Extrude Ragu

No, you're right, we should make Second Life as scary for those not familiar with computers and full of as much technobabble as possible. That'll show those new users for trying our old technology. How dare they expect things to just work. You're a genius! You've saved Second Life!

What I don't understand is whenever I hear about education in SecondLife it's always a University trying to send students who already attend a real campus into the virtual world... why? To me the whole point of Second Life is to provide a life we can't have in our first. The people who would really stand to benefit from education in the virtual world are the ones who never got the opportunity to study at a real university maybe because of disability, maybe because they are not lucky to live in a wealthy society. It seems crazy to me that when it comes to education, the people educators seem to want to educate in the virtual world are those who already have access to education in the real world.

Here's something fun... you know how there's all that play games to win L$ stuff trying to grab newbies attention before they can even know what they can buy... Well. I watched a newbie today and discovered that even on the off chance a newbie does take the bait, the teleporters do not work Yup, the newbie tried to go through both, and neither worked. So I tried myself. The Linden Realms one does nothing, whilst the paleoquest one throws up a scary permissions dialog...

On the Blender front One could use GrabDoc to bake the 2d images, this has the benefit that you can also render the normal, metalness, roughness etc What you'd do is place the object over the grabdoc square at the rotations you want, go into material preview for each and render. To get a transparent background, you disable the grabdoc plane and ensure transparent film is enabled. https://razed.gumroad.com/l/grabdoc Can download the blender addon as a zip from the github if money is an issue: https://github.com/oRazeD/GrabDoc

In general you want to be creating trim sheets to get the best out of PBR I recommend studying this:- https://www.beyondextent.com/deep-dives/trimsheets The AO channel should be reserved for material AO, ie AO maps that came with your material, rather than from the object. In general, triangles are cheap so long as they belong to the same material (as it's a single draw call) but texture memory is not cheap Under PBR you shouldn't be baking any lighting data including AO. I recommend checking out Alchemy's new club region, which is fully PBR and demonstrates materials used well http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Fractal/128/42/12

I mean I don't think most of us on SecondLife are really in the business of sharing who we are IRL with each other anyway. AI voice conversion might get used, which just reinforces the whole idea that you don't really know anyone on SL until you meet them. AI video could be an interesting tool for content creators wanting to make concept art to help visualize an idea before making it. For most people though I imagine SL would be business as usual.

On the internet, nobody knows I'm secretly a cat IRL

Kokoro Academy's NPC's have various forms of situational awareness. The main challenge is the size of the prompt because they run on consumer hardware (an rtx 4090). I'm just a hobbyist working in a hobby budget. We use a term vector database to store summaries of the NPC's interactions with people that are generated with a dedicated summarizer model. The memories are injected into the prompt based on what has recently been said in the transcript, along with a few random character memories. In effect giving the NPC's long-term memory. Because it's term vector based, exact keywords are not required, just related terms. We maintain a static lore book in json format with information about the world/keywords, which similarly get inserted into the prompt but here based on keywords in the transcript (We will probably move this to the term vector database later, it was an early stab at environment awareness). In addition, each NPC has their own lore book. Every NPC in Kokoro will talk to you in a different style, and some will be more happy to see you than others. NPC's in Kokoro Academy are scripted agents that are aware of where in the world they are, and what action they are currently performing. We have a standard list of area ID's in our sim and we use that to give the NPC context about the area they're currently in. We also factor things that adjust this prompt such as time of day etc. We have a system for inserting temporal events into the prompt. For example, if you walk into the chat range of an NPC, this adds a temporal message to their prompt, [Captain Ai enters the scene.] which leads to them greeting you. We had the issue of NPC's being too chatty at first, because they responded to every message. So the way we solved this was to not actually put the NPC's name into the start of the prompt, instead letting it predict who speaks next and choosing whether it speaks based on that. We've been experimenting with letting the NPC's make decisions from the language model (in effect, giving them some level of self determination) but found it can make them quite 'flighty' in that they often prefer to explore than talk to whoever is nearby. This is an ongoing challenge. We're looking into using a dedicated multiple choice model for this. When the NPC's are not being interacted with, they fall back to a weight based decision making model in LSL. There's a huge table of possible decisions they can make/when they can make them/who can make them based on roles other factors etc. Another challenge is that language model software is not always bug free. We have hiccups now and then because the LLM will become 'stuck' which requires human intervention. Our NPC's can walk around the world using pathfinding, but because they are scripted agents, can only use the static navmesh. Which means they are terrible at avoiding dynamic obstacles such as other avatars. Although I attempted to solve this, the solution is not fully effective and tends to result in NPC's walking right into people. I haven't had time to fix this problem yet. We also added a needs system to our NPCs, similar to how the Sims works. Needs include fun, hunger, social, energy, hygiene, bladder and all steadily rise over time. The needs affect the NPC's prompt in turn affecting how and what they talk about. We're also considering using it to affect generation 'temperature' making the NPC's more creative when they have energy. The needs also affect what choices are available to the NPC and weights when not using AI etc. As for how they have effected Kokoro - I would say they are no replacement for an actual human, but they make for a fun activity for guests in the sim. I have seen people bond through playing with the NPC's together and it's not uncommon for people to share memes of what the NPC's have said in our private discord. They're generally enjoyed and received positively. Phew! That's probably a lot more than you bargained for. As for a link, our sim is Kokoro Academy but note it's an anime roleplay sim with a dress code.

I mean this is all assuming that a newbie even wants a house to begin with. Why did any given newbie who is a the Welcome Hub sign up for Second Life? The answer is, none of us know. There are lots of possible reasons. I think what LL need to do is design the Welcome Hub to make it as easy as possible for the newbie to self-serve and find what they are looking for. With that in mind, if I were in charge of the Welcome Hub, I'd make the following two changes:- Get rid of that L$ kiosk at the end of orientation. Linden Labs interests (money) should not come before the newbie's interests. In the kiosks place, put a great big 'What are you interested in?' waypoint/teleporter sign, with all sorts of categories that a newbie might be interested in Such categories might be Communities in Second Life Building and Content Creation in Second Life Gaming in Second Life Clubs and Dancing in Second Life Land ownership in Second Life etc... The newbie would click whatever interests them and get teleported to the relevant area in the hub. Obviously this is not an extensive list, but the point is just a starting point so a newbie can quickly find something that interests them personally. I'd add message of the day tips, so that residents who don't read orientation can still learn to play Second Life over time. I'd then make orientation something that a newbie can choose to skip with a dedicated button. This could be achieved via a temp HUD with a 'skip orientation' button, that teleports the newbie to the end of orientation where they will find the interests kiosk.

The main challenge would be verifying that they are indeed newbies and not someone being clever with the registration API or oldbies gobbling up free homes on new accounts.

My own stance is that having actual mentors and residents around for newbies to talk to is very important. I think they just that they need to avoid standing in positions that makes it look like it's 'required' to talk to them, as it is likely to intimidate some newbies and cause them to not complete orientation. Being available and ready when they do have questions but let them go at their own pace.

I make large language model NPC's for my own sim and have experimented with a lot of open source language models. A language model will rarely admit it doesn't know something, instead it will hallucinate new information that 'sounds' correct. Of course, one could forfeit AI and go with an old school chatbot like found on the secondlife support portal. But then I doubt many people will find it much more useful than simply reading the orientation text. I wouldn't personally bother with chatbots at all for factual information (that coming from someone who makes them). It's not going to make the information any easier to find and probably just going to end up with a lot of newbies having wrong information, which is worse than no information.

If you are using Alchemy try also clicking XBOX Defaults, this fixed it in the past for me.

It sounds like the computer is detecting input from a 'joystick' or 'gamepad' Try this: Go to Preferences (CTRL + P) -> Move & View / Movement -> Other Devices Set Joystick to None Also try unchecking all 'control modes' for each joystick in this dialog.

They're members of the linden department of public works (LDPW) they do a lot of mainland work

If you're a tech wiz this is already possible. I've actually made NPC's like this at Kokoro. Dressed them up how I fancied, designed their personality for the AI language model. I have already been called a stupid idiot by one of my npc's and hit with a chair (I was trying to get them to kiss me). Perfect bashful npc 10/10 she's perfect.

On the topic of greeters I avoided bringing this up yesterday because I didn't want to name and shame people by posting about it as it was happening. I observed during part of the day yesterday there were two mentors standing either side of the orientation arrow, right where the gate was. Roughly where they were standing. They were both looking inwards towards the orientation. Probably if you're an extrovert you don't see the problem... But this might as well be like building a solid wall across the gateway. To an introvert this basically looks like an ambush, two people waiting for you to dare to cross their path. They're never going to walk through. In fact in my shyer days I probably wouldn't have dared to move from the little circle whilst people were staying at me like that, fearing it would trigger a helper to come rushing forward. I think it would have been better to stand off to the side or maybe even inside the help booth, to signal you want people to approach them, rather than they are going to approach you.

Maybe one of the overlooked things about SecondLife now is that as the game got older, there became a lot of services for older residents and marketing is naturally trying to show all those services. But really the needs of players who have been playing SecondLife for 10+ years are very different to those who signed up an hour ago.

I think another problem is that completing the whole tutorial can be overwhelming for a new user. One way video games teach players how to play is a Message of the Day (MOTD). The messages usually appear during loading screens, and display a random tidbit of helpful information. My own sim, Kokoro Academy, displays a random MOTD via an Experience each time you teleport in. Examples of MOTD Messages from my own sim. Perhaps LL could be utilizing teleport/login loading screens to display small, easy to digest chunks of useful information like this in teleport/login screens to help players passively learn the game over time.

What I noticed is that, when the new welcome hub was first introduced, all of the 'play games to earn L$' signage etc wasn't around. They seem to be a later addition. It makes me have the sneaking suspicion that whoever did the 'level design' for the welcome hub knew it wasn't a good thing to bother a user immediately after the tutorial with, but a higher up has later demanded that it included such elements and thus it has been retrofitted. It has to be said. I've played games in the past that have tried to nickel and dime me immediately after the tutorial, and in general I personally have just quit them. I don't think it's very wise placement. There should be some fun activities to reward the user for completing the tutorial more than anything.

X Marks the confusion spot This is another route I've seen a couple of new residents take, after bouncing off the L$ kiosk, they will go through the Senra Avatar Market and then end up on that long circuitous path with nothing on it. It takes a while to walk that path, and I've seen a couple get confused around here, but they did at least not give up. Watching another newbie, I saw them go back to this Welcome Hub Map. They looked at it, walked off, then seemed to double take and walked back to the map. Wayfinding map - You are not here! I took a closer look at the wayfinding map. It's not correct. The 'you are here' marker is not where the sign is, which I think is probably serving to confuse newbies a lot more than help them. I've marked where they really are in green.

Another observation. There's this buy L$ kiosk at the end of the orientation tutorial:- The kiosk. Note that the orientation exit is behind it. I've seen two newbies stop in front of the kiosk and become distracted by it (Presumably fiddling about with that web page floater that pops up, getting nagged to set up payment information) One of the newbies after clicking the kiosk and seeing the web page, logged off. I wonder if this is really a smart place to put the kiosk. I get LL probably want newbies to set up payment information on their account, but this kiosk appears long before a newbie might become in any way invested in SecondLife, or has even seen examples of what L$ can buy. I can't help but feel it would have been better for the newbie to see some actual content first. Maybe even a shop, so they could become invested in the platform and had some kind of motivation to buy L$

More people watching this morning. One newbie did make it to the community exhibition this morning, and even looked around, but I wonder if it clicked with them that the exhibits are not the destinations themselves. The newbie seemed not to be reading things in general, rather seeming keen to make progress and reach the 'finish'. Perhaps the welcome hub assumes too much that newbies will read things. When they reached the back of the exhibit and there was a big fence blocking further progress, they logged off. Where they logged off Maybe a great big 'where next' sign with a link to the destination guide around that back wall might help with that issue of people who need to feel like they're progressing. I can see how to a newbie it might look like 'that's it, you've seen all there is to see'. That or a portal to somewhere interesting or maybe portal park etc.

Something I'd like if a Linden or a mole could clarify on:- There is a sign telling established SecondLife residents to stay out of the Landing Zone. But I'm not sure if we are allowed in the tutorial area, just behind the landing zone? Can anyone sit in the booth with the beer crate inside it?

I spent a few hours out the front of the new community exhibition the other day. For new users, they should, in theory actually end up there, because the 'follow the arrow' tutorial from the landing zone does take you there. One newbie made it as far as me and proceeded to try to hit on me (as you do) but most of the new accounts did not complete the tutorial. In my opinion, having seen the landing area and the route newbies are supposed to take, I think a secondary art pass would help. The choice of fonts, the textures etc it's all a bit 'technobabble' and not very enticing to explore. The tutorials look very informative but it's just not so inviting a path to walk along. It's all a bit sterile.