animats

(Black hole) Actually, that was Meta. I cannot imagine how Meta spent over US$36 billion on their metaverse and produced so little. When LL made a big mistake, they produced Sansar, which looked good and worked OK. It just wasn't something anybody wanted. I'm looking forward to seeing how LL markets SL on mobile. Apparently they can make it work technically, but onboarding has to be drastically simplified and the user's first hour has to be a lot better, or it's going to be a niche thing for existing SL users who want to log in on the go.

Not too good. I tried the Gianni Brox avatar. Looks good, fits clothing OK. But the sit height is way off. I usually use Roth, which has a good default sit position. Sit with Brox, and if you're not on an adjustable seat, you're about 0.25m above the seat. That's not adjustable, is it?

I'm not promoting Sharpview for wide use at this time. It's a tech demo at this point. Running it on a Raspberry PI is pointless. It's intended for gamer machines with a good GPU. Minimum is about an NVidia 1060 6GB. It's intended to answer the question, can we make Second Life look like an AAA title on a machine that can run AAA titles. The answer appears to be yes. When I started, people were saying that was inherently impossible. It's not. It does, however, take a lot of GPU memory and network bandwidth. While I've been working on this new implementation, (Sharpview is 100% safe Rust, all new code) though, the C++ viewers have improved quite a bit. They now have ALM as standard, PBR is close, multi-threaded asset decompression is now in several C++ viewers, and in general things are looking up. Looking ahead, the really hard problem is to figure out some way to bake avatars, with all those mesh layers, down to one mesh and skeleton, like an animesh. Like Bakes On Mesh, and done at the same time, when clothes change. That's really hard. But it's necessary if we don't want things to choke every time we get 50-100 avatars in the same region. At least for avatars further away than 2-3 meters, where we can get away with some loss of detail, it's probably possible.

Things are picking up in metaverse land. Now that the NFT clown car has crashed, and Meta/Horizon has peaked, the people who were quietly plugging along are starting to show things. There's M2. This is based on the Improbable back end, and, I think, Unity graphics. It's a real metaverse, in that multiple users can create in the same space. It exists as a tech demo, and you can request a free account. Requires a Google or, I think, Facebook account to identify you. Philip Rosedale is on M2's board. M2/Improbable continues to lose money, yet continues to attract venture capital. Disney recently put US$1.5 billion into Epic's metaverse project. It's not clear yet what that means. It will involve a large number of Disney/Marvel/Lucasfilm/Pixar licensed characters. Readyverse has the rights to Ready Player One and is making something based on that. They have a demo video of what looks like Aech's Garage from Sansar and a MMO which supposedly looks like the driving game in Ready Player One. You can request a test account. VRChat continues to grow, slowly but steadily. 30,748 users on line right now. They're still a little behind Second Life, but may pass us in the next year. Roblox is still losing money, but has a lot of it left, and has a huge user base, average age still stuck around age 14 or so. So those are some of the major players.

If something is showing out of order link numbers viewer-side, taking it into inventory and bringing it out might fix that. On rez, the viewer gets told about the links of a linkset all at once, and they will probably match the sim-side numbers. Probably. The way this works at the message level is that each ObjectUpdate has the ID of the parent prim. ObjectUpdate messages don't have any information about children. Linksets are put together viewer side from parent info alone. . Parent matters, because position is relative to the parent. The viewer doesn't really need child link number. That number is displayed in Edit, but it's just for user display. Attachments, by the way, are children of children at the ObjectUpdate level. It's possible to have a 3-level hierarchy: Attachment->Avatar->Vehicle. The protocol supports a full N-level hierarchy, but the servers do not support that. There was an accepted JIRA to provide a full hierarchy, forgotten in the transition to the Canny system. Philip Rosedale once said that not having a full hierarchy was one of SL's biggest design mistakes. The workarounds associated with not having a full hierarchy dwarf the difficulty of implementing one. Face numbers of a prim are fully synchronized between sim-side and viewer. They have to be, because face numbers are used with mesh data and texture info.

How? ObjectUpdate messages don't have a link number. Although usually all the object updates for a new object come in one message, that's not required.

Port Babbage Caledon Federation of Democratic Simulators

Actually, it should run on anything that Rust can compile for that can handle the graphics. Some tests have been run on Apple silicon. For now, though, I'm only producing Linux and Windows versions. This is still early.

I wouldn't mind having access to UE5's excellent renderers. The rest of UE5 is mostly incompatible with how SL and the Other Simulator do content, though.

I think I see what's going on there. If you can turn the point cloud into a mesh of triangles, it's much faster to run this test. Convex hull vs. convex hull is amazingly cheap to compute, but I would not want to have to implement it in LSL.

About six months back, at Server User Group, there was a big test, where we were all asked to TP in and out of two test regions. This was supposed to test a fix for teleport problems, including the long delays for clothing load that produce pink clouds and backwards heads. The test regions seemed to work well. There seemed to be real progress on incoming teleports. Nothing has been heard about that since. Any idea what happened?

Right. You can 't block the sending object from email. You can go to **** Cove, which is an "online gaming" region, in world, find the offending object by its location and name, and block it there. It's on a little pirate ship full of advertising signage. Nothing bad seems to happen if you go there. I did that, and the emails stopped. Can you go there if you're in a jurisdiction for which LL blocks access to online gambling? Don't know. But, come on, LL. Those guys are not only spamming, the message is deceptive. It's a casino, and they're not giving out free L$, just casino credit.

The Confederation of Democratic Simulators is, in real estate terms, a Planned Unit Development. That's like a condominium, but more than one building. Each resident owns their own space, has a shared interest in common spaces, and gets a voting membership in the Home Owners Association. It takes a lot of attention to keep such a thing going. People have to show up to make it work. That's a big reason it hasn't caught on in SL.

Walk/local teleport optionally uses double clicks. Anything else? Does SL ever use triple click? Long press? (Implementing something, need to know how fancy things get.)

The textures seem flat. Were these pictures taken with ALM off?

Always on in newer viewers, I think. Shadows remain optional.

Something I still need: an animation that just sets the bento joints back to neutral, to be used with non-bento animations. Anyone know of that?

"Feedback" is back up. Linden Lab does really well at keeping the 3D world up. That's an exotic, complex system with a robust fault-tolerant architecture. It works surprisingly well. Most of the failures are on the web side, which is mostly off the shelf technology.

"An error has occurred. Further information is available in the server log." immediately after login. But the Committee of the Mending Apparatus now came forward, and allayed the panic with well-chosen words. It confessed that the Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair. The effect of this frank confession was admirable. “Of course,” said a famous lecturer — he of the French Revolution, who gilded each new decay with splendour — “of course we shall not press our complaints now. The Mending Apparatus has treated us so well in the past that we all sympathize with it, and will wait patiently for its recovery. In its own good time it will resume its duties. Meanwhile let us do without our beds, our tabloids, our other little wants. Such, I feel sure, would be the wish of the Machine.” "The Machine Stops", E. M Forster, 1909.

Must have been cleaned up. Visited the emergency hospital shown, the place with the parking lot. No sign of trouble.

Yes. There are still many Gor sims. They're not used much. You can roam through empty castles, empty markets, etc. Caledon has a huge castle, used for nothing. I've been trying to drum up more interest in New Babbage. We now have Port Babbage looking busy, but it's all NPCs on autopilot. There are three regions of Japanese city for combat, starting at SSOC. Nobody uses them.

Spam every day now: The object "**** **** Treasure Chest' has sent you a message from Second Life: Attention animats, we would like to remind you your replay credits of L$200 ... How do we stop this before others start doing this?

Port Babbage Anne Aurelia just completed a rebuild of Port Babbage. It follows the East End of London in the late 1800s. There's the port, of course, with some ships in dock. The docks are cluttered with crates, many from the busy Bryant and May match factory nearby. The market stalls at the port are busy. You'll probably be approached by one of the urchins. Watch your wallet! There's some kind of argument going on at the Customshouse. If you cross the street and the tracks, you'll find the Sailors' Rest, where sailors can stay while waiting for a ship. It's nice inside; look around. The less fortunate can stay at St. Martha's next door, a grim place you can check out. There's a workhouse on the other side of the Sailor's Rest, with beds and a kitchen, and kitchen staff hard at work. Behind it is the Ragged School for the local urchins, with a teacher and a few students. If you look around, you'll also find the small Maritime Bank and an infirmary for sailors.

For an example of a good target system, go to region "SSOC". Find the huge SSOC store, with some of the most realistic guns in SL. Outside the store there are stairs down. They lead to SSOC offices. Go through the offices to the target range. It's a realistic known-distance range. Hits appear on the target and on a display of the target. You can set the range. You can have the target return to zero range and look at your groups.

Steam takes a 30% revenue cut on in-game sales.