All right everyone, welcome to prime time. Again, it's a half hour AMA where you can ask any questions about Neos.
We don't have any questions today, we just actually have people complaining about my microphone,
which is perfectly natural and please thank you for continuing doing so. If there are any issues,
please do let me know. Microphone's a difficult year. But yeah, we have no questions, so I don't
need to use the microphone. If you have questions, please put them in the thread and I'll get them as
I can, otherwise I'm going to go ahead and mute and we're going to sit here for the entire office
house segment. We have nothing to talk about. Grace says, can I ask something not to do with
Neos? Usually it depends on sort of how busy we are. I usually skip personal questions because
we're busy, but if there are no questions here, go for it. Do whatever you want. I may reject the
question depending on what it is. I am only sort of guaranteed to answer Neos questions.
That kind of controls a little bit of the sort of off the track, off the beaten path stuff that we
have got going sometimes, but doesn't usually control it. Maybe we're talking about jelly
sandwiches before we know about it. Okay, so our first actual question from Lex who says,
apart from settings menu, what would be one of the first things in the UI to redesign that would
change? Not quite sure we got any further than talking about the settings menu. I know that the
settings menu was going to happen because it would allow us to do a whole lot of other stuff.
Basically, we'd be able to throw check boxes, sliders, drop downs and input boxes for basically
everything that people don't like. That's why we wanted to do it because right now we're sort of
limited in that. For those who are unsure what that means, I would like you to go Google images
of an airplane cockpit and imagine that you were designing that for the first time and needed a
switch for literally everything that the plane could do and how you would design that. That's
what the settings UI redesign does. You want to make sure that everything can fit. But no, after
that we were looking into user blocking, which of course would have UI, but it wouldn't be UI
redesign. It would be like new UI. However, with that might have come, I don't know, this is just
me speaking hypothetically, might have come some edits to the contact screen because of course the
contact screen would have needed new buttons for blocking if we were to do user blocking.
For those in the modding community, I'm sure you're aware of the contact screen needing more
space to put buttons. For those unaware of the modding scene, Neos mods in the Neos modding group,
not moderators mods, it's really difficult. The two things have the same phrase, but whatever.
They kept adding new buttons to the buttons that appear when you select someone in your contact
screen and eventually it got to the point where like people's Neos contact buttons were overflowing
and people were like, hey, can we stop adding context buttons? That was a good discussion that
occurred over in the modding community. For those who are unaware, modding is perfectly fine and
not against our terms of service. You can just go do it. Provided it's not malicious or breaks
any of the other guidelines, go do it. You don't need mods for a lot of things. Some people come
into our Discord or come into the modding Discord and be like, where's the flying mod? That's a
native feature, guys. You don't need a mod for that. Gray has a question here. Are you going to
MFF? I didn't know Canadian was going. That's interesting. I was in him at a convention before.
Yeah, so MFF is Midwest fur fest. I knew it was fur fest. I just didn't know what it was.
That's a furry convention that's in the Midwest. I don't know anything about it.
No, I won't be going. I currently don't have a job for those who don't know.
And so I can't fly random places on a whim because it's expensive. I'd actually cancel a visit to
a friend's wedding. I had a really good friend, but I just couldn't justify the cost. So I had
to cancel the visit to their wedding. That made me sad. And yeah, I can't attend conventions.
When I had a job like I had before, I could totally just randomly fly around to wherever
the hell I wanted to because I had a salary, but I don't currently. So I have to avoid travel.
I'm trying to navigate and negotiate holiday travel plans, which my family are making endlessly
complicated and I don't want it to be complicated. I just want to hop on a plane and get off and no
one to yell at me. That's actually always the plan for the holiday period is like, no one to yell at
me. That's all I want. If it were up to me, I'd probably just shut my door and do what I wanted
over the holiday period. But hey, holidays are about family obligations. On a side note,
whilst I wait for additional questions, I kind of like I do and don't understand fairy conventions.
So let me just imagine a scenario. OK, so most people at fairy conventions just want to see
people that they know or friends of theirs that they know to see people. And so what they do is
they pay thousands of dollars to travel halfway around the world or whatever to essentially be
in the most cramped space possible. Instead, what you could just do is say,
this month, this date, where there's no fairy convention happening, this group of people can
go to this town and hang out. And it costs so much less because you don't need fairy convention
tickets. The hotels aren't ram packed because of all the other people that you'll never interact
with. It's just pick a random time, go to a random town. You'll save so much more money
and you basically make your own convention when that happens, of course. But it's easier to
control than I'm going to go to this place where everyone else is going, these hotels,
which are already rammed full of people to see a great group of people that I do want to speak,
but also hang out with a bunch of people that I don't know that are basically raising the prices
of everything. Lex says, wouldn't conventions be more about booths and discover a wider community?
Yes, there is also that. But if that's what you're going for, that's great. From experience,
a lot of people are going just to see each other. And if that's the case, then don't go to a
convention. It's much cheaper to just visit each other. But yeah, no, booths and stuff like that.
A lot of the convention though is just wandering around and speaking to people. While I haven't
been to any specifically fairy conventions, I have been to various other types of conventions,
including ones where I have been working there as a person of worky. I actually have in my bedroom
hung around a large teddy bear is my collection of event passes. Every time you go to an event,
you get like a lanyard. And I've collected all of them. And it is crazy because I had,
as an example, I have an exhibitor badge for E3 a few years back. An exhibitor badge for E3, yes.
It's one of my proudest moments. That is, I have an exhibitor E3 badge.
Let's take a look. Oh, we have an actual Neos question. That's great. Let's get off the
convention track. So Ozi asks, I noticed volume unlit materials are not super popular due to 3D
textures being hard to understand outside of medical scans. Have you seen them used in Neos?
If so, how? Well, outside of medical scans, no, I haven't seen them. Although there is this
tutorial where I talk about making a GIF. And I think I make one as a joke. I import all the
frames of a GIF as a 3D texture. And it's kind of creepy. I think it's in my public folder somewhere.
It's a Doctor Who GIF of David Tennant as a doctor saying, oh, yes. And you kind of sort
of scroll through it with the slicer. I don't know what you would use a 3D thingy for.
I don't really know, like, when it comes to Neos features, you always need to start with,
what are you trying to do? Otherwise, you'll just be lost. Like, what are you trying to do?
I'm trying to build a boat. OK, then you need prims. You need a design for the boat. You can't
just build a boat. But I want to build a boat. You know, you need to figure out what you want
to do before you build a boat. For anyone who got that meme, congratulations. For anyone who did not
get that meme, I'll link a video in a moment. So I don't really know what you'd use them for.
Theoretically, you could use them for things like fog. But then a fog material would be better for
that. The 3D texture stuff inside volume unlit is really stressful on your resources.
I don't know enough about shader language to say this for certain. So if you quote me,
quote me with this disclaimer, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not a shader expert.
When I read the shader code for volume unlit, it appears to be remarched. So just be careful with
that shader. It is very intense. Particularly if you drop what's called the step size property
down to zero, you can lower someone's frames. If you drop their step size down to zero and put their
head inside it, you can lower their frames incredibly quickly. I don't know what you'd use it
for other than, of course, medical scans. We've also used it for basically anything that can get
like an image of slices work. Sometimes there are other data sources that can do this. I want to say
something like a radar scan might be possible. I'm not sure. I'm sort of thinking about those
shockwave things they do to survey ground. You know, there's usually a man. It basically looks
like they're shotgunning the floor. They're not. They're sending a shockwave through the floor so
they can measure the sort of density of the rocks beneath them. I wonder if that sort of data would
be able to sort of be 3D visualized. I don't know what sort of format it comes back in. Anyway,
we'll move on. They go to show off their bespoke carpet suit. That is another thing. The sort of
publicity of your character and all of the pictures and stuff like that. Yeah, that's
always good. Moving on to Lex's question who said, so you know how people go to Wikipedia and browse
for ages clicking a bunch of links. It's near so large. Would you happen to do that for the code?
Yeah, that happens a lot. I have a renewed interest in this thing which I don't think
it ever got finished or it's not up to date. It's called Code Bubbles. See if I can...
I just searched that on Instagram. Curse my shortcuts. Code Bubbles. I have the DuckDuckGo
browser doodads. If you do exclamation mark gi space, it will search Google Images. If you
do exclamation mark i space, it will search Instagram. I just dropped the g. It's really
old but I have a renewed interest in maybe making it figure out maybe if it's suitable.
So there's a picture of it. So instead of navigating code via files, you navigate them
via bubbles. The reason why that's great is because I can control click about 20 times before
I actually get to the code I need inside the Neos codebase because I'm not familiar with all aspects
of it. As an example, the other day I needed to figure out why... like the context menu code I
needed to figure out the other day and it was just very thick. I don't mean thick as in silly,
it's quite well written, but it was very thick as in I was in the input drivers and all sorts
before I found out exactly what I needed to do. There was also a problem I was having with the
world browser another day where I'd added a bunch of log statements to half of Neos to figure out
something that was going wrong and then I figured out I just made an oopsie and it was a single line
change. I'd actually then go like pull out all those log statements. It took like half an hour
to pull out all those logs and get rid of them. That is kind of a meme though, removing log
statements once you've fixed a bug. It's kind of sort of a thing that you'll know if you're a
programmer. Arguably you should leave those log statements in there and then just sort of flag
them off, but flag logging isn't something we have currently. I'll probably sort of try and get that
in when I can. So moving on to Ozzy's question who says, related to Lexi's question, what's a funny
Easter egg in the Neos code base? There's a bunch. You'll see actually one of them that exists in the
latest tutorial I did which is in desktop mode. In desktop mode my cursor is a piece of cheese,
it isn't the usual desktop cursor. That's because when Frix was creating the desktop mode he needed
to make a cursor image and I don't know why it came up but I was just like maybe custom cursor
images in the future? Mine would be cheese and then he just added it to the code base.
We are removing some of the sort of old memes, particularly ones that have caused some confusion
in the past. For example there is a joke screen which can be added to your assets, your dash.
I don't remember the circumstances in which it was added but it adds a screenshot of discord because
someone asked for a discord like tab on the dash and so we added a screenshot as a joke but then
someone wrote a mod to re-enable that dash facet screen and then a lot of people got confused in
the modding community and thought that we'd somehow got a discord client into Neos which is incorrect
because that is against the discord terms of service so thumbs up. So yeah there's stuff like
that that we're kind of removing. Sometimes it's just the comments that are funny though.
When code doesn't make sense you know there's all the memes about sort of comments that say things
like don't edit this code you'll die if you edit this code or this code is really difficult to
understand but sometimes there's just like funny stuff that exists there and you can kind of feel
and see their pain but in a more comical way than the standard sort of like this code is bad it's
sort of you know I don't know why this works but it does and those are those are some funny easter
eggs. With that we're out of questions so if anyone has any additional questions do let me know
let somebody go look up that build a boat meme. Oh I got an email that's cool I'll have to deal with
that later. There we go there's the build a boat meme it comes from Second Life. I don't answer
cheese questions Gray Foxen. Cheese questions have all been answered in prior office hours please
check the notes. Okay looking through oh we have another question fantastic thank you for the
additional question. When working on the spirit sweepers game we found almost every action
involving the player equipping, dequipping, avatars, moving the character, installing
locomotions was best performed by the user versus another user or host. I understand networking is
typically the go-to thing to blame but I'm wondering why that is. I think that's probably
a function of synchronization so as a good analogy here when you think about a first-person
shooter game two things happen when you shoot a gun in a first-person shooter game and this is
like maybe older information from my brain I haven't looked at how new FPSs work but there are
two things that happen and they are separate. Number one is animations happen so you shoot a
game in an FPS animations happen you see the bullet leave the gun you see noise you see the
muzzle flash you see whatever it hits you see particles from whatever it hits that is separate
from what is actually happening to figure out if you actually hit them which is usually what's
called a hit scan which is basically just a physics raycast right that is a separate operation
now sometimes that physics hit scan is performed locally which gets a result but that is also then
sent to the server to perform a server-side calculation to see if that actually happened
from an authoritative point of view and depending on the synchronization of those events you can get
sort of the gun doesn't fire but you kill someone the gun does fire but you don't kill someone
and then you know the actual one that you want which is the gun does fire visually and you
actually kill someone and you get the points and if all of those aren't synced up then you end up
with a game which is not satisfying excuse me there I almost died for a second words are
difficult sometimes for neos that's sort of the same thing kind of happens there are nodes and
operations which are validated by the host but the trigger of that event should be as close to
the event as possible so you're right in saying it should be the user carrying out the interaction
and that is because they will start to see the results of that interaction first and it'll be
snappy additionally if you trigger an event for a user from another user then that other user has
to send that message to the host and then the host has to send that message to the user that
actually the event is for so just try and keep that smaller right so if you're equipping an
avatar you want that to come from the person which is equipping the avatar you don't want
that coming from OZ or Lex you know on other sides of the planet like let's say you know Lex
is over in Australia I'm over in America and Lex equips an avatar for me that's like okay cool
Lex sends a message to the host let's say the host is in Europe it says equip an avatar for Prime and
then the host has to send that message to me and it says yo you've equipped another avatar there's
latency there yeah things things can get really really strange and like the most annoying thing
as well like desync is one of the most annoying things you just don't feel like a human great
asks a metaphysical question which is always interesting what kind of life form would you be
if you couldn't be a carbon-based one I have like a interesting answer on that one which is like
I don't particularly enjoy biological life if that makes sense we're gross like humans are gross
right we constantly need to like shove crap in our face and every like every pore in your skin
is currently producing like goop that you don't want and so periodically you have to go wash it
off it's gross so I think like the idea of identity being just floating there is good
there are lots of films which try to do that but they usually do it as like
oh it's a floating cloud of like glowy mist or glowy light and I'm just like
oh yeah look into that non-corporeal I guess would be the thing right I don't
I don't I don't want to leak goop everywhere but I do leak goop everywhere like right now I'm warm
right so I'm leaking more goop than I should be doing I should take off my sweater anyway
let's move on and stop talking about goop who's he asked do you have a strategy with best
combating corrections and sessions or what to exactly look for sometimes it can be massively
annoying trying to understand what could be causing them like apparently world intensity
world color systems being driven which is saddening that like could be a bunch of problems
all in one and I think the best answer there would be of course in terms of features to wait
for hard permissions at that point we can sort of say hey you can't drive this particular system
because it's it's not yours to drive but whilst that doesn't occur I always like to
sort of restart the world with no one in it and see what the problems and then journey around the
world looking for those problems it's it's always difficult to figure out what's going on there
lots of stuff which people do can be undesirable but they don't know it's undesirable or
they've put something on the avatar and they don't even know how it works and it's undesirable
I'm looking at you with the bells on your collars please configure your bells such that they have
a localized volume and not global volume and maybe use your own sound effect not the common
sound effect which is used on 99% of bells now I have seen some good bells out there like I'm
seeing a change there are some good bells out there but the majority of bells are exactly the
same as I've been seeing for years and they are incredibly loud incredibly annoying in global
audio space and I can't like they're so shrill as well I know that kind of went to like my common
rant about bells but you know um if you have like a specific circumstance let me know it's
difficult to answer sort of generically about saying like hard permissions would probably help
with that no no bells bells aren't bad it's the way that they're configured I've changed my
opinion on bells recently to be 99% of bells are bad because I have seen a few that are okay
maybe I should go to MFF I'll take like a church bell with me and just constantly ring it I'll put
it like on a dolly and just like push it around the convention and just be like ringing it
continually I'm also waiting for additional questions Lex is that interstellar does it well
with a fourth dimensional being that does it well yep I agree um star trek discovery one of the
later seasons does it well I can't really say much without doing spoilers but there is a creature in
there which which is great um if I said like cosmic horror you'd see like you know the additional
forms of life that aren't goop bags are interesting to me I think although the aliens in arrival are
good and are very strange they still are goop bags so no goop speaking of goop after this
office hours I'm gonna go get another another mug of coffee which is just goop I'm gonna go drink
some goop I see what you mean Ozi so Ozi says um that they were trying to optimize uh some session
performance issues and they found some funny systems such as a fire on change of no user
attached a localized dine bar that did a loop through of hundred slots to turn off lights
all sorts of stuff like that if using dynamic variables why do you need to loop to turn off
lights just use a dynamic variable driver and a world scoped variable and you can turn off all
the lights without a loop what the hell maybe I should do a tutorial on that just turning off
a hundred lights with a dynamic variable because like without dynamic variables I can agree that
would probably be difficult but with dynamic variables holy crap that's like most great
thing ever I know that there is a little bit of a stigma around using the world dynamic variable
space but if the lights and the objects are part of the world which you own which you are building
use the world dynamic variable space exclusively it's great I use it a lot for the science that
I'm doing because I'm like this isn't a world for socialness this is a world for science so I can
just shove stuff in the world dynamic variable space all day it's great like if you go into a
world of mine where we're doing science it's eye movements eye rotation the secret to the life
that you diverse and everything it's all in the wild the world uh the variable space but if I'm
building like an avatar or I'm building an object which is designed to go into other people's worlds
then it doesn't use world because that is kind of rude. Grace says if you go to mmf would you
consider wearing a tf2 spy costume with a paper furry mask as a disguise no there's a 3d printer
in my bedroom which I packed up because I was going to move apartments then didn't I would
unpack that up I would print off my mask I have links saved in my browser for everything I would
need to authentically recreate my avatar irl and that is what you would see I would even take a
drill and drill like a hole into the mouth hole so I can like put a straw in there and drink from it
because I think a that would be funny and b it would be ironic people like ah it's lunchtime
Prime's finally going to remove his mask of like nope as I just like cram goop in my mouth hole
okay we're at 28 so if there are no more questions we'll be closing down shortly I see
Ruscio's typing if you have a question please go ahead Lex if you're typing you can get a question
as well otherwise we'll be ending after these questions are sorted out. Lex asks how do you
feel about sounder shutting down its podcast hosting service are you going to migrate to
another podcast hosting service or just use the wiki um I don't know right now it kind of
agitates me that the reason why I picked sounder in the first place is because they had automatic
transcription and then they turned off automatic transcription and now they're shutting down so
it's really annoying I'll look around and see what like stuff is there I just want it to be like
automatic I kind of know that Lex does a bunch of work after office hours to to process the audio
and then put it on the wiki I want it to be automatic and that's my like goal so that's why
I started with sounder and then just went downhill I will do what I can I don't really know what I'm
going to do though it is on my to-do list to look at it's just not very high enough to do this right
now okay um cutting off questions after Ramper because because Stifle you snuck one in there
that's absolutely fine but but Ramper if you've got a question perfect otherwise no more questions
you know when like an umpire declares safe on umpires that the baseball I don't know baseball
terms the guy wearing all the armor he's like they're they're saying that that that's the
motion I'm doing right now if you know baseball let me know what I'm saying yeah cool
Rusev says I've been hearing more and more users coming into worlds for starting point in logic so
particularly I would typically take the time to start showing them but unfortunately been too
busy to provide building stuff to provide assistance you know any good starting points
to recommend when you can't provide direct help um I you know in the military where people do drills
and part of the reason there is that they want they want users of of you know weapons or equipment
or orders like half the point for you know militaries so that people follow orders of that
question to just do what they're told without thinking about it and that's why you know you
clean your gun you just you you know you dismantle the gun you put it back together you load it you
unload it you check the chain you do all that stuff so you know when it's drummed into you
I want people to do that when they learn logics with the logics tip I see so many people struggle
because they don't take the time to understand the like the terminology and the mechanics of just
using the logics tip um so a good example there that I have I don't know where I put it in my
public folder um someone knows because it's in the um the mentor workshop world so glad to see that
I edited a logics tip to um have a node menu attached to it which just has maths nodes
and I think I removed some of the sort of options on the context menu somehow or maybe I didn't I
can't remember um that's good though because what that does is it's purely there to teach you
spawning nodes and linking two nodes together and that's what I want people to start with I don't
want people to start with I want to build a boat or on a boat again I want people to start with
spawning a node connecting a node to another node disconnecting a node from another node
packing and unpacking and so when we get into complex tutorials and I say and then spawn this
node I don't get wait how do I do that again like I want that to be like memory and for those of you
who have been doing logics for a while you know that that's memory you know if I say to you oh
yeah you'll need a four node for that you like automatically half the people in this office hours
are like oh yeah flow loop right you know like you did it in your head really quickly and it was
almost subconscious right I want that to happen for people who are learning logics so many people
get like down in the depths of logics and then I don't understand how anything works it's like
okay do you know how to spawn a node well I keep forgetting that okay cool welcome to boot camp
today we'll be sporting a node 400 times and then you'll know how to do it additionally a good
tip as well is for that that mathematical logics node browser I talked about the reason why I did
that is because the logic nodes for maths don't have any confusion they all spawn with float the
data types by default which means you don't have to worry about data types none of them have
impulse lines because impulse lines are confusing when you start none of them have reference lines
which are confusing when you start by references I mean things like slots and users and then
it's just mathematics and you connect them two together I remember Zane I haven't really seen
Zane on Neos that much but for those who know Zane I saw Zane and he didn't know logics and I gave him
like I didn't have that an logic node browser at the time but I drew like a box like a rectangle
around a grouping of nodes and it was just plus minus divided in times and I said just link these
together those are the only nodes that you can you can use you can't use any other folders you can't
use any nodes that have white ribbons you can just use these nodes and he put them together and he
was doing mathematics and learning how the you know the techniques of that worked and he said
well what can I do I'm kind of comfortable with that and so I gave him the t node the t node that
just counts up and he plugged that into all of his maths and he's like well t isn't round over here
but over here I have a round number and it's like cool that that's that's great you appear to have
rounded a number accidentally by using a bunch of mathematics that's cool and they were enjoying it
and then I think I plugged their random mathematics into the shape of a sphere or
something and it was like jumping around and then they got the picture I don't I don't like how you
know we start with like I want to make a gun or I want to make a custom multi-tool or a custom
inspector start with can you spawn a node and can you link them together okay moving down to
stifle who says when a user is under a slot with a tag and I think created not spawned from the
inventory will have that tag that is created including object logic's important assets what
are some good use cases for it I don't know that can be useful for like tags are meant to sort of
be like categorization of objects so I don't really know why that functionality was originally
added I would ask freaks freaks is kind of busy right now so I don't really know what might be
uses for that kind of have an example I guess from a world I'm building where I need I need
every object that has a certain tag to be parented under at least some other object right it can't
go to root so many things in news that are either written by users or not written by users sometimes
it's you know nodes or components or just accidentally parent stuff to root and that
cannot happen for this world and so I start attacking stuff that needed to not be under root
as a certain tag and then I could I could pick that up and repairing it to where it needed to
go that was useful yes that's a use remember guys though tags aren't evil I made a whole tutorial
on that because tags used to be used for data storage and people are like tags are bad no tags
are fantastic you just need to use them correctly braces this is a podcast no not really but I was
struggling to get it up on the wiki because the wiki is you know kind of unreliable sometimes
and I found this service called sounder and I put it on sounder and it turns out you know
sounder is a podcast platform and it automatically dumps my episodes into spotify so I'm podcast now
hi all right then the last question that we have is from ramp who says I mean the transcriber could
be made for you by community with some good ml people otherwise I heard my question just answered
not to ask if there any form of I'll figure something out like I'll probably move it to
another podcasting platform I just don't know which one it would need I guess better transcription
like I would love if like if it did whisper api just like just by itself that would be great
because it means that that Lex wouldn't have to do it not that I don't want him to do it it's just
I want it to be as automatic as possible as automatic as possible you know it's up to me
every time I made a tutorial I make a page of notes about it that includes everything you see
in the description field I would love it if I could basically hand the video file and the
description text file to some program and be like do it right and it would like I don't know make a
thumbnail upload it post it on twitter post it in discord and I wouldn't have to deal with it because
automation is cool as linker says tags as in tags on the item inspector yeah in slot tags tags are
used like everywhere like there's tags on records there's tags on assets there's tags on contacts
there's tags on users tags on slots within a world with that I believe we're done so I'm gonna go
ahead and end off here if you guys have any additional questions please do direct message
me post them in questions and help or speak to anyone else that might be able to help you out
I will see you again next week do you remember that you can submit questions before the session
as well you can find that form on the office hours wiki pages along with
prior notes from all the other sessions I hope you all have a fantastic day