animats
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Posts posted by animats
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Well, it beats shooting avatars out of cannons, which is an actual transportation system at WelcomeHub.
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Now that there's work underway at LL on making teleports work faster and more reliably, it's worth looking at experience teleport transport systems again.
Make it look like this before and after teleports (From this SL video on Reddit.)
Here's the concept:
- Avatar gets on a tram car and sits.
- Tram goes into tunnel.
- Tram stops, and a moving wall effect like the one above starts to indicate motion. So you don't need much tunnel. Most existing subway stations in SL would work.
- The avatar is teleported via an experience to a freshly rezzed identical tram car elsewhere, and seated in the matching seat to the one they were in. It's a teleport, but it doesn't look like one.
- More moving wall effect.
- Tram comes out of tunnel at station. (Or maybe goes onto SLRR track or a road trip like YavaPods.)
This is intended for short tours. When you get there, you get a tour of some interesting place in SL, and if you don't get off, you eventually ride back to your starting point. New user entry points might have a few of these, to show off parts of SL in a somewhat controlled way. An audio track of a tour guide might help. (Playing the theme from "It's a Small World" is tempting but has copyright problems.)
SL already has Portal Park, and Firestorm's help island has a ring of portals, but they're not used much. Also, those are one-way - it's not obvious to new users how to get back. WelcomeHub has no obvious way out. There's a little train station at the south end of the Linden Homes area, and a long rail bridge to Bellessaria, but you have to rez your own train. There's some signage which suggests looking at the Destination Guide. But nothing like an organized tour, with a stated duration. The only way out is a teleport into the huge, cold, hard world.
SL, as anyone who talks to new users knows, has a big "what do I do now" problem. (The other classic new user question is "how do I fix this %#^&! clothing problem?") This is a way to provide new users a safe introduction to SL beyond the WelcomeHub. It's a theme park ride. New users will get that immediately.
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My SL looks inaccessible today. My fiber line for Internet access is down. Literally down, as in sagging down to head level between two telephone poles due to tree branches. Telco maintenance will be out tomorrow, but they'll probably send the "turn it off and turn it on again" first-level responder, who will have to look at the cable and schedule a crew with a bucket truck for next week.
I am connecting by tethering to a cell phone, and if I really, really had to, I could log into SL with settings set to low. IMs go to email and will reach me.
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50 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:
The new materials have a whole separate emissivity map
What you're supposed to do with PBR is have lots of lights and realistic surfaces. Unless it's an illuminated sign or a disco, very few surfaces should be emissive. The big change with PBR is that you need to light the interiors of all buildings, or you can't see anything. A problem is that SL lights don't have real lumen ratings yet. PBR still has lights from 0 to 100 of something. They're supposed to be real light values, the sun should be far brighter than most lights, and you need tone-mapping to give the effect of auto-exposure. All the heavy machinery (PBR, tone-mapping, high dynamic range in the image) for that is in SL but it's not exposed to creators yet. Once this all works, SL should look like Cyberpunk 2077, which has all that. It's very striking when you go from a dark room to bright sunlight. Just like real life. Which is the whole point.
PBR doesn't change illusion of depth. We had normals with ALM (although too many objects don't have them), and we have normals with PBR.
Please try to hold down the use of shiny with PBR. Go visit Materials 1 on the beta grid with a materials viewer, or Rumpus Room on the main grid. Ooh, shiny thing! Cool for ten minutes, then ugly.
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Oh, that WalMart thing. That's a VR concept WalMart prototyped in 2018.
The state of the metaverse is pretty bad. The Game Developers Conference agenda for 2024 just went live, and no sessions mention "metaverse". Epic has been losing money and pulled back. Facebook now has a demo setup where you can have conference rooms with photorealistic avatars, but not a whole world. Roblox, which developed some nice technology (their avatar clothing system is very good) continues to lose money, their stock is way down, and they can't retain their 13-year old user base even into high school.
Over in NFT land, there's still a new metaverse, token, and land sale announced about once a week. They're all junk. The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating some of them.
There are still people trying to make this happen. There's Improbable's M2. They had a system a few years ago good enough that there were about five big-world games based on it. But it was so expensive to run their system, which needs a huge number of servers, that free to play games where you could buy stuff (similar to SL) went broke. Improbable pivoted to military simulations for the British military, who weren't bothered by a few dollars per hour per user cost. Worked OK, but a small niche. Then they pivoted to NFT/crypto stuff, teaming with the Otherside/Yuga Labs/Bored Ape Yacht Club crowd. Did two live demos for a few hours each, with tens of thousands of identical avatars running around. The promised Otherside world never shipped. Now they're trying to do something with US major league baseball - sit anywhere in the stadium. The system only has to be on during game and they can charge, so the cost works out.
There's something called RP1, but I don't know much about it. It's far enough along that you can log in and build.
SL is still the winner in the metaverse space, but it's not a bigger space than it was a few years ago.
I'm rather encouraged about Second Life from a technical standpoint. At long last, important things are getting fixed. There's a big push from LL to fix the serious immersion-breaking bugs server side, such as failed teleports and avatars stuck in white/pink cloud mode for long periods.
What seems to be driving this is more crowds. WelcomeHub usually has a crowd, and about half of it is stuck in white/pink cloud mode. LL set up Motown, and got 120 avatars into a dance club. Look at Destinations Guide's "What's Hot Now". Often you'll see more than ten regions with over 50 avatars each.
But those regions look awful. Pink/white cloud avatars. Nude avatars with their heads on backwards because of rezzing delays. So there's a big push to fix avatar loading.
Something that's not obvious is that simulator speed is good enough to handle those 120-avatar regions. Go to a busy region and watch the simulator stats. It's usually 100% speed (the simulator runs at 45 FPS), and mostly 100% scripts run. I've been to some crowded places with my Sharpview viewer, which draws all the objects except avatars, which are drawn as a block. I can move freely through the crowd. So the bottlenecks are all in comms and viewer side. That's fixable. You do need a GPU that's at least a good model from 2016 or later to handle regions with crowds, though.
The "fun" problem remains. A new user recently wrote that SL lacks "punch". They're right. That's another subject.
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11 hours ago, Bleuhazenfurfle said:
From what I understood, the rez command was unable to return the key of the new object because the actual rez happens asynchronously. (Pretty sure that was at one point, actually stated in response to requests for them to return the key up front as this command appears to do.)
If that is no longer the case, can we then immediately use llGOD to inspect the newly rezzed object? Or does this just reserve a UUID and get the ball rolling, but the bulk of the rez operation still happens ASAP?
It's still asynchronous. The purpose of all those rez parameters is to eliminate the need for scripts in bullets. Starting up a script is a reasonably large operation, and doing that for every single bullet slows down pew-pew gaming. Worse, before the bullet's script has started up and is accepting events, the bullet may already be downrange and may have hit something. So the script never sees the collision and can't explode, or make a hit sound, or delete itself, or whatever. So this builds in the basic functions ordinary bullets need.
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Sounds good. I'd suggest consulting with the SSOC people, who have some detailed weapons, and ask if this covers everything they need.
If this works without scripts in the bullets, just about any realistic weapon should work.
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15 minutes ago, Cristian Hirsch said:
Nvdia GeForceNow and Boosteroid works nice and smooth with other games in any browser or device .... would simplify things much easy and faster ....just saying
I've looked into those. NVidia's GeForce Now is a useful service, but they want to control the identity and login process, and may want a fraction of revenue. GeForce Now has raised their prices several times. They started at $5/month, and now they're up to $20/month. There's an hours per day use limit. You're renting a dedicated PC with a GPU in a data center, so it's an expensive service to provide. That's why most cloud gaming companies exited the business (Google Stadia) or went broke.
Boosteroid has better pricing, but they have other problems. They're in Ukraine, and have to operate despite bombings. Customer service is slow to respond, for good reasons.
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Between Facebook's three flops and the NFT clown car, "metaverse" has a terrible name right now. Give it a year to turn around. There are some projects underway that might actually work.
SL's big problem is new user retention. I wonder how much WelcomeHub is helping with that.
WelcomeHub may start to work better once the teleport fix demoed at Server User Group last week is deployed. That seems to get avatars fully rezzed within 2-3 seconds, even in busy regions. It might fix the white/pink cloud problem, which is really bad at WelcomeHub. Go look. It's kind of embarrassing that the first thing a new user sees is broken avatars.
There seems to be, at long last, a serious push within LL to fix long-standing immersion breaking problems. This is great! New users won't put up with that stuff.
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8 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:
Why does LL tolerate men naming their avis "janetheslot" and "ballsdeephoe"? My God this place...
You may laugh at them behind their backs, if you wish.
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15 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:
These devices have always seemed weird and non-standard to me, but maybe they're not; maybe they follow a standard relevant to the current work Leviathan Linden is doing on game controllers,
Yes, they follow the Human Interface Device standard. This is the spec which defines how mice, keyboards, joysticks, game controllers, and other input devices talk to a USB port. Anything with some combination of buttons/switches and sliders/dials/joysticks/other positional devices talks in a standard way. According to Leviathan Linden, SL is going to support some subset of that.
Each device needs a control mapping file, something that says "joystick axis 1 means down/up, axis 2 means left/right, axis 3 means slow/fast, button 1 means shoot, button 2 means jump..." Usually there are mapping files provided for common devices, and some kind of edit menu for unusual devices. All this stuff was standardized about 20 years ago, and hasn't changed much.
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So do something original. Most of the Disney properties, from Star Wars to the Marvel Overexpanded Universe, have been done to death.
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On 9/29/2023 at 4:48 AM, Katherine Heartsong said:
What I'd envision is a series of "worlds" if you will (SL being one, Roblox another, etc) that are vaguely equivalent to websites, and a system where I can move my avatar from one to the other seemlessly along with my personal goods/clothings/etc, if the core/common attributes the world user set up their world with allow that. Basically, anyone could host a world with a provider and allow whatever access they wish.
There are still groups working on that. Unclear how it will work out. That metaverse standards organization has most of the companies who do anything in graphics. They're trying to firm things up from the bottom. glTF (Graphics Language Transmission Format, for moving textures and meshes from one program to another) is the starting point. Second Life is moving towards using that, in place of Collada. This is generally agreed by people who have dealt with both formats to be forward progress. More and more tools speak glTF now. Blender and Maya do, and SL speaks glTF textures. Meshes in 2024, we hope.
There is a Interoperable Character/Avatar Working Group. They're not trying to standardize avatars. They're trying to figure out how to translate between different avatar formats. Like the various import filters in Blender that let you bring in .obj or .3ds files. This group focuses on the mechanics of doing it, not whether you're allowed to do it. A separate group is working on exploring Digital Asset Management, the parts of the system which limit what you're allowed to copy, transfer, import, and export. That's more of a talk shop right now.
That's a good division of labor. The group working on the mechanics of avatar import/export can get that working, while the other group argues over NFTs, DRM, and business issues.
I'm wondering how much time to spend on this. Animats (my RL business name) is a member of this organization. They have some events coming up in October, and I want to see how real this is.
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Game devs have been trying GPT-powered NPCs. Search for "AI NPC" to see what's going on. What seems to happen so far is that the NPCs can now conduct conversations on general subjects, or they can do some canned things associated with the game, but not yet act intelligently with respect to the game world. The GPT part isn't yet using much info about where they are, what they are doing, what's supposed to be happening in a game/roleplay sense, etc.
This will probably be solved soon for one of the big more-scripted games outside SL. The large language model system needs the backstories of all the characters and current context. As that gets working, SL can reuse some of that technology. SL doesn't have enough people doing the same gameplay to lead in development here.
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On 9/27/2023 at 6:37 PM, Ardy Lay said:
LL needs to be a bit more proactive in moving them elsewhere. Maybe a designated bot park.
(Hint to bot controller developers: When your bot-control viewer gets the RegionHandshake message, check the SimName field. That's the region you just arrived in, which may not be the same as the one you asked for in the login request. If it's not where you intended to send your bot, your destination region is probably down. Log out and try again in a few minutes. Increase the retry interval with each retry. This will prevent your bot from cluelessly cluttering up safe hubs.)
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3 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:
LL is under no obligation to compensate anyone for anything and can terminate your account for any reason or no reason. They could shut down tomorrow and we'd have no recourse since we agreed to the ToS. Could someone take them to court again? Sure. You, as the lawyer, would be better able to gauge whether it would be a winnable case.
It's complicated. Check Tilia's terms of service. Tilia has much stronger obligations to customers, both from their own terms and from their status as a regulated money transfer service. Because of what's been going on in the NFT and cryptocurrency sectors, there's been considerable litigation over the value of virtual tokens and assets. It seems to be settled now that virtual assets have real value which cannot be disclaimed. People have gone to jail for converting customer assets to their own use, despite disclaimers. If you want to read up on this, see SEC Cyber Enforcement Actions. If you're really into this, there's "Application of FinCEN’s Regulations to Certain Business Models Involving Convertible Virtual Currencies" "Convertible virtual currency" is defined very broadly. Doesn't matter what you call it. If' there's some way, however indirect, to convert it to dollars, it's regulated. The Wild West era of virtual assets is over, and the big-hammer enforcement era has arrived.
This is somewhat off topic, though.
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3 minutes ago, Monty Linden said:
There's a lot going on on our side both before *and* after the TeleportFinish.
I'm aware of that. We don't see it viewer side, but know it's happening. After all, this is TeleportFinish. Double region crossings will probably be the hardest problem. Each time you fix an intermittent bug in messaging, though, the remaining bugs acquire greater clarity, and become closer to being fixed.
I'm encouraged at progress in this area.
Tuesday's demo at Server User Group of faster avatar rezzing in test regions was impressive. Pink/white clouds disappeared within 2-3 secs, and avatars had no parts missing. That was great to see. SL is getting more crowds, and crowds of avatars half-rezzed in event spaces have become a serious problem. Unwanted nude avatars, avatars with heads on backwards, stuff like that. Looks awful. That may be an unrelated problem technically, but from a user perspective, seeing old immersion-breaking bugs being fixed is a clear indicator of progress. From a marketing perspective, half the avatars in the WelcomeHub are stuck in pink/white cloud mode, and some of those won't come back. That alone justifies to management the effort expended in fixing that problem.
Keep plugging, and thanks.
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2 hours ago, TechLawProf said:
I'm a law professor at the University of Tennessee. Here's a link to my faculty profile: https://law.utk.edu/directory/nicholas-nugent/, and here are a couple of my recent publications: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr/vol98/iss2/7/, https://ctlj.colorado.edu/?p=708. Although these articles are more in the field of Internet Governance and may or may not be of interest to folks in SL. The papers are doctrinal, rather than empirical, which is standard fare for legal scholarship.
My project here is also Internet Governance-related. My purpose is to analyze the concept of digital property, inclusive of identity (aliases, avatars, etc.), goods (tokens, resources, entitlements), and realty (mostly websites). I'm interested in SL because of how much users invest into building up their avatars and acquiring digital goods. To what extent should the law treat such resources as property? (If you're interested, there's at least one case on this issue, which focused on SL assets: https://casetext.com/case/evans-v-linden-research-12).
OK. Now this is much more helpful. (The link to digitalcommons.law... is a dead link.)
First, some suggested reading: "Making a Metaverse that Matters", by Wagner James Au, is a recent book by someone who spent much time in Second Life. That's a good overview.
Second, the issues of digital property were at one time addressed by the Second Life Bar Association. There was a group of real-world lawyers in Second Life, and they had their own little "legal village" in Second Life, and discussed dispute resolution and property in virtual worlds.The organization, and its "legal village" of offices, is gone. Faye Blackheart, one of the officers of that organization, still has a law office in world, in the SYZM Tower in NTBI.
Third, a point I bring up now and then is that Second Life manages to operate without a huge number of "moderators". Almost everybody else in this space, such as Facebook/Meta/Horizon and Roblox, has an army of outsourced minimum wage moderator goons armed with ban hammers and qualified immunity. Second Life has a small and famously slow-responding governance department. Why does that work? (Hint: it has to do with how property rights work in Second Life.)
Feel free to contact me.
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2 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:
... If a day-one avatar presents as a researcher and appears to have poor research methodology, them some posters will question that. This can invoke moderation and lead to posts being deleted which can be perceived as unfair. This actually happened recently.
Yes, it did, although it was a grad student.
Now, if an actual professor came on here, and said "I'm Prof. NAME at UNIVERSITY, here's my university web page and publications list", they'd get a much better reception.
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12 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
- Allow your avatar to "sleep" - appearing that you are logged in - in a bed, etc. even though you are logged out.
That should come with a premium membership, since that gets you a home.
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3 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:
I personally don't agree with animats statement about never going below 20 on the lowest setting.
My point is that below some value, the rendering load doesn't decrease, because the overhead of setting up the mesh dominates the draw time. The LI computation does not fully reflect this, though. I think Beq Janus did some tests on this.
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1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:
"Hi, I'm some random Academia-Wannabe, who logged in here in the hope that I can get strangers in this game-world-thing that I don't have a clue about, to write the crappy thesis paper for my 'Piled Higher & Deeper' for me! Please respond!"
Right.
This happens regularly. Usually it comes with a link to a Google or SurveyMonkey form.
If you want to interview people in SL, log in and talk to people. To be taken seriously, set up a storefront in world for your project and advertise it a bit.
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If you make all LODs the same as the highest LOD, your object will look great but the land impact will be higher.
As a rule of thumb, each LOD should have about half the triangle count of the next highest LOD.
The lowest LOD should never be forced below 20 triangles or so. Look at your objects in lowest LOD (set Firestorm's LOD factor to 0.0). If you can see through them, you're doing it wrong.
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This looks like something for a parachute that's open all the time. The timer is always running, so 10 times a second, the script activates. Maybe have a 1 or 2 second timer to detect falling, then turn on the parachute behavior and go to a fast timer when Z velocity < -EXCESSIVEFALLSPEED.
If you just want a parachute to use, Drivers of SL gives out a good freebie.
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How Does Your SL Look Today?
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
Back online. Telco had to replace 150 meters of fiber optic cable.