animats

Those are deliberate? Not just a bad physics model?

It's not hard to hook a chatbot into SL. The problem is setting up one that has some clue about what it's doing in SL. There's an anime sim which has some smart chatbots now. But you have to have an anime avatar to visit. They're strict about roleplay.

Right. There's SL, and there's Upland, a somewhat sketchy NFT scheme. The tie-up with JP Morgan Payments didn't accomplish anything. That was a disappointment. For a while, it looked like Tilia might become a first-level bank product, rather than a third-level system that goes through PayPal to get to banks. But no. Not clear how Thunes will work, but if it works like Payoneer, which uses Thules, it might not be too bad. Thunes is plugged into the banking system properly. They have cross-border payments, currency conversion, real time payments, all the usual stuff.

Let me know. I should set my collection of hard-to-render sculpt objects out somewhere for test purposes. The C++ sculpt implementation has bugs which were exploited by sculpt creators to get twice as many vertices.

If you do a wheelie... My own bikes will do a wheelie if Page Up is pressed, which will get over these invisible obstacles. This is the only time I've ever needed this on a Linden road. Those wooden road parts need mesh repair.

Another Sharpview demo video: A walk through two regions of Fantasy Faire 2024. Technical notes, mainly for viewer devs. Viewpoint is first person, and there's no camera smoothing. So it's a bit bouncy. No environment rendering, lighting, or new PBR materials yet. Avatars are still blocks. There are still frame rate drops when moving. Rendering is 60FPS when stationary and the asset loader threads are idle. Asset loading is supposed to be concurrent with rendering. For that to work, Sharpview, Rend3, WGPU, Vulkan, and the GPU all have to support that. Right now, Sharpview and Vulkan are ready, WGPU isn't ready, and Rend3 needs some minor fixes once WGPU is fixed. See this posting in WGPU discussions for more details. I'm trying to get a high frame rate without sacrificing detail. It's not easy, but it's possible.

Is it open now?

Yes, that was strange. I suspect that happens occasionally and viewers compensate for it. I'll find the part of the log file that matches the video and make it available. (I use Hardlimit because it's free, and doesn't insert ads. YouTube has too many interruptions now.)

I've received dialog boxes that say "You have been permanently banned' while driving on Linden roads. That's all the popup box says. No source or object is mentioned. Nothing happens to my avatar. Presumably it's some rather lame security orb.

That's what I'm doing now. Good to know the C++ viewers do it too. A few bogus messages from the old region are normal at a region crossing, but in the video i linked, the old region or regions kept sending bogus ObjectUpdate messages for tens of seconds after the avatar and vehicle had left the area. Hundreds of ObjectUpdate messages from the wrong simulator. I have detailed logs for that video if anybody cares. I've seen this at two region corners. It's an indication that the simulator to simulator handoff somehow became confused. The viewer sees fallout from that, but it's not a problem with simulator-to-viewer network traffic.

Right. Especially since Disney and Epic are now working together. We're probably going to be able to visit large Disney-themed virtual worlds soon. SL may have to up its game.

Sharpview 0.10.0 has some serious problems at some region crossings. Here's a video. In a double region crossing, it's possible to get a situation where two regions are both sending ObjectUpdate messages for the main agent object. In Sharpview 0.10.0, that produces terrible visuals and eventually a disconnect. I put a check in my development version, 0.10.1, which ignores bogus ObjectUpdate messages which try to change the main agent's region away from the region that the most recent CrossedRegion message said was in charge. This workaround helps a lot. No more vibrating between two regions. I still log the bogus messages, of course. I suspect that the C++ viewers have a similar check. I've been testing this by logging in an alt with Sharpview and seating them in a YavaPod or SLRR train, then just letting that run for an hour or so.I get about one fail per hour. It falls just like it does in Firestorm - the avatar is Left Behind, seated on the ground, while the YavaPod or train goes on without them. Avatars come off at the usual spots, such as that spot on the Heterocera SLRR main line where the tracks cross over a region corner. So I've achieved bug compatibility. Monty Linden has some fixes to region crossings in test. Right now, they're up on a few regions on the beta grid. I've tested and haven't had any failures there so far. This is a big step forward.

This came up in the TPV meeting today, and after some discussion, it became clear how some new backwards-compatible extensions to UDP messages really work. So I updated the SL wiki to document this. See https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Packet_Layout#Extensions_for_backwards_compatibility If you understand this stuff, please check and update. Thanks. I've been quietly updating the wiki when I discover something that is hard to figure out and TPV developers really need to know. Mostly for my own benefit, so I have a record of what I've found. This one is an issue for anything which has to decode or generate those messages using other than the standard Linden Lab C++ code. That now includes Sharpview, the new mobile viewer, Crystal Frost, libopenmetaverse, the Other Simulator, control programs for such things as SmartBots... We're getting quite a ecosystem going.

The latest thing to be automated with AI: creating 3D models of interiors. https://yueyang1996.github.io/holodeck/ Generates Unity assets, which can probably be converted to SL assets.

There have been real therapists with verifiable credentials in SL. "A basic understanding of psychology and mental health or willingness to learn" is not enough.