animats

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.

SL should have face expression tracking via webcam, for those who want it. The bento heads have enough features to follow along. Not many would use it, but it would be good for performers, machima, talking head videos, etc.

Air Show at Firestorm help island. https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Firestorm Sandbox/24/172/30

Thanks. I'll do that next time. What's a good landing point for people needing help?

Recently I ran into a new SL user who was having major clothing problems - shoulders transparent because they'd somehow gotten a mismatched alpha layer and clothing layer. Not being knowledgeable about SL female clothing problems, I tried to find a new resident area with helpers. No staff at Firestorm Help Island. Nobody at the Caledon Oxbridge new user tutorial help point. Nobody at White Tiger. Nobody at NCI Kuula. A few days later I ran into a guy who'd been issued the 70's Disco Guy with Radio avatar, and was frantically trying to figure out how to get out of it. He'd found a freebies store, but things were not going well. Nobody on duty at Firestorm Help Island or White Tiger. Where do you send new users who need help right now? (The SL onboarding process really needs to get people in-world with one good outfit, saved so they can go back to it. Some people are really upset with coming in world and looking awful. It's humiliating. It's worse than being a "default" in Fortnite. In SL, you can be a defective.)

I'm starting to see a pattern. I was driving around the block in Kama City, where blocks are one sim and the sim boundaries are in the middle of the road. I saw the "terrain only, disappear, reappear" thing twice a block ahead. This is with 240m draw distance. I think what's happening is that when you get beyond draw distance of a sim, there's a wait time before the viewer stops talking to it. If you come back within that wait time, there's some disconnect/reconnect confusion. This seems new. I used to be able to drive all over the Kama City street grid without any issues.

LL says that, but that's just a self-serving statement. The US IRS is more interested in how they're used. IRS FAQ on virtual currency transactions. This is a must-read for anyone with Linden dollar revenue above the miscellaneous-income threshold.

I've seen anti-push HUDs. They seem to be rare today. Search Marketplace for "Movelock HUD" if you want to try one. There are ancient freebies. I think they're turning physics off for the avatar until the user requests movement. The first avatar other than mine to try one of my escalators was wearing one. It took a while to figure out whey they weren't moving. Those work by friction, so if you turn physics off, you go nowhere. That kind of HUD should also break most SL elevators, and little stuff like those things that move incoming avatars off landing points.

from The IRS Sets A Trap for CryptoCurrency Tax Cheats - Wall Street Journal

Gamers expect the reliability level of an AAA title. SL should have reached that by now, but hasn't. On Steam, SL would be stuck at "early access" level forever. SL is pretty good about not crashing much. That, at least, is in good shape. Server-side, the immersion-breaking problems are region crossings and group chat. That's what people are screaming about at Server User Group each week. The list of major server problems isn't that long. Viewer side, I like to say that the goal should be to make SL look as good as Strawberry Linden's blog pictures. That's quite possible. We need Viewer 3. What Viewer 3 needs has been well-discussed elsewhere. As the original poster points out, the onboarding experience still needs work. From a bit of time in new user areas, the big questions seem to be "what do I do now?", and "how do I get this !$&%(& outfit to work?". The big complaint seems to be "it's so slow". With EEP and animesh, and cloud uplift in user testing, it's time for SL to look ahead for 2021.

Go around the loop a few times without stopping. This seems to happen on repeat visits. I suspect it may be that the region didn't fully disconnect yet from the previous visit, and that may be why you see the region shown as bare terrain first.

More info. Here's what this bug looks like, from recorded video. Approaching a sim crossing, next sim is visible, but only the terrain is drawn. Then, next sim is gone. Driving over the edge will leave the avatar stuck and a logout will be necessary. But wait a few seconds (sometimes as long as 20) and the next sim reappears and is fully drawn with its objects and terrain. I've seen this six or seven times now. It's usually at the same places. Here I'm driving round Robin Loop. This is the Burns - Neumogen crossing, and I've seen it there at least three times now. Anyone else seeing this?

It's a bit more intrusive and automatic than that. From a site that uses the data to track VR headsets: "The Steam Hardware Survey is offered randomly to a portion of Steam users each month. If they agree, it uploads their system specs. These specs are publicly collated each month, giving PC developers insight into the hardware capabilities of their market."

Right. Even when no one is around to see them, the trains continue to run, the Yava pods continue to travel, the breedables continue to graze and age, the leaves continue to fall from the trees, the crops continue to grow, and the amusement park rides continue to run. The designers did not envision that the population would be so spread out, with most sims empty of avatars.

Why not? With EEP, most skin looks like vinyl anyway.

The Steam community has a group for people who also play Second Life.