animats

Lord of the Metaverse - the Metaverse gets the attention of The Economist. They're writing about Neal Stephenson, author of "Snow Crash", which described something like Second Life before Second Life existed. He got so many details right, down to low-bandwidth connections being seen as inferior, female avatars having excessive breast sizes, and the problems of collision detection for crowds in-world. He was thinking VR with full body tracking, like VRchat. His comment now is simply “Because just having a game engine that works, and that is sustainable as a business, is kind of the table stakes. If you can’t do that, you can’t build a multi-user realistic 3d platform.” Fortnite is mentioned; Second Life is not. Metaverse ideas keep showing up in the financial press. That wasn't happening two years ago.

SL broke the baking server that combines the layers for Bakes On Mesh into one texture. That's been messing up clothing changes for most of the day. I saw it broken; in particular, changing outfits could leave layers on that were supposed to come off. See the SL status page. The LL status for this says "Monitoring - A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results." Seems to be fixed now.

Ruth 2 comes fairly close. New users can get Ruth 2 at a new tutorial at New Resident Island. (Creators can get Ruth 2, as a Blender file, from Github.) Ruth 2 is mesh, and fits most mesh and fitmesh clothing created for classic avatars. Plus it's Bakes On Mesh compatible. This simplifies the problems of new users. If you just buy fitmesh clothes intended for classic avatars, it pretty much works. Plus Ruth 2 can wear texture clothes, so you can mix a mesh jacket with a texture T-shirt. The tutorial at NRI is set up that way, showing users how simple it is to use Ruth 2 if you stick to the easy cases. Dealing with non-fitmesh, other avatars, and related problems can be left for later. Roth 2, the male version of Ruth, needs some work to be as useful with existing clothing. I've been saying more on that in another forum.

Incidentally, don't mix those. When using llSetKeyframedMotion, it can take several seconds for the keyframed motion system to take control or release control of the object. It's not interlocked with the SetPos family of functions, and using keyframe and SetPos too close together in time doesn't work well. Nor is llSetKeyframedMotion very accurate over a chain of moves. There is cumulative error, and not just roundoff error. Move 100m with keyframe motion and you might be 1m off at the end. This gets worse in overloaded sims. It helps to think of motion control in SL as you would real-world robotics. You get to send commands to the actuators, and then you check what happened and make corrections. This is sometimes new to people who've never programmed in a world where they didn't have total control.

Applying an impulse to an object in SL is deliberately throttled to prevent certain types of griefing. llSetVelocity is more accurate. I haven't tried llSetForce. The mass of SL objects is what they would weigh if their bounding box was full of water. Avatars weigh around 100-200Kg. Build a balance and sit on one end to test this. There's a top speed in SL, a few hundred meters per second. There's also a rotation speed limit.

Robin Wood has a free T-shirt template: https://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/RSWTShirtStart.html Of course, that's a classic T-shirt, a paint-on texture. Works with classic or BOM mesh bodies, but not pre-BOM mesh.

Yes. The clothing system is complicated. Most useful info is to save good outfits by name from the T-shirt menu. Then you can easily go back to an outfit if you mess up what you're wearing. New Resident Island has a walkthrough which not only explains mesh, it gives you a free mesh female avatar and some basic clothes. The male side is being worked on. SL has far fewer clothing options on the male side, for the same reason that American malls are mostly female clothing stores. To configure payment, go to https://secondlife.com, in a web browser, log in with the same username and password you use in the viewer, and go to Account->Billing information, where you can enter a credit card number. This is charged if you buy Linden dollars with the Buy button in the browser. If you buy land, you're charged a monthly fee based on how much land you own, and if you buy Premium membership, you pay about US$100 per year. Once you have "payment info on file", you can buy Linden dollars with the "Buy L$" button in the SL viewer. You'll be asked how much you want to buy. It's not a sneaky system; Linden Lab is very clear about when they are charging you. Currently, about L$250 = US$1. This varies from day to day, but not by much. There's a fee of US$1.49 for buying Linden dollars, regardless of the transaction size. Spending about US$10 will give you enough Linden dollars for basic clothing and such. Looking really good costs more. Almost all of that goes to other residents who make things, by the way. You can cash out Linden dollars to US dollars for another fee, and it's possible to make money in Second Life, although few people do. Personally I have a small net profit. There are lots of freebie places, and like bargain bins in the real world, it's mostly old stuff, with the occasional good find. There are sales and discounted items, just like real life.

On Marketplace: Not providing a clear picture of the product. Too many images have text, color effects, and other junk, and are badly lit. Searching for "fitmesh" brings up many products that aren't fitmesh. Ads totally irrelevant to what's being searched. The search checkboxes should work like the ones for auto accessory stores, where you put in Toyota->Corolla->2018 and you only see stuff that fits. A "has demo" checkbox for search.

Because one should do such things with a sense of style.

I've made some logo wear for NPC workers. Lorem Ipsum. Your logo here. A placeholder used on my animesh NPCs until they have a role to play. Roller Freight! Worker at a freight hub. A Roller Freight sign was also on the building. GTFO Hub Loss Prevention. These NPCs are at a few GTFO hubs. They patrol, say hello to anyone who shows up, and have enough sense to get out of the way of vehicles. People making GTFO stops get the feeling that the hubs are live and in use, and their delivery isn't pointless. These logos on working clothes all have a purpose. They're not ads.

"Moon is too dark near the horizon" bug. I'm tempted to add "Moon is always full" and "Moon is too big" as bugs.

If you want a small surrounded parcel, look at the Linden land auctions. There are many available for $0.50/m^2. Bad location land in SL is very cheap.

You're not missing anything. "Skill gaming regions" are large areas full of slot machines. For people who are not gambling addicts, they are boring.

If all you want is an explosion, look into the particle system. The movement will be better, and the complexity will be lower. If you try to manipulate 100 objects that way, things won't happen all at once, and you'll probably slow down the sim for a few seconds. Look on Marketplace under "Weapons".

Your region isn't in the cloud yet. A few Linden-operated mainland region are in the cloud. Hippotropolis is one. But private estates, not yet.

It's an open question. Compare Decentraland's MANA.

Pretty much, yes. Most games offer some pre-made outfits with options, but not that many of them. A few systems have Unity uploads; you can build a whole character offline and upload it. What Fortnite calls "skin creation" we call "getting dressed" - you assemble some premade clothing items into an outfit. SL/Open simulator seems to be unique in offering general mix and match. True. Someone at NRI is doing the tutorial. She did the female side, which uses Ruth. We were just going through some available male bodies and clothing. Roth does have problems. Some of them can be fixed with the appearance sliders. Not all. Roth is free and can wear a good selection of casual wear. It's BOM, so all the classic freebie clothes work. Much, but not all, fitmesh for classic avatars works. It's a start.

Actually, no. Each texture, mesh, sound, animation, etc. has a unique UUID. If you upload a new texture, etc. the upload gets a new UUID. So the SL system doesn't need cache expiration and replacement, the way web pages do. More like what was important 10 years ago. Assets (textures, meshes, etc.) used to be sent to the viewer from the Linden Lab sim servers themselves. Now they come in through a separate path that works just like web pages - requests with a URL go out, and assets come back later, all run from ordinary web servers on AWS, with Akamai caches. That's totally separate from the servers that run the sims. The statistics bar doesn't have much info about that part of the viewer. Which assets to load in what order seems to be somewhat broken. A good way to show this is to teleport to a new sim to a spot right in front of a big picture or sign. It takes far too long for the big picture in front of you to rez in full. Sometimes a full minute. The viewer needs to be smarter about that. Yes. When you teleport into somewhere, there's briefly a huge amount of traffic. The first traffic is over UDP, as the sim tells you what's where in that sim. Then the assets are dragged in from the asset servers. Entering a new region, it may be a minute before everything is loaded. Most of the network traffic is in the first 10 seconds, though. Then the traffic goes way down, too far down, and the rest of the assets dribble in slowly. Something is throttling the traffic, but whether it's the viewer or the Akamai cache system or the AWS web servers isn't clear. This has come up at Server User Group, and may get looked at after cloud uplift. The short answer is, because, in the end, those assets come from disk drives holding thousands of terabytes of SL assets, and they have physical limits on how fast they can random access all those little individual assets.

I spoke too soon. The Meshbody Classic really is just an updated TMP. It can wear some fitmesh based clothes intended for classic avatars, though. Tops and bottoms work, but not long coats - the butt is too big. I'd tried wearing it with a classic body, which works but isn't that useful. Yes. There's some dependency on an external server in there. The New Resident Island people are trying to put together a male tutorial to go with their new one for women. The women's one ends with you wearing open-source Ruth and some basic outfits. That works well. Open source Roth doesn't work as well, and they're trying to get enough pieces together to make it work. I was showing them the same outfits on different avatars to see what fits. Fitmesh is a big convenience for new users because they don't have to fuss with HUDs and alphas. The target audience is a 0-day user who got stuck with the 70s Disco Guy avatar and desperately wants to stop looking like a n00b default.

Ebbe Altberg's interview says Sansar was supposed to be the "more nimble R&D company": With Sansar off its books, Linden Lab is now "a very profitable company," according to Altberg. "Second Life is an older, very established cash machine that works really well, and right now, we're seeing some tremendous growth happening as we speak. Whereas Sansar is a VC, more long term, need-more-investment-type-of-thing. Mixing those two within one small studio like Linden Lab was kind of tricky, so it was easier to have them go separate." The spinoff of Sansar did nothing for user counts. Still stuck around 20. Not 20,000, twenty. Steamcharts: 18 users playing now, 24-hour peak user count was 26, all-time peak user count was 221 in September 2019. There's been zero indication in the last year of any plans to advance SL much. "Cloud uplift" is a cost-saving measure. Altberg has said what the plan is - run the "older, very established cash machine". Meanwhile, we still don't know how the acquisition is going. The longer an M&A transaction drags on, the less likely it is to close.

When you edit something, it switches to high level of detail, regardless of distance, so you can see what you're doing.

Fits at last. A mesh body wearing fitmesh sized for classic non-mesh avatars. Jacket and jeans are fitmesh. This is Bento and BOM, too, so it's all the latest SL clothing technologies. Turns out the reason the skin peeked through at the belt line in the posting above was that someone was overcompensating and set the default "package" shape appearance slider slider to 100. Set to 50, the body is inside the jeans. (So fitmesh doesn't respond to that slider, unlike "butt size", which does affect fitmesh.) If you see this, it should fit. (Pending further testing.) I need to try more clothing, but I expect that most fitmesh clothing that works with classic male avatars will work with this one. I've tried some other fitmesh items and they fit. Fitmesh either works or it doesn't; the end user can't adjust anything. For fitmesh, it's the clothing creator's job to get sizing and alphas right. This body has no HUDs. It doesn't need them. With BOM, clothing that needs an alpha layer is supposed to come with one. That simplifies things for new users. On the male side, there's not much demand for nail coloring, lip gloss, and such, so HUDs for that are unnecessary. This looks promising for a new user tutorial and starter kit. New Resident Island has a good one for women only; they come out wearing Ruth with one good outfit. This can be the equivalent on the male side. I'd talked to some of the Caledon Oxbridge people about adding a section to the newcomer tutorial to include mesh clothing. They've been interested, but as a nonprofit, they can't promote the expensive name brands. Same for Firestorm Help Island. I'll put together a starter kit and see where this goes. Right. That's what I'm using here.

I'm deliberately trying for all mesh, all bento, all fitmesh, all classic shape, all BOM, no fit HUDs here, free or low cost, to see if that's possible as a starter kit. The male counterpart of the female modern mesh tutorial at New Resident Services, in other words. Everything necessary is out there, but hard to find. (Marketplace for Apparel should work like sites for auto accessories. The ones where you start by selecting Toyota - RAV4 - 2017, and only accessories compatible with that vehicle appear.)

OK, let's try that one. So close! Fitmesh jeans with Classic Meshbody. Note peek-through problem at belt line. Upper body fits nicely. Those jeans will fit a real "classic" avatar; I checked using "Boris". But the Classic Meshbody chest is just slightly too big. The jeans are fitmesh, so adjusting the body sliders won't help; the jeans adjust too and the peek-through area stays. There's an alpha with these jeans, but it doesn't cover that area, because if it did, from some angles you'd see through the body.

That's a good question. UE4's optimizations are mostly in the developer tools. Trying to do an SL viewer in UE4 has been looked at both by LL and third party viewer developers, and it didn't look promising. UE5 is supposedly doing more at run time, in the GPU. In particular, they claim to be doing mesh reduction for lower levels of detail in the GPU. The initial public release of UE5 ships in 2021. The big-world MMOs now have to load content dynamically, so they hit most of the technical problems SL does, and have to solve them with AAA title quality. They also have to automate content optimization, because it's too expensive to hire armies of artists to do entire cities by hand. So the bigger engines are getting much better at dynamic content. So it's time to be thinking about Viewer 3. I know some of the graphics Lindens would like to get going on that.