animats

I just tried flying around there. Over the Bingo Strait at Barbarossa. No problems with the little Duoquito, and the blue helicopter on the right seemed to be doing fine. I was able to land and hear voice chat (there's an info hub there), take off again, and enter and exit that sim from all four sides without problems. Spent about fifteen minutes flying around the area, visiting about 20 sims. No problems. I'm quite critical of region crossing problems, as is well known, but I'm not seeing them here.

It's always good to have a backup system. Just in case.

OK. I just removed my free motorcycle rezzer, installed the day Bellesaria opened, to be fully compliant. Back then, there were no rez zones and no way to get around, so it was needed and used. Now there are enough rez zones.

Part of the idea of Project Arctan is to get people to care more about their avatar render cost. How to make this work without breaking existing content is a regular subject of discussion at Creator User Group. Vir Linden is gathering more data. There's no consensus. The viewer has the power to render an avatar at any level of detail, as an impostor, or as a jelly doll. How it should use that power is a big question. How do most avatars and clothing look at "medium" LOD? Acceptable as background characters? Maybe the viewer should be dropping avatars to a lower LOD or to impostor mode sooner. This beats dropping the frame rate to single digits. One approach would be that avatars only go to "high" LOD when in hero mode; close to the viewer and occupying lots of screen space. There's nothing wrong with high-detail avatars provided that only one or two are in that mode at a time. What we don't have now for avatars are good intermediate stages between "insanely complex" and "jellydoll". I'm very aware of this because I do standalone animesh characters. Those have a high LI cost and object-type LOD handling, so they have to be efficient or they blow the parcel's LI budget. They also have to look good at lower levels of detail, because they're often shown that way. I'd like to see the "medium" level for avis be around the complexity level of a good animesh character - 20,000 tris or so. (You can look at things at a lower LOD by opening the Firestorm menu and setting the LOD setting to some very low value. It's instructive to set it to zero and see what's still visible.)

That's when you need a pro architect. Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Custom designed for the site, of course. One of the most famous houses in such a location. Gives a good idea of how to layer levels to fit terrain. A combination of glassed in levels with balconies on stone supports can fit most hills.

Now that's a good idea. The animesh will need to enable llAllowInventoryDrop. The animesh sends a message to a sittable object that it wants to sit there. The sittable object replies with a sit target, an animation name, and uses llGiveInventory to give the animesh a copy of the animation. The animesh gets a "changed" event with the CHANGED_ALLOWED_DROP flag. Then it has to examine its inventory for new stuff, possibly discarding any unwanted new items. It finds the new anim. It moves to the sit target. It plays the new animation. Now it's sitting on the sit target with the proper animation. Right. You don't get the link of a real sit, so it won't work for vehicles. But it's enough for the basics. Thanks.

Animesh sitting is going to require some cooperation between the animesh and the sittable object. It's not likely to work on existing sittable objects. There's no "Sit" cursor, and animesh can't answer dialogs. It's also a big job for the LL devs, and they're overloaded. If LL wants to take this on, that would be nice, but it seems unlikely right now. However, if we had minimal support in LSL, which is what I'm asking for here, open-source AVSitter and similar code could be modified to use it. Then anything which uses an updated AVSitter could accept animesh. Someone has already done something like this as a mod to AVSitter, but the sit animations have to be in the animesh. So it's a short step to making it work in a general way.

When an avatar sits on an object, it becomes part of the object's linkset, and the object can apply animations to it. Animesh can't "sit". So they lack a way to get access to and run a sittable object's animations. So, a proposal: If an animation has Copy/Mod/Trans permissions, then llGetInventoryKey will return its UUID. But there's not much you can do with that UUID,a as far as I know. With a texture, if you have the UUID, you can set that UUID as a texture anywhere in SL. But for animations, llStartObjectAnimation only accepts a name in the object's inventory. It does not accept a UUID. So, what if it did accept a UUID, the way llSetTexture does? Then an animesh and a sittable object could communicate; the sittable object could tell the animesh what animations to run. The question is, are there major security objections to this? llStartObjectAnimation only works for animesh, so this doesn't let avatars do anything new. My interest is in animesh NPCs. I'm trying to get them to do more of the things avatars can do. They can't sit. With a cooperating script in a sittable object, and this minor change, we can make that possible. Comments?

Some of the problems with mainland builds could be helped with a class, perhaps at Builders' Brewery, on "how to build in difficult terrain". Topics such as: How to build on hills. Most prefab SL buildings are for flat ground. Putting them on hills is usually done either with terraforming or with some huge blockish slab underneath. Some examples of best practices would be helpful. How to connect to a Linden road. This is often hard to do neatly. Some roads have rocks or high curbs or jaggy parcel boundaries. Linden advice on allowable encroachments would help. Sometimes you just have to reach a bit beyond your parcel to make the connection work. Such work needs to look like it belongs there. This is especially important for GTFO hubs, because they will have truck traffic. For the hard cases, it should be possible to pay for mole work and get a curb cut. How to clean up terraforming messes. Where the original moles built rolling terrain, parcel owners have often flattened their lots. A few generations of ownership later, each parcel is flat, at a different level from its neighbors, and there's a cliff at the edge of each parcel. Much abandoned land looks like that. If someone good at this gives such a class, I'll go.

You can use key/value pairs in a locked way using the llUpdateKeyValue function with "checked" set to TRUE. That's a "compare and swap" operation in computer science terms, a way to avoid race conditions in asynchronous operations. When you want to set something, you do an update with what you think the old value is. If some other script changed it while you weren't looking, you get an error back from the data server. Then you can get the current value and try again.

Just because it's industrial, it doesn't have to look awful. The climbing ivy improves the brick wall. A friend's freight hub. Simple and well-kept. Decorative fencing helps here. Should SL have zoning? Something to think about for mainland. Bellesaria is single-family residential, with occasional public areas. One of the big landlords has about five different zones, from single-family residential to heavy industrial. New Babbage has building inspection for city consistency and quality.

I use voice when possible. Usually I chat in local. Lately I've been using IMs too much because my local chat window is clogged with debug messages from stuff I'm working on, but I expect that problem to end soon.

Nice. Let us know when you're open for business.

Anyone have an measure of how much more Bellesaria space is needed to satisfy the backlog? Is it going to take a few more continents?

Yes to both. If a parcel goes up for auction, it should be priced to sell, not to just sit there. Otherwise it's the same thing as putting a sell price on a lot and waiting for months or years. The auctions need to keep moving, rather than clogging up with overpriced parcels being re-listed. If the high bidder is below the seller's minimum bid, the seller should be offered the opportunity to sell at that price or decline. If they decline, it should cost them something. At a minimum, they shouldn't be allowed to relist that parcel at that price for some months. Has to drop at least 10% to be re-listed. Sale prices and unsold property non-sales should be public, so stats can be accumulated. Then we can have a price estimator like Zillow for Second Life. LL might offer a listing of parcels for sale at set prices, for sellers who want to do that. A Land Marketplace.