animats

How do you block someone in the new forums? Thanks.

Roblox took a long time to get going, but then... Roblox started as Lego-like, but has slowly become closer to Fortnite-level objects. Like SL, it's a social open world system with building. There really are big wins in this space. Linden Lab had a Roblox competitor, called BlocksWorld. Launched in 2016, it was less successful, and was quietly shut down on June 17, 2020. What went wrong?

I've been reading some of the old wiki entries, from the days in 2007-2010 when people were trying to link multiple SL-type grids together. There are chat logs on a regular basis, and then suddenly in 2010 it just stops. The final meeting is busy, has no indication that anything is ending, or that there are any major problems. So what happened?

I can get the world X and Y coordinates of a region from within SL with a dataserver request. I can get them from Tyche Shepard's grid survey server in the outside world. Is there any LL API where I can get them so I don't overload Tyche's very slow server? Doing some mapping stuff. Thanks.

Someone in Russia made a game that's intended to be boring - "It's Winter" It’s nighttime and you find yourself in a small, dark flat in a nondescript suburb in Russia. You look out of the window and see the courtyard covered in snow, illuminated by street lamps and the cold neon glare of store fronts. You turn on the light switch and look around your apartment. You can make eggs on toast, turn on the radio, take a bath, and take out the trash. You leave the flat and go for a walk around the deserted courtyard. The corner shop and beauty salon are both closed and the playground is eerily empty. In fact, there are no people to be seen wherever you go. “Nothing awaits you: there is no chance to get out, no room for adventures, nor a breathtaking plot. All you have to do is experience the precisely detailed, pixelated mundanity of the world around you." Somehow that feels all too familiar.

Turned out to work, but it's kind of a pain. Use the hover height slider in the "Edit Appearance" dialog box to set sit position, then the hover height slider in the pie menu to set stand position. Opening "Edit Appearance" forces your avatar into pose stand position, which is inconvenient for adjusting sit height, of course.

Now that browsers have WebAssembly, they can run compiled programs. It's possible to build a viewer that runs in a browser at reasonable speed. Big job, but possible.

Streaming gaming is a great idea that currently costs too much. There are services such as Shadow, which rents you a rackmount PC in a data center, which you then control from a remote desktop client. Clients are available for desktops and and phones. You can run whatever you want. Costs about $12/month for a basic gamer PC, about $30/month for a really good one. Unclear what happens if you stay logged in 24/7. They used to charge more, but then NVidia and Google got into the business and forced the price point down. But those won't run SL. There are many other streaming game services, but most of them come with a list of games you can run. Shadow just gives you a bare Windows 10 PC, so installs are your problem. Because your machine is in a data center, it has lots of bandwidth to and from SL's servers. Ideally, you'd like to have game streaming from the same data center that hosts the SL servers. Asset loading could be really fast. If the Shadow "Subscribe" button produced more than a blank page and lots of web console errors, it might be interesting to try. A few other companies have offered similar services, but didn't stay in business. This one may be having problems too. Not sure this business model works. $12 a month is a very low rate for a full time computer in a data center; the going rate for a dedicated server is $75-$150. NVidia and Google have similar offerings, but they only work for specific games. SL would have to cut a deal with them to get a viewer onto their platform, and maybe give them a cut of revenue.

SL should have a face generator like that.

I'm pushing the idea that new users should start with a mesh avatar that supports both BOM and bento. They should get a starter wardrobe, maybe a dozen mesh pieces, plus some legacy texture clothing. New Resident Island has new walkthrough tutorials that take this approach, one for women and one for men. You get the open-source Ruth and Roth avatars and some clothing as you complete the tutorial. Most of the new user tutorials assume you have a classic body, and maybe at the end they mention mesh. It's time to turn that around. Teach new users that the modern avatar is mesh, bento, and BOM. It's backwards compatibility that's complicated. Pure BOM is straightforward. You just use "Wear" or "Add" and look at the list of what you're wearing.

There's something throttling asset loading. Run something that shows your computer's network traffic load, then TP to a new sim. Watch the traffic spike up for 10 secs or so, then drop to a very low level for a minute or two even though there are still many assets left to load.

You can sail all the way to Sansara. Unfortunately, though, you can't get around the Sansara coast or into its waterways. There are few water regions around the edges of that continent.

Ah, I will try the second height slider.

I'd like to see an "Perfect Fit" event. Fitmesh clothing that doesn't require an alpha. You just wear it on the designated brand of body and it Just Works. The body never goes through the clothing. Even if you move and or adjust the body sliders.

I've never had much trouble with seat height being way off before. But now I'm using the Roth open-source avatar. That works reasonably well. But it's taller than real life, so I used the height slider to make it shorter. (6'2", my RL height; we're not talking tinies here.) Then I had to adjust hover height, so feet are on the ground. Now, everything I sit on that used to fit has the avatar about a quarter meter above the seat. This has me puzzled. If anything, I'd expect it to be too low or the same. Sit position is relative to the center of the bounding box, right?

You can sort of do that now. My NPCs have a listener in one prim of the linkset listening on DEBUG_CHANNEL for messages from the same linkset. If anything crashes, I get an email, and all the scripts in all the other prims get reset. This is to catch major problems, mainly stack/heap collisions, not something that trips in normal operation.

I think I see how this could be fixed server side. I was just driving the little Infinity Freight quarry train around Bellessaria, and kept getting the usual errors: [20:32] llStopAnimation: Script trying to stop animations but agent not found [20:32] llStartAnimation: Script trying to trigger animations but agent not found [20:32] Camera control currently only supported for attachments and objects on which you are sitting. When you think about it, all that's wrong here is that the LSL calls were made too soon. What's needed is to queue animation and camera change requests made during region crossings until the avatars catch up, instead of reporting errors. This would make these LSL calls Just Work, without any special action in scripts. This ought to be do-able. It's all in one sim, the "gaining" sim (the one you're entering). The gaining sim knows when all the avatars have arrived; Simon Linden implied that at Server User Group. Second Life is supposed to be a consistent-eventually system - when sims and viewers get out of sync, they should get themselves back into sync without problems. So doing this server-side moves towards that design goal.

Good point. LL came out with a project viewer that could handle YouTube streaming. Did that ever make it into the release viewer?

That sounds right. If the avatar arrives before the vehicle scripts turn back on, there probably isn't a CHANGED_LINK event. If there's any delay in avatars arriving, a CHANGED_LINK event probably occurs. That creates some problems. In my vehicles, I stop all movement by turning off physics at each region crossing, then turn it back on and apply the pre-crossing velocity when the avatars show up. If they don't show up, the vehicle is frozen, and after 30 seconds, it gives up, turns off, and reports it's stuck. If you don't want to stop motion like that (the typical delay is < 100ms, so it's not very visible) there's a problem distinguishing between "avatar got off" and "avatar failed crossing". After "Uplift" is done (and all sims are now in "the cloud") we all need to beat on LL to actually fix region crossings. Not just tweak their timing a little, FIX THEM. I'm tired of coding workarounds.

It's a legitimate complaint when a social networking system can't deliver messages. Meanwhile, there's Discord. (Twitter interview question: "How would you design a system so that when a celebrity sends a message to a million followers, they all get it within 3 seconds?")

Well, yes. Extra round trip delay will do that. Add a full second and double region crossings fail almost every time. Region crossings extrapolate movement during the stall which occurs at every region crossing. Region crossings require a round trip handshake with the viewer (the underlying cause of many problems), so adding network latency and you will slow down region crossings. Are you running a current version of Firestorm? Firestorm does, in fact, limit bogus rotations at region crossings to 20 degrees and position error to about half a meter. Technical discussion here. Without that, you'd sometimes roll much further or momentarily go underwater, if you were pitching or rolling or moving vertically going into the crossing. On "smooth water", you should get smooth crossings. Should be better on AWS sims, because the region crossings are faster. That's a common problem with vehicle scripts. You have to check that you still have animation permissions after a region crossing, and not do anything avatar-related until the avatar arrives in the new sim. When you get the CHANGED_REGION event, the vehicle has crossed but the avatar(s) are usually still catching up. A recent fix made objects cross regions faster, and now it's more likely that you see avatar delay. So scripts have to wait for the avatars. The way to check is to call llGetObjectDetails on the avatar's key and ask for its root prim. If that's the same as the vehicle's root prim, the avatar is properly seated. To make this less frequent, LL recently put in a delay so that scripts don't restart after a crossing until either the avatars have arrived or something like half a second has elapsed. This makes that problem less frequent, but it really should be fixed in scripts. It's important that scripts restart after a crossing even if the avatars haven't arrived, because during that period you can't steer but may still be moving. Scripts need to take appropriate actions, like stopping. This is more of a problem for land vehicles, where you're not far from going off-road or hitting something. There's one curve in Satori near GTFO HQ with a double region crossing, and many vehicles go off the road there. There's also a jog on Robin Loop like that, where region crossing problems with naive vehicles regularly result in landing in someone's yard. Fortunately the resident there isn't in much. You have to manage region crossings in LSL, annoying though this is. Really, though, with most crossings now down to 500ms or so, the viewer and scripts can mostly cover for the delay and you barely see it.

Anyone tried using DynamoDB on AWS? It's a key/value store. The free tier offers 25 GB of data storage 2.5 million stream read requests per month from DynamoDB Streams 1 GB of data transfer out per month, aggregated across AWS services but writes are US$1.25 per million writes. Amazon does all the backups, it's a redundant system, etc. If SL is up, it's unlikely to be down. It uses HTTP requests in JSON and responds in JSON, so you should be able to access it directly from LSL. It's similar to the experience key/value system. It would be useful if LL offered this as an add-on for SL accounts, so you didn't have to set up an account with AWS directly and it was authenticated through your SL account.

Here's a detailed look at the wardrobe from Thoroughly Modern Millie. This is a 1960s interpretation of 1920s styles. A Thoroughly Modern Wardrobe

Flooding has been simulated that way. There are pictures on here somewhere.

Especially since problems like that, where sim-side state is messed up, are entirely server-side.