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animats

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Everything posted by animats

  1. The Confederation of Democratic Simulators is, in real estate terms, a Planned Unit Development. That's like a condominium, but more than one building. Each resident owns their own space, has a shared interest in common spaces, and gets a voting membership in the Home Owners Association. It takes a lot of attention to keep such a thing going. People have to show up to make it work. That's a big reason it hasn't caught on in SL.
  2. Walk/local teleport optionally uses double clicks. Anything else? Does SL ever use triple click? Long press? (Implementing something, need to know how fancy things get.)
  3. The textures seem flat. Were these pictures taken with ALM off?
  4. Always on in newer viewers, I think. Shadows remain optional.
  5. Something I still need: an animation that just sets the bento joints back to neutral, to be used with non-bento animations. Anyone know of that?
  6. "Feedback" is back up. Linden Lab does really well at keeping the 3D world up. That's an exotic, complex system with a robust fault-tolerant architecture. It works surprisingly well. Most of the failures are on the web side, which is mostly off the shelf technology.
  7. "An error has occurred. Further information is available in the server log." immediately after login. But the Committee of the Mending Apparatus now came forward, and allayed the panic with well-chosen words. It confessed that the Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair. The effect of this frank confession was admirable. “Of course,” said a famous lecturer — he of the French Revolution, who gilded each new decay with splendour — “of course we shall not press our complaints now. The Mending Apparatus has treated us so well in the past that we all sympathize with it, and will wait patiently for its recovery. In its own good time it will resume its duties. Meanwhile let us do without our beds, our tabloids, our other little wants. Such, I feel sure, would be the wish of the Machine.” "The Machine Stops", E. M Forster, 1909.
  8. Must have been cleaned up. Visited the emergency hospital shown, the place with the parking lot. No sign of trouble.
  9. Yes. There are still many Gor sims. They're not used much. You can roam through empty castles, empty markets, etc. Caledon has a huge castle, used for nothing. I've been trying to drum up more interest in New Babbage. We now have Port Babbage looking busy, but it's all NPCs on autopilot. There are three regions of Japanese city for combat, starting at SSOC. Nobody uses them.
  10. Spam every day now: The object "**** **** Treasure Chest' has sent you a message from Second Life: Attention animats, we would like to remind you your replay credits of L$200 ... How do we stop this before others start doing this?
  11. Port Babbage Anne Aurelia just completed a rebuild of Port Babbage. It follows the East End of London in the late 1800s. There's the port, of course, with some ships in dock. The docks are cluttered with crates, many from the busy Bryant and May match factory nearby. The market stalls at the port are busy. You'll probably be approached by one of the urchins. Watch your wallet! There's some kind of argument going on at the Customshouse. If you cross the street and the tracks, you'll find the Sailors' Rest, where sailors can stay while waiting for a ship. It's nice inside; look around. The less fortunate can stay at St. Martha's next door, a grim place you can check out. There's a workhouse on the other side of the Sailor's Rest, with beds and a kitchen, and kitchen staff hard at work. Behind it is the Ragged School for the local urchins, with a teacher and a few students. If you look around, you'll also find the small Maritime Bank and an infirmary for sailors.
  12. For an example of a good target system, go to region "SSOC". Find the huge SSOC store, with some of the most realistic guns in SL. Outside the store there are stairs down. They lead to SSOC offices. Go through the offices to the target range. It's a realistic known-distance range. Hits appear on the target and on a display of the target. You can set the range. You can have the target return to zero range and look at your groups.
  13. Steam takes a 30% revenue cut on in-game sales.
  14. The data you get with default settings has what you want. The hit position is where the ray hit the object, in region coordinates. Note that ray casting tests against the physics model, not the visible mesh. So your target needs a physics model that matches what you see.
  15. I tend to scale everything realistically except for making ceilings about 4m high. SL camera control needs work.
  16. It's possible to work entirely within Linux. I no longer have any Windows machines But to use some of the Havok upload features, you have to run Firestorm or the SL viewer under Wine. Also, to see the pathfinding mesh, you have to run an SL viewer or Firestorm under Wine. This is a pain, but possible. (Useful line of development: replace the Havok convex hull decomposer with a better algorithm. Like this new one. That's a much better algorithm. But like much academic code, it's brittle. The model has to be watertight or it gets totally confused. You have to go into Blender and work until you have a completely clean mesh.If you can generate a clean mesh, it generates a really good physics model.)
  17. There's an AO which brings out a smartphone when you're typing. But you can't tell the difference between local chat and IMing inside an AO, so it doesn't distinguish between local chatting (which is talking) and IMs (which are phoning). That would be a cute feature. When you encountered groups of people standing around doing nothing visible, you could tell whether they were communicating or just AFK.
  18. My experimental Sharpview viewer can now display multiple regions. Unlike previous versions, you can now move across regions. This is a limited viewer. Avatars are still blocks, but most other objects render properly. No audio, no editing. Just move and view. It's a completely new implementation, written entirely in Rust, and uses many threads. The goal is to effectively use the full resources of a gamer PC with a good GPU with 6GB or better. This version displays the four regions nearest to the avatar. All four regions are displayed at High level of mesh detail. Modern GPUs have enough power to do this. The eventual goal is to show region-sized impostor meshes for distant regions beyond the nearby four, much like sim surrounds. I recommend Sharpview only to people doing development work on SL or the Other Simulator. Downloading requires a password, which you can request by sending me a message. See the release notes. I'd like to have a few more people testing it, but it's nowhere near being a daily driver. Sharpview should be used only with a low-value alt. It doesn't do anything hostile, but it hasn't been tested enough for general use. Runs on Linux and Windows. Some tests indicate it can be built for MacOS, but as yet that's not supported.
  19. At one time, there were plans to have more grids. IBM briefly had their own grid cross-connected to Second Life. The architecture supports this, and the Other Simulator has many loosely-associated grids. Some share objects, some don't. Some use different money systems. The original idea was to grow this to Internet scale. Then came Facebook.
  20. I've noticed that the login server for the beta grid is much slower than the one for the main grid. In my own viewer I often get login timeouts on the beta grid in Sharpview, which currently only has a 5 second timer. If I get a login timeout, the next attempt to log in may succeed but will usually not connect to a region, probably because there's a partially complete login that has to time out. So some beta grid problems may be beta grid login server overload.
  21. Well, that clearly makes it spam. Not something like a group joiner. CashCove on the SL map is an isolated skill gaming island. There's no way to visit it by accident. I got another one of those messages today, too.
  22. There's no category in the ticket system for spam reports. Like this one, which came in overnight, around 5:48 AM SLT. That's from an IM to email. Was not logged in. The object 'Cash Cove Treasure Chest' has sent you a message from Second Life: Congratulations animats! You have been awarded with an extra credit of L$ 200. = Cash Cove Treasure Chest is owned by CENSORED = http://slurl.com/secondlife/CENSORED/243/128/25 Governance, please contact me for the uncensored version.
  23. Right. Only light sources should be emissive. Use for lighted signs, neon, and such. Otherwise, avoid, unless you really want glow-in-the-dark effects.
  24. Sellers can set an asking price. A price is only real if people pay it. Basic economics. This can be seen on eBay for many collectables. High asking prices, but actual sales happen at far lower prices. Beanie Babies are a good example. "US$5000 - no bids" is a seller fantasy. Reality looks more like "Beanie babies lot of 10, $15.00 or Best Offer".
  25. That only works if the seller has a monopoly.
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