animats

These are your options, n00b! You'll look like this and like it! This is the message from Linden Help Island Public2. This Exit point does nothing. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Both of those domain names point to the same IP address at AWS. Try a ping. (This is ordinary Internet plumbing stuff.)

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.

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.

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.

I think SL's internal Unicode representation is UTF-16, in which all the major languages should work, but maybe not emoji.

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.

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.

There are things you can do legally, but for US$31, it's not worth it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The IRS seems to be taking a position that would make Linden Dollars a virtual currency. Read their FAQ. But it's considered "property", like holding a stock, and capital gain rules may apply. Also, the IRS says that if you pay someone in a virtual currency, you have to issue them a W-2 or a 1099 form if the US$600 threshold for that is reached. US$600 is the general threshold for reporting miscellaneous income. Few people will reach that in SL. But some will, and they need to talk to their tax accountants. All of this is because the cryptocurrency people tried to claim that cryptocurrencies were not money and not taxable. That was rejected by the IRS and the courts. So now, there's an IRS definition of a virtual currency. IRS: Virtual currency is a digital representation of value, other than a representation of the U.S. dollar or a foreign currency (“real currency”), that functions as a unit of account, a store of value, and a medium of exchange. Some virtual currencies are convertible, which means that they have an equivalent value in real currency or act as a substitute for real currency. The IRS uses the term “virtual currency” in these FAQs to describe the various types of convertible virtual currency that are used as a medium of exchange, such as digital currency and cryptocurrency. Regardless of the label applied, if a particular asset has the characteristics of virtual currency, it will be treated as virtual currency for Federal income tax purposes. In other words, it doesn't matter what LL calls it.

IM sent as requested. Red/Red signal is at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Timpson/246/249/32

OK, trying various options with llSetPrimMediaParams. list params = [PRIM_MEDIA_CURRENT_URL, TESTVIDEO, PRIM_MEDIA_AUTO_PLAY, TRUE, PRIM_MEDIA_AUTO_LOOP, TRUE, PRIM_MEDIA_CONTROLS, PRIM_MEDIA_CONTROLS_MINI, PRIM_MEDIA_PERMS_CONTROL,PRIM_MEDIA_PERM_NONE]; As far as I can tell, PRIM_MEDIA_AUTO_PLAY does not affect anything. I've tried both TRUE and FALSE. PRIM_MEDIA_AUTO_LOOP set to FALSE won't stop a .mp4 file from repeating. It plays a .MP4 repeatedly after the face is clicked.

Good point. Also, you can change the URL for the parcel media for media on a prim. So, if you have a theater, when everyone is in place and it's showtime, you can start everybody's players at the same place. If, of course, they've previously clicked on the screen to start things. A nice way to do this would be to run a loop of filler material that can be interrupted at any time. The prim shows the filler material until showtime, and then at showtime, the real content starts. Does [ PRIM_MEDIA_AUTO_PLAY ] work? I tried. It's still necessary to click the prim once, it seems.

If you want to make your own clothes, there's often an intermediate way - get a blank or full perm article of clothing that fits and make new textures for it. T-shirt blanks, which are Photoshop files with lots of layers, are available for free. This is far easier than making your own 3D rigged mesh.

You squared the number, then took its square root? But what you have in "rim" is the radius of the wheel, anyway. Not the circumference. Parentheses. I think you wanted float mag = dir * (llVecMag(llGetVel()) / (rim * TWO_PI)); rim*TWO_PI is the wheel circumference, which is what you need to divide the velocity by.

I tend to agree, but SL has a rather loose connection between servers and avatars to allow for lag. There's a lot of fakery and interpolation going on to make that work. For example, when you turn your avatar, it turns immediately. That's in the viewer. The simulator then gets told which direction your avatar is facing. But when you move, that's done in the simulator, and you see a bit of lag. You'll see that this is fake if you use an avatar that's much longer than it is wide, like a horse. It looks like a horse, but it collides like a vertical cylinder. You can turn the head or rump through a solid object. That's wrong, but doesn't lag. If you tried to do this all from the server side, the server would have to work much harder and have much more detailed collision models. A system that does this well has to intelligently split the job between viewer and server. Many games do that. You control character position with arrow keys, and the animation system reacts to nearby objects in some reasonable way, like switching from walking to climbing. The original Tomb Raider was one of the first games to have that. For a really good example of such implicit animation, see the UE5 demo video. The narration points out that when the character goes through a narrow doorway, she reaches out and touches the doorframe. That's triggered by the situation, and makes the movement look much more real. You'd need a system where, instead of animations stored as a timeline of joint angles, behaviors were stored as goals with code to achieve them. Something where "close to vertical thing and moving forward" triggers the "climb" behavior, for example. Such systems exist, but it would be a tough retrofit to SL.

I have a little script I put in wheels. It calls llTargetOmega(axis, rate, 1.0); directly from the timer event, which fires every 0.300 second. Rate is calculated from the vehicle velocity in the forward direction. There are some protections. If rate is < 0.01 rad/sec, it's set to zero, because very low rotation rates don't work with llTargetOmega. If it's above 10 rad/sec, it's clamped, because rotating too fast for the frame rate is useless; it won't look right. The call to llTargetOmega is skipped if there's been less than a 20% change in rate since last time, to hold down the number of updates. And when the vehicle is turned off, the script gets a message to go to an off state, stopping the timer. Works fine. Inch the bike forward and the wheel rolls slowly, synchronized against the ground. Zoom around fast and it continues to look right.

Delay in block. Somerville, southbound. After passing about four sidings with good signal behavior, I reached this. Red on both branches. Waited 10 minutes, no change. That looks incorrect. Both the main line and the siding are empty. If the signal system has detected an oncoming train in the block ahead, it should put me on the siding and hold me there until the other train reaches the siding and clears the block ahead. For that I should get a red leaving the siding. This indication means the signal system detects the siding as full, I think.