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News coverage in the South China Morning Post: “Covid-19 has accelerated the path to the metaverse … primarily because those who typically would not have been a gamer, have now become gamers … and we believe that the first citizens of the metaverse will be gamers,” - Razer CEO. Tencent is getting into the Metaverse business, according to NASDAQ: "With the launch of its Mini Programs, companies are able to build richer experiences within the WeChat ecosystem. In some ways, WeChat is a mini, 2D Metaverse. As Tencent quietly orchestrates the adoption of the Metaverse via its minority investments, it will be interesting to watch how much inspiration the Metaverse takes from the WeChat ecosystem." Tencent, for those who don't know, runs WeChat, which is a phone app that runs everything in China. When I search for Metaverse news lately, I find it in the financial press. Not the gamer outlets. Money is going into this area. We may be at the beginning of the era where systems like Second Life become really big. The dream of the founders of Second Life may be realized. If Linden Lab doesn't fumble the ball.

Bellessaria has a reasonable height rule, but whenever that's proposed for mainland, the skybox people freak out.

No idea what the problem is. You might want to take Lindall Kidd's safety class for Second Life users, at Oxbridge Caledon.

XRspace was announced, but it's not live yet, is it? So Facebook Horizons made it to beta, finally. From the videos, it's all bright and cartoony and safe and clean. It looks like it's aimed at ages 6-13. Any idea how they do in-world movement? That's a big problem. About 5%-10% of the population gets nauseated in VR when the visual world moves differently than the real world. That's why Beat Saber, where you never move outside your standing location and are always in sync, is the biggest VR success.

Dual Universe finally made it to beta. This is a really big open world MMO. Multiple planets. Building. No shards; everyone is in the same world. 20,000 users already, they claim. It's a classic MMO, with mining and combat. This should appeal to people who play Space Engineers. The technical issues of a large number of users have been addressed, somehow. That's why it's interesting as a step to the big-world Metaverse. Building is about at The Sims level - you can stick prebuilt pieces together. Clothing is terrible; everybody is in what looks like space armor. There's a lot of grinding - go out and look for rocks, find bauxite, make aluminum, craft something... There's an in-game economy in those resources. Give it a few weeks for the user videos to appear, and we'll know more. Anyway, somebody finally shipped a new big seamless open world. Note the name similarity to Second Life.

The server doesn't really know where the sun is, because it's per-viewer and the user can change it. This is a problem for things that should change based on whether it's dark, such as street lights. As for "God rays", someone near me has a "God rays" object in a tiny bit of forest. It looks great in the daytime, but it runs all night and looks like a glowing griefing object at night at distance.

OK. There should be a simple explanation of this somewhere, but I'm not finding one. So: How Second Life Works There's a viewer, a program you run on your computer, and many region servers owned by Linden Lab. The region servers are in a data center in Arizona, USA, so the further you are from Arizona, the more network lag you get. Each region server runs a few regions of Second Life. Usually one per CPU on the region server; more regions per CPU for "Homestead" and "Open Space" regions. There are also some other non-region servers that handle logins, voice, inventory, marketplace, and other things that aren't tied to a single place in the SL world. There are also "asset servers". These hold files with the textures and meshes for the objects you see. In early versions of SL, the region servers handled that. But now that's all outsourced to machines on Amazon Web Services. There's also a caching system to speed up accesses to commonly used assets; that's a service purchased from Akamai. The whole asset system works just like regular web page serving, with URLs and HTTP. (The "cloud uplift" you hear about is just moving the region servers from the Arizona data center to leased servers in an Amazon Web Services data center. Things work pretty much the same, but on newer machines with faster networking.) The viewer talks to the server running the region the avatar is in, adjacent regions within your view distance, and the asset server cache machines. The region servers tell the viewer where everything is, and the asset servers tell the viewer what it looks like. The viewer puts all this information together with a lot of custom code, then calls OpenGL to render it into an image for display. The region servers, the "sims", are mostly concerned with where things are and what they're doing. They have little information about what they look like. What the sim servers mostly do is this, 45 times a second: Receive info from viewer's keyboards and mice. Receive info from objects entering the region from servers for adjacent regions, and from teleports. Run all LSL scripts in the region that need running. Run the physics engine to handle movement, collisions and such. (This is the Havok part.) Send info about how the world changed on this cycle to all viewers that have asked to be told. So that's how SL works. Note the division of labor. The sim servers are concerned with where objects are and what they're doing, but not what they look like. When you teleport to a new region, at first you see something close to the region servers' view of the world - everything is a simple grey object. The region servers tell the viewer where things are, and the viewer fetches the files of textures and meshes needed to make them look good. You get to watch as the files arrive at the viewer and the world starts to look better as textures and meshes come in, first at low resolution and then at higher resolution. The "look" of SL is done by the viewer, based on the files uploaded when the objects you see were created. So visual improvements to SL mostly involve changes to the viewer. Improvements to motion and scripts involve changes to the region servers. This may help with understanding what's going on inside SL.

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Just don't break the base product. Thank you.

Since Microsoft bought Havok, Havok has been much more opaque. The full documentation for the Havok system used to be on line. Now, the site is just pretty pictures and "send us your email". No idea what pricing, terms, and supported platforms are at this point.

The one anti-griefing service that might be useful is one that finds and ARs hard to find griefing objects. That often requires using tools such as area search and sound explorer, and looking around the area of trouble to find some invisible object that's causing the problem. It's drudgery, not roleplay. If you complain about that sort of thing to LL, they get to it eventually, but it may take days until some staff member can devote an hour to the job.

There was a time when you could dial 911 on any Gentek Telecom phone and get an emergency dispatcher. The lights are out and no one is on duty. But those big consoles were functional and were once staffed. This was a roleplay support service. Call 911, and they'd contact the appropriate emergency service - SL coast guard, in-world fire departments, hospitals, police stations. The call center staff was instructed to be confident and move the roleplay along, dealing with the situation in less than 5 minutes. If SL ever gets region crossings fixed, mainland emergency services might make a comeback. Multi-region roleplay suffers badly when you can't reliably get from A to B.

That's a useful skill. Terraforming is hard, requires some artistic skill, has to be done live in-world, and is often botched badly, as can be seen if you look for abandoned parcels. If someone is doing that as a service, they should advertise.

Yes. The encouraging thing is that how to do good rendering has become more standardized. For a while, people were coding custom shader programs for each object and wiring them together. Pixar had a big operation in San Rafael, California doing just that. Eventually, people at Pixar/Disney figured out a standard set of shaders that could do almost everything needed for movies. That became "Principled BSDF", which is a specific way to do physically based rendering with a standard set of layers. Then that made it into all the tools, such as Blender, into graphics APIs such as Vulkan, into GPU shader programs so it goes fast, and into game engines. This made artists much happier, since they could draw instead of program. So today it's pretty clear what direction to go

Not what you'd expect in a region called "Hellish". I wonder what the history of that sim is like.

I started this because I'm running the Firestorm EEP beta viewer, and it's too dark most of the time. Some of that is a bug. When EEP was rolled out, the default settings for mainland had diffuse lighting set too low. That's been fixed, but not pushed out to all the mainland regions. Apparently there's no automated way to do that yet. With darker nights, lighting matters more. If you own mainland and have something open to the public, take a look at your parcel with midnight settings, advanced lighting, and shadows on. If it's a store, and it looks closed, or you can't see the merchandise, it needs more lighting. I want the range on light projectors increased from 20m so we can have longer range headlights. It's now too dark to drive without them.

Uploading in "surface" mode. This, too, generates convex hulls. This time, 6 instead of 7. It's followed the original geometry more closely. The joints between the sides are beveled, and the hulls match that. That's as good as it can get for this model. Incidentally, the image above has been contrast-enhanced so you can see what's going on. The upload window is trying to show the convex hull pieces as translucent, and the image is just too dim. In world. 2 LI. Getting from 7 hulls to 6 brought us down by one LI, as it should. 0.360 LI per hull, as Chin Rey points out. So this is the "house and door" problem done in a straightforward way. One big mesh for the whole object, with correct geometry in Blender. No duplicate vertices, no interior faces. Given clean geometry, the uploader seems to be able to do the right thing. Files for this example: http://www.animats.com/sl/misc/basichouse04a.blend http://www.animats.com/sl/misc/basichouse04a.dae

Basic house, in Blender. One mesh piece. No trickery at all. Solid walls, beveled connection at the corners, door cutout. Convex decomposition. Extra contrast in the display window. Now, this is almost perfect. The convex decomposer got all the right hulls, except for the left side, which was split into two triangles. Exported with Blender SL static defaults. Same model used for all LODs and physics. Analyzed "solid" physics, no "simplify". 3 LI. Next, analyzed "surface" physics.

What NPCs should be doing is an useful discussion. There are several NPC systems in SL already. SmartBots remote controls avatars with external servers. It's pretty good, but expensive, because it requires a sizable chunk of a server 24/7 to drive the avatar. There are some scripting systems that take NPCs through canned sequences and paths. There are pathfinding-based systems. There's Virtual Kennel Club. Any other good examples? The practical problem with NPCs and automated vehicles is complex setup. The end user needs to spend too much time filling out obscure notecards, fussing with obstacles on their parcels, and learning about fine details of SL pathfinding few should have to worry about. Then they have to monitor operation and adjust things until the NPCs run reliably without attention. Same problem with automated vehicles. Someone has to pre-record the route. Someone has to monitor their behavior and deal with problems. It's not just a sell and forget product, it takes administration. A support organization is needed. Like the SLRR, or the Virtual Kennel Club's approved trainers.

Try the adult forum. It's obvious what you have in mind. You can do animations to give the illusion of what you want. Actual physical simulation, no. SL physics doesn't offer springs. Useful hint: if you want an animation to not look repetitive, get four slightly different animations of the same thing and use them in random order, never doing the same one twice in a row. This works for audio clips, too. Drum machines use that trick.

I don't know why or by whom it was done, but if you go to the Ungren safe hub now, the biggest political signs are gone. There's now a 150m black monolith with no signage.

I tend to agree, which is what got me into making NPCs that can really move. The trick is to make them interesting without being annoying. That's hard. Dani, at GTFO De Campion This is one of my experimental NPCs. She's a security monitor for a GTFO hub, by arrangement with GTFO management. First decision was that she's not dressed as a cop or guard. Her t-shirt has a GTFO logo on the front, and Hub Loss Prevention on the back. So she clearly works there, but isn't intimidating. Making her interesting while not interfering with what else is going on was tough. She has a number of goal points, and walks from one to another, picking the next one randomly. At each goal point, she stops and waits for a while. She goes up and down stairs and avoids obstacles, including avatars and vehicles. She's not just running on a fixed track. When a new avatar, not seen in the last 15 minutes, shows up, she approaches them, faces them, and says hello. She's aware of which way you're facing and tries to get in front of you at a proper conversational distance. If that's not possible, she'll get a few meters away and say "Hello there". Right now, that's all the conversational ability she has. She's not doing all that much, but it's enough. Anyone who visits the hub gets the feeling that it's not a dead place. There's someone there, and the place is in active use. That alone seems to cut down griefing. There's a feeling that someone is watching. She's not a phantom; she's keyframe animated and can bump into avatars. She tries to avoid avatars, and will stop and say "Excuse me" if she bumps into someone, then move on. Phantom NPCs get no respect; people go right through them like they're not there. It turned out that wasn't enough for a GTFO hub with heavy truck traffic. She was getting in the way of people trying to park trucks. There were some annoyed people. So I added an additional behavior. She tracks vehicles, and tries to avoid the space they will occupy in the near future, based on their velocity. That wasn't enough. One day she knocked over a semitrailer truck! Turned out that the trailer had a physics model with holes in it, and the ray casts didn't see it. There was also the problem of standing in front of a stationary truck, keeping the truck from moving. So the next behavior was to simply stay 5m clear of the bounding box of any active vehicle. (Active means physics on, avatar on board. Stop the engine and the vehicle becomes approachable). That worked. Now she can be active in a busy hub with large trucks moving around, and there have been no complaints for months. So that gives a sense of what automated vehicles need to be like. Either phantom and ignorable, like Yava pods, or very aware of their environment and competent at driving. Getting this right was a lot of work.

Interestingly, homeowner associations and planned unit development operators used to think that. They'd forbid yard signs. Many states now prohibit them from doing that. California is such a state. We're about to have a big debate in Congress on how much censorship private social networks can, should, or must do. No legislative action is likely this session, but we may see something next session.

Welcome to the Ungren safe hub. Many points of view represented, including others not in this picture. OK, which ones are now prohibited as "political"? You see the problem. LL should have taken those monster ad boards down years ago for being over-height. Maximum allowed is 8m. Those boards go up over 200m. That's the right way to go at this. Time, place, and manner restrictions, as they're called in First Amendment jurisprudence. Restrictions should be content-neutral. Someone previously mentioned objects place on the land of others being used for political signs. That should be addressed as object littering and griefing, not political speech. The LL terms of service say that a sign on your own house or business in SL is not "networked advertising". LL terms: "Networked advertising", means the use of multiple parcels on multiple regions for the primary purpose of advertising, usually on behalf of other inworld businesses or organizations outside of Second Life. The political sign restriction, as written, applies only to networked advertising. You should still be able to put a Trump 2020 or Black Lives Matter sign at your own house or business. Just not in bulk on ad sign parcels. LL management, don't get into the censorship business. Not only will it annoy the customer base, your main asset, but you'll have to hire censors and pay them. Besides, we only have another 70 days of election season. Wait this out.

Oh, about the mesh upload window. It has some undocumented controls. None of these affect the upload; they just let you see what you're doing. Left mouse button - pivot view about Z CNTL-left mouse button - pivot view about X CNTL-shift left mouse button - pan in view plane, but not very far. Mouse wheel - zoom view Preview spread slider - move the convex hull pieces apart so you can see them. Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A - 30 extra lives.