[Describe Second Life in 4 words.]

Death by snu snu

[Sandbox Bellisseria (Yes, Bellisseria has a Linden Demo Home sandbox area now)]

Hey if you're going through and updating the houses, could you be a darling and set the click action to 'none' for everything that isn't a door, window or control panel?

Right now, every part of the linden homes is demanding to be clicked with that grabby cursor and hover tips for clickable items, there's nowhere for our poor cursors to rest

[What Would You Like to Remove From Second Life Permanently?]

Sim crossings.

Yes I know it's not practical to simulate the entirety of SL on one computer.

But we could make simulators like 10x bigger so we didn't have to cross them so much. Computer processing power has moved on since SL's inception 20 years ago

[Your Vision - Our Code]

I do attend meetings from time to time on an alt. The impression I have is that on the whole LL wants to improve itself, but LL's work on SL is very departmentalized and often even given to third party contractors like Product Engine etc.

The result is that whilst yes SL gets improvements, SecondLife as an experience is not cohesive.

Attend meetings and depending on which meeting one team will ask you questions such as  "How can we improve the marketplace?" "How can we improve Caspervend?". Another team will ask you "How can we improve the simulator and scripting?" and another team will ask you "How can we improve the viewer?".

The truth is the most meaningful changes you can make to SecondLife are ones that treat SecondLife as one big experience, rather than a set of different components.

Lets imagine we are designing a new social game, and want to design a shopping experience. If we were doing it from scratch, we would probably imagine that there is some UI on the screen in the game next to our character, where we can scroll through a list of pictures of shoes or whatever we're shopping for. We click one and it just appears on our avatar. We click another, click click click, oooh I like that one.. BUY. This takes about 20 seconds for the user to demo ten products and find one they like. This is a 'designed' shopping experience.

Now compare that to the SL marketplace. You simply can't have that experience. Even demoing one pair of shoes is an experience that can be measured in minutes. You've probably logged into the game a second time just to visit the marketplace, not all products have demo's, and the ones that do each have a different unpacking system. You've probably realized you can't rez where you're standing and had to teleport away from your social group. All but the most determined customers are going to be willing to demo ten products in SecondLife. This is a 'not designed' experience, it's a combination of properties LL has brought over the year and maintained (Caspervend, XStreet) - It is not the result of big picture thinking but rather users trying to make something - Anything - work in the games existing limitations, and then LL buying it out for a lack of better solution themselves.

Delivering such a 'designed' cohesive shopping experience that is so fast and easy for the user would require modifications to the viewer, simulator, and marketplace all at once and really needs one team of people acting as jack of all trades to get this done.

I personally think SL's biggest weakness is that SL simply can't deliver a designed cohesive SecondLife experience. Trying to get 4 different teams who are free to work on whatever they want to collaborate on a single 'big picture' project like this and deliver it in a cohesive for customer and timely manner is simply not possible. Feel free to prove me wrong. I'm not saying that LL aren't talented, they deliver plenty of quality improvements to each of their products, but they are just that, separate products, and not a cohesive experience.

 

[Why were landbots banned?]

To be honest sniping land intended for someone else I see being best described as a form of theft.

People tend to hide behind the argument that since the system allows them to do something, they can do it. But this does not hold water to me. The system allows you to grief people and say all kinds of nasty things in voice chat, nothing stops you, but does that make it OK? No.

If I was lending my bicycle to a friend and left it unlocked for a minute for my friend to take, and a thief came along and took the bike, that would not be OK. I did not consent to that transaction. It is theft. Sure, I could have protected my bike better, but it is still theft and it is not OK.

In much the same way, using a bot to instantly find out vulnerable land faster than any human could, and take it from a non consenting user who intended to give it to someone else is theft. Plain and simple. It was not intended for you. It was not yours to take. You simply took advantage of a vulnerable situation and the users lack of technical knowledge.

[Why is SL Clothing Mostly Overtly Sexual?]

Because one of the primary reasons people come to SL is to do things they'd never feel comfortable doing in RL.

I'm more surprised by the people that come to SL and try to be as normal as possible, makes me wonder just how freaky they must be in real life that normality is their fantasy

[Reflection probes]

On 1/6/2023 at 11:30 PM, EliseAnne85 said:

I'm trying to understand where the pattern of objects goes or will come from.  Patterns/textures of our world like the grain of wood, tree bark, corduroy fabric for some examples as Fluffy said the albedo is just color.  So, I'm assuming albedo is like a tinter or our inworld color palette because she said it's just color.  I'm just lost as to where texture/pattern of items would come from. So, I asked in my post above does the pattern come from the roughness map then?  

See photo I will place below because what I was asking for clarity on is the albedo actually color AND pattern.  See how the shirts of the PBR picture below have a pattern.  Fabrics have patterns, so to speak, and I was wondering how one does that in PBR.  Where does one create texture/pattern with PBR - which map area?  I was assuming with PBR we would create pattern/texture and color in the albedo.  So, I'm lost here.  

The patterns as you call them are not 'patterns' at all.

Bark - The darkness 'pattern' you see is the crevaces between the individual flakes of bark. This would be where your normal map and ambient occlusion would come in.

Same for linen and nylon, you're looking at individual threads of fabric interwoven which have tiny creases and crevaces, this would all be shaded with your normal map and ambient occlusion. Most PBR materials you can download from websites already come with such maps, it's not work you'd have to do yourself typically unless you were designing a material from scratch.

[Accept Experience or No Entry]

10 hours ago, elleevelyn said:

a variation on this. Instead of llTeleportHome, use llEjectFromLand. This will send them from the main parcel to the tiny parcel "spawn point" upon which they can use the experience inviter to join the Experience to get access to the main parcel. Should they choose not to join then they can teleport themselves home or someplace else

I agree with the sentiment that it's better to teleport the user back to the inviter rather than out of the region.

There is a problem with llEjectFromLand however in that they will be ejected to the same altitude as they were in the main region. Meaning that unless your region is flat and doesn't use skyboxes, your guest has a high chance to end up being sent on a long fall or getting trapped somewhere unintentionally, which is why I personally went with llTeleportAgentHome.

I did in the past request llSendToTelehub, to improve this situation as I don't like having guests that just  entered the region be immediately teleported back out, but alas it never happened.

[🔔 LindenLab 🔔 : The Strong Need For Differentiation Between Actual Residents Versus Bots, Scripted Agents And NPC's In Second Life]

Interestingly on my exploration I have come across places where bots are marked as scripted correctly, I even found a place where there's a whole group of like 12 of them all marked correctly. Although I suppose it's possible that LL themselves might have manually marked them

[🔔 LindenLab 🔔 : The Strong Need For Differentiation Between Actual Residents Versus Bots, Scripted Agents And NPC's In Second Life]

Just now, Orwar said:

real reason as to why they should?

Linden Lab largely depends on real users staying around on SecondLife and continually playing the game for revenue, as users who stick around invest themselves more and shop.

A large portion (but not all) users come to SecondLife seeking social experiences. Those users primarily use the destination guide, the world map and the mini map to find places with people to talk to.

If a user keeps going to places that the game tells them there are people to talk to, and then finding that there are not people to talk to - The user is exponentially more likely to give up on the game with each failed attempt to find people to socialize with. If this happens, this is the loss of a lifetime of revenue for Linden Lab - A disaster.

LL very much should care IMO.

[🔔 LindenLab 🔔 : The Strong Need For Differentiation Between Actual Residents Versus Bots, Scripted Agents And NPC's In Second Life]

27 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

Well they are bots, NPC's models for the store.

You do not believe me? Here is your SLURL http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Imperial/159/91/52

This is the user experience Linden Lab provided me with using their Destination guide. I was supposed to find a location with 7 people, one of the more busy destinations.

Out of curiosity I visited this sim and used my script to check if they are correctly registered as scripted agents - They're not.

With that said, one of the bots did walk down the catwalk to me and started introducing me to the shop, so I suppose at least they're not just purely there to drive up traffic numbers

 

[🔔 LindenLab 🔔 : The Strong Need For Differentiation Between Actual Residents Versus Bots, Scripted Agents And NPC's In Second Life]

It would be interesting to see how many bots on the grid are correctly identifying themselves as Scripted Agents. Here's a quick script that checks for scripted agents in the region, and tells you how many there are and lists them off to you. Just put it in a prim and click it:-

 

default
{
    touch_start(integer total_number)
    {
        list agents_in_region = llGetAgentList(AGENT_LIST_REGION, []);
        integer i = 0;
        integer len = llGetListLength(agents_in_region);
        list scripted_agents = [];
        while (i < len) {
            key agent_in_region = llList2Key(agents_in_region, i);
            if (llGetAgentInfo(agent_in_region) & AGENT_AUTOMATED)
            {
                scripted_agents += agent_in_region;
            }
            ++i;
        }
        integer num_automated = llGetListLength(scripted_agents);
        string strOut = "Of " + (string)len + " agents in the region, The following " + (string)num_automated + " agents are automated:";
        i = 0;
        while (i < num_automated) {
            key scripted_agent = llList2Key(scripted_agents, i);
            strOut += "\n > secondlife:///app/agent/" + (string)scripted_agent + "/about";
            ++i;
        }
        llInstantMessage(llGetOwner(), strOut);
    }
}

 

[🔔 LindenLab 🔔 : The Strong Need For Differentiation Between Actual Residents Versus Bots, Scripted Agents And NPC's In Second Life]

In my own region as part of the Experience, I implemented a custom mini map HUD, which shows players nearby as green dots, and NPC's as grey dots.

Below the map, I show a count of real players on the region to give you an idea of how many actual people there are around. Clicking it gives you a list of profile links, as a quick way to IM real people on the region.

Perhaps a green dot-grey dot system on the SL minimap would be a good addition to SL itself.

[🔔 LindenLab 🔔 : The Strong Need For Differentiation Between Actual Residents Versus Bots, Scripted Agents And NPC's In Second Life]

I am someone who operates some scripted agents in-world.

1 is scripted as a clothes display in my store at AMH. People can select an outfit and it will change into that outfit so the customer can see what the clothes look like before they buy it.

A couple are scripted agents that act as NPC's in my anime roleplay sim. They are scripted to walk around using path finding, with complex behaviour based on time of day, who is nearby, personal needs etc. They interact with the environment, and I use a self hosted language model on my personal computer that allows them to talk to guests, each with their own personality and lore. I put countless hours of work into those NPC's and making them fun to play with and guests are often playing with them together.

I personally beleive scripted agents are not necessarily evil and do have legitimate purpose that can be helpful in SecondLife - It's not the tool it's how you use it.

With that said, Do I think they should be excluded from the world map? Actually, it might surprise you as a bot operator, my answer is Yes, they should be excluded from the world map!

Why do I think this? Well, as a sim owner, running my NPC's come with a downside - Some people do come to my sim thinking there is activity at hours when there is not. I don't like this because it might make my guests think I am dishonest or trying to mislead them into visiting - I'm not. I want my guests to always have a good experience when visiting my sim, because it gets people to come back.

I actually made a jira precisely because of this problem not too long ago.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-234612

The topic has also been discussed on the internal sl discord so it's certainly on people's mind.

Nobody is complaining that 99% of the human characters in GTA online are not real people, and the reason for that is the game does not present them to you as real people. People don't mind NPC's, and a lot of game worlds would feel very empty without them. The key is that they are not presented to us as real people. SL does need to differentiate scripted agent and real human to users.

We do also need to clean up the less than savory bot operators that really are just using them to game traffic, that just plain sucks

[Accept Experience or No Entry]

In my own sim I made a tiny parcel in the corner of the region just big enough for an avatar or two to stand in and put the sim rules/experience inviter there. Once that tiny parcel detects the experience is enabled teleports the user to the main parcel.

Then in the main parcel I have a script which simply loops through agents in the parcel and checks llAgentInExperience once a few seconds and then llTeleportAgentHome people who aren't - This is just to catch friends teleporting friends thus bypassing the main spawn point.

[Latest PBR changes: shadows gone with the wind !]

My understanding is PBR viewer has a 'legacy mode' where it emulates legacy behaviour, this occurs on old sky settings that were made before the new reflection probe ambience slider in sky settings:-

When this is set to 0.00 (default on old skies) then the viewer attempts to emulate appearance of old behaviour best it can (But will never be quite the same, because PBR is in the end of the day a different method of shading). Full PBR (Probe Ambience > 1.0) brings the ability to have true darkness (like, actual pitch black) where there's no lighting which is obviously not compatible in legacy content where there is ambient lighting even at midnight, my guess is the 'legacy mode' being seen in the screenshots is probably preventing things getting shaded too dark to avoid breaking legacy content - some sort of compromise.

Whether it can be improved? Maybe, hopefully even. At the same time I hope that people don't lose their mind and make sure that any changes they ask of LL for the sake of legacy content aren't ones that ultimately break PBR going forward. We should avoid compromising the future of SecondLife content for content that is long past its prime.

 

 

 

[I like to make friends, but for some reason, frankly, they treat me coldly, I had a few Turkish friends, then they treated me coldly, why do you think?]

Why did OP mention they are Turkish twice, are they implying there is some significance to this 🤔

[Experience train/tram system for tours]

Now that I've got that out of my system,

On 10/8/2023 at 7:13 PM, animats said:

SL already has Portal Park, and Firestorm's help island has a ring of portals, but they're not used much. Also, those are one-way - it's not obvious to new users how to get back. WelcomeHub has no obvious way out. There's a little train station at the south end of the Linden Homes area, and a long rail bridge to Bellessaria, but you have to rez your own train. There's some signage which suggests looking at the Destination Guide. But nothing like an organized tour, with a stated duration. The only way out is a teleport into the huge, cold, hard world.

Personally I think that at minimum all LL-owned destinations should have a media signboard which shows

https://secondlife.com/destinations

The viewer should also have this web page on a button available to new users and feature somewhere prominent by default on new viewer installations to help them find it. The existing destination floater built into viewers is very limited in comparison to the full guide and most users don't even know of the full guides existence let alone which URL to access it on.

---------------------------------

As for the tram idea, I think it could be used as a method to revitalize some of the mainland, the same way that trains built America. The screenshots I shared above show barren mainland, but mainland around linden roads tends to actually get developed:-

Immersion and connectivity funnily enough, seems to actually attract users to develop virtual land, funny that isn't it?

Funnily enough, the few times I've played on the mainland, the destinations I ended up sticking around at was some place I reached in either a car, a plane or a train.

 

[Experience train/tram system for tours]

On 10/9/2023 at 2:50 AM, Zalificent Corvinus said:

More laggy Clueless Out-of-Touch Vehicle Fanatic Induced Planning Blight, in the name of the Almighty "Immersion".

You know what, you're right! What All new SL users REALLY need to EXPERIENCE is more of this!

https://i.gyazo.com/519cb7c6a4abf2ad8e4d718a824dd2c2.mp4

What kind of STUPID user needs immersion and curated destinations, when they can JUST TELEPORT.

On 10/9/2023 at 2:50 AM, Zalificent Corvinus said:

You managed to TELEPORT to the Portal Park, you GET BACK the same way, even noobs should be able to figure that out, those that are TOO STUPID to do so, won't last in SL anyway.

You're SO right, there are SO MANY stupid people who join SL! How stupid they are to not figure out OUR game

SecondLife doesn't need to attract ANY new users! All of the population are so YOUNG and TOTALLY DON'T have one foot in the grave!!

 

/s

 

[20 years, still full crash on teleport]

On the issue of people going to play something else due to teleport failure, a similar issue occurs for sim restarts.

Tuesdays we can have multiple visitors in our sim but the sim restarts, and the user simply doesn't log in again, or teleports to their home and never returns, which can hurt the momentum of smaller community sims.

[(Lack of) product images included with purchases.]

I have an issue with OP's statement.

OP frames what she wants as a standard expected part of a marketplace purchase that creators opt out of. I don't think that it is a fair statement. There is nothing to indicate to a new and budding creator that including a product image with the bundled product is expected of them. The only way a creator might come to learn of this practice is word of mouth or if the creator happens to think of it themselves.

["People that play Near You" search option In Second life]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Just to spell it out here, I assume you mean the RL time "relative to YOUR RL time" would be displayed.

The actual RL time for that user.

For example, an Australian might select "Sydney (UTC + 10)" from the list.

If you then visited their profile the viewer would show you "11:27pm" as that is the current time in Sydney, Australia.

["People that play Near You" search option In Second life]

10 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

How would that work?

You would have to manually select an "SLT+/-" time from a dropdown in the viewer? (Versus leaving it blank for MYOB)

Yes I'm imagining a drop down with common city names / timezone offsets, the user would select their timezone from the dropdown.

When you visit that persons profile, the RL time that it is for that user would be displayed, meaning that at a glance you can see what time it is for them without having to figure it out yourself because the viewer has done the work for you.

["People that play Near You" search option In Second life]

18 minutes ago, Alwin Alcott said:

how about typing SLT + 1-12/- 1-12  in your profile .. no messing with the code needed.

The advantage of having it as a drop down is that the viewer can simply display you the actual time for the other person, rather than you having to do the maths in your head. You might say that this isn't that much work, but If you're like me and manage a large community, it takes a lot of time figuring out that information for a large group of users.

Another advantage is that users generally don't think to share that information to begin with - Sharing your timezone is not a concept most people are aware of, especially not tech savvy users who are less than used to the concept they are talking to people around the world, or have never had to run a big even themselves. Having an (optional) drop down is a small visual reminder that such information might be helpful to give.

["People that play Near You" search option In Second life]

To put a different spin on things

I personally requested the ability to share our timezones on our profile, so that other people could see what time it is for you.

Not with the intent of RL dating but rather simply for running events and knowing when it's a reasonable hour to IM people at a glance. Also helps organizing events if you know when everyone is awake.

----

With that said, I want to say that I don't like OP's attitude

On 10/2/2023 at 6:01 AM, Stitch Kealoha said:

For example, for most people in the United States, it would probably be more interesting to chat with someone 20 to 40 miles from you. Rather than talking to some troll in Europe.

Seriously, imagine being labelled a 'troll' for simply being in the wrong country. OP seems to think everybody should play SL like a dating simulator like them, which rubs me the wrong way. SL is many different things to many different people. Just because we're not what you want us to be doesn't make us a 'troll'.