[Second Life Beginner Forum]

Somebody into SL clothing should organize a "how to get dressed" class at Oxbridge Caledon, with models and demos. It would be popular.

[Adult Content - be afraid, be very afraid - of Google]

Ah, here's the FTC guidance.

The real problem is that YouTube wants to track viewers, even if the video is not "monetized" and the user is not logged into Google. (If the user has a Google account, Google presumably knows how old they are,  along with a lot more about them.) Google tracking kids is a COPPA violation. Has nothing to do with the content. This is really a Google-created problem, with Google wanting to track non logged in users.

It makes SL look bad. How many videos do you see with warnings like that?

[Adult Content - be afraid, be very afraid - of Google]

Watch the Lindens and the Firestorm developers talk about the problems of getting EEP into Firestorm! See the viewer developers discuss the chat delay problem!

Definitely not for children, unless they know C++.

This is a big reputation problem for SL. How can someone hold a business meeting or convention in SL when there's enough fear that someone felt this warning was necessary? It seems silly, but it's a huge problem for anyone posting videos if they get hit by a badly aimed Youtube ban hammer.

[Future of the metaverse, and all that]

More metaverse news:

• Roblox just raised US$150 million to work on their approach to a "metaverse". Not quite sure what they're doing, but they have money to do it with.
• NVidia CEO says "We’re going to have a whole bunch of metaverses. Each one is going to be based on the stories you like. There will be some based on Minecraft, Fortnite, Battlefield, or based on Call of Duty. There are all kinds of styles and personalities. You’ll see one based on The Witcher, one based on Warcraft, and all kinds of genres. There will be hundreds of metaverses. That’s the exciting part of it." This is a recurrent theme - virtual worlds which are tied to comfortable, familiar entertainment franchises. It's a way to avoid SL's "what do I do now" problem? Most people already in SL are past that, but much of the population seeks more structure.
• Dean Takahashi from Yale (who is not from the academic side, but from the money-management side), in "It's time to hurry up and build the Metaverse", comments "You have to have a big audience that you can lead across the desert into the promised land of the Metaverse." He's thinking Fortnite, etc. While Fortnite Party Royale isn't that great, it's one click away from tens of millions of Fortnite players, and that matters.
• The usual guy from Forbes is plugging GTA V Online as a possible foundation for the Metaverse. His point is that in GTA V you build up assets and become committed to the world. GTA V Online and Second Life have about the same number of concurrent users, in the 50,000 range.

And none of these articles even mentions Second Life.

Somehow, SL needs to get the word out. And get better, technically. Before someone with a zillion dollars gets this figured out.

 

[Prims & mesh disappear when zooming.]

5 hours ago, Zane Skizm said:

I also tried baking high-poly to low-poly and making it as a display, but then the prims are too high.

Yes, when you rez your object in-world, you get charged land impact. Wearables don't pay that price. And for wearables, the lower levels of detail are rarely seen, because the level of detail is based on the entire avatar size, not the size of the individual object. (Plus there's a 2x boost due to a bug.)

Here's a pair of shoes custom made for animesh. Animesh don't get the allowances for excessive detail that avatars do, so they need clothing with good LOD models. Like these, which are 5 LI rezzed standalone.

Typical SL shoes have 20x the triangle count of these, so if you  rez them in world, you get a huge land impact.

 

[AV Not Moving w Object]

To have a saleable product, you'll have to automate the assembly process after the user moves the object. It's do-able, but complicated. You have to send messages to the moving part telling it where to go. Usually the fixed part rezzes the moving parts for such things.

The sequence for this is something like:

1. Fixed object rezzes moving object at desired position and rotation.
2. Moving object, upon being rezzed, starts listening on a channel for messages.
3. If fixed object is moved via editing, it sends a message to the moving object to tell it where it should go. Or just sends it a message to die, and rezzes a fresh copy.

I do this in my escalators. The steps are a separate object from the frame. Move the frame, and the steps will be left behind, but will be deleted and re-rezzed the next time the escalator is touched.

There's some additional work required to allow the customer to duplicate the object via editing without causing confusion over which fixed object owns which movable object. Random IDs or serial numbers are necessary. There's also the fact that rezzes take time; if you rez something, it may not be listening for a few seconds after the rez. A recent sim side change affected that, and broke some projectile weapons.

[Overload]

57 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

This makes me curious how simulator hosts are defended against general Internet mischief and if adding scripts with llRequestURL results in some exposure to additional mischief.

The system seems to be well protected against individual scripts using too much time. A compute-bound script does not cause trouble. Huge numbers of idle scripts are more of a problem.

[AV Not Moving w Object]

7 minutes ago, GManB said:

I have experimented with this:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Hierarchics

I don't think it would be of help with my current problem unless I could compute pos/rot for the avs sitting on the swing and move them in sync with the swing...

It's not that hard. Make the swing seat, the ropes, and the bearing at the top of the swing set one object. Have the bearing be the root prim, so the center of the object is the center of rotation. Like this:

Really big swing. Makes it clear that the swing is really part of a wheel.

This ride is in The Unknown Theme Park on Heterocera. Great rides, there for years, nobody goes there.

See the little swing set at the lower right? There's an ordinary swing, and it works. Same principle.

[AV Not Moving w Object]

32 minutes ago, GManB said:

animats,

I am moving the child prim (which is the swing bench and ropes) with

llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(LINK_THIS, [PRIM_POS_LOCAL,llList2Vector(posList,stepIndex), PRIM_ROT_LOCAL,llList2Rot(rotList,stepIndex)])

Ah. As someone mentioned above, you're moving the child prim, not the root prim. Sitters are always tied to the root prim.

Unlike everything else in 3D graphics, SL does not have a proper hierarchy. There are root prims and child prims, but no children of child prims. Philip Rosedale has said that was his biggest design mistake.

[Mesh at Lowest LOD]

12 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

I kind of prefer the floating triangles, honestly...

It looks awful in close-up, but when it's tiny on screen, OK. You'd never get that close-up a view in normal use.

[Overload]

7 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

you currently have 3 URLs of your own in Vallone, according to About Land / General / Script Info. I think these data are pooled for all land in the region with the same owner. As parcel owner, you should be able to get details of the objects, including those with URLs. A few banlined parcels in Vallone don't seem to ever populate that table (but one of those owners also has a non-banlined parcel that does populate the table -- no URLs from that one).

I have two CasperVend vendors, a dropbox, and a redelivery terminal, all working. Those expose URLs so CasperVend HQ can talk to them. But LL support claims CasperVend vendors are not a problem. If they were, we'd see far worse problems.

Moving the sim to another server raised Scripts Run from around 25% to around 80%. I suspect problems with some other sim on the same server.

This has happened before. Over weeks and months, Scripts Run decreases, I complain, LL switches the sim to a different server, things get better, slowly they get worse again, and the cycle repeats. I'm on iteration 3 of this in 18 months.

[AV Not Moving w Object]

How are you moving the prim? Did you by any chance use llTargetOmega? That doesn't really move a prim in-world, but it makes the viewer show it as rotating. It's used for wheels, windmills, fans, etc. which need to appear to rotate and don't affect anything else. It's a low-overhead special case, usually used only for round things.

[Do LL rent servers to events]

37 minutes ago, Yman Juran said:

the picture above shows a perfect  solution.

Yes. Note that you can set up the parcel permissions so that fans can't enter the performer space. You can even set up a group for VIP fans that allows them entry with a backstage pass. Although it's seldom done, it's even possible to charge for entry to the sim.

Oh, and for one-time events, LL rents out some sims at the south end of Sansara, north of Bellissaria, at L$4000 per day. But they're mountainous and need terraforming. I'm not sure how that works.

[A New Look For Second Life]

I can see the rationale for "Solutions Providers". Some company comes to LL and says "I want to buy some virtual space for my employees working from home". LL has a sales team for that, and there's even an in-world sales center where they once had offices. OK. So they buy a region or two. Now they need to set it up. LL doesn't offer that as a service. There's no obvious way to get such a service. Marketplace doesn't help; that's all goods. So LL needs some place to aim business customers. Somebody who can set up "office park, one each"  in a hurry. Someone they can call if something breaks.

That's neither good nor bad; it's just setting up a business-to-business service, something LL hasn't needed in years.

[Mesh at Lowest LOD]

High fashion at low LOD. This is what an SL fashion event looks like at LOD factor zero. In Firestorm, go to the Firestorm menu in the bottom bar and set "LOD Factor" to 0 to see this.

I've been looking at the rigged mesh bug LOD Beq Janus reported, to see what was possible in that area. One reason SL chokes when too many avatars are in view is that every worn rigged mesh item, no matter how small, is rendered at the LOD appropriate to it being the full size of the avatar. Every detail on your bracelets and rings is rendered if you're way across the room. That's no good.

So I'm looking at clothing at the lowest LOD. I was worried that clothing would drop out and expose too much skin if the LOD algorithm was tweaked to not show every attachment at highest LOD. But what seems to happen is that both the clothing and skin mostly disappear, leaving random triangles like those above. Looks awful.

These were just random avatars that happened to be at a fashion event. I went to the main store of a Big Name Skin Creator, and it wasn't any better there. It looks like the skin vendors aren't even trying to create lower LODs. Which, since they're very rarely displayed, is not surprising.

I've seen only one item of clothing that looks good at lowest LOD, and it's a red dress by Exotic Mole, a sculpt I think.

What an avatar should look like at lowest LOD. See the one in white and the one in blue in the windows? Barely visible, but clearly characters, not jaggy triangles.

 

What those two really looked like at lowest LOD. The viewer is at LOD factor 0 here, so we can see them at lowest LOD in close-up. These are actually animesh, constructed to have somewhat reasonable lowest LODs. Animesh don't get the LOD boosts of avatars, so they need better low-detail models. Lowest LOD skins and heads ought to look at least this good. No reason they can't. This shows what's possible.

This is part of why SL chokes in crowded spaces. It would be easy enough to fix the viewer's excessively high LOD settings for avatars; both Beq and I have looked at the code for doing that. People would scream at the results.

Arctan was supposed to be a LL project to fix this, but they hit the same problem.

 

 

 

 

[Smooth Swinging Motion: A Better Way?]

1 minute ago, GManB said:

What we need would be a llSetLinkKeyFrameMotion.

That would be nice.

Most of the code in my escalator steps, which are keyframe animated, is for setup. They have to be separate objects because they are keyframe animated. Placing them relative to the escalator frame, and moving them if the escalator is moved during installation, is over a hundred lines of LSL. The actual step movement for escalator operation is one line.

[How do you feel about religious humor in Second Life?]

I think it should be kept within your parcel boundaries.

[how many letters can a string contain?]

31 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

That being said, every time you pass a string to a function, you effectively make a temporary copy, so your memory usage doubles at that moment.

I know. And it's strange, since strings (and lists) are immutable. They should be passed by reference. You can't tell the difference from inside the script, and garbage collection would take care of recovering the space. Mono can certainly do that. It's probably a legacy misfeature from the pre-Mono script interpreter.

 

[Overload]

On 5/22/2020 at 2:09 PM, Theresa Tennyson said:

You have - you've had issues with Vallone's performance a few times now over the last couple of years.

Yes, and I've looked hard for the cause. Shutting down all my stuff makes a small difference, maybe. It's smaller than random variation in load. Restarting the sim usually helps, and moving it to another server helps immediately, but then performance slowly drops. I've looked at what scripts are running all over the sim, and no one script is using much time. But there are about 6000 scripts in the sim, mostly idle. That in itself is a big load. Each idle script uses about 0.003ms per frame, which is tiny, but adds up. There's about 16-18ms of script time available per frame.

Known bug - overhead for scripts that do nothing is a major cause of load.

[Overload]

LL support chat made this remark in response to a ticket about the overload:

Quote

One thing I would heavily advise is taking a look at the objects that have URLs; based on what I am seeing in the region there may be a URL that is not functioning as well as it should or has gone bad. ...The behavior of this region and some others I have frequented with "bad" or funky URLs is quite similar and that may be why it seemed to sort of spring-up. .

Now that's an unexpected source of load. "Having a URL" presumably means an object calling llRequestURL, which is what you do to set up a web server within SL. That's uncommon. Why that would result in high script load isn't clear.

CasperVend vendors might do that. They take commands from CasperVend HQ;  when you load your dropbox the vendors are told to update. So, maybe. But LL support said CasperVend wasn't the problem. What to look for? Anyone seen this problem before?

[Make Ungren Voice Again (MUVA)]

Ungren still has many avatars standing around, but whatever they're doing, it's not in local chat. Went there to look.

 

[Starting a BeYou Restaurant]

Cocoon has something like this for their roleplay restaurants. They have an in-game currency; you can buy it with Lindens, but mostly you get it by winning things. If you're a Cocoon roleplayer, you can eat at Kitsune, Gigabites, or the taco place. You click on the plate, get a menu, pay game currency, and gain MP, which helps in combat.

There are tables which display food from a menu. The restaurant in the Brunel Hotel in New Babbage does this very well.

The Silver King diner used to have waitresses on roller skates. That was popular enough that people volunteered to be a skater.

So all the pieces for what you want to do have been done. Whether people will pay for it is a separate issue.

[Overload]

I and others are seeing more overload situations. Unusually slow sim crossings, bad enough that it had Firestorm developers looking for a Firestorm bug. Sikkima sim seems to be intermittently difficult.  My home sim, Vallone, dropped to 25% scripts running. I turned off all my NPCs and escalators, and the load barely changed. Submitted a ticket. No new big builds there.

These are sims with one avatar present. It's not a crowd problem.

[Tilia Pay to Power USD Transactions in Second Life Beginning May 26]

Tilia, remember, is a payments company set up by Linden Lab to handle payments for multiple online services. Their only customer was Linden Lab, but they intended to solicit others.

Now they have a new customer! Upland.

Reviews of Upland.

What could possibly go wrong?

This probably isn't a big risk to SL users, but LL legal staff might wish to take a close look at Upland, with special reference to the Howey test and how Telegram got in trouble with the SEC.

 

[Is SSD really this much faster than HDD?]

Putting the cache on an SSD is a big help with texture loading speed. There's no need to put the viewer or the prefs on an SSD; those are loaded once at startup. With the cache, but nothing else, on an SSD, the hard drive light blinks only occasionally.