animats
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Posts posted by animats
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5 hours ago, Hexadeci Mole said:
Getting there.... took forever to figure out the FURWARE face offsets. Gotta throw on the MIT license n stuff.
Here is an example video of HexText rendering Unicode:
https://gyazo.com/f34f7951a2f79fd0363a3539e7fdbbf2
(Gyazo capture is blurry compared to in-world.)
How does that work? There must be some huge texture with the font.
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4 hours ago, RowanMinx said:
You must complete tutorial/task #1 before you can proceed to the next.
That's a bit too control-oriented. But having tutorials for specific goals which involve doing various steps is useful. Like the one at the top of this topic, "Your First Mesh Body". Each tutorial should give the user something upon completion. Think carrot, not stick.
QuoteIt can be time consuming and often it seems as if they're not focused on what you're saying.
One of the Caledon helpers made a similar remark as we watched some people running through the Caledon tutorial at high speed. When they hit a problem, though, you can get their attention.
QuoteLinden moved from inworld tutorials (like is found on Help Island Public and Orientation Island Public) when context sensitive help came with Viewer 2 back in 2010
What passes for "context sensitive help" in the viewer is not all that helpful to users with clothing problems.
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On the left, classic avatar. On the right, mesh avatar.
I've been trying to duplicate my non-mesh look, which I rather like, in mesh. Here's what I have so far.
The avatar on the right is built from the open-source Roth, the "BOM 2000" version. You can buy this on Marketplace for L$10. Roth is the male counterpart of Ruth. Ruth is used often; Roth not so much.
(The version on Marketplace is not ready to use. Out of the box, there's a see-through section at the neck and the head and body don't match, even with with the same skin. After fixing the see-through section (one face is 30% transparent for no good reason) and setting the alpha mode consistently (body was "alpha masking", head was "alpha blending") for body and head, it looks OK.)
Biggest problem with Roth is skinny lower legs. I have to turn up "leg muscles" to get a big enough leg size down at the boots. Roth's thigh to ankle ratio is more female than male. (There's no separate adjustment for lower leg size, is there?) I should bulk up the arms a bit, which is an option. Other than that, not too bad.
Alphas are a problem. The supplied "alpha HUD" only lets you blank out areas at the level of "lower leg", "upper leg", etc. No fine adjustments. No good reason for that; the HUD for Open Simulator has more control. You also don't get any of the fancy stuff like nail color adjustment.
I have a non-rigged leather jacket that fits, but it takes some fussing because the alpha layer it comes with doesn't hide some shoulder areas just below the neck.
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50 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:
spewed ... blown on ... slathered ... plated ... fused ... annealed ...
This is bikeshedding. My point is that the new user experience can be improved, but new users are being sent to some limbo place from SL ancient history by mistake.
What I hear from talking to new users are two big questions. 1) What do I do now? 2) How do I fix this $$#%* &%! clothing problem. #1 is inherent in what SL is, but #2 is mostly an onboarding problem. Some people get really upset at a broken appearance. Their whole self-image is damaged.
As I've said in another topic, the single biggest thing I've found it useful to tell new users is that once they get a reasonable look, save it. Then they can go back, and the risk of appearance disaster is much reduced. They can then try things without fear. Somehow, none of the tutorials emphasize this.
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Just now, RowanMinx said:
They had to use the word "suck"? Adhere perhaps would have been better? Anything but suck.
They did a modern mesh tutorial. NRI's text and graphics could use some polishing, but they're doing good work. I've been after the Caledon people to do something like this.
It expresses the idea well, too. With classic avatars, you had all those system clothing layers other than skin (dress, coat, etc.). With BOM mesh, the classic stuff is applied (I think) only to the bare skin. Dresses and coats must be separate rigged mesh. So it's simpler now. You layer the skintight stuff on the bare body, then put on some clothes. And it's good to see it expressed that way. Much of the BOM info is "how to bang on your existing mesh avatars and wardrobe to make them play with bakes on mesh", which gets complicated. For a new user, that's unnecessary.
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16 minutes ago, Mollymews said:
if brandnew people are being sent there directly then what is happening is that the Linden onboarding regions currently online are full.
26 minutes ago, Maitimo said:Those people you see there are there because they teleported there on purpose. They probably searched for "help".
Ah. A picture is starting to emerge of how those lost souls end up in limbo.
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7 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:
Oh for the ...
Help and Orientation Island Public are both archived/historical versions of an "onboarding" process that does not exist anymore and should not be used or thought of as any sort of example for the present process.
That surprised me, too. I was just flying over the public Linden sims in north Sansara to see what had moved to the cloud. (Denby just went to AWS.) There were people at those old abandoned hubs. So I went to take a look. They're getting new users from somewhere. More than Caledon Oxbridge gets. Somewhere, something is sending zero-day new users there.
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OK. First of all, here's Furware's default font.
Furware's default font texture, which is open source. The Github code will show you the UUID of this texture. That's all you can get on most SL signs. That's the Basic Latin block of Unicode, plus an additional block of symbols.
Letters are shown by showing a tiny piece of that texture in each letter position. Cramming all of Unicode onto one texture won't fit.
LSL/Mono uses UTF-16, which is what Microsoft and Java used 15 years ago or so. UTF-16 is supposed to be a fixed-length encoding - one character takes 2 bytes. There's a hack to use two UTF-16 characters to represent characters way up in the Unicode character set (these used to be called the "astral planes") but I don't know if SL supports that. UTF-16 covers everything in languages people actually use much. Up in the astral planes are archaic and obscure languages (Cretan Linear B, Sanskrit, etc.) and emoji.
UTF-8 is a clever variable length system; one character can occupy 1 to 4 bytes. So all that astral plane stuff can be represented without making common characters longer.
In general, the Web is now UTF-8 everywhere, Linux is UTF-8 everywhere, Go, Javascript, and Rust are UTF-8 everywhere, the major databases all support UTF-8 but also support legacy encodings, Python talks UTF-8 but internally is ASCII, UTF-16, or UTF-32, and Java and Microsoft still have legacy problems but are mostly UTF-8 now. After a decade of misery for everyone who understands this stuff, we're mostly done with it.
(Then there are emoji modifiers, the gimmick that allows changing the skin tone on emoji and other special effects. That's on top of Unicode. Another nightmare for anyone who has to put in line breaks. SL seems to have very little emoji support. On mobile, though, everybody has all that and people keep demanding new emoji, or complaining about old ones. You can put a "not" modifier, the "do not enter" sign, on anything, and this upsets some people.)
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These are your options, n00b! You'll look like this and like it! This is the message from Linden Help Island Public2.
Muwhahaha! You thought you could get out of here and explore? No! You're trapped here! There's no exit! We have you now!
New zero-day users are arriving at this place about once every two minutes. It's not an unused sim, it's a forgotten, broken part of the onboarding process. Wonder why new users aren't staying? Much of that may be due to bad initial experiences like this.
Needs improvement.
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Recently I was looking at mesh bodies for men, and looked around for an in-world tutorial. None at Linden help islands. None at Firestorm help islands. None at New Citizens. New Resident Island, though, just recently installed a tutorial, "My First Mesh Body".
Start here to look like the ads for SL.
This just became available; a few days ago it was in a skybox reachable through a hard to find teleport, but now it's in the mall at New Resident Island. And it's been upgraded for Bakes on Mesh. If you go through the tutorial, you come out wearing the Ruth open source avatar. There's no tutorial for men yet, although the companion Roth open source avatar is available. ($1 on Marketplace.)
As far as I know, this is the only tutorial in-world that covers the current BOM avatar system. It assumes you don't have an existing wardrobe to adapt, which is the complicated part of BOM.
It's so much simpler to explain when it doesn't have to be backwards-compatible. Compare that big flowchart Slink gives out on making Omega, BOM, and Slink play well together.
This is forward progress. Congratulations to New Resident Island.
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SL needs to not be a total turn-off to a gamer. Or for new users. The onboarding process is still weak. In some ways, it's become worse, because most of the new user places are no longer staffed most of the time.
New user. 0 days. Starter 70s Disco Guy outfit. Fortunately he managed to make it to Firestorm Help Island and found the correct tutorial. Many never get that far.
A slow, steady decline in the number of users is just not good enough.
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In-world employment is for fun; you can't make much money that way. It's not like being a YouTube influencer. If you're lucky you might be able to pay your Second Life expenses.
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2 hours ago, KT Kingsley said:
Checking out region Hippotropolis, I notice that while Help/About says "You are at 128.0, 128.0, 30.3 in Hippotropolis located at ec2-35-163-246-234.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com (35.163.246.234:13020)", llGetEnv ("simulator_hostname") returns "simhost-0ab4af337179dda29.agni.secondlife.io".
Is there a way to determine if a simulator is cloud hosted using LSL?
Both of those domain names point to the same IP address at AWS. Try a ping.
(This is ordinary Internet plumbing stuff.)
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That came up at Server User Group this week. Others reported seeing that. HTTP status code 499 is something SL generates for some internal reason. Too many HTTP requests can cause it. But it may be some internal SL problem, too.
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9 hours ago, Conifer Dada said:
Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can notice things others don't!
Yes. I've been talking to new users lately. There are some simple things none of the tutorials tell new users. One is simply to save your first good outfit, using the T-shirt menu. Then you have a safe outfit to which you can easily go back. I've seen more than one new user stressed out because they tried on clothing, got a mess, and didn't know how to undo.
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2 hours ago, Seicher Rae said:
Yup. That's your SL Feed. The thing that no one knows about. Oldbies think it has vanished. Noobs have never heard of it. There are a devout few who still use it a lot. I used to, but now very sporadically. There are so many reasons it failed. Right now it is because it is buggier than an honey smeared picnic basket. You can upload raw screenshots directly to your feed (in theory).
Oh, that's what LL did with it. Never saw that before. Went and looked. I have a follower there!
The idea behind Avatars United was that you'd have one social account across many game platforms, so you could invite your friends to go play something else. Steam has something like that.
Some of the "metaverse" concepts build on that idea. Log in, play or visit one of many alternatives, keep the same identity and friends across all of them. Epic is making noises about taking Fortnite down that road.
For only one platform, it's not all that useful. We already have chat, IMs, friend lists, etc. in world, and can message via the forum system too.
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I think SL's internal Unicode representation is UTF-16, in which all the major languages should work, but maybe not emoji.
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In 2010, Linden Lab bought a company, Enemy Unknown, operators of "Avatars United". That was supposed to be "Facebook for avatars".
Like most Linden Lab acquisitions, it didn't work out.
The Steam forums seem to be serving that market now, with more success.
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After spending some time talking to new users, I think SL needs a Fashion Emergency Center. A place to go when clothing just isn't behaving. The most frustrated new users are the ones with clothing problems. The other common problem, "what do I do now", is less urgent. I've seen new users quite upset because a wrong alpha layer was blanking out part of their body. They need to be first talked down, then taken through the repair process.
The idea is from anime conventions. They usually have a Cosplay Emergency Room, equipped with a sewing machine, needle and thread, safety pins, duct tape, hot glue guns, and people who know how to use them.
SL needs something like that. It might look like the changing room section of a store, with private booths (if only we had mirrors!) and a counter with a helper. Have some racks of clothes around for decor.
Get someone with a big clothing mall to provide space for it. The people who go there are likely to want to shop, once their immediate crisis has been dealt with. It would probably be a win for clothing sellers to staff such a place.
Teleports to the Fashion Emergency Center should be at all help areas and safe hubs.
This would remove one of the serious "I give up" pain points for new users.
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There are things you can do legally, but for US$31, it's not worth it.
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There's a mesh avatar tutorial at https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Lawst Paradise/89/53/2002.
It's at New Resident Island, but hidden in a skybox. If you start at New Resident Island, go the the marketplace, and there's a building devoted to mesh avatars. There, you can click on a map and get the link to the skybox.
It's a good tutorial. If you go through step by step, you come out wearing the Ruth open-source avatar wearing one of a few outfits on offer.
It's pre-BOM, alphas for the offered shoes don't work yet, and the head and body skin colors don't quite match. But it's a good start. A new version of the tutorial is being constructed, I was told. Almost all the other new resident locations predate mesh and have not been updated.
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The OP is absolutely right.
Remember Sears?
It took decades of complacent management to reach this point. But they got there.
LL lost a year moving SL to "the cloud". That's working now. Visit Hippotropolis. Good job. Works just like the old data center. User will barely notice.
OK, let's go down the list.
1. Two factor authentication. All that work to spin off Tilia, and no better security?
2. Mobile-Friendly/Responsive Website, Account Dashboard, and profiles, etc. Yes. It's not that hard, and you can hire people who know how.
3. Old, outdated, deprecated graphics frameworks need to GO. Big job. It means a rewrite of the rendering end of the viewer. A Viewer 3. I've written about this before. One point I make is that most of SL's datedness is viewer-side. That's good, because the sim side is hard to fix without upsetting the world. The viewer isn't as hard to change, and any problems only affect people testing new viewers.
4. Mobile Viewer for Android and iOS. Probably not; not enough compute power or bandwidth in those things. Non-3D clients are possible but not all that useful. But reevaluate each year; the time will come.
5. Official Controller / Gamepad support. Yes. It's ridiculous that SL can't be played with a gamepad. Or use joysticks properly.
6. Fix the new user onboarding experience and provide some objectives and incentives. That's hard, but can be outsourced to groups. Just offering more useful portals at the Portal Park would help.
7. Streamline and standardize the avatar editing/creation process. Remove the default system avatar entirely and focus only on wearable / detachable bodies that support bakes-on-mesh...
I've been talking to new users recently at Caledon and Firestorm Help Island, both of which now seem to be rarely staffed. Two things come up repeatedly. 1) What do I do now? 2) How do I fix this %$#(^! clothing problem? As an absolute minimum, the onboarding process needs to finish with the new user wearing one good mesh avatar and outfit, with that outfit saved so they can go back to it. I've found that the most useful thing I can tell new users is how to save an outfit. Once they know they can go back, the whole clothing system becomes less frightening. Major clothing problems are extremely upsetting to some new users. I talked to one woman who was having alpha layer problems, had lost her shoulders, and was quite upset. Knowing there's a way to go back helps increase user confidence. Also, not one of the new user entry points properly covers current BOM-capable mesh avatars.
8. Repeating point 3: VULKAN for Windows! See above.
SL is becoming less and less relevant by the day because of LL's refusal to update and implement even the most basic of things while wasting resources on things that no one asked for. EEP comes to mind. Huge effort. We got a nice moon out of it.
"Less-relevant" is on point. I have a topic where I post articles about "the metaverse", currently a hot subject in the business press. Often, Second Life is mentioned. Often in the context of "oh, you might remember that old thing". Second Life is so out of the news that searching for "Second Life" in Google News returns zero first page results about Linden Lab's SL.
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19 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:
If LL ever mentioned early Fall 2020, then my guess is that it was a very, very rough estimate with lots of caveats around it - because LL is usually very good at never give solid dates for things.
Most of us here in the forums have been expecting more like a winter time frame.
The move to AWS has already started.
Now entering The Cloud. Crossing from Hippo Hollow, hosted in the old data center, to Hippotropolis, hosted on Amazon AWS. Works fine. Viewer "Help" gives this info:
You are at 30.9, 148.6, 28.9 in Hippotropolis
located at ec2-35-163-246-234.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com (35.163.246.234:13020)Hippotropolis is a Linden-operated sim for showing off advances in Second Life technology, so it's appropriate that it's one of the first to make it to AWS.
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Linden Estate Services. There really is an in-world land office. Nobody is ever in. Perhaps at one time companies dealt with Linden Lab here for deals on multiple regions. Now most of the offices are vacant, without furniture. Some have nice collections of Linden Bears.
Soon, when "cloud uplift" goes live, new regions will become available. Maybe this place will be staffed again.
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Non-mesh vs. Mesh
in Your Avatar
Posted
Yes, I get that there are alternatives. I wanted to try the open source body.
Open source Ruth isn't bad. Open source Roth looks like someone took Ruth and tried to turn it into a male body, badly. Hence the skinny ankles.
One can do worse. A Slink demo. Default settings. The jutting chin is easily fixed, but I have no idea where the stripey pattern on the arms is coming from.