OfficeHours:ProbablePrime:2023-01-03

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In this Office Hours, Probable Prime talks about:

• Happy New Year

Transcription

(Please note that the transcriptions will not be 100% accurate)

Alright, so welcome to office hours. It's been a little bit of a gap before the last one we had

That's because I was away for the holiday period but I'm back and we're back to regular scheduled broadcasting with the office hours

Tuesday at 4 p.m. My time zone which is a Pacific. You can check the office hours wiki page for it in other time zones

So this is the AMA

Office hours where you can ask questions about Nius and we go through them in the order that is shown in the thread

Which I just created. I see some questions in there. So we'll get started on those questions

So we have a question here from a rigorous who says how does Nios handle my composition?

Actually, I can't answer. I think I know what's going on, but I don't want to be unauthoritative

the netcode

Code being the sort of stuff that glues together the synchronization and the way that Nia speaks to other people in the session

Isn't something I've taken a good look at I'm aware of sort of parts of how it works

I'm not aware of

How all of that works if you expand your question with additional sort of like elaboration or areas you're looking at

I'm about to help further. Otherwise, I'm sorry. I can't answer that one move forward to unnamed cyborg cat who asked

What's Nios achieved in 2022?

You can check the newest updates channel or the answers channel for stuff that we have done in 22 that is published again

If you expand or elaborate a question into additional areas or avenues, it might be easier to answer

But that's a really broad question moving forwards to

This is second question, which says is there any updates for Nios planned for this year or next year?

And there are always updates planned. We just can't do them currently see announcements, etc, etc

And with that unfortunately, we're out of questions. So keep them coming. Otherwise, we'll be set here and unimaginable unending

tormenting silence

Waiting for questions. I do think I could probably take the gap in questions

There's an opportunity to wish you the very best for the new year. I had many difficulties typing the word 2023 today

I had to put it into the thread. I had to put it into the

Various other things as well. So we have another question here from Jack who says how was New Year's?

I spent it at Geens's house Geens throws a sort of almost annual tradition now, which is a party his house for New Year's

It was great. Saw a lot of Nios people there

Met some new faces saw some old faces

Lots of fun was had

Chikal girl says how is your own personal work on medical insulation thing? It's it's going well

There's not really much to say

On top of the videos I produce sort of in November December last year

That's sort of where we're at right now are doing some additional exploration into sort of what's going on there

But to share right now

Okay

So check a girl says if you're very old you might refer to January's check your area the month we accidentally write the previous year

on your checks

Checks I am aware that like some

businesses and

Landlords and my rental places still don't understand direct deposit but like you don't need checks anymore. You just use what's called direct deposit

So your money can go straight in your bank and the rent can come straight back out again

I've heard many a story about landlords who don't understand direct deposit and they want their like rent in cash

No, just like are they filing taxes on your rental? Is it a legal rental?

Paying cash. It's a bit weird

You should at least get paperwork if you're paying a rent in cash

Make sure you get paperwork invoice for rent the fact that it's been received and signed and stuff like that like crazy

Sometimes they want checks that's like okay ish

But you should encourage them to use direct deposit

The way does I have is like if they don't need cash or if they won't accept cash or sorry

They won't accept direct deposit which means cash or check then they have to come visit you and you have to talk to them

I don't want to talk to my landlord

It's not a desire I have if I talk to them it means something is wrong

So direct deposit the rent just goes straight to them

I don't know when it just does when I see it, you know

It's not something I do manually moving forwards to a reverse this question

Who says it's possible make a web server in logics in Neos with logics? No

logics is a language ish the

interacts with the Neos world and the Neos

data model and the Neos engine

So it's limited in what it can do

There are some things it can do the sort of exceed the bounds of Neos for example the HTTP or web socket nodes

But remember that it is running within a another engine. So you can't do it to you. You can't use it to solve generic tasks

It's sort of the equivalent of saying can you make a web server in redstone in Minecraft?

Like I hope that helps you sort of picture in your head moving forward to another question abysmal says is there currently a maximum?

Maximum of users that can join a session

Do you know how many avatars Neos is aiming to support once can expect Neos to be usable for MMO player counts?

Um, there isn't a maximum which is enforced by anything that is decision-based

so the only maximum would be like technical and so it's probably something close to one of the

binary numbers

But I wouldn't know which one it was without looking a nose in high as 50

I'm pretty sure I can go higher than that. Like there's no there's no real like limit that we have made a decision about

As for what we're aiming for we are aiming to make that better to get that number up

Particularly to get that number up to sort of you know, be more of sort of VR chat style levels

I don't know if we're aiming or able to get it to the MMO player count would need much more culling there pretty

Automatic culling I know that the community are great and putting all the culling systems into their world

But you shouldn't have to we should have a native solution

So once we have that it should make every world able to be called as well as the the cold sessions that you see from

The systems that people are making and installing in them and then a reverse also asks is it possible to make auto load?

Sort of the problem level of detail is it depends on what you mean? So in games

Level of detail is you just sort of like stuff will look less detailed the further away you are from you can sometimes see that

Pop in which is where they've done lots slightly incorrectly

where you know

You'll sort of like go over the threshold of a doorway or something and the contents of the room inside will turn from sort of shit

Tier to like amazing tier graphics. That's an example of log being done incorrectly to do it in a way where it's not noticeable

You can absolutely do some mod systems there, but the limitation is

that the LODs are

Always loaded in so for example if you're a high poly one or a low poly one, that's still loaded into the world

You're just swapping between them for rendering. So while you do maybe get a little hit for rendering which is better

You'll lose that on the sort of model being in memory in the games thing

They you know, they try and load only the details that you need

So if you never visit an area, they don't load the high poly version of that area for example

There is a gap issue for more LOD related stuff. Yeah, the inbuilt LOD one is like a little you have a lot component

I just it's weird. So we have another question here from Marubus who says

How do I measure distance from a player to an object in logics?

so the easiest way to do that would be to

Grab a slot reference to both the player and a slot reference to the object

Make sure they're both in global by using the global transform node

That's just easier and then plug both of their positions the global position of the player and the level position of the object

Into the distance node which exists in an operators or math at large that will calculate you the distance

We're gonna do it automatically. There are various things

Use a distance value driver

And stuff like that. They'll handle the whole like global cool mess for you, but that's how you do it

It's just a mathematical thing the distance between two objects is just the difference in their position and then you

normalize everything and the distance node also

Magnitude because it's a three-dimensional thingy. Jbot says question similar to the surgical visual planning

Where are there other projects for Neos focused on building digital workspaces be it for dialing manufacturing?

Not that I'm aware of but probably I mean there's like God knows what going on. Not that I'm aware of

Moving on to Rigibus who says can Neos interface with a drawing tablet?

Depends on what you mean

You can put the Neos screen on a drawing tablet and then the pen will work with it

As in when you push if it's like, you know, if operates as a mouse like where you put the pen will push

We do not interface with the drawing tablet sort of pressure sensors

Smoothness angle sensors or anything like that. It would literally just be a click touch screen like one of those really bad touch screens

You know like an airport touch screen. Yeah, one of those I was on a lot of planes over the holidays and

In-flight entertainment systems god damn their touch screens are bad. Specs are answering their question though. I think

Wraith, what ID do you use these days? I am on a mixture of Visual Studio code for anything that is not like

Compiling if it needs compiling I should try to go to Visual Studio hate to be boring, but I need stuff to just work and

Once it works, I don't really have like much inkling to change it

So getting Neos compiling in Visual Studio was like a two-week effort and now it works. I'm like cool

Let's not break. Rigibus says how smooth does

Neos run on the Raspberry Pi 3? I don't know. I don't own a Raspberry Pi 3

I own a Raspberry Pi 4, a Raspberry Pi 0 and a Raspberry Pi 2 so I don't know. I skipped the 3

You're more than welcome to try that is what's called an empirical question

Rampa says that it's not boring with the community vs license being pretty good. It does it is good

What I meant by that is like some people expect on a cool tools or better workflows, etc

I'm like so ask would you know what causes the loading indicator for a world to stay open and never finish?

I don't know. There's a bug open for it though. Alright, so we have

another question here from Rigibus who says

How does Neos multiplayer architecture work? Is the Neos backend just a big database with reference to IP addresses that contain the public instances?

Again, your question is it's more focused. Got that. It's more focused, but it's still unfocused

So there are two parts of the multiplayer architecture

So there's the stuff where we communicate to the cloud and then there's the stuff where we communicate to the session host

And those two different things they do overlap in some cases, but those are two different

So again, it depends what you mean based on the second part of your question, though

I'll assume we're talking about session listing in that case

Session listing is just a big database with a reference of where to connect there might not be an IP address

It might be like some other route or some other thing

Sometimes it's a bit more complicated than that. But yeah, that's the session list. It's big database keep the questions coming

Yeah, the river says how do I switch between sessions and desktop?

I know the session list facet thing that requires it in the dashboard has been put up

You can't all tab as far as I'm aware

Jack said you could troll tab shift look at that on the

Troll tab and okay guys make sure to read the basic controls wiki page

Which has a lot of sort of shortcuts which aren't documented anywhere and tell you how to use this

That's our bad. We'll fix that as soon as we can

Additionally to that the original way that you are meant to transit between sessions

without the facet which I made and without the legacy world switcher is if you go to the

Active sessions tab of the world browser you'll see the sessions that you're in there at the top and you can select them there and

Then click focus world on the pop-up that appears

So those are a variety of ways to do it. I thought that that was

Potentially confusing and not like a short path. That's why I made that facet. There's lots of praise for the world's are invested

That's the one I made I like I just got annoyed and I solved a problem and everyone else was like I'm annoyed by that

Too and they just like everyone installed it. It was great. Yeah, we are investigating making it into some default facet

Puddle Nexus world so Lex is talking about a world I made where there's an active sessions ball for each world

Yeah, I just I hacked the world browser apart to make that work

So that world is technically a world browser where I've convinced it not to make UIX stuff

I never intended it for it to work or people to enjoy going there

It's just sort of like this is asking what portals are and how they work since some people mess with them

I can understand what they did. How do you mean?

Camera portals or well, let's make a second screen arampa. That's why I did camera portals. Okay, so camera portals are

Somewhat similar to and it's kind of like good to view them like this

Having another headset in the world that you can sort of look through

So what it does is it makes a camera like a traditional camera, but it renders it stereoscopically

so

The you know, the left eye is different from the right eye and it does that according to your headset your your rendering, etc

But only when you're looking at that camera portals like rendering pain

So it's like having like another headset camera, you know with the two left eye right anything in the world

That's really all it is. It's just like a rendering trick

We get sort of a stereoscopic camera another word for it literally would be stereoscopic camera

the bit that makes it cool and more portal like though is the ability to move the

Camera location separately from the rendering location, which of course you can technically do have a camera as well

It's just really confusingly named

But it is like a portal to another part of the world or another

Area, there's really not much to them though. You just like create a new object portal there

You're done. You can make them different shapes different sizes. They don't need to be square

You put them on like rings and stuff. That's always cool. That's how the portal guns usually work. The camera says

What kind of optimizations can I do for big worlds?

For big worlds, you need to make sure that you are culling so grab one of the culling systems already exists or make your own

Not only culling objects, but also culling players. Make sure that's happening

You need to balance your sounds so that you don't have more than 32 sounds running or like some of them will like not work

You can make sure your assets are optimized effectively. For example, I once had to help a

Game design student who was trying to do a project at university and their unity project wouldn't compile

And I found out that they had a million trees in their scene because they wanted a forest and so they put a million

individual trees in their scene and

No

That's not how you should do it

So do keep an eye on that. The way you do it is you should have up close some trees

As you go further and further away, you should transition to lower and lower poly trees and at a certain point

Just a picture of trees and that's what you do. Other than that. It's like the contents low

You know, do you need 8k textures on this piece of concrete? Probably not. Everything on the dash can be resized. Everything

So the world browser itself, so I'm jumping around a little bit. There's comments about the world browser going on

The world browser is composed of essentially four facets

There's the filter list on the left which has you like everything, active sessions, features, etc

There's the the grid in the middle

which is all the sessions and then there is the search bar at the top middle and the

pagination bar on the top right. Those are all facets. You can move them around exactly like other facets. As for questions

Specs says are there any plans to update the content hub in the future? I would love

I kind of love the place and it would be a little sad if it got left in dust in a favour and made it more convenient dashboard UIs

I do believe that the content team have plans to update it

For anyone who's not aware of what the content hub is, that is the space station

satellite space station thingy

Which was used in a lot of streams

until the twitch house got created and then we

It's meant to be like a content hub. It's meant to be I guess a little bit like the VRChat home

You know, there's like you can go discover what's out there. It just has been it was deprioritized for the MTC and you know

Busy working on other stuff. So I hope it returns. Ray said that be kind of more of a question for the content team

Yeah, if the content team had an office hours, maybe that would be cool

I mean you can ask them questions at workshop Wednesday. That's usually where I catch them

I can catch them whenever I want, but you know, if you're a user you want to ask the content team questions

Try the workshop Wednesday stream. Yeah, I understand that workshop Wednesday is on hiatus

That's usually where I can. Moving on to Rigibus' question when importing assets from blender

Is there any don't @ team members at me? If you need to @ team member at me, I can take it

I'm weird like that. I can like just process notifications quite well

Is there any kind of thing I need to do in a blender project to make it work better?

I've tried importing some models from blender, but the scale would always be wrong

Scale is one which is actually kind of easy to do. So if I default blender scale is in meters

So when you import a model from blender or any other source that you know has been in blender

Usually what you say and what I say in my tutorials is I go 3d model and then auto size, right?

I always say select auto size if you know, it came from blender and you know that blender was using meters for it

It's like scene units like this the units of the file

Select meters rather than auto scale and then it will come in at the exact scale

Which it was in in blender. If you export to FBX or other things then you'll have oddities generally

I'm trying to sort of advise going away from FBX these days head was GLTF if you need to do avatars and animations and stuff

Blender works well as well. Blender it'll just turn into an FBX and a GL whatever

Try it though. Um, I will be making a tutorial on at some point

until then go into blender make a one meter by one meter cube in blender import it into

Neos until you get a one meter by one meter cube in Neos you can use the meter tip for that

And that will allow you to sort of see what size it is

And then you'll know what works and the reason why I'm telling you to do it

Even though I will make a tutorial at some point is it'll give you a feel for what's going on

Like if you import a one meter by one meter cube and it comes in a hundred meters, you know

Oh, I understand what's happening here Neos or blender or something in the middle here for some reason

It's making everything a hundred times bigger like get a feel for your workflow spend time on your workflow as well

I know sometimes the temptation is like well if I do three hours work on each model

Then I don't have to work on the workflow or you can just work on the workflow and then you don't need to spend that

time every time

It was it for the blender question. If you have any other blender issues you add more questions

Arukabha says it's possible to make a mod to lower the resolution of all active mirrors in Neos

It is please ask the modding community for that on the mod you've scored. Just a quick reminder here

Because people are talking about map makers not adding, you know, things like mirror options stuff like that

You go to Neos Essentials Mirrors

There is a wide array of mirrors the ones to the right usually have those menus and the ones to the left don't

So you pick one on the right and then you can have automatic

mirror resolution modifiers

Additionally, remember that we have the community sort of standards thing that is able to happen

We were able to do it with the colors for music that was done. Most people use the same

Variables for that these days your avatar just works someone could write up a standard for

cloud variables and stuff for

resolution right and then it could be hey, I am telling you the

cloud variable

resolution

Scale on off state of mirrors in the world and then you can say you could do that

Perfectly, you probably need to do that via group and go to like I don't know G standards or something

I don't know whatever but like you could do it is within your power to do it. Should we Neos maybe have some standard

Cloud variables that you can hook into probably but we don't currently

Where are we? Fuzzy ask is there a page about the non standard standard stuff? Yeah, I mean

It's a complete mess but like

I've been meaning to tidy up if I tidy up it starts looking like official and I don't want to be official because it's not

official

There's some stuff there that has just got it's mostly audio and like audio color stuff. So alright got some more questions

Does these supports playing SVG files?

Don't remember gonna say no

Make an issue on the gap if you'd like to see that

This also asks how variables work in logics again that really does depend on the avenue that you're after so, please

Try a lab ring on the questions. See if you can make it any sort of more

Detailed and be able to answer that one. Otherwise, it's a bit sort of too vague

You know that could be how do variables synchronize which is a 20 minute explanation or how do you write a variable?

Which is like a 30 second explanation like it you expand your question

I can I can help you out better how to read and write the variables. Ah, yeah. Okay. There we go

Um, so there's there's various ways to do that and it depends on the type of variable that you're using the thing

that you need to remember is

The most fields like every time for example, every time we see a number that's probably an int or a float field

Sometimes it's a double and some other weird ones. Don't worry about it

But it's usually a float or an integer and that is a variable and you can write to it if it's part of a component

You'll need to use the logic interface card

If it's in logics, then you can use the nodes for that those are in variable storage value register

And then into a float whatever type you want there and then you can use the right note to write to those

But you can also use the right note to write to logic interface cards

They're all variables and you can all write to them

If that didn't make sense, then I would suggest taking a look at the introduction to logics. There's a very good video by a business

Basement nerd. Sorry. There is also one by

Business law is a little bit older now so you try both of those triple yeah like pretty much every single time you see a text

Box of some kind where you can type in a number or a letter or a type or anything like that

It's a variable in those various ways to do. Jackal asks if you import vector files. Does anyone understand what it is?

No, we don't. With that we are at half past so I'm gonna go ahead and say

777Faku if you have a question, please continue typing it. Rigibus if you have a question continue typing it

But the only two additional questions I take for this office

I'll just make noises. Rigibus says how does the newest database I had the database corrupted yesterday and I was wondering how Neos

Stores something like a SQLite database. It is a SQLite database. I believe it's NoSQLite

I don't remember. The point being is that there is a local database lightdb. That's the one. It's a NoSQL

SQLite style thingy

It's basically a file and the file is a database that can be queried by Neos and it

And what we do is we say hey database, where is

Rafe's face text?

Where is the texture for Rafe's face and the database goes it is here and that here that I'm talking about is usually a file path

On your computer and then it picks up from the computer and goes here you go

I'm now rendering Rafe's face and we don't need to redownload it from the internet because we had it stored locally in the cache

When the database corrupts it means that file that light database has corrupted and we can't read from it

And therefore we don't know what's going on. You know, we can't figure out where those files are

And that's what happens when it gets corrupt

That's why we need to repair when we repair it we switch from sort of interrogating as a database. We switch to interrogating it as

A file that has a problem we fix that problem if we can and then we go back to interrogating as a database

It is time. I will allow a reverse expanded question because it is related to the previous one

And I said I would allow some of the vacuus stuff. So I'll read that even though I haven't I don't know

I don't think it's a question. I don't see a question mark at least I'll read in just a second

Um, so they say how does neo store the local cache? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I understand. Thank you

How does neo store the local cache? The local cache is stored as a bunch of you can go just look at them

There are much of files. They are sort of encrypted, but it's not like encrypting encryption that would be used for anything security related

It's it's more sort of partially organizational partially encryption. The light database itself is also encrypted

But again, it's not military-grade encryption

Just a sideline by the way, if you see a VPN advert that's talking about military-grade encryption

Yeah, your browser already uses it don't buy a VPN if you just want military-grade encryption. Your browser already does it. Anyway

Point being there is a little bit of encryption involved, but it's not strong. It's not designed to be strong. As for how it stores

It's just files on your computer and then 775 who said they had an idea in the back of mind for AI

Integrations for example having a fairy guy that can listen in on command and help out with things like logics and other radio functions

Do it I would love it

Lots of people talking about getting documentation into games

And into news being quite interest and stuff like that is one way that it could be done

We're not quite sure how we're going to do it. But when we do do that, we'll see what's going on

I'd love it if there was a way to click on a logics node and it popped up the information about it, videos, pictures, guides, etc

You could even directly like spawn examples of how to use it in the world all sorts of cool stuff like that

I'll come up with some. With that I believe we're at the end of office hours. I'll go ahead and leave off here and

I will speak to you later. Bye bye