animats

If it's at the Akamai level, whether you see overload throttling depends on where you are and to which cache server you're connected. Akamai's world of caches. This is what makes it possible for everyone to view the home page of CNN or Fox at the same time. It only helps for SL if more than one Second Life user happens to be both in the same area of SL and the same area in RL. Or some of the people in the same area in RL are seeing some of the same items in SL.

Really, mostly tedium. There are 7 sizes and three packages, a new version is a pain to package, and I was off doing something else when their IM came in via email. I think you're right, though. I should make them mod, but put in the resizing checker.

"No user-serviceable parts inside." It's an interesting question. I sell my escalators as no-mod because someone tried to resize one just a little, which broke it because the moving parts have to fit for it to work. Then they were unhappy. Then I had someone else who was unhappy because they wanted a mod version to re-texture, and I didn't want to bother with a custom job. What do creators with complicated objects find works best?

That's rotation around a single axis. Any object rotating freely without outside forces has some axis of rotation. The axis will not change without some outside force. This is why gyroscopes work. Rotational velocity is described by a vector. The direction of the vector is the axis of rotation, and the magnitude of the vector is the speed. That's what you feed into llTargetOmega. Changing the axis of rotation by applying an external force is called "precession". There are good articles and videos on line about how that works.

Yes. The history is that the US was formed as a voluntary alliance. Version 1, the Articles of Confederation, was set up more like the United Nations, with a very weak central government. Version 2, the US Constitution, had a much stronger central government. The US federal government is weaker than the central government of France or England, where Paris and London run things. It's closer to Germany and Switzerland, where there's some regional autonomy. The effect has been to over-weight rural areas. This has some interesting effects. US interstate highway system. All states have at least one, even the ones with few people. All mainland states except Maine, in the upper right, have at least two. That's what it took to get Congress to pay for it. UK motorway system. Only the heavily populated areas are served. Strong central government.

The Unreal Engine tools don't really do visual content creation. You create in Blender or Maya and import into Unreal Engine, where there are some tools for optimizing content and assembling content created elsewhere. (I'm not a UE4 expert; I installed it once, built some demos, and tried a few things.)

The 7 types of VR users Someone's take on the available demographics for virtual worlds. The "VRChat Bro" is included. Ask yourself which of those groups might be drawn to SL.

Right. The viewer is happy, system load is just the viewer and is low. System memory usage is about 60% on the graph. The viewer is just sitting there waiting for assets to arrive. Viewer is the current Firestorm beta, the one with EEP. Clicking "edit" on the no-texture areas doesn't bring them up. That normally increases the priority of showing an object, so if it's loaded but not in the GPU due to GPU memory space problems, it gets brought in when you edit it. But there's no texture info the GPU can find. Speculation: Akamai, which runs the caching system used for SL assets, has detection for overloads, and will throttle requests from an IP address if some threshold is exceeded. Maybe that's it. Akamai's system is tuned to deliver web pages. Teleporting somewhere in SL looks to Akamai like loading a web page with a thousand images or so. That's an abnormal event. A quote from Akamai: "An online video game download consumes as much traffic as about 30,000 web pages, so that's why Akamai is working with companies such as Microsoft and Sony to reduce global Internet traffic during hours of unusually high demand." Due to the US elections, we're probably in a period of unusually high demand, with news pages constantly changing and being reloaded. I've brought this up at Server User Group, and it's on the list of things to look at after "cloud uplift".

It took 5 minutes to load this scene. Most of the time the network was almost idle. 45 Mb/s is available. Texture loading was very, very slow today. I went to New Babbage and buildings were showing with opaque windows for the first two minutes while textures loaded. Above is Robin Loop, which I drive around every few days. This time, the road texture never showed as I drove the 13-region loop. Equally bad with cloud and non-cloud regions. Are others seeing this?

Larson Logistics' quarry train and the streecar from Sumi at Burns seem to use newer scripts that work well. I've run the quarry train the length of the Bellessaria line without problems other than those from defective signals. "Model Railroading is Fun!" - old issues of Model Railroader

Take a look at the trains in Jane's Viking sim, Folkvang. Those are all keyframe animated. So are the trams in New Babbage, I think. Keyframe animation will work well in overloaded sims, which is why I use it for my NPCs. Those appear to move like avatars, but they're really keyframe animation precalculated dynamically a few seconds ahead of motion. That's a good way to run trains, which follow predictable paths along tracks. Trying to do it by constant feedback is in theory better, but with script overload the new normal, precomputation is the way to go.

I checked my logging, and on some region crossings there's a meaningless "CHANGED_LINK" event.

I have one, "animatsalt", for testing. Non-premium, L$ balance 0, no inventory, with a good male minor-brand free mesh avatar from The Free Dove. Used mostly when I need a vehicle passenger or a second point of view.

Once LL gets the provisioning automated, private regions should be limited only by the ability of people to pay for them. AWS capacity is very easy to add.

OK. "Pack" is a function in Python for making binary structures. ">BLBL" is an instruction to the Python packer on how to pack up that data as raw bytes. I'm amazed that they got far enough to send a UDP datagram to a sim correctly with so little code. What's going on here is that you did the XMLRPC call to the login server. It then replies, and tells you the address info for the sim running the region into which you are logging. From that point forward, most of the communication with the sim uses binary UDP packets. These are encoded in a format described here.The actual binary format of blocks is defined by a huge machine-readable text file called "message_template.msg", which you can find in the viewer sources. Decoding this format is Not Fun. Each UDP packet contains multiple SL messages. The messages are just run together; there's no structure that lets you pick out just the ones you want without decoding all of them. There's Lua code to do this in the Open Simulator world, and C++ code inside the viewer. Probably C# code in Open Simulator. SL has other communication protocols. There's a serialization protocol called LLSD. It comes in two flavors, XML and binary. It's self-describing, like JSON and Google protocol buffers. That is, the names and types of the fields are in the data. Once upon a time, around 2009, there were apparently people interested in this level of detail about the system. That was before my time, but you can go back and find info. There was an Architecture Working Group, and Project Snowglobe, and much interest in building the Metaverse. There's a monument to Project Snowglobe in Hippotropolis. Go visit and read the posters. That totally ended by 2008. But the documentation is still around, there's Open Simulator, and there are third party viewers.

It is invisible to most users. Right now, if you drive around on mainland roads, you're crossing from sims hosted in the Linden Lab data center in Arizona to sims hosted in the northern California Amazon Web Services data center. And back. You probably won't notice. Those of us who develop within SL were testing on the beta grid months ago. Bugs were reported and fixed long before main-grid user-visible sims were moved to AWS. There were some big problems at first, JIRAs were filed, people reported trouble at Server User Group meetings, and the problems were fixed. There are still some obscure timing problems, but some of those will go away when everything is on AWS. I'm often critical of the dev team, but this migration is going well.

Yes. You have to do all the work to check for all the avatars arriving, and then reset controls and animations. Avatars and vehicles cross separately and are re-connected after arrival. Those animation error messages can be completely eliminated.

Is this for inbound HTTPS, where you request a URL in a prim and try to connect to it from outside SL?

Good insight. There need to be small payoffs along the way.

From the last server user group meeting, the plan was to "uplift" about 2000 regions each night. So it should be done within two weeks.

This is far enough. Beyond that, water.

There's a horizon line, where water meets sky, but it's infinitely far away. World as an island is common in games. A very few virtual world systems have a spherical world. Mostly ones which support space travel.

I do not think that word means what you think it means. Sharding in games means having multiple copies of the same area so that more people can be in it at the same time. It's what you do when your MMO can't handle many users at once. Sansar had shards. Fortnite has shards. The whole point of Second Life is that it's one big world and doesn't need shards.

I'd like to have the viewer show, at least, bare terrain out to the horizon. Like Google Earth does, with less resolution for distant objects. Like my slippy map of SL. That looks like the regular map of SL. Now right click and move the mouse. SL should look something like that to flyers. The nearer regions should have elevation, so that when you're sailing you can see distant land. Heterocera and Sansara have great mountain ranges. Few have ever seen them in their full glory. SL has the best big world around, but it doesn't *look* big.

Really, unless you're deep inside the viewer or doing HTTP into or out of SL objects, the DNS names of the simulators don't matter. (There's an obscure feature of HTTPS where the HTTP client can offer a TLS certificate to the server on request. This is the reverse of the usual authentication. It would be nice if SL did that on outgoing HTTP connections, with one EV cert for all of SL. Then, viewers which really needed to know it was SL at the other end could check the certificate. It would be a rarely used feature, except for a few in-world applications which need high security. Like vendors. Some game servers might use it. Once the server is sure it's SL sending, the server can trust the extra HTTP headers which indicate who, what, and where within SL is sending the request. This beats rolling your own crypto inside LSL.)