Okay, welcome to Prime Time, it is 4pm, so we're going to go ahead and get started.
Please drop your questions in the Office Hours text channel if you have questions, and I'll
get to them as soon as I can.
There are no questions waiting, so whilst we're waiting for that, I do want to promote
the newly created-from-myself myths page.
We're a little bit agitated by just myths in the community.
It's kind of natural right now due to the situations at play, but hey, that's a Tico
link.
It's a natural link, I copied it from my Twitter, that's why it's a Tico link, give me a second,
there we go.
My myths page.
Those of you who drop in, if you have any questions, drop them into the Office Hours
text channel, it's two slots above this one in the channel list, I'll just hang out and
we'll wait for any questions that make, if at all.
Please ask questions.
In case we have a question from Drace, which is why are you so amazing, the answer to that
one is that is an opinion, which you are welcome to have, there is no way to justify an opinion.
It's your opinion.
For those new folks dropping in, drop questions in Office Hours and we'll get to them as soon
as we can, otherwise just sit back, relax, and listen to the uncomfortable silence that
exists in this room when there are no questions.
For those dropping in, drop questions in Office Hours, the text channel, it's two slots above
this one that you clicked, and we'll get to them as soon as we can, there are still no
questions.
So the uncomfortable silence will be increased to level 11.
We have a good question from SnakeFinnis who asks what is this?
So this is the Office Hours or AMA for Primetime, which is myself.
I'm in charge of sort of many things, but most importantly documentation and tutorials
here at Neos, so if you have questions on those lines, let me know.
If you have questions just for the Neos team generally, ask them, I'll be able to sort
of either answer them or redirect you to the appropriate place.
Whatever you want to ask, you can go ahead and ask, just drop it in the Office Hours
channel.
That's a good question, says are there any guidelines for formatting Neos Wiki pages?
The answer is yes.
On the sidebar of the Neos Wiki, there is a button called contributing to the Wiki,
which leads to a page which talks about the formatting and guidance for how to contribute
to the Wiki.
Good.
We have some questions.
So from Trace, we say how are you doing yourself on this fine day?
I'm good.
I saw a bird.
I thought it was yesterday, but I guess I'm going to talk about it.
Yeah, I've got a balcony here in my apartment, and a bird landed on the chair outside here
and looked at me grumpily and then ruffled his feathers and flew away.
That was cool.
So where does the money from Patreon go to?
So the money from Patreon goes into an account, and then that account is used to pay for various
things.
Right now that would be the cloud bill that we have, so we have cloud services.
Those do require money, and any other sort of technical stuff like that.
So I presume we'd have to renew our domain periodically.
So Neos.com is searching needs renewing.
That will get paid for.
Other than that, I don't actually know.
I'd love for us to get to pie chart.
Pie chart would be great.
It would be like I'm making up these percentages.
These are not the correct percentages.
I'm just making them up for conversation.
Let's say 10% goes to service costs.
2% goes to, I don't know, the administrative costs, like whatever domain renewal, I don't
know.
Just like stuff like that.
It would be like two thirds goes to salaries or whatever, and it would be like 1% goes
to cheese.
You know, like a pie chart that shows exactly where the money was going would be like amazing.
You'd be able to apply that pie chart to your individual contribution.
Let's say, for example, you contributed $100 a month, then you'd be able to do that quite
easily.
You'd be able to be like, ah, 1%, that's $1, goes towards prime's cheese collection.
You'd be able to be like, yep, $1 of my money goes to prime's cheese collection, and you'd
be beautiful.
So hopefully maybe that in the future.
We'd probably sort of extrapolate those out over a year as well, which sometimes isn't
done.
Sometimes you'll see pie charts which are just like the month.
That means what you get is like spikes and randomness.
Whereas if you take those yearly expenses, break them down monthly, then you can get
like a pie chart that's a lot more stable.
So Daffy has a question.
For people who might want to start making things utilizing resources outside of Neos
to contribute to it, has anybody thought of developing a workflow tutorials to help generate
assets or encourage user-created content inside of Neos, i.e., a blend of the substance to
an important game?
Not that I'm aware of.
It's certainly like an avenue that people can certainly go into.
I know that we've got a couple of sort of pin resources around for things like what
substance painter workflow to use, what materials, what textures to use.
We've also got Wiki pages starting to appear, like the humanoid requirements I completely
rewrote because it was driving me mad.
We constantly get queries about that.
They're like, my hip bone is called orangutan, and Neos isn't recognizing it as an avatar.
Like, it should be fixed.
I'm like, no, it shouldn't.
Don't name your hip bone orangutan.
Name it hip, or hips, or hips, lowercase, or hip, lowercase, fine, it'll pick it up.
If it's a hip bone, it should be named hips.
But yeah, certainly like modeling and stuff like that.
We often get feedback on our PBS, like, metallic maps that people find confusing, which is
confusing to me because it's the standard Unity material map, so I don't really know
what's going on there.
Maybe it's an unreal thing, who knows?
As always, just make tutorials.
Make them, share them, people will watch them.
If I was confident in my 3D modeling ability enough to make a functional avatar, we're
talking just like a blob person, you know, like, tubes for legs, et cetera, I would do
the entire process.
I'd be like, all right, day one, wake one, open blender, make the tube man, export to
FBX, import, put the head where the head is, the hand where the hand is, look, I'm using
them, just to sort of show it isn't hard.
The hard part should just be in the creativity.
It shouldn't be in the technicalities, it should always be the same.
Yeah, the skin modifier, yep, that would be, you know, perfect.
There's a variation there, like the one on the bottom right, sort of reminiscent of sort
of Incredibles or Minions styling.
You make like an armature, and then you do the skin modifier on it.
You do the armature like just lines.
When I say armature, I don't mean blending armature, I mean like how you do an armature
if you're sculpting IRL, you take wire, sometimes metal coat hangers, you bend it into the shape
of the body, then you throw clay on it, and that's exactly what the skin modifier does.
You make the bent coat hanger, and then you throw the skin modifier on it, and you get
clay.
Duff asks, have you seen other user workflows utilizing resources outside of blended substance?
If so, what would alternative programs be?
People do still use the other 3D modelers, Maya, and then like other more obscure ones.
Maya and Blender are usually the two that people use these days.
I've also seen a lot of people that use ZBrush for sculpting.
That's totally fine, too.
ZBrush, ZBrush, American, UK pronunciations.
Fusion comes up as well.
I forgot, like when it comes to hard service modeling, some people use like fusion stuff
like that, SketchUp, that one for like architectural modeling.
There's one particular user who was using the hammer editor to make their map for everyone
to see.
That was fun as well.
But yeah, it's basically like the assets there are very similar to the ones that you would
use for any game, really.
I wouldn't like discourage or discount, is probably a better wording there, the use of
anything like Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.net, anything like that.
You just sometimes like, a good example here being like you download an avatar base and
it has brown eyes and you want blue eyes, Photoshop or whatever can fix that for you.
There's no need to open Blender.
There's no need to open Substance Painter.
There's no real need to even understand how the avatar works, right?
You just open up the texture file and you're like, there are the eyes, I'll make them blue.
And then you make them blue.
I'm sort of interested, but not really because the Windows UI is unfortunately, it wasn't
good the last time I looked at it.
It might be good now.
There's this program called Dust, Dust 3D, which is a completely different way of modeling
than you have seen.
It's like hard to explain, but you have to get a side and front photo of the same object
and then you can kind of just like model it.
Oh, that's going to be the recording there, I just started a YouTube video.
If you hear piano music on the recording of this, just ignore it.
But yeah, if you look at this video here, they model a dog and it isn't in any way that
you would imagine that you would model a dog.
They'd never edit vertices at all.
It might look like they do, but they never do.
For maps and worlds like that, I have a lessons to World Machine.
I haven't used it.
World Machine usually makes worlds which are too big for Nius.
There is another one that generates terrain.
Just do that easily with Blender and Photoshop as well.
You just make terrain.
It's easy.
It's just like a grayscale height map.
Maps and worlds, just sometimes like paper will actually help there.
Just throw stuff around.
I did see a video yesterday of the PS5 game or PlayStation game called Dreams, where you
can...
It's very much sort of like more simplified than Nius, of course, but very much more user-friendly
where you can just sort of throw around stuff and people are like making art there or making
scenes there that allow them to just explore what they're doing.
I know a lot of people use that for sort of sharing ideas and then they'll go ahead and
build it once they know what the ideas look like.
Moving on to other questions there.
Let's ask what happens to the games' office hours.
I don't know.
I've asked them a few times.
I moved their office hours to like temporarily suspended along with Chroma's.
I would presume you would have to ask them if you want more information about that.
Russia asks, is there anything you've been wanting to cover in a tutorial but haven't
got around to or would like to see more tutorials on?
I have a huge list I just haven't got around to, so I'll just skip that one with everything
jazz hands.
I would like to see more tutorials on basically anything.
Sometimes people are like, oh, I won't make tutorials because Prime makes them.
You go ahead and make them.
Go ahead and make them.
Basement Nerds Logix tutorial isn't like my style.
It's made completely differently.
I myself wouldn't find it effective to learn Logix, but some people do and they find it
helpful and that's great.
That really just highlights that everyone learns differently and has a different approach
to both learning and teaching.
So go for it.
Like make tutorials.
If there were like, I don't know, 50 tutorials for learning Logix out there, then there is
a greater chance that one would fit a particular user.
Additionally, there is this abbreviation called FAST or FASTER if you want to be more modern
in the sort of lingo for it, which is about learning things.
There's a blog article about it, learning and I think FASTER, and it just has an abbreviation
and I think the T is like teach.
Yeah, the T is teach.
So there's a way of like, there's also like a pyramid of learning, I never remember what
it's called.
Yeah, here it is.
I don't know if this is like the exact one, but it promotes the different types of learning
and it shows here that like lectures, audiovisual stuff is 20% retained and then doing it, which
is the sort of lower half of that pyramid, is 30, 50%, 75% and then teaching others right
at the bottom, 90%.
I was talking to Fruchs a while ago and there is a study that was portrayed in I think it
was a European country.
He recommended a book about it, but I forgot the name of the book, where they created a
new type of school and in this type of school there was no real structure to it.
People were just like free to learn whatever and I didn't understand it, I was like what
do you mean?
What happened was they mixed the age groups of the students, just sort of freeform really,
and they taught each other mostly.
So there might be like in the school like a reading room or a reading corner of a room
and there might be an older student there reading a more complex book and it'll be a
cool story and so a younger student would go over there and sit down and be like sounds
cool read me the story and then they would read the story to them and then maybe they
might go I want to know what happens next can you teach me how to read a book at this
level and then boom you've got an older student learning to read by teaching a younger student
how to read who's learning how to read and then that just happened everywhere you know
maybe the kid likes dinosaurs so he goes over to like a freeform library and goes cool pulls
a book on dinosaurs can't read it but can look at the pictures looks at the pictures
shows the pictures to his classmates and they're like cool we would like to learn how to read
this dinosaur book over to an older student all sorts of stuff like that that's probably
the name ng says it's a Sudbury school probably I need to read the book to understand more
about how that works because I've got sort of questions about sort of base skills I don't
think would be taught effectively there like let's say a kid goes into that environment
and they want to make a game cool like they'll need to learn some maths there but I believe
there's probably a path through that school where they don't learn more traditionalized
stuff but part of the argument behind that type of schooling is do they need to and that
goes against the sort of whole like up and arm stand on your soapbox land of standardized
testing is bad which generally I agree on but like I'm I'm biased because I've been
through education so like whatever it's a good thought experiment the point there being
though is that you'll learn better by teaching people and you'll learn better by interacting
with people whilst you are teaching and also by just doing and making tutorials is a fantastic
example of that so try that just googled to ng use Sudbury school and yes there is a wiki
learning and teaching people also comes up with like new new scenarios new things that
you might not have you know wanted to know how to do so with my work with Hamish University
of Sydney and now whatever university they're working with there's just like crazy stuff
that comes up that just doesn't make any sense but you're like cool like it's time we came
to me and he's like hey I need to calculate the angular velocity of your eyeball just
like okay okay sure we can do that we can calculate the angular velocity of an eyeball
and so we used the eye tracking data to figure that out it's useful I can't remember exactly
how that's one of the problems you're like okay I'll do this crazy thing but like why
are we doing it and you kind of forget sometimes it is something to do with the stuff there
their phd was on which is a test that involves eye movement to head movement synchronization
which can diagnose vestibular issues vestibular issues is the sort of organ and system that's
in the middle ear that drives your balance and when it's broken you can do what's called
a hit test which sort of figures out if there is a problem there you do that by measuring
the eye movement in relation to a head movement after you rapidly jerk their head towards
one direction almost like you're kind of breaking their neck in a sort of cinemagraphic way
like you might see in a movie but not actually breaking their neck of course because that
would never go through like ethics so doing that in in game is what we were trying by
measuring the velocity of the eyeball moving on to the next question here lazy hat guys
is any atas on the next major update to nears no I don't have any atas we don't usually
provide them I would love to provide them in the future we just can't provide them right
now check the roadmap check our discord announcements channel and check our steam update feed I
guess and it'll come eventually there is one sub preschool in the entirety of the UK okay
well I had zero chance of going to that then where is it oh it's in Margate I know Margate
Margate's a coastal town I'd usually go there to go to the beach that's a good good good
good question from crusher here so crusher says how would you go about starting large
projects nears or elsewhere I am traditionally now I don't really want to be but hey careers
are fun I am actually a product manager right now and so I am very educated in this area
but there are parallels where you can sort of scheme off the top is what I'm saying if
you go deep into project management you're wasting your time planning and communication
is so important I would love if we just had in the education science channel we just had
a sort of recording from a couple of people from the MC 2022 where they talked about sort
of how they built things I would love to get that from a particular group I'd like to see
it from the credit canyon group and in particular from their last year's entry the same group
did the abandonware last year and I know abandonware that we had just forgotten their name for
no reason com dog com dog was just like running around managing the project and making sure
everyone did stuff and that's because they knew what they wanted to do and they did it
I've seen a lot of people that just like you know you go into nears and you're like cool
I can throw this around I can throw it everywhere I can do whatever I want but then they never
finish it because they don't really have a plan they don't know what they're doing I
also get sort of comments about sort of oh I don't use dynamic variables I don't use
dynamic impulses because I can never remember what I've called them and the answer there
is like well plan and document your project then if you are making a shooter in nears
and you're using dynamic variables for that shooter write a text document in notepad which
lists the dynamic variable player health or player ammo or whatever you want to use save
it in there's a dot text bring it into the world save it to the world till it's complete
and then everyone in that world can just float over to that text document and be like oh
yeah it's player health I can use that great but if you don't do that then it's gonna lead
to problems particularly if you have multiple people working on the project you need to
know what you need to do I don't want you to stop and do the whole sort of like let's
plan for three months and then not do anything but just like stopping and realizing that
you need to converse or talk about things will get you a long way there I highly do
not recommend scrum but like there's about 15,000 methodologies scrum I've never seen
done correctly though I am a certified scrum master but I don't put that on my resume anywhere
it's just a word I'd like to show you an amazing document from the Department of Defense this
is the United States Department of Defense and it's called spotting agile bullshit or
something along those lines it's a really scary link because it's like literally the
Department of Defense but I promise you it's fine it's just a PDF detecting agile BS it's
great and they talk about how like it's a buzzword they talk about everything and then
they go all the way down to the bottom and there's like a great graphic on page five
page five is like more suited to larger more long-term projects rather than you know say
for example a month-long project for the MMC or you know a smaller NEOS project the graphical
version on page five would be great for looking and modeling for example NEOS itself or modeling
any other VR platform itself it's like one of the things on the graphical things is our
teams delivering working software to real users every iteration and gathering feedback
yes then it's actually agile otherwise no it's it's not and we were doing that I mean
I'm just sort of skip over what's going on right now in the announcements channel etc
we were doing that right we were like updates came in we might not necessarily be able to
work on exactly what you guys wanted us to work on but like it was someone would be like
I'm having trouble doing this and freaks ago here's a new logics note and you get it so
cool so just think of that and think of stuff like that back at university we had to do
a final project which is worth like I don't know like 60% of my degree and I nailed it
I was amazing at it and the project methodology I used for there was fake it till you make
it but I had to do like 14 pages of a like a paper etc on evaluating the different methodologies
and scrum like hit the bottom of the list for some reason so moving on because we're
running long time mr. Angie asked if we had any exciting things so this is this is for
use in jaw reconstructive surgery where if we are reconstructing someone's jaw we can
actually use the leg bone I don't know why it's decided that we you know there's there's
many bones between the leg and the jaw but apparently the leg bone is the more suit most
suitable bone and what the doctors want to say is what like section of bone can they
cut and then what would that do to the jaw so there's a little rig where we're slicing
the leg bone twice we're using a larger model for slicing it and that would then be placed
near the jaw but then we're also reflecting that slicing on the actual leg bone so they
can check that they haven't taken too much leg bone because the user ideally still needs
to be able to although usually they are in crutches or have reduced mobility but they
have a jaw again that's kind of more important sometimes so let's hop through the rest of
the questions trace asks when creating a world near say a project that is going to be a game
world that is publicly playable how far can you go into the terms of using ripped assets
or sound from other games or movies before it dips into the toes of legal valley please
read our terms of use and our guidelines before you do that there is the concept of fair use
facebook fair use is often misunderstood for an appropriate terminology or look at that
you would need to contact a lawyer i would advise just not using ripped assets at all
because then you don't need to contact a lawyer and lawyers are expensive if you would like
to use ripped assets you are stealing stuff unless you can justify it under free use fair
use so check our guidelines check the terms of service read up on fair use contact a lawyer
if they say you can use it you can use it and if they say you can't you can't or just
avoid all that complexity and just don't use ripped assets it's very simple so ng is i'm
asking um what methods i've seen that work uh work with a similar philosophy um to be
honest i've never seen any development methodology it's scrum fdd which is feature-driven development
traditional agile traditional waterfall all the others that have various names i've forgotten
now i've never seen any of them work and the reason is that like you need to build your
own and you need to build your own from the community of people i say community because
like when you'll get a large enough team it's less a team it's more like a community of
people and seeing what they want to do a good example there is things like story points
where um i have frequent arguments at work about if story points are days and the answer
is no story points are not days story points are a measure of difficulty and then you can
track story points based on how many you can complete during iteration i need you to find
some terms here we're running over but i'm going to do it because it's a good interesting
conversation um if you are planning the next two weeks of a a team uh you know software
development team you would call that an iteration sometimes a sprint doesn't really matter i
never call them sprints because sprints implies moving fast and that's bad um well moving
fast is good but like moving fast sprinting means like over exertion that's why i don't
use it and so what you're trying to do is plan how much work can we do over the next
iteration how much work can we do over the next two weeks and it used to be historically
that that would be defined way ahead of time in project planning which occurred before
anyone picked up their pencils and started making stuff but now it's planned sort of
as you go and you might say hey i think we can do two of these really big things for
the next iteration but then you kind of get fuzzy on that it's like well how big are they
how much are they going to take and so you try and estimate how long they're going to
take and then there are schools of thought about estimating in days you're like oh well
this would take five days and this would take five days and you're like boom that's an entire
iteration of work two weeks was 14 days four days for sort of wiggle room cool you've managed
to schedule two features but days are not useful um if you're using the story points
a story in agile development is kind of like a unit of work which benefits the user it's
hard to explain um so instead story points should be the difficulty because the difficulty
means that you have more of a range to play with with a two-week iteration you have 14
days whereas with story points you can go anywhere from 0 to 99 and then you know what's
going on and you can track it and figure out how much your team can do so as an example
here you might say hey this really big feature that is 50 story points and hey this other
feature that is five story points historically how many story points have we got through
in this particular iteration over the course of the last year historically we've managed
to do 40 story points well great you can't do that 50 story point activity but you can
do that five one and it lets you plan a little bit better but because it's a community of
people working i'm like oh you've given story points to my items as days again haven't you
colleague and they're like yes okay sad face and then we have to work around that and then
like the hierarchy of course we want to do work tracking and doing well tracking at work
especially this company of my scale is just crazy people are like oh yeah but i need to
put this under this and that under that and this under that and just no okay two more
questions uh hack 13 asks i used nested sessions this past weekend however i struggle to see
the benefits of the use of the page for them also seems to not exist you provide context
in the use case yes hotel rooms um so they're used a lot and they're actually created for
the vblfc and the reason behind that is let's say you have a lobby of a hotel or the lobby
of a convention that's where people sign up they get their badge and then they disappear
um the disappearing act we wanted that to be other worlds so if you went to the pool
you'd go to the pool world i remember the vblfc pool world well or if you want to disappear
the hotel rooms you go to the hotel rooms world but what that does it starts to show
a unrealistic expectation of the number of people who are at the convention because they're
all in different worlds and they're all spread out if you use the nested session feature
you can group all those sessions together into like a whole hotel and so it doesn't
matter what part of the hotel they're in they're counted together and anyone new who wants
to join can go either straight to the session that people are in via the friends list or
to the entrance of the hotel where they can then find signposts to other sessions that
have been there there's a bit of a like problem in the naming of that feature because um nested
sessions also comes up in code uh when it comes up to the if you remember the like the
like uh the ball menu that's on your right hand where you can sort of see which world
and then when you close out worlds you'll close out worlds in a certain order that's
also called nesting and so i want to kind of like drop the terminology there between
the two features um try and make those a bit clearer and then document them um honestly
if you're not doing a sort of convention or a hotel style event or like a a big collection
of people style event you don't need to use it and even sometimes when you are doing a
big event you don't need to use it that's a good example there for the mmc award party
the award ceremony we we didn't have nested sessions going there because it was different
watch parties it was oh here's the critic canyon watch party here's the i remember because
it was a while ago but you know here's the other social world that's doing a watch party
here's the other social world that's doing a watch party you didn't need that to be nested
because it was distinct activities but um conventions i believe um for uh fernal i keep
saying funeral equinox i had that whole problem throughout the event uh psycho asked about
the ball menu if it's legacy it is legacy but the systems that play uh weren't and are
not and will not be removed you'll notice that even if you use my worlds are in facet
if you close out worlds you'll still end up closing out them in a like structured way
and that still matches what the balls would render if you had the balls on but yeah the
balls are legacy you can quote me on that one damn it the balls are legacy so dre says
now i'm curious what's more expensive um to hire a musical sound designer or pay a lawyer
um honestly musical sound designer you don't need an industry like giant you don't need
like a triple a musical sound designer you need someone from the community um depending
on the project that might even go for free there is the jobs and freelancer section and
there is a bunch of community people out there that would love to be part of your project
uh you can also use um massively licensed sound i know i use kevin mcclood's uh collection
a lot in moc some corrections from cole's and rusio that says that the uh new user events
only were the ones that used them uh for the next decisions great i was aware they were
being used but not exactly how they were being used and then uh rusio says that the the
funeral event seat the fronal event um used them for the new player nights they worked
quite well uh and then hack posted a uh picture uh which shows how they were using them uh
yes that is a suitable setup for how you would use them with that i believe we are out of
time we were like we're way out of time i i like remembering is that especially when
i was in the hotel room world with the car someone spawned the very complex mmc car in
one of the hotel rooms and it freaked out because of course it was a very narrow space
and so it would periodically just sort of teleport into the hotel room sweep people
into it because it sort of had like an auto anchor system on it and then glitch out of
the map and fall down again and so if you weren't careful you would just like be attacked
by a car periodically as it like grabbed you forcibly put you in its seats and then teleported
out of existence it was basically an scp waiting to happen i will see you guys later um we
are out of time go ahead and uh call it here if you have questions please dm me or drop
them here i might respond in text form and i'll speak to you later bye