animats

That looks a lot like what I remember. But, as you say, it's not there now. Did it move? It seems something someone would have kept.

There was a museum of SL somewhere near Da Boom which had a mini copy of the Cornfield. I can't find it now. It also had a Telehub and many other artifacts from the early days. Large square building with an open courtyard in the middle. Anyone know where it is?

Suddenly, today, old Lab Gab announcements back to January showed up.

Marketplace is officially down for maintenance today. From Second Life status: Update - Scheduled maintenance is still in progress. We will provide updates as necessary. Oct 28, 13:46 PDT In progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary. Oct 28, 13:45 PDT Scheduled - We will be performing a scheduled maintenance on The Second Life Marketplace starting on Wednesday, October 28th at 1:45 PM PDT. While maintenance is in progress, The Second Life Marketplace will be inaccessible to our Residents. Please keep an eye on this blog for any updates. I got that Marketplace Forbidden message at login. It's probably the viewer checking to see if anything was added to inventory while you were out.

Try the Firestorm support group while in-world. This sort of thing tends to take some hand-holding to fix.

Yes. I've even had IMs go to email shortly after a teleport.

Here's an idea. Have not just a club, but shopping and freebies for newcomers. Firestorm Help Island has that, but their club doesn't have much going on.

Facebook Horizons has that. It's creepy. They wanted horizons to be "safe". So they turned it into a police state.

The vacant shops in the mall have all been acquired by one of the larger landlords. The price has been raised. The shops remain vacant.

I'm experimenting with a better approach to standing. As we all know, if you stand up from a sit, you may end up standing on the chair, or a table in front of the chair, or worse. So I tried adding a little motion planning. Seated at table. Standing alongside chair. An attachment moved the avatar to the nearest reachable clear space. Default stand behavior would put the avatar on the table. This borrows from the motion planning I use for my NPCs. When the attachment detects a stand, it uses ray cast calls to find a nearby open space big enough for the avatar to stand, and uses a "move to target" call to put the avatar there. This works well when there's open space near the object being sat on, and there's a clear straight line path to it. It doesn't work well when there isn't. Chairs or seats close together with a table in front are troublesome. The avatar is physical and won't move backwards through the chair. Chairs can be set up to move back when the avatar stands (Rolig Loon has done this), and that helps. Theater seats are tough if tightly packed, as they are in RL. Inside seats in diner booths don't work. Getting out of a vehicle sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Motorcycle, yes. Dune buggy, yes. Big truck, no. Cars, it varies. With cooperation from the vehicle in opening the door, it could work better. Vehicles with bad physics models give trouble. Unfortunately, because attachments don't get an event when the avatar stands, it takes a constantly-running timer to detect a stand, which increases overhead. Haven't found a way to avoid that. A high-end AO might do this, and add some animations like "move sideways off seat" to make it look smooth. For now, this is an experiment only. Comments?

After a region crossing, a vehicle has to re-establish all animations, controls, and sounds. Scripts must wait until all avatars are fully re-seated (avatar parent is the vehicle) and then do it. It's a pain, but a necessary workaround. Also, if a vehicle loses its driver, it should stop until the avatar catches up and re-seats. If you do that, region crossings are either OK or hard fail. Hard fail is the avatar totally separated from the vehicle. That's the major sim-side bug LL has been unable to fix for years. Most of the better vehicle builders do this by now.

That looks like someone is running a scraper on these forums to generate reddit posts.

Attachments don't get CHANGED_LINK events when an avatar stands. Any way to tell when an avatar just stood up, without having a timer running all the time?

Next try a rattleback.

You can definitely get the goth/cyber/vampire look in SL. SL is all about clothes, so you don't have to look like anybody else. Try New Resident Island and The Free Dove for clothing and avatar basics. Visit Graves at Oxymoron sim to see some good high-end cyber stuff. You just missed Cyber Fair. There was a big show of the stuff you want last month, where all the major sellers had pop-up shops. You can still buy it; it's just not all in one place. Not all clothing fits all avatars. The different avatar brands are not compatible. But most major clothing brands have clothes for the major brand avatars. All this clothing and avatar stuff is made by users; that's why it's not standard and why it's so complicated. Visit Cocoon for a cyberpunk roleplay sim done very well. Ask people there where they shop. They have clubs, too. There's some kind of Harajuku event on, if you like that style. There's a search engine under the "Content" browser menu for finding these places. Plus there's web shopping, on SL's Marketplace. Most good stuff has free demos; try those first. SL is a lot like RL. It's big, stuff is all over the place, there's no central anything, almost everything you see was made by a user, and land is mostly privately owned. Simple clothing is free, the really good stuff is expensive. Have fun!

That was good, and it helped, especially for large, complex vehicles, mostly boats. The remaining problems are on the avatar side. Most region crossing fails have the vehicle crossing OK with the avatars Left Behind. Teleports, of course, are avatar-only. There's also some problem connecting to new regions. I've been posting pictures where I've reached the edge of a region and the next region takes 10-20 seconds to appear. That got worse in the last two months. It's usually at the same sims, too. That might be related to the teleport problem, which, of course, involves connecting to a new region. It's discouraging that this isn't fixed yet. It is encouraging, though, that it's starting to look like a small number of very specific problems.

That's using up all the developer time, but it's not the cause of teleport and region crossing problems. Those suck about the same no matter which data center is running the sim.

Tune in tomorrow and find out how to multiply quaternions.

It's nice to see a video about SL that isn't talking heads. Those are boring after the first minute. (We really ought to have face and head feature tracking via webcam in SL. The bento heads can do facial expressions, but few people puppeteer them well, if at all. Look up "Facerig" to see what that looks like, done well. Not everyone would go for this, but YouTubers, machima, and quite possibly people having meetings would.)

Yes! That's fun to watch. She knows how to look good in real life, and she's using those skills in Second Life. Seeing that done is great for SL. She even customized the dialog boxes to pink backgrounds! Who else bothers to do that?

Putting Firefox's cache directory on SSD is a big help, but outside of that, more SSD will not speed things up. The viewer uses the cache heavily, but, once launched, barely touches other files.

The asset servers, where textures, meshes, and sounds are stored, have been on AWS for years.

Try New Resident Island. Not only do they have the free Ruth avatar, they have a whole tutorial on how to get started with it.

Here's something simple that could be done. This hangs above a help island which is supposed to be defunct, although it still gets visitors. When you push F1 for help, in the Firestorm viewer you get sent to the home page of the Firestorm wiki. This is not a good starting point. It starts out "General Index" and "Tag Cloud". Not helpful. You can click on "Getting Help". That starts out with "Firestorm System Requirements" and goes on with "How to File a JIRA". Worse. A new user might find their way to "Firestorm Gateway - For New Residents". That starts out with how to join Second Life and how to become a helper at the Firestorm gateway. At the bottom of that page is "Help for those new to Second Life may be found here." ("Here" is https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/new_residents:start) There, at last, is useful info. But it's all "below the fold"; the top of the screen has a map of the Second Life continents, plus info on how to join Second Life. Finally, we get to the useful stuff. Or at least links to it. How Does Clothing Work? How Do I Mod My Shape? Where Can I Get Good Free Stuff? How Do I Use Furniture? and other basic topics. Retargeting "F1" would be an easy fix. What's behind "F1" in other viewers? (I just ran into a day old user who was checking out the SL election simulation mentioned on Strawberry's blog. He wanted advice on the basics, and I wish I could have just told him "Push F1". Seemingly trivial stuff like this really matters for customer retention.)

Moving defunct stores to Marketplace Remainder Outlet would help. If the parcel where "see object in world" goes changes ownership or goes away, the store owner should get periodic messages to update their store. If no update happens, the store should be moved to Remainder Outlet. Same for store operators who don't log in for some number of months.