animats

I got the branch store going, after the estate manager finally logged in. It's fun to look at, but generates no revenue. This "coins" sim has plenty of traffic, but it's from people who are willing to repeatedly spend 30 seconds to get a coin worth L$0.05. Not useful customers. I'll take the store down in a week or two. I get more business from the free bike rezzers I have in a few places.

It looks like the bottom is about to fall out of NVIdia GPU prices. They had 300,000 of them returned from retailers who overstocked for the cryptocurrency mining boom. If you haven't been following this, GPU prices doubled in the past year as cryptocurrency miners bought them. Now that bubble has popped, between NVidia making too many and special-purpose mining hardware outperforming GPUs. So prices are dropping. But don't buy a used one; it's probably been run at 100% utilization doing crypto mining for months, which wears out the ICs.

The lines of code that move the vehicle are: llSetVehicleVectorParam(VEHICLE_ANGULAR_MOTOR_DIRECTION, angular_motor); llSetVehicleVectorParam(VEHICLE_LINEAR_MOTOR_DIRECTION, <forward_power,0,0> ); Once all the vehicle setup params have been set, you move by setting the torque and force applied to the root prim of the vehicle. If your vehicle isn't moving, check what values are being applied there. Vehicle support in LSL is rather basic. All vehicles are really sleds, sliding around on the surface of the world or floating above it. The wheels don't do much. The wheel stuff in that script is cosmetic, to make the wheels appear to steer. Useful resources: Linden Vehicle Tutorial in the wiki. Vehicle Lab in-world. (Vehicle Lab is a sim to teach how to build vehicles. It was never finished, though, and the demo vehicles are not too helpful.)

Gas station, Robin Loop, Heterocera Three different brands available. It's not a rule or anything, but gas stations in SL usually offer a rez area. ACS is a common vehicle control system in SL, from Karyn's Chopper Parts. The ACS Fuel System is a free feature which any vehicle can use, and usually comes pre-installed on ACS vehicles. ACS is really a HUD-based system - it's the driver, not the vehicle, that has a "fuel tank". The NTBI Global Fuel System is from SL's conglomerate for modern day role play props. Any vehicle can install this free system. They operate a big mall in Prototype and SL's phone system for roleplay. It's all server based, and the gas pumps connect to a server outside SL. The signs and pumps all show a price, and that changes a little each day. Haru Motors has a fuel system that's just for their cars. Each car comes with a gas pump, which customers are encouraged to install somewhere.

Yes, what's with that? The background is in crisp focus and the foreground is blurry.

The estate owner tools provide a list of which scripts are using the most time. Unfortunately, you have to be an estate owner to use them. Your stats show a sim in severe overload. I have a simple tool to report intermittent lag. This just reports when its timer events are being delayed. It's useful when the average lag is low but there are intermittent overloads and stalls. If you're on permanent overload, it won't help, but if it's an intermittent problem, it might.

That has to be a collision between the sitter and the physics model on standing. Standing in SL could use an upgrade. Sitting works well, but standing too often results in standing on a chair. It's hard to do much about this from chair scripts, because they lose control on stand. But an AO feature for "graceful standing" might do it. Someone made a chair which, when you get up, moves backwards to give the avatar some room. When there's clear space, it moves back. That could work.

"This video is unavailable".

The Destinations sales Linden said that a big point of the Destinations Guide was that it produced visibility in Google. If that's not working, report it, because that's a Linden marketing goal.

That's a good talk. Worth a listen if you're developing anything in SL. Oz and Grumpy sound quite upbeat and plan a steadily improving future for SL. Most of the plans focus on making things look better. The move to the cloud is just so LL can get out of running a data center. There might be some performance improvement from newer hardware, but they're not promising anything. That's in contrast to yesterday's talk by the marketing Linden who does the Destinations guide. His goal is merely to get the rate of decline in users to level off, and maybe, just maybe, increase some day. That's unusual. Normally, company marketing people are optimistic. He probably gets that from Ebbe Altberg, who said much the same thing in his talk a few weeks ago. Marketing management at LL seems to have rather low goals.

Brett Linden, the LL marketing guy responsible for the Destination Guide, is speaking now at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/SL15B Astound/253/250/45

But crystals are the theme! "Crystals reflect light in a multi-faceted way & SL has been a creative light to many residents. Come read what 4 luminaries of SL say & look for our HUNT gift! Crystal rides that will inherit the glow of the past and head toward the future will be exhibited. and Elevator ride to see the high-rise part of the exhibit is attached." Tall shiny things area Crystals on sale now! City of crystal palaces This vision of Second Life is very shiny.

I have voice working on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Firestorm. It's not easy; Linux has several alternative audio systems and Firestorm only understands some of them. Try Firestorm support. Pixbuf is completely unrelated to voice.

That just adds PARCEL_FLAG_USE_LAND_PASS_LIST, value 0x800, a rarely used feature. All those bits off, and you can still be kicked out if it's an owner-only parcel. All those bits on, and you can still get in if "Anyone can visit" is checked and you're not on the ban list.

That's PARCEL_FLAG_USE_ACCESS_GROUP, PARCEL_FLAG_USE_ACCESS_LIST, PARCEL_FLAG_USE_BAN_LIST, and, strangely, PF_SHOW_DIRECTORY. (Why is that last one in there?) That won't work. I'm on a boat! This is in Cook, next to Joiner. The boat has a script which is testing ahead of the boat for parcels with access restrictions. The boat is in a Linden waterway, but just ahead is a private parcel. llGetParcelFlags is returning PARCEL_FLAG_USE_ACCESS_GROUP and PARCEL_FLAG_USE_BAN_LIST. So it looks like it's restricted to a group. Here's what the user interface shows: Parcel info just ahead of the boat. Note that "Anyone can visit" and "Allow group" are both checked. Since 2017, when Grumpity Linden insisted on the change mentioned in the JIRA linked above, "Allow Group" is ignored when "Anyone can visit" is on. The avatar can walk or fly into that parcel. But llGetParcelFlags still returns the allow group bit. Thus, there's no way to test for "Anyone can visit" from LSL. This boat script interprets that permission combo as "keep out", which is too restrictive. If Allow Group was off, the boat would enter the parcel. That's not enirely right, either; you can set a parcel to only allow the owner in, and not have any flags set. Can't detect that with llGetParcelFlags. The channel which runs through Fitts, Joiner, and Cook is a great place to test for these problems. Most of the combinations of parcel permissions appear there, adjacent to public Linden-owned water. There's even a no-script area in the middle of open water. This is all way too complicated. It should Just Work. If a vehicle has an avatar that can't enter, the whole vehicle should be denied object entry. Recovering from denied object entry is easy; just move back a little to a previous safe position and turn physics back on. Doing all this permissions testing ahead of the vehicle is complicated, expensive in script time, and not fully effective.