All right, we're gonna go ahead and get started as it is 4 p.m. So welcome to Prime Time.
This is the half hour, sometimes hour, segment where Prime rants about recycling and sometimes
answers Nia's questions if they appear. If you'd like to get your question answered,
please drop it in the office hours text chat thread. That is a couple of channels above this one.
There is a thread dedicated for questions. Please drop them in there. They'll be answered in the order that they appear.
So we have some questions here and we're gonna go ahead and get started.
So first of all, we have a question from Lex that says "are there any projects you want to work on given infinite time?"
Absolutely. So, um
there are a few worlds that I have that
have hidden things on them. I won't tell you which ones, but for those who are aware, please also don't tell them.
But there are a few worlds I have which have hidden things in them and
I need to finish that because that was gonna be a huge big project that I never finished
so I need to finish that, but I haven't had time to work on that in about three years.
So, you know, that's always fun.
Yeah, shout out to
2019 Prime who thought that they could work on that forever and then join the Neos team and etc, etc.
Yeah, there are currently four finished. So there are four items to find. No one to my knowledge has found the fourth.
Next question, Beagle says "where's the Atlas field inside the point cluster cloud component? There's nothing about it on the wiki."
I will go ahead and take a look. I have actually opened the code base today so I can go ahead and take a look.
Point...
Point cloud...
Point cluster, sorry. Point cluster. Point cluster mesh. There we go. Point cluster mesh.
I'll take a look in just a second. He said Atlas. Let's take a look. Atlas info.
I think that's probably gonna render the point cluster a little bit like
a little bit like a particle animation sheet because it uses Atlas info there.
Yeah, it's gonna move the UVs of some of the points around to that
to
according to that Atlas. So you should be able to provide like a texture and then Atlas info there and it should
should be there and
shrink around there.
Atlas info. Yeah, you want to drop in an Atlas info component.
You can take a look at how to use that via a different component. If you go to a tutorial I have on my planet...
Yes, my planet of videos. My planet of videos, or I have the UV Atlas animator
that uses the Atlas info component. So create an Atlas info component, grab the top white bar
that says Atlas info and drop it into that Atlas section of the
Atlas thingy.
Yeah, planet.
Let's see what we've got there. Specs comments on pouring out water for that one project everyone has to work on more later.
Yeah, it's it's like saddening.
I'm sure you all have stuff just sort of
in your computer, out of your computer, in your apartment, in previous apartments, sometimes even in my family's houses
which I meant to work on later, but never have had time to. Wow English is difficult today.
I need more coffee. Moving forwards, Reddy says what's with this website? It's a website.
You'll have to be more specific on your question. Beagle says how come a user has a thing Atlas info.
Yeah, I think it's the Atlas info component. I'll play around with it a little bit. Maybe after this but
it should just be dropping the Atlas. So go to the Neosensals assets particles.
There's some sheets in there that look like smoke or fire etc.
Use that as the texture and then drop in Atlas info and it should sort of
make the point cloud use
frames from that sheet. With that we're out of questions. I'm waiting for like a broom to arrive.
This is gonna be like another tangent whilst we have - I will get back to questions at the moment, but like
I'm waiting for a broom to arrive. So like my apartment has a balcony and I don't really use it.
I didn't intend to use it, but then last year when I thought I was moving and then didn't move, I got rid of my
chair that's out there, so I didn't really have any reason to go out there now.
But it's really dusty out there and I was like I'm gonna clean that because they'll charge me on the deposit for cleaning it
so I'm gonna clean it. But then I realized I need like, you know, an ability to stand up and brush it.
Otherwise, I'm gonna be on my hands and knees with a smaller brush. So
like, you know, I need a brush I can stand up. So I brought like a, you know,
a full-on like hard broom that you might use to clean an entire deck just for this like tiny balcony.
But it's got a collapsible handle. So I'm hoping it'll save room. Sometimes I have to sort of get around this sort of
mental space of eventually I'll own a house and I'll need a big broom like that for my big garden.
Tiny balcony! Tiny balcony!
Need clean!
Yeah, for those who are unaware in America at least,
the apartment complex companies will charge you for literally everything.
Literally everything. They have no qualms about you basically moving out and then them going, "Yes,
we're replacing the floors in your apartment and we're gonna charge you for that."
And it's like I can understand if I damaged the floor, but like if you're just upgrading the apartment to a new floor,
you can't charge me for that. It's just like what? But they try to so that's fun. They'll also be like, "Yeah,
well, we'll have to repaint the entire apartment. So we'll charge you for that." And not only will they charge you for the paint there,
they'll charge you the hourly cost that they pay the painter. So it's just really scummy or whatever.
So I try and do as much as possible to get that down. Like for example,
cleaning that balcony will take me the cost of the broom, which is I don't know like $11, and I don't know, an hour or two
to brush it or whatever.
So $11.
But if they charge me, it'll be the cost of the labor for the maintenance person to brush it,
which will be more than $11. I have a mop, I have a vacuum cleaner, and I have a small,
like we call them dust buses, like a small handheld vacuum, which I use if I don't get the big vacuum out.
I also do have a brush, but I don't like with a vacuum and a mop, I'm good. When I say broom as well,
I mean brush, right? It's a hard brush broom rather than like what like, you know,
Gildy broom. All right, moving on to questions. Like I said, I'd answer them the moment they appeared and they were talking about brooms.
Lucas says "May I ask what's currently been working on development-wise? Last I heard of Geens was starting work replacement for Unity.
How's that coming along?" I don't know, you'd have to ask Geens about that particular one. That's continuing.
It's an open source project outside of Neos, which of course means it like it's free from bullshit.
So, I mean it has bullshit for other reasons because it's a complicated thing to replace Unity, but you know,
I mean like it's free from Neos bullshit. "As for development-wise,
you can check our roadmap available on the Neos public thing for what we are currently working on?" Yes,
I know that hasn't been updated in forever, but that is all the information available, additional information will be available in the Announcers channel.
Moving forwards to Baxter's question. Baxter says "There's a rotation scale. You can see information available to build more materials.
So I've heard but I've not encountered information on that. Do you have a quick insight into that or a video available somewhere?
Is there something you don't touch yourself?" I have not touched billboards. Every time I think about billboards,
I'm like, I don't know why I wouldn't use a particle system or a point cloud mesh.
Like for example, you could like take like a model of a cat and you can apply like a billboard material to it.
But then you just have like a cat shaped particle cloud. I don't really know why you need that.
Alex asks "What if they do that? I'll string all over again." They will.
But I also plan to get a cleaner to do a pass on this once all my furniture's out.
And that cleaners invoice and details will be left in the apartment like on the side. They're free to ignore it, of course,
but like when they start saying "We're charging you a cleaning fee." I'm like, yeah, I already got it professionally cleaned, so piss off.
I'll be able to get a better deal. Cyberfrog asks
"Is there plans for creating own shaders in runtime?"
Um, yeah, so what we want to do is want to create like a shader style system that similar to logics in that
you can link together, which is also similar to sort of logics plus blender shading nodes, right?
So rather than writing shader code, you can link together those nodes.
The reason why we want to do it that way rather than allowing you to upload your own shader code is because
we need to keep backwards compatibility done, particularly seeing as we won't be staying on Unity forever.
And that means we can't just say "Hey, get poly on me," because like, you know,
we just can't. Like it just it locks us into a sort of compatibility layer where, you know,
two or three years down the line, we have to remove the ability to use poly on me and people are mad at us again,
so we'd rather they'd be mad at us without us doing the work.
Like you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't see much, well not in this particular case.
You think you can inspect the MMC trophies? As far as I remember,
they're shape keyed animations, which means they are a little bit unperformant, but like they're cool.
I don't think they're billboard. It might be though. I don't know. I didn't inspect one, that was like last year though.
So I'm not gonna like remember that.
Revy says "Is something gonna happen sometime soon? I've been hearing rumors with this new studio under frugs. Feels like you guys are getting somewhere."
All rumors are false unless they are in the announcements channel.
And I hate to say that and be very deliberate about it, but all rumors are false.
Prime doesn't have pink hair.
Neos is not being purchased by Kroger supermarkets. You can just make rumors up whenever you want.
What I'd say to rumors is if you turn back round to the person who gave you that rumor and said "That's very
disingenuous of you to provide a rumor to me that you have no source of.
Do you have a source of this rumor?"
And if they say "yes" and the rumor source is not the announcements channel,
then you ask that person to go back to their source and ask them why they think it's appropriate to make silly rumors.
It's inappropriate, and that's all I'll say on that matter.
As for the comment of "Is something gonna happen anytime soon?" Check the announcements channel.
All available information will be in the announcements channel when we're able to share it, if we're able to share it, when we're able to share it.
Whatever it might be.
I hate to sound like a broken record there.
I know that people hate me for being a broken record there, but think about it from our perspective.
We have people all throughout the Neos community that are like "Yeah, so I heard that
the People's Republic of Congo is gonna purchase Neos." I'm just like "What? Like who the, like what?"
I'm like "No!"
Just like it's ridiculous, right?
So the only official information we have is available in the announcements channel.
And if there is no available information in the announcements channel, don't then immediately say "But there is no information in the announcements channel."
There is. It's just all the information we have is already in there.
Moving forwards, Lex says "Are groups able to get any more storage than 10 gigabytes?" I don't think so at this time.
We're able to sort of expand our storage offering
configurations at this time due to everything else going on.
Particularly with
trying to sort of
I can't really answer that one.
Beagle says "On that are we able to do motor groups?" Yeah, I think so. I own like three, so yeah.
Check the Patreon tiers for how many groups you'll be able to create there, as I am on the Neos team.
Sometimes I will have additional groups for various sort of technical reasons.
Beagle says "What time are we getting on Neos to Mess with Atlases?"
Tell you what, like can, I never know, like can you share a screen on stages? If you can do that,
I'll try it at the end, and I'll just keep it going and you can do that.
I would drop into like one of the regular voice channels,
but like we know what's gonna happen there, like 50 people will join, all talk at once, and then like mess will occur.
Or I just record a quick two-minute video and upload it. I think I know how to use it,
I'm not sure, but like I think it would be like probably like five minutes or so just to take a look at it.
In that case, I should start Neos. I really do think it's gonna be like less than five minutes,
so I'll do it right at the end. Oh, that's an old thread. I should lock the threads. Thank you for forwarding that across, Mike.
Peach Clover asked, "Everyone who refuses to use Neos whines about the lack of P.O.M.I. Will there be a P.O.M.I. converter to win the MontaN.I.O.S.?"
We can get close to P.O.M.I.S., we can't get exactly to P.O.M.I.S.
One of the most annoying things I have when it comes to P.O.M.I.S. is discussing what they want from it. As a good example here,
if you go into a paint store, and in that paint store, you're looking for a particular color of paint,
instead of describing the paint color, like I would like a blue paint, you just name it.
I'd like a jar of Ocean Breeze, and we're like, well, we're Prime's paint store, and we don't stock Ocean Breeze,
but if you could describe Ocean Breeze to me, I can show you a vast array of colors that look similar to what you're describing.
They're like, no, I just want Ocean Breeze. It's like, just like, is that like a, you know, a cyan-y blue?
Is there like, you know, more green in there? Because like, you know, it's a paint store.
We've got like swatches and tubs, we got every color of paint. We just don't call it Ocean Breeze,
so if you could just describe the color Ocean Breeze, then we would be great.
Yeah, if you expect like regular users who go into paint stores to know Panetone, then...
Not Panetone. Pantone? Yeah, like, it's not gonna happen.
I hope that like, kinda makes sense. Like, I've had it so many times though, people are like,
I want Pyomies, and then I find out they want it because their horns need to be RGB, like strobing,
and I'm like, well, we could just do that without Pyomies. And they go, oh!
And then I set it up for them, and then they go, oh, I guess I don't need Pyomies then.
It's just like, tada! I've thought about doing one of those meme-y videos,
like actually a series of them, you know, it's like, 10 things you don't need mods for on Neos.
10 things you don't need plugins for on Neos. 10 things that just work on Neos,
because so many people just don't understand, like, things like flying and scaling,
they don't understand that they can just happen, right? You don't need any mods or any capabilities
to them, because their only frame of reference is VRChat, where they do need mods to fly,
change their size and all this sort of stuff. I've been thinking about doing that,
and maybe I'll do another video which is like, 10 things you don't need Pyomies for.
Back to the says, "But events happen locally, but collider events fire. For everyone,
would it be practical to create a physics collision check node that only runs on character colliders,
specifically ones that have an active user to create local collision events?"
That's what you're trying to do. Like, if you're doing a character collider, it's usually like,
some sort of barrier, a teleport, or like a culling thingy, and there are components
available for all of that, which will do it a lot more proficiently than those nodes.
So if you tell me a scenario, maybe I can help out a little bit more there.
You can actually just run it through an if, and be like, if, and then like, target user,
like local user is target user. I was like, wait a minute, which number key and desktop
nodes spots the logic strip? I forgot. Ah, okay. Yeah, physics. There's no actual node
that's like, is local user inside? There is on the character, what's it called, the thing,
the component. Character something. Someone help me out here, it's the one where you collide
a user tracker. Thank you, Nitra. Thank you. Physics utility. Thank you. The thing, you
know, the thing that does the thing and has the behavior of thing. You can plug in the
output, the second output of onCollisionStart into getActiveUser or whatever, because that
like, the output is a collider, and then you can get the active user of the collider that
you're colliding with. That's a real fast way of doing it. Sometimes yes, sometimes
no. It just depends how things work. Yeah, we got it. Alex, let me just go ahead and
lock the old thread so that we just, there we go. How dare I not remove every component
all the time, even though sometimes they change names and locations and, you know, once we
have a component and a tatcher that has searching, I want to change up the location of a bunch
of them. Let me check my emails again. Has my broom arrived? My broom has not arrived.
I'm so... Because if it arrives before it gets dark, I can do that today, and that'd
be an arm off my to-do list. But if it arrives after it's dark, I'm not going to be out there
at nighttime, like cleaning. Cleaning my patio. Yeah, something like that, Alex. That's good.
Might be able to bypass the get slot, I'm not sure. Because we don't have getActiveUser
for a component. Oh, we do. Yeah, that worked. Yeah. I think it works, I don't know if it
works. You can try faster than I am, the one hosting office hours, let me know how it goes.
Problem with a material video is, it's again unclear what people want. Sometimes they want,
like a big common one we have is the sparkles, right? So something in Pyumi is able to make
an avatar look really sparkly. You know, you look at them, like you might look at sort
of like one of those expensive glass sculptures you can get... hold on, let me get a picture.
Yep, that's exactly, that is exactly what I was saying. Sometimes, you can buy these,
like, I wouldn't recommend it, but like, they're the glass art, right? Sometimes it's like,
people want their surface texture to look like that, they want it to like twinkle and
stuff like that, so again. But sorry, I managed to make that work. A lot of times as well,
they just want scrolling textures, and we can just support that. One thing we are limited
on though is independently scrolling different maps. So a lot of times in some of our materials,
you can only scroll all of the maps, you can't scroll just once, you won't be able to just
scroll the emission or just scroll the albedo, sometimes the albedo and the emission will
scroll at the same time, and I get that, that can be problematic. Because if you can isolate
just the emissions to scroll, then it means that you can get sort of like ribbons, bands,
and shapes of light that move across the avatar that don't affect the actual albedo. Because
if you scroll the albedo, then your eyes and your lips and your face and your nose also
scroll and that looks creepy. Alright, scrolling around, making sure there are no additional
questions. There are no additional questions that I can currently see. That's a good question
from AgriPilot. I'll read it and then I'll go immediately to the code and take a look.
Why does the component context menu item source not get disabled when the slot is disabled
that it is on? I think I know why. Yeah, that's just a design thing. So what happens with
the context menu item components is once you've created them and you open the context menu,
we scan your hierarchy for root context menu items and then we descend from there to find
context menu item sources. And because we're scrolling through those, we're just using,
internally we're just using code that gets components and doesn't really care about the
slots, so we don't really have any information about the slot. The way around that would
be to look at the slot and pay attention to the slot, or once you have the component,
get the slot that the component is on and then look at that enable property. Sometimes
it makes sense to do that, sometimes it doesn't. Like I can imagine that there might be cases
where someone has accidentally disabled their context menu. That's probably something we
can fix. Like Slick says that we can't avoid get slot because it doesn't work correctly.
So yeah, that's something you can probably sort out. We should be able to go from a component
to a slot. There was something we were trying to do with Logix where we were trying to sort
of like detect that people were doing stuff like that and then automatically spawn nodes
that were more logical. The two straight bars that you sometimes see are touching each other
of different colors, that's called a cast. We were trying to basically add to that cast
system and be like, there is not an easy way to cast these, but there is a node which will
do this properly. So instead of auto-generating the cast, we would auto-generate the get slot
node for you. So we wanted to do that at some point. There's a path, like lots of times
there's a path. We also wanted to do that for URI. URI is a mess. What we did originally
was we added nodes that look like, resemble, and behave like cast nodes, but aren't actually
cast nodes. They are like URI construction nodes, and it just caused a bunch of mess.
So we wanted to fix that so that it would spawn the appropriate URI nodes, and that
was on my plate like three years ago, and I actually didn't do anything other than coding.
Player Cody asks, is there a tutorial that talks about mapping a physical object that
drives the volume meter from the audio output? I think you probably mean the volume on an
audio output. So you're talking about like a physical volume bar. I don't particularly
know why this popped into my head, but like, you know, how high you raise a coconut in
the skies, how high the volume is. That would be very easy to do. There is no tutorial that
has been created about it, but it would be easy to do. You just get the sort of relative
change in position of said coconut, and drive the volume of the audio output from it. I
have no idea why I thought of coconuts, but you know, there we go. Broom will be here
by 8pm. There's also that bad UX trend meme where they create really bad volume meters.
It would be great to see a collection of those. I won't be updating the wiki, I'll probably
just record a video and dump it there, because I'm really busy. But like I said, it should
be less than five minutes for me to figure out how in game. And we'll do that at the
end here. I'll stop the recording, and I'll be like "the recording has stopped!" but
then I'll just share my screen here. I don't wanna put like, you know, "ah, that'd be
great." Or like, you know those sculptures where you balance forks and bottles and stuff?
Yeah, this stuff, right? This is how you control the volume of an audio source, you have to
balance bottles like this. No, that wasn't a question. Thank you Lex, thank you. That
wasn't answered. Bacta says "I want to be able to define how materials map images to
the UV map, I know Trig for a reason, dang it I want things to spin." I didn't really
see that as a question. That's not really a question. With that I do believe we're out
of questions, if anyone else has a question please go ahead and type it, I'll give you
a few seconds to do that whilst I figure out... let me get like... I need a point cloud, like
where can I get a point cloud? Beagle, you got a point cloud I can use? Send me one.
Oh no, if you're not in Neos, don't worry about it, I'm sure I can find one. I think
there's one in Neos Essentials. Yeah, I got one in Neos Essentials, it's a ring. That'll
do. Alright, so we got a few more questions. I'll go through these questions, then we'll
stop the recording, I'll go live, and then it should all work out. Like at the end of
the day you'll still be able to go to bed, that's what you've got to realize sometimes,
at the end of the day if your broom arrives or your broom doesn't arrive you can still
go to bed and sleep. Anyway, Specs says "Any mesh you can convert it to a point cloud?"
Of course you can. Alex says "Will there be an official component on logic searcher?"
Yes, you can find that on our roadmap. Peach says "Who's a quilt clone, is there a tool
I would like to resize when it is equipped, how do I do this?" There's a video on that
one, where I make a tool out of an elephant. There's lots of people struggling with that
one. That is a really old video, but it should work. Playa Curdi clarifies "Smaller positional
object that dictates the volume, like the object's starting point, is audio volume 0
and the slider goes far to where the volume reaches." Yeah, that's just a slider, that's
exactly what we're talking about. I know you can't hear the audio right now, and I will
try and get the recording up here. Look, I know I've been sloppy about that one, but
like, hey, last week's office hours just transcribed itself so I can get that one done. I don't
need a thing, Beagle, I've got a thing, I found one. Alex says "An inventory searcher?"
Yes, it's on the roadmap. Icecreampie asks about fog volumes, I don't, I haven't used
fog volumes, I'm sure someone in here has, I'm just gonna throw some onto the bus here.
Specs! Okay, you're thrown under the bus, enjoy. I'm sure Specs has used a fog volume.
If not I do see a few other people lurking that might be able to help. That's untrue,
I've used one in one of my worlds, but Vigilab set that up for me. With that, I'm gonna cut
off questions there, I'm gonna stop the recording, so I'll say good, okay we got like, one question
just slipped in, so we'll go for it. We'll go for it. "Would it be possible to make it
so Logix works a bit more visual coding where you pull from a node, drop it in the air,
search for it?" Yeah, that's, we also want to add node searching, and something similar
to the way Blender does it, where there's like a search bar, yeah. Now that's it. No
more questions. See you next week for those on the recording, for those not on the recording,
I'll show you how to use the point cluster mesh in a Sherry thingy, and I'll also record
it to OBS and shove it in my random info playlist, which is where I do low-effort content. Alright,
bye bye!