animats

Didn't want to put this in Oz's pinned topic, but that's what it's relevant to. Outbound HTTP from Cloud Sandbox 4 working fine. Data from the server that logs region crossings for my test bikes. (Only ones that say REVIEW or DEMO do this; if you buy one, it doesn't have the logging.) +---------------------+---------+-----------------+------------------+------------------------------------+------------+-----------------------------------------------+----------+ | timestamp | shard | region_name | owner_name | object_name | eventtype | msg | auxval | +---------------------+---------+-----------------+------------------+------------------------------------+------------+-----------------------------------------------+----------+ | 2020-09-10 11:55:07 | Testing | Cloud Sandbox 4 | animats Resident | Smooth Cruiser - V2.7.1 (REVIEW) | SHUTDOWN | Distance traveled (km) | 0.145052 | | 2020-09-10 11:54:39 | Testing | Cloud Sandbox 4 | animats Resident | Smooth Cruiser - V2.7.1 (REVIEW) | SITTER | on prim #1 :animats Resident distance to seat | 1.37295 | | 2020-09-10 11:54:39 | Testing | Cloud Sandbox 4 | animats Resident | Smooth Cruiser - V2.7.1 (REVIEW) | RIDERCOUNT | | 1 | | 2020-09-10 11:54:39 | Testing | Cloud Sandbox 4 | animats Resident | Smooth Cruiser - V2.7.1 (REVIEW) | PERMS | Got permissions | 0 | | 2020-09-10 11:54:38 | Testing | Cloud Sandbox 4 | animats Resident | Smooth Cruiser - V2.7.1 (REVIEW) | STARTUP | animats Resident/animats | 0 | +---------------------+---------+-----------------+------------------+------------------------------------+------------+-----------------------------------------------+----------+ "Shard" is from what the sim is sending in the HTTP header "X-SecondLife-Shard". It's "Testing", the documented value for the beta grid, not some new value for AWS. The main grid uses "Production" there. Everything I look at looks exactly the same. I went over to the nearby Sandbox Pristina, which is not on AWS, and got the same values. Looking good. Only Cloud Sandbox 4 has outbound HTTP on right now; Cloud Sandboxes 1, 2, and 3 do not. I don't look at the source IP address; I authenticate using a MD5 signature computed in LSL and verified by the server. Checking for "this is really coming from SL" by IP address will not, as Oz points out, work very well. All you can find out that way now is that it's on AWS.

We don't often see distant hills in Second Life. On Strawberry Linden's blog, a recent picture showed some. North Dakota looks big. Same location. Ultra, no special settings. It really does look that big in SL. Go there. It's not done with a huge draw distance. It's one sim, surrounded by off-sim mountains. Those show even outside the draw distance. Some time back, I was suggesting that SL should do something like this automatically on mainland. Outside the draw distance, draw the bare terrain of distant sims at low resolution. I wondered what that would look like. Now I know. It looks good. Worth looking into more.

Yes. Once a problem is accepted, it goes into some kind of internal JIRA queue where users can see neither the contents nor the status. Closing a user JIRA as a duplicate of an SL JIRA is kind of bad, though. The user JIRA should remain live, but dependent on the internal one. Users may have more info to add. This was discussed at Server User Group today. The server dev team is totally focused on getting SL onto AWS by the end of the year. The two big server side problems right now seem to be region crossings and group chat, both of which have been modified in preparation for the move to AWS and both of which seem to have been badly impacted by recent mods. Simon Linden has way too much to do. LL is trying to hire more people to work on the server side of SL.

If SL did that, a big chunk of mainland would turn to bare ground. Much of Zindra is owned by a big landlord who puts in filler buildings and cranks up the price. Landlord-owned filler building. Kama City in Zindra only looks like a city because of such dummy buildings. I don't see how the business model works.

One whose management knows fear. Fear of competitors with more money, more users, more technical know-how, and more sharp teeth. Linden Lab has had an easy ride for a few years. Not much competition in the virtual world space. Then, about a year ago, people started talking more about the "metaverse". Look who I quote in this topic. Not gamers. Business magazines. People with money think there's money to be made in this space. Things are happening this year. See my previous posts, and Brian Schultz's blog. Second Life is not doomed. But it's not safe for Linden Lab to just coast any more.

Becca watching the ocean One of my non-player characters, standing on a dock. She walks around the dock area to make the place look busy, occasionally greeting people or dodging a vehicle. They live in SL. We're just visiting.

A full fix to visible motion would be really hard. But a partial fix, with some viewer side collision detection during animation, could help. So can systems that do implicit motion based on the situation. That's pretty standard in games, and SL does it with animation overriders. It's easier to fix this for moving avatars than for stationary ones being animated by user animations. In motion, the AO has freedom to do the right thing, and if it did a smarter right thing, like having a clue about foot placement, that would be OK. Here's the next generation of that technology. The part of the UE5 demo where they show off the motion warping and control system. The character moving around has a relatively simple model for control purposes. It has a "super AO" that's reacting to the objects around it.

> Hello. Is this the LL chatbot? I want to talk to the chatbot. Here is a related answer: Hi Boxy Did you find the answer helpful? > Yes That's awesome. Let me know if I can help with anything else. Is there anything I can help with today? > Tell me how to get started with a mesh body. Thanks! I will transfer you to one of my minions. They will be happy to assist you! Thank you for contacting Second Life's live chat support. It looks like you have reached out to us outside of our support hours! Our support hours are from 9 AM EST to 5 PM EST. Linden Lab will be closed Monday September 6th in observance of Labor Day. So, yes, we can talk to the LL chatbot, but it's neither useful nor interesting. I've been looking into chatbot systems for my NPCs. It works only if you have a lot of questions coming in and a staff to answer the ones the chatbot can't handle. Questions the chatbot couldn't answer have to be reviewed periodically by humans and answers written for them. This is a huge win if you're big and several thousand questions are coming in each minute. You'll probably hit 95% coverage on common questions in a few days. LL doesn't have the traffic to do that fast. Unless you collect the fails and add new questions and answers, it never gets better, of course. As a test, I put the GTFO FAQ into RASA chatbot format and ran it. It works, but it's not very useful. Not enough questions and answers. These things are pretty dumb, but they're getting good at matching the question to a set of stored questions, even if it's worded very differently. That's the machine learning part. The machine learning system has no clue about the answers, but can match two sentences that have roughly the same meaning.

Oh, right. Yes. I'll look in a Havok viewer.

Let us know what you find. Tell us triangle counts. I'm always looking for low-LI clothing for animesh. For my animesh NPCs, I had a low-LI hoodie and sneakers made for me by Duck Girl. These are low-LI rigged mesh. Animesh are charged 1 LI for each 666 triangles. Typical SL shoes with 20,000 triangles each are just not on. So if you do animesh, you really need such low-LI clothing. 4 LI sneakers. You don't need 20,000 triangles for shoes. That's 4 LI for both.

What are you trying to do? Encrypt, or authenticate? Base64 is not encryption. It's just a way to get binary numbers into a set of characters that will pass through most text handling systems. LSL has SHA-1 and MD5 hashes available. They're not secure by modern standards, but they require a fair amount of compute power to come up with a collision, and unless you have a well-funded adversary they're probably good enough. I've used an SHA-1 hash to validate log entries I make to a server. I was originally considering doing a racing game, and wanted to avoid people messing with the results. That's not hard. The LSL random number generator is not random enough to be used as a key generator. "The random number generator is not a source of entropy." - LL docs. If you're sending messages to an outside server, you can use HTTPS, and get regular web-grade encryption. You can probably even do object to object HTTPS within the LL world.

I think a recent fix did not produce the intended result. See BUG-229312. It was a reasonable fix, but it has side effects. Vehicle builders seeing new problems should come to Server User Group at 1200 SLT on Tuesday. This needs a discussion between vehicle builders and the Linden dev team. Managing SL region crossings well requires a cooperative effort between vehicle scripts and sim servers. If you want the technical details, read the referenced JIRAs.

There's an open source cross-platform adapter to make Vulkan work on Apple platforms. Because you really don't want to maintain two very different versions of the viewer. There's also something called "Zink", which is an OpenGL adapter for Vulkan. That would be useful in porting the viewer for the parts that aren't 3D - the dialogs and windows, for example. You don't need physically based rendering and custom shaders for the chat window; boring old basic OpenGL functions are enough.

"Fortnite is a game. But ask that question again in 12 months." - Epic CEO Fortnite has tried concerts and special events with success. Users can create "skins". But it's what we in SL call "getting dressed". It's just putting together an outfit from items made by others. Users can create levels. All that is tightly controlled; you can't just make something. Epic takes a cut of revenue above 90%. They're terrified of losing control. Second Life has a social culture that works, and doesn't need heavy governance. Linden Lab does well at running a municipality. Property rights let the users do most of the work. LL's big problems are over them falling behind in technology. SL ought to be the Metaverse, but it's not happening.

I think teleporting in SL is much too easy. You can teleport from anywhere to almost anywhere. At one time, that wasn't allowed. You could only go from telehub to telehub. And you couldn't even fly without a "flying feather" attachment. That was before my time, although I recently got a flying feather from a dispenser at a dead university sim. What's the history on that?

Nostos is gorgeous. It's a game that you play and finish, though. Some people claim to have cleared Nostos in 3 hours. It's not a place to live, like SL.

Now that's a good insight. Almost all the attempts at a metaverse other than SL have cartoon-grade avatars. Games, on the other hand, are getting close to photorealism. It's not that it can't be done. There's a reluctance to go there. Where should SL go? Further towards realism?

The National University of Singapore also has an empty campus in SL. North Carolina State University's business school also has an empty campus. This is the home of Accounting Island. They even have a business you can audit. It's sad. Even with millions of students locked down at home, SL can't do education.

Just had this fail with a Manji Automotive Works car. So it's not my bikes that are the problem.

Suggest that to the Virtual Kennel Club people. Their dogs already can do "come here".

Good point. Dual Universe does claim to have an economy, and there's a role for creators. But I don't think you can cash out, as you can in SL. Character customization? What character customization? Everybody wears a spacesuit at all times, even indoors. "The character be male or female, and currently four different parts of the character's suit are color customizable. Character can also equip pets, gear, weapons, and other upgrades that change their visual appearance and game statistics. There are no other character customization options at this time, but this feature is expected to expand in the future." I'm mostly interested because they claim to have solved the big-world technical problem. That has two parts - smooth movement through the world, and crowds. They claim to have both. SL almost has the first (come on, guys, you can fix it - you're close!), but crowds do not work well at all. (I wonder if variable size SL regions and setting up clubs and big events as lots of small regions,, like 64m x 64m, would make crowds work. It would take a lot of servers, but if, say, the Fashion Week area was only turned on during short periods, it could be affordable.)

Dual Universe, the big open-world MMO, came fully online late last month. Luca Grabacr, who does those great Second Life promotional videos, went over there and did live streaming for eight days. See her YouTube channel if you're interested. Dual Universe is a huge single seamless modifiable world. They're not saying how it scales, which is a technically interesting question. They claim to support crowds, and it will be interesting to see what happens when a few thousand users go to the same area. That's been the killer problem for everyone who's built an un-sharded metaverse, including SL. It's voxel-based. Users can build, but not as freely as in SL. Users can build voxel-based objects from (I think) 25cm cubes. There are mesh objects available, but users can't create new ones. It's like The Sims in that respect. Finer-grained than Lego. Ground is voxel-based and you can dig holes. Mining is a big thing. Blowing up stuff is a thing. Combat is a thing. Commerce is a thing. It's much more of a game than SL, although the world itself has no built in notion of "winning". However, it's more directed than SL. The tutorial tells you you're supposed to claim some land, start mining, and build yourself a base. You don't have to, though; you can just be a tourist if you like. As a society builds up, other jobs may appear. There are organizations, like SL groups. Like SL, the world started out empty. Emptier than SL; no road system. Everybody flies. There are infohubs, and huge amounts of bare ground. You claim some bare ground and start building. Parcels are a hexagonal grid. Land is free, but you have to mine and refine to build, so you can't fill the world fast. It's going to be interesting to see the place after six months of building. Everybody starts out now with their own little enclave surrounded by emptyness, but in time the planets will fill in. Everybody is in a space suit. No clothing options. Also, no sex. It's amusing how the newer virtual worlds dodge that. Facebook Horizons' avatars have nothing below the waist. The industry is terrified of making sex possible. It's all very bright and shiny. Most stuff looks like SL objects from Delaunay Industries and Solares. Dual Universe has trees and plants, but they're not very realistic. It's more for people who like EvE and Space Engineers than SL users. Useful to see what others are doing. For a long time, SL had the big seamless world biz all to itself. Now others are doing that, and it's worth tracking what they're doing. So that's Dual Universe. They're trying to cold start a big world. It will be interesting to see how its society develops. One small step closer to the Metaverse.

I'm thinking this depends on SL load. No fails after 10:30PM or so SLT last night. Two this morning. Fail at Vine. Nowhere near a region corner. This is happening far too often.

(duplicate)

Filed JIRA: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-229312