moderation
system, it's not a cop-out, it's just what needs to happen.
Are there any comments you could provide to hesitant users beyond immediately filing complaint,
if the first thing that a new user needs to do is to file a complaint, then something's
wrong there, I'm not quite understanding what's going on there, I see new users coming in
all the time, they seem to love us, we do lose users after the YALC update, and I knew
that that would happen, they came, they checked us out, we're a bit like broken and rusty
right now, and then they went elsewhere, they went where their friends are, that's totally
fine, I'm going to read your original question again Zygmund, one second, so the behaviour
might just be because what we have is a lot of users just poking and prodding at us, and
there's really nothing we can say, if we want to say something, we'll say it, but there's
nothing that we can say, I could give you a blow-by-blow of every single message that
I have received from anyone in the internal team about this dispute, but it wouldn't do
any good, there's nothing that is a good announcement, and so therefore following, again, common
PR stuff that you'll find at any company, which we sometimes do lax on, because we let
information go, or we give more information than we should, we're doing the right thing,
and if you don't like that, then you don't like the public relations community or industry,
and that's unfortunate, but it's a way to just keep it going, I don't know, do you want
like an egg timer, or like a pie chart, or like a countdown, I can't give you any information,
like there's no information, the moment I can give you information, I'll give you information,
until then there is none, do we have any additional questions in the office hours text chat?
That's a better question, actually, let me take a look at, make sure I'm not missing
any questions, Linker says, will you give me new shader processing back on asset variation
side so I can make funny material orbs in the future, maybe exception to plugins if
they have been loaded, no, sorry, we really cannot have custom shaders, if you can get
them to work for the plugin, fantastic, but we can't do any work that would allow them
even if it's full of plugins, because they will simply just break, they will break.
And while the Neos Plus community may understand the implications there, some random user that
you set up with a custom shader on Neos Plus and then suddenly Neos Plus doesn't work,
they won't understand in the future, and they'll probably misdirect their anger towards the
Neos community and the Neos team, and they'll say things like, I know that you said that
this is going to break, and now it's broken, but it's broken and I'm still mad, and that's
a problem, and so we kind of need to mitigate that a bit, it is problematic, it is sad,
but like, we're trying to protect you, I don't know why it popped into my head, but you know,
Undertale popped into my head there, you know, and Toriel's trying to protect you from going
into the rest of the game, they're like, no, stay here, it's nice here, it's not an apt
analogy because, you know, through that door would be full custom shaders, I do get the
complaints that I do understand, it's just like, it would be a, it's a lesser of two
evils to block it on the server side, basically.
Moving forward to Zigman's additional question, thank you for rephrasing this one, the question
was less about the behavior and more about the reassurance and the belief that Neos is
changing, adapting and moving to the future.
We are moving into the future as best as we can, negotiations are ongoing between Carol's
and Fritz's side of the things, there's stuff going on behind the scenes, we have nothing
to share on that because we are taking the recommendations to not share what's going
on, mostly from various people that are telling us not to.
If Neos was not changing, adapting and moving into the future, I would not be here every
week except for the past two weeks answering your guys' questions.
I don't know how else to reassure you of this fact.
I think, yes, I know it hurts and I know it's sad, but it's actually going to happen a
bunch of times with all aspects of Neos.
You'll discover something and then it will suddenly not work.
If you look at the issues I've been making on Neos Public, you'll see examples of that
everywhere.
For example, the slice shader that goes through 3D volumes like MRI data, that has to work
with a uniform unit cube, it cannot work with anything that is long, which is really annoying
because most CTs and MRIs that we've had are sort of cubular things like the upper chest,
the head, those are regular shapes, they're approximately a cube, but I have a CT scan
of an entire body, where of course the length is greater than the width, and we had to do
some really hacky stuff there.
And that is not only a limitation of the Neo source code, it's a limitation of the shader
as well.
I looked at the shader code and got really scared, it's sort of re-marched, so it needs
a lot of updating to work with non-uniform-ness-ness.
It's just going to keep happening though, unfortunately.
If you're looking at integrating a Wii scale, I would sure go for it.
People still have those.
In fact, actually I predict that there is a bunch of houses around the world that have
got Wii scales from Wii Fit, just sort of tucked under their TV stand, and they've been
there for years and they're gathering dust.
That's where mine used to go.
You know, it's sort of like, oh, you used it, and then you tuck it underneath the TV
stand and it gathers dust.
Is it under a TV stand though, Stifle?
When my mother had a Wii, um, strange phrase, when my mother had a Wii, when my mother got
her Wii, she lost a lot of weight on that, it was great, it was really, really good.
And then she stopped playing.
She didn't put back on the weight, she kept it off, but you know, she was up there all
the time.
Vturexulus says, will there be cake after office hours?
Unfortunately I don't have cake, I also don't have cheese, I should probably go grocery
shopping after this.
With that, there are no additional questions though, so rather than talking about Wii scales
for the rest of the evening, I'm going to go ahead and leave off here.
If you have any additional questions, feel free to direct message me, post in the questions
and help section, I'll take a look at the various YouTube channels, etc.
I will get back to you next week, I know there was a break for two weeks, I was away, but
we'll be back for the weekly office hours, and enjoy!