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Some big themed places in SL. The City-State of New Babbage A sizable town with lots of details. Go into almost any building and it will not disappoint. Folkvang, a Viking sim. Rides, trains, experiences, history. Only one sim, but several levels with much detail. Caledon, home of Oxbridge Caledon learning center and many other things. Another sizable city. Mopire/SSOC - Three sims of modern Tokyo. Remember to drive on the left. All are mom-safe.

Yes. What users haven't yet seen in "the cloud" is a busy sim with 5000 or so scripts, most of the object capacity used, and 40 or so avatars. The empty sandboxes are working fine now. It's time for load testing.

The comments above about Dual Universe land cost are interesting. If land is free, what prevents someone from grabbing a lot of it? The need to defend it. The way DU works, I think (I haven't played it) is that, as with an SL premium membership, you get some land for your home base. That space (DU uses a hexagonal grid) is safe. You can build on adjacent land, but others can, too. And they can shoot up your stuff. That's what prevents filling up the world with junk. You can form a group and cooperate, or fight. It's very MMO, even if the underlying machinery is sandbox virtual world. So that gives a bit more insight into the business model. Again, being an MMO, everything is no-copy, you can't teleport freely and can't move fast without a vehicle. If you're killed you lose what you're carrying. So DU has a different set of user problems than SL. Notes from the DU tech support Discord stream: "... stranded in space and my ship is spiraling away, attempted to slow down and the game froze. guess i crashed? could you help me out?" "...Could i please have my ship tp'd to me. i died and now its 200m in the air and I'm on the ground." "...Was flying down to the moon's surface and ended up outside the ship. I'm now on the moon's surface and my ship is sitting 1.45 km above me. Is it possible to have my ship teleported to my position?" "...Entering Atmosphere and encountered situation that warranted a respawn, didn't respawn on ship and now my ship Steve is about 4 km off the surface and cannot reach or fetch it. Attempted to respawn on the ship and just ended back at my base on Sanctuary. Request: Possible to have ship teleported to my location." "... Ship just glitched through a platform after landing neatly and softly on it. The glitching of the ship going through the platform caused some damage to our ship. Request: Can you please repair our ship? It looks like rescue, towing and salvage services will be needed over there. Imagine if SL worked that way. If you wreck your vehicle, you have to call for a towing service to get it back on the road, and you're stuck there until they show up. If your boat runs out of fuel, you really need the SLCG. And all those services cost.

We brought that up at Server User Group today. Actually, all hitting a ban line does is turn off physics. A script can back the vehicle out and turn physics back on. My bikes and a boat do that. Bumping into a ban line with a ground or water vehicle equipped this way is not a big issue. Unless the parcel also excludes the avatar, and the avatar enters before the center of the root prim does. Then the avatar is violently ejected from the vehicle. That sucks. What came out of the meeting is that while the correct answer is to check vehicle and avatars at the same time, that's apparently hard for LL. It requires a complex check on every parcel border. Desired behavior is like what happens when you walk into a ban line - you bounce off. Meanwhile, please set your parcel options in a consistent way. If only avatars in your group can enter, also set permissions so that only objects in your group can enter. At least if you're alongside a road or waterway.

I hate hitting that in narrow waterways. Happened to me last night. I was trying to boat through the northern part of Sansara, which is a maze of little channels, and I'd get orbs telling me I had 5 seconds to get out. Out of where? They didn't put keep out buoys in the water. (Which exist in both RL and SL, and can be purchased on Marketplace.) No visible ban line. Some orbs are bluffing, sending those messages to boats outside of their parcel. (That's a TOS violation.) The parcel lines are underwater and hard to examine when you're under a tight time limit. This a real-life keep out buoy. This particular buoy is upstream of the water intakes at Hoover Dam. So there's a good reason for keeping small boats far away. Most security orbs in SL do not have that good a reason.

I wish there were more human animesh models in SL that weren't ripped from video games. Look on Marketplace. SL has the Star [Trek|Wars|Gate] franchises well covered. The Marvel Overextended Universe is well represented. So is Game of Thrones. Plus way too many zombies. After those, most of the human low poly models are not very good. It's hard to find low poly animesh models that aren't game rips. I'm always looking for generic background characters to make NPCs to populate stores and malls. I bought a few on marketplace, then found that some I'd bought were background characters from games. You might be able to claim "transformative use" for those. They're not famous characters or brand names, more like "anonymous third extra from the left in bar crowd," so there's no trademark issue. I have the open source Ruth and Roth animesh, with various clothing I put on them, but need more variety.

I'm making a net profit from SL, without trying very hard. Mostly from escalators.

Dual Universe is going to be an interesting competitor. It's a sandbox MMO, with combat and grinding. A big sandbox MMO, with 12 planets and more to come. Planets start out as rocky empty spaces with a few info hubs. Users can build. Land is free, but you have to do a lot of mining, refining, and manufacturing before you can build. That's time-consuming. If you think SL requires too much free time, DU is much worse. It's all about grinding your way up, building up your very own military-industrial complex, one bauxite rock at a time. Fortunately you can automate some of the grinding and do work in parallel. How this plays out as users move in and fill the worlds will be interesting. Technically, I'm waiting to see if the system can maintain performance as more and more of the planet surfaces are developed. We may have lost one of SL's best promoters, Luca Grabacr, to Dual Universe. She's been making videos about how great SL is for years, and has appeared on the Friday Linden show. She went over to DU and livestreamed daily for two solid weeks. She's now up to "Fur Admiral Luca" with her own battleship and crew of furry friends from SL. Right now she's in DU negotiating deals with in-world electronics and chemical suppliers to fit out her battleship.

Filed a Firestorm JIRA. It's not the message rate that's the problem, it's the total number of messages. If you have something that writes a lot of messages to LLOwnerSay, even if the scrolling window can keep up and you don't hit the throttle limit at the server end, the viewer will gradually slow down and eventually time out and log you out. You have to type "clrchat" once in a while to clear the chat window. See JIRA for technical details.

Yes. They ended up buying their own sim and having meetings there.

llListSort might be helpful. Concatenate the lists, sort, remove sequential duplicates. SL's sort is O(N²) speed, which is embarrassingly slow and might be a problem for large lists.

Oh, no, not that. This is one of those "blockchain" schemes. If you want that, there's Decentraland and Sominium Space. Those are virtual worlds where the users mostly trade land and don't go in world much. One blogger says of Decentraland "the meta-game is the game". SL already has pay-for-attention schemes - "fishing" games, lucky chairs, and that thing with a shiny rotating coin that pays avatars L$1 or so to hang around for many minutes. I tried the coin thing once at a store. People did show up, they stayed for the coin, and they never bought anything. The users who will wait 10 minutes for L$1 are not able to buy anything.

Facebook Horizons got some press coverage in VentureBeat. Visually, it's low rent. Someone could have done this in Shockwave 3D 10 years ago. They use low-end VR headsets, so the detail is limited. It's like a low-end version of VRchat. This is supposed to be the Trojan horse outside the walls of Troy. Quick build. You can get a big semi-private space and build. There are no land or object charges. They still have legless avatars, like Facebook Spaces. If they have textures, they're not in the promo pictures. So what have they got that's new? Facebook offers a shield-shaped panic button on your virtual wrist. If somebody offends you, you push that, and you're placed in a protective bubble where no one can hurt you, and connected to a "safety specialist". They're really, really worried about making this place being a "safe space". In the early days of Linden Lab, Second Life was envisioned as the social network of the future. Facebook beat them using a much simpler system with better social engineering and good ease of use. SL could use some serious attention in the ease of use area.

In the SL architecture, the only thing that can look inside an object seems to be a sim process. Rezzing an object is very complicated, and only having one copy of that code simplifies the system. User inventory is just a directory of names, UUIDs, and permissions, like a file system directory. Only being able to examine objects in-world implies other limitations, too. Marketplace doesn't seem to be equipped to look inside an object. So Marketplace can't easily have a 3D web viewer, letting you see something in detail from any angle before you buy, or even much of anything that lets you see inside the box before you buy it. Fortunately we have temp demo rezzers in world.

It's nice. Since it's organized around a central railroad station, it should have train service to other Japanese sims, such as Mopire/SSOC, which is a 3 sim city. Then you can RP salarymen going to work and back.

I've been selling about one escalator set per day for the past week. One customer complained about a Marketplace redelivery not happening, but about an hour later, the LL Marketplace system delivered. Other than that, no problems. (People must be building or improving commercial structures big enough to need escalators. That's a good sign for SL; if you build something that big, you're doing something in SL.)

I tried making an in-ground pool in the Builders Brewery terraforming sandbox. It can be done, but you need some deck around the pool to hide the fact that you can't make vertical land, only a steep slope. You could make a large house with a smaller basement and just set it in a suitably sized hole. Got chewed out for this. Builders Brewery doesn't want you to build in the terraforming sandbox. Just practice terraforming. So don't test out your basement design there.

There are some more new virtual worlds. Sandbox just turned on. Imagine Minecraft crossed with blockchain, with lots of land speculation. Land speculation is a big thing with some of the new worlds. In fact, it's sometimes bigger than actually spending time in world. Decentraland and Sominium Space work that way. Voxel based worlds are now a thing. There are standard mesh objects, and you can place them in a 3D grid. Dual Universe and Sandbox work that way. You can't create new mesh objects. Kind of like Lego. If you saw the Lego movie and want to live there, voxel based worlds are for you. All these are getting user counts in the thousands, but not tens or hundreds of thousands. So this generation is doing better than the Sinespace/Sansar/High Fidelity generation, all of which maxed out below 100 concurrent users. The new ones are visually worse but scale better and have easy building. This bears thinking about for SL. Ease of use matters a lot.

Few materials need all those layers. Subsurface reflection is mostly for skin. Two layers are mostly for automobile paint jobs. The viewer doesn't have to load the highest resolution for textures, either; for SL, textures are both progressive and rescalable. (The viewer's decision making on this isn't that great, though.) That's unlikely to choke the viewer on modern computers.

Yes, better lighting would make SL look much better. It might happen someday. (All that work on EEP, and we didn't get physically based lighting out of it.)

Found the problem. One of my NPCs was having a problem which caused it to send large numbers of error messages to llOwnerSay. When you get about 5000 messages queued up in local chat, Firestorm starts to choke. Around 10,000, Firestorm slows down so much you get logged out. Message storms stalling the viewer were producing the overshoot as the viewer had to discard incoming messages.

Once on AWS, Linden Lab can put sims in various Amazon data centers around the world, if they want. Estate sims should be allowed to pick their AWS region, near where most of their users are. All of SL doesn't have to be in the same data center. Right now, the beta grid is partly in AWS-West and partly in the old Arizona data center. Sometimes for adjacent sims you can cross between. That's working reasonably well.

First, thanks to whomever turned on "Object entry" for Cloud Sandbox 1-4. Now I can test my NPCs over there. Notes: Mostly, things work about as they do on the main grid. My NPCs pretty much work in the cloud sandboxes. The viewer pathfinding debug tools can't download the navmesh. BUG-229354 filed in JIRA. llGetStaticPath returns status 3 on cross-region paths, instead of reporting a path. Not sure about this yet; above bug makes debug difficult. Keyframe animation sometimes overshoots visually. With a light load in the sandbox, sometimes keyframe animation overshoots and then comes back. I've seen that on the main grid, but only in very heavily loaded sims. The overshoot is visual only; scripts see correct positions. Keyframe animation overshoot. The escalator works by moving the steps with endless keyframe animation, using KFM_LOOP. The scripts are idle while the escalator runs, and KFM does this all by itself. Here, they've gone beyond their normal stopping point, on all four escalators at the same time. It's like the viewer didn't get the message that tells them to stop soon enough. No packet loss. I see this on extremely overloaded mainland sims at times, but in the cloud sim, four escalators and 3 NPCs are enough to trigger it. That's less than I have at my home base in Vallone. But I may have exhausted some resource by rezzing large numbers of NPCs and then deleting them. Trying to reproduce in the Linden viewer; now working perfectly both there and in Firestorm. Sometimes my NPCs run through an obstacle, then snap back. They use keyframe animation; same issue. Sometimes all the NPCs suddenly move fast, as if the viewer is catching up to the simulator. Anyway, test your keyframe animated stuff in the cloud sandboxes. Something may not be quite right. Not sure yet. The really good test for this would be to copy Janet's Viking sim, Folkvang, into the cloud. That place has more keyframe animation in one sim than anywhere else in SL.

Why can't Linden Lab get a validation signature from Apple? It's not IOS, where Apple wants a 30% cut of revenue.