It is 4pm, so we're going to get that started.
Let's jump straight into the questions that we have in the thread.
So Lex says "What are the plans for Neocene again?"
So Neocene was like, it's unfair to call that like a backup, but it's like an addition
to the big chunky launcher, right?
We would be remaking the big chunky launcher and making that into like our own launcher.
So that would also allow us to have more of a backup in case the things like the steam
removal happened again, whatever, we'd have our own launcher, etc.
But it would also allow us to sort of more simultaneously manage builds.
So if there was any testing needed, or people wanted to jump between the headless or the
quest build, or the android build, etc. they'd be able to do it a lot easier.
We'd also be able to serve builds there for different establishments, such as businesses,
education, learning, etc.
Yeah, that was what Neocene was meant to be.
Next up we have hentai games who says "What's the status of the lawsuit and when are we
getting an update?"
I don't know what that is.
I mean, my suit's in the cupboard, but like, I don't know what that is.
So I don't know.
And with that, we're out of questions.
So Jack asks "Is Neocene accompanied by a change in the build/deploy pipeline too?"
Yeah, the idea there was to update how the build pipeline and the deployment pipeline
works.
It would have been a great actual hero scenario for the recent Cloudflare, YouTube download,
MMC 2023 issues where we had builds being unsynchronized.
Right now, builds that are generated are like three different pipelines, and so it's really
difficult sometimes to manage them.
Neocene would completely streamline that, and we'd be able to do that a lot easier.
Lou says "What tips practices would you recommend for inventory management?"
I actually have a video on this one as far as I'm aware.
Let me go ahead and double check if I can find it.
It's been working really well outside of Neos as well, it does require diligence, and sometimes
you'll end up clicking a lot of folders.
But if you start doing it, it really does prevent many issues.
People go "There is no inventory management in Neos, so I won't inventory manage."
And I go "Okay, cool.
You could do a little bit of it."
So yeah, but then all the stuff I hadn't managed would still be there.
I was like "Well, yeah, but you can do the new stuff."
When did I upload that video?
I've not got a staff badge there, I've only got one row, and I'm wearing a center hat.
That's gonna be well dated, let me see.
Strangely the date isn't displayed in YouTube Studio, I have to go to the actual video.
Two years ago!
15 December 2020, fantastic.
I didn't answer the question, because it assumes things that don't exist, or might not exist.
It's a very strange question.
I guess the second half, yes, the second half, that's a better answer for the second half,
which is "Any updates will be in the announcements channel."
And before you say there are no updates in the announcements channel, yes, any future
updates will be in the announcements channel.
You can compare it to that one thing that you pre-ordered on the internet two years
ago and it never shipped and then suddenly randomly arrived today.
I've got edi controllers sat next to me charging.
If you find checking the announcements channel problematic, you can always go to this amazing
URL.
Jack has an overarching question.
What things are planned, considered for future improvements to new users' audio systems,
and better reverb zones, deafening zones, etc.
I would like to, firstly, in my opinion, I guess, and then for what we're actually doing,
you can go ahead and check the roadmap, but I would like to see, we were looking into
it, I can't remember why we stopped, but we were looking into a different audio system
that would allow the structure of the area that you're in to affect the audio in some
way, like walls and doorways and stuff like that would have affected the audio.
I'd have to go double check what the name of that library that we were looking at is,
but that doesn't, I can't remember the name of it, etc.
We are using Steam audio right now for some things, I think we want to upgrade that.
I would like to see more tweaks to the logarithmic falloff, I would also like to see better tooling
to visualize that as well.
It would be great if we had similar debug visuals to things like the reflection probe
and the default cube editing for the falloff of audio, because I know most people just
don't care, and they leave the falloff on logarithmic, they leave the sound at 100%,
and then everyone just complains because audio is always too loud, no one balances their
audio.
Quick reminder there, balance your audio.
Here's how to balance your audio.
Set all of your audio bars to 100%, and then walk through your experience, your world,
your tool, etc., and figure out what needs to be quieter, what needs to be louder, what
you shouldn't hear from across the map, what you should hear across from the map, and then
you can normalize it there.
For anyone who doesn't agree with setting their audio levels to 100%, remember that
the word 100% in the audio level means 100% of normal, or as in the intended way that
the author wants this experience to be established with you.
So if you're running at like 2% audio, like I know most people are, then you're missing
out on a lot of range that you can have there.
Let's say you're making a horror map, you know, maybe footstep sounds, sorry excuse
me, are very quiet, but like the monster screaming and tearing you into pieces, that should be
a bit louder.
You get more range there if you use the entire audio bar, rather than just the bit that occurs
between 2% and 0%.
Lexis, the ETE controllers don't work with Neos anymore?
They do.
I think the path for using them is a bit different, but I've been collaborating with some of the
people in the ETE Discord about that.
We have Silver, they are probably in this Discord, but Silver here is doing some logics
with the ETE controllers.
It might be some facilities or gestures etc that don't work.
I don't know.
Mine arrived, and one was charged to full, and one wasn't charged to full, so I just
put them all on charge.
I actually sent, I could find this library again, because I sent an email to the library
creator, because it's not licensed.
Unfortunately like Gmail searching is just terrible.
Maybe it wasn't on that account.
I might have sent it from, it would make sense if I sent it from this account.
Yes, here it is.
Yeah, it's here.
There's literally no license, no information about it.
Acoustic echo cancelling, voice suppression, voice activity detection.
Very good module.
I asked for a license, they said no.
They said that it's open source, I don't want to give it a license, so I just said okay,
and we didn't use it.
I don't even remember why we did it.
Frix asked me to look into seeing if I could get them to clarify the license, so I was
doing the email back and forth there.
Okay, jumping back up to questions, because I forgot them.
Glavin says are there plans to have a native built-in user calling system?
I would love for the halls like that to kind of be drop-in and easy to use.
We would of course make it so that you can disable them or build your own, because we
don't want our tools to supersede or block the custom creation of additional tools.
But I would love for more logical systems to exist.
I know that VRChat has done some amazing stuff with culling, both audio and avatar related,
which we should absolutely emulate, and then someone starts saying, "No, you're going to
steal it or copy it from VR."
It's like, come on, guys.
I am complimenting VRChat on a pre-feature, well-created, and saying that we could emulate
similar features on our platform, that's totally fine.
Jack comments that there's stuff that Logics can't do, like reduce update rates and stuff
like that.
Yes, if we made a system, it would have a lot more capabilities than Logics.
However, we could take a look at providing additional components, nodes, etc., that would
allow that additional functionality to be established.
Something like that, when we're giving you more control over the world, might have to
wait for hard permissions, though, because at that point we are enabling you to kind
of damage the world.
A bit like the knockback gun problem, we gave people the functionality to accelerate people
at the speed of light, and that's cool, because you can make guns and stuff that knock people
back, but if you crank those numbers up all the way, then weird stuff happens.
So if you did that, the same with IK or culling and stuff like that, there might be some worse
consequences for that that we'd have to sort of handle.
Jack mentions the IK culling mod, yeah, I've looked into that one.
Every mod I look into the source code of, I'm like, I'm sorry, guys, I'm so sorry, because
it's like one line of code to change something that annoyed people.
Jack asks, did you ever find your personalized easter egg in our MMC entry?
You'll have to unfortunately remind me of which gear and which entry.
I looked at far too many, and oftentimes it was not clear who worked on the list, or if
it was, it was just a big list that sort of merged into one.
No, in which case I did not notice it on dashcam.
There was actually, that was like, I know it's like, you know, months away from MMC
2024, but that is something to note as well.
I don't want to pick on, you know, anyone individual, but I've got to to provide my
example and talking point.
So Rukio, good map, fantastic work team.
However, they put a lot of secrets and easter eggs into their map, and they were quite hidden,
like more hidden than I think was reasonable, and therefore we didn't notice that they
existed and found them confusing.
There were a couple of bugs that prevented us from looking at those, but it was like,
cool, there are easter eggs in here, but they weren't easy enough to find.
Now I know mainstream games sometimes do that, like there's a side quest in Final Fantasy
IX that took ten years to find.
That's okay, because it's like a mainstream game, but when it comes to just a world or
a session as a part of MMC, if you want those easter eggs to be part of your judging, please
make them more obvious.
We have so many entries to look at, and not enough time to look at all of them.
So at a certain point, what I had to do in Rukio's entry was go, I know that there is
more here, like I can see that something is meant to happen here, but I just unfortunately
don't have time to discover it.
There's something about like, if you made a certain drink, then something would appear,
and if that thing appeared, you can then collect them, and then if you collected them, a new
duck appeared.
And the only reason I knew that, oh not duck, floaty appeared.
And the only reason I knew that is because I saw something weird, and then I inspected
it, and I was like "oh I see this", because I was then technically analysing the system.
Oh, Jackal, thought, do you...
So Jackal asks "how's the move, are other efforts going, do you think you'll be starting
out tutorials again at some point?"
I'm still incredibly busy with a variety of things that are non-neos related before
anyone starts like Moveroo the rumour mill.
I'm trying to get the move sorted, I have now applied for the apartment building, which
is next to my apartment building.
They needed income verification, which I provided, and for some reason that's gone all the way
up to the regional manager of the company that owns the building, and she is not responding
to her email, so that's fun.
She needs to respond in the next couple of days or she'll lose a customer.
She'll lose a customer with a very good credit score as well, so you know, she's losing out.
Once that's sorted, then I can do things like arrange movers.
I haven't got that much to move, but I am feeble and weak, I can't move a bed and a
bookshelf by myself.
And then I'll probably get a cleaner to do it once over here, because they charge you
anyway, but if you get a cleaner to do it, then they don't have to do it.
And they won't charge you, but you'll charge - it works out cheaper.
"But you have requested a tutorial about the multi-UV material and what it's good for."
I can give you an example straight off the top of my head.
It really comes up a lot in avatar management and stuff like that.
So let's imagine you have an avatar that has a scrolling emissive effect.
I mean sometimes it's stars or sparkles or stuff like that.
In some cases, you want elements to scroll differently over the UV than other elements.
Like for example, you might want the star or the sparkle shape that's on your emissive
map to scroll at a higher rate than something else.
And the only real way to do that is to scroll those at different rates, which means different
properties, which usually means different UVs.
If you think about the UV for a face, that's sort of where you take the skin off someone's
avatar and lay it down flat like some sort of weird mass murderer.
That is one set of UVs, but then maybe another set of UVs is the stars or the twinkles that
you need to scroll across their face.
And that's why you'd use more UVs.
Separate those up.
Yeah, good idea to use that.
I have to look at my avatar and take a look at that.
Inside of Blender, you can use as many UV maps as you want.
And I know that a lot of people use those for things like baking and shadows and stuff
like that.
Lots of prep that I see for Substance Painter uses multi UV maps.
There's stuff in Blender that I still don't know what it's for.
And I'm just like, this looks cool, but I don't know what it's for.
And the whole reason behind that is I don't do renders in Blender.
I don't do any of the sort of animation in Blender.
I don't even do particle systems or geometry.
No, I haven't looked into that yet.
I just like I have a character ID to like, you know, reweight paint their arm or something.
Just I use it for like probably like a small part of its capabilities.
Jack is commenting on the fact that they are starting up work on a new version of their
MMC project, which is fantastic.
They do comment that they were burnt out by MMC.
The goal of MMC isn't to isn't to burn you out.
So make sure that you are approaching it with your health in mind.
Lex says one thing for them is that they're not going to work on multiple entries.
That's a very good idea.
For those who remember the NCC, which is the Neos contest, I made three entries.
And the reason was because back then Neos was so small, I wanted there to be a wealth
of entries.
And I had a lot more time there because I wasn't on the team.
So I made three entries.
I wouldn't suggest doing that.
There are no additional questions.
I will scroll up the list, double check and I haven't missed any.
I haven't missed any that I can see.
How many additional questions do you let me know?
I put them in that thread and I'll get them in the order that they have here.
Lex asks would you know why accepting a contact request takes an indeterminate amount of time
extra time for the person who's getting accepted?
It's something to do with polling and caching as far as I'm aware.
I know that's like a sort of like, what's the word I'm looking for?
Lacklustre I guess we'll do for now.
I know it's a lacklustre answer, but it's always that particular thing.
I know that we want to expand our SignalR offerings such that that's faster and more
immediate in the future.
But you know, it is 4.24pm.
We'll keep going for a little bit longer.
But if you don't have any...
Oh my god, that's a big question.
So go ahead and get that done.
Okay, cool.
I've got some reading to do.
So Jackal has a gigantic question which we're going to read.
Vakrin, I have set up a simple round frame.
I have to read it because otherwise it doesn't appear on the recording.
I have set up a simple round frame that I'd like to be linked to my context menu.
I've set up with the virtual parent component, an additional value copy board component so
that I can drive its active state using the active state of the visual chart of the context
menu slot attached to me and the player.
Likewise, the override parent field is set to said visual slot.
Let's set my frame's rotation scale and position using targets, virtual parent, and local settings
to make it pretty.
This works great, but only if every time I spawn I drag the visual slot into the override
parent field of the virtual parent and the active i field name of the visual slot into
the source of the value copy manually.
I try to replicate these actions and logics if any miserably.
The object has dark grey invalid markers all over when I respawn, and lately when I try
to drive the active field, my object nears crashes entirely with an n-e-a-splosion in
its locks.
I'm having a difficult time getting consistent series of events though, so thank you for
reading my book.
I'll get to the question.
How can I recreate those actions that I have to do manually using logics or components
or some combination thereof so the frame object automatically sets itself up?
If it's a timing issue where I have to put in some kind of delay, don't the rest of me
load or any sub-hardwired or something zero?
Okay, right.
So in summary, they're trying to get a frame or a ring to appear in the same place as their
context menu when they open it.
Lots of people do that for visual aesthetics etc.
Better not have a loud sound effect associated with it.
It's just a visual, we're good.
And they need to orchestrate a virtual parent component and a value copy component to copy
those values around to make that work.
You can absolutely do that.
Good, good, no sound, no flashy lies to say.
You can absolutely do that with logics.
I would probably say, okay, Jack said that they suggested a solution to the problem,
if you need help you can contact me in game, great, so that's the solution.
You can absolutely do that with logic.
You'll probably have to use things like the slot finding nodes or the slot descending
nodes, you know, like get child, get child, etc. to descend down to find the slot that
you're after.
Once you have a slot reference, you can get that active property from that slot with get
slot is active, etc. inside logics.
You can also write slot references to virtual parent, etc.
That should all work fine.
You may need a delay though.
Here's the sort of rule of thumb that usually works is stick an update delay of two in there.
I don't know why two works well, I just always use two.
Sometimes two doesn't work.
I know if you could say something about dynamic variables and that requires six, but yeah,
stick an update delay of two and it should work.
It should totally be available to do using a variety of logics.
Update delay is a node.
Update order you shouldn't really need to touch.
There's lots of things where I add the two, update delay two, that I don't really know
why I just have to.
As with the updating relay and similar things like that, try adding those things and then
if it does work, great.
But if it doesn't work, do you remember to re-remove those because then you're not consistently
adding bloat that you don't know why it's there.
I do that every time.
Like I get some like logic just won't work.
I start adding random update delays, it works.
I start removing update delays until it doesn't work again and I know exactly where the problem
is occurring.
It's basically like an order of operations thing.
Like if logics is faster than some non-logics process or vice versa, then stuff won't line
up sometimes.
Particularly in avatar spawning, which sounds like the problem that you're describing.
Jack says, "Would you be interested in perhaps throwing together an official NES calendar
once I have the thing improved?"
You mean an in-game calendar?
Yeah, sure.
And we want to get the event system set up on this Discord here.
I don't remember the exact reason why we don't have it here.
We want to get that sorted.
I also want to get a calendar sorted that is on our website ideally.
I would love if we could have like more social style stuff on our website.
I always talk about it, but it kind of doesn't make sense anymore.
Like the AltSpaceVR event calendar was amazing.
It was basically, you know, you want to host an event where it's just you playing a guitar
in a fire, like a round of fire based map.
You know what I mean?
Campfire, that's the word I was looking for.
Round of campfire on a map like that, you can just post that to the AltSpaceVR webpage
and people can come.
You want to do a special interest group?
We saw everything on that list from religion to politics to support groups, etc.
It was great.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has pulled the plug on AltSpaceVR.
I don't know how far along they are in pulling the plugs, it might exist, but I'd love to
get that on the website at some point.
And in game.
We have like a community tab on the dash, that would be amazing.
But starting in five minutes, Jack plays the trombone.
I don't know if he can play the trombone, I just thought the first instrument that popped
into my head.
Next question.
Second, says "Do you know of any changes that may have happened to make LNL more unreliable,
more desynchial of later?
Is it like an external factor like international peering that's just going downhill?"
There have been no changes to those things as of late.
Cloudflare would have not affected those, because that's a socket channel which would
not go via Cloudflare.
No changes I can think of.
International peering might be a culprit.
I am so happy that someone so far away knows what international peering is, thank you so
much for knowing that phrasing.
So many people don't understand how crazy the internet is, so I'm glad you know that
term.
Raid, I can never pronounce your name, I'm sorry, I've seen your pronunciation guide,
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Do slots load in a consistent order at all is the way to manipulate order slots load
in.
Not that I'm aware of, although try the update order.
That does affect things like aligners, UIX, and things like that, so it might affect load,
I'm not certain.
Yeah, the internet is just crazy.
Stop using super reactions, guys, don't those cost like, you can only do like five of those
a month or something.
Five a day, oh that's fine, yeah, five a day, I thought it was five a month, I've never
used them because I thought it was five a month.
It's like when you play a video game and like, you know, some quest giver will be like "thank
you for savoring the forest, here's this like potion that will make you super awesome",
but you never drink it, because you're never like "oh I might need it for like, I might
need it for like", you get to the credits and you're just like "never drank that super
awesome potion, never drank that super awesome potion".
Per week, it's per week, that's still bad, okay, thank you, I go.
Anyway, we will leave off there, if you have any additional questions please feel free to
direct message me, please feel free to also check the questionsnail.com channel or the
announcements channel out, or wherever else you get your news from, and remember, fight
the rumour now and stay awesome.