[Can we please have the Deploy Plans for that Week so we know if what will happen?]

6 hours ago, arabellajones said:

That is going to make things interesting for folk in some parts of the world.

As I understand it, the uplift process can't be invisible. Maybe not, strictly, a restart, but there's some risk of losing changes. We haven't even been told we should be careful about making changes at some particular time of day, other that these ambiguous restart warnings.

2 days per week at 2000 per day, doen't feel silly as an Uplift rate, call it 5 weeks, but it's too much like mushroom farming: kept in the dark and fed on bull*****.

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.

[Script behaviour changes linked to vehicles and region crossing]

20 hours ago, Mollymews said:

the main thing is to poll for the agent when the vehicle crosses, applying animation and camera only when the agent is actually present on the region

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.

[SSL connection certificates for "Uplift"-ed regions/simulators]

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

[2020 an SL noob’s first impressions...]

6 hours ago, cunomar said:

It doesn't need to be managed - they don't need to be helped , working it all out is a huge learning curve that will fill many hours - but they need a reason to think it might be worth investing those hours .

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

[Can we please have the Deploy Plans for that Week so we know if what will happen?]

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.

[Draw distance > 1024m]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

And you want to see to infinity?  That would introduce much more unrealistic distortion (if I can call it that; it's really non-distortion), that would be very disorienting, I should think.

 

This is far enough. Beyond that, water.

[Draw distance > 1024m]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Say what?  SL is flat.  There IS no horizon.

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.

[Second Life, and sharding]

22 minutes ago, Chroma Starlight said:

Second Life were a social sharding system

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.

[Draw distance > 1024m]

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.

[How do you know if a region has been uplifted?]

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.)

[SL urban legends and conspiracies]

22 minutes ago, Garnet Psaltery said:

Is it this?  I found a link in the Destination Guide but when I got there, everything had changed, there was a forced landing point on the ground, and a flight up to the expected level revealed nothing in the air.

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.

[SL urban legends and conspiracies]

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?

[SL forums "Unread" showing old Lab Gab items]

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

[The Transaction with the Marketplace failed with the following error - Forbidden]

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.

[Voice works in SL Viewer but not Firestorm]

29 minutes ago, Waialae said:

Hi. The Second Life viewer allows my avatar to speak using my computer's microphone. The exact same settings in the Firestorm (v 6.3.9) viewer puts the "voice dot" over my head, but my voice isn't heard. It seems like a microphone activation issue. I opened preferences and changed the mic activation from "middle mouse" to another key (used z) but still no voice. I went to the Firestorm wiki and the instructions there mimic the settings I already have in place. Tried different mics on the off chance but still no voice. Any ideas why voice works normally for me in the SL viewer but not in Firestorm?

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

[Some Groupschats still dead, Sim wide IM confi down, STILL!?]

14 hours ago, AramintaLeRouge said:

Worse...anyone else having group notices going to email while in world?

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

[Looking to develop a new comer friendly club, but need help]

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.

[SL urban legends and conspiracies]

On 10/25/2020 at 11:16 PM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I can think of dozens of occasions in SL, none of them involving BDSM, where I wanted a word that would magically make what I was seeing / hearing / reading magically stop and go away.

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

[SAFE HUBS WITH NO VOICE?!?!?!?!?!?!???!!]

7 hours ago, Chaser Zaks said:

Zindra mall (Unused/Abandoned safe hub like area) - http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mosh South/128/179/25

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.

[Standing up without standing on tables]

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?

 

 

[Are you tired of all this laggin and crashing]

4 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

The main problem I am aware of is the sort order of sitters on a region crossing being broken, breaking a lot of vehicles especially with a passenger.  Hiking on boats breaks after a few crossings,  or the vehicle just comes to a stop because even though sat on it, the script has lost them. 

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.

[SL resurgence on Reddit]

33 minutes ago, Fauve Aeon said:

More current content is on the main r/secondlife page.

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

[Any efficient way to tell when an avatar stands, from an attachment]

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?

[Gömböc mesh test on Second Life Engine]

Next try a rattleback.

[Newb here, Ugh!]

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!