animats

Strange enough that a screenshot would be a good idea.

You can do quite a bit with animesh NPCs. But they can't do many avatar things. In particular, they can't "sit". "Sitting", in SL, is a strange kind of linkage that's only implemented for avatars. So NPCs can't interact with furniture intended for avatars. However, NPCs and furniture can be designed to work together. You can see this at "Sexytyme", which is what you'd expect. There's also SmartBots/SmartMates. These are actual avatars, bots controlled by programs outside SL. Rent a bodyguard to follow you around. They can even follow you through teleports. These are quite good, but they're expensive and sold as a service because they need a computer outside SL to control them. Virtual Kennel Club had pets that would follow you around. They shut down recently. And, of course, there are my own NPCs. Visit Hippotropolis. Cindi will find you and say hello, then run off and resume jogging around. All of these work. All are hard enough to set up that they are not used much in SL. If you sell something like this this, it takes a support organization to get customers through the rough spots.

I don't see the connection between Second Life and Burning Man. SL doesn't try to be a nicer world. Just a virtual one. SL has landlords, evictions, property taxes, neighbor problems, and jerks. Just like real life. What makes Second Life work is this: It's a big world, and being a jerk has only about a 100 meter annoyance radius, the range of a shout. When someone manages to annoy over an area larger than that, it's so obvious that Governance can take action. That's rarely needed. The only broadcast medium is group messages. You have to join a group yourself. No one can add others to their group unwillingly. You can leave a group at any time and you're immediately off the list. So spam is a minor problem. On your own land, you have enough power to kick jerks out, keep them out, and keep them from seeing much of what you're doing. Or even just block new users. There's a social consensus that, given all those tools, you should deal with your own problems and not whine about little stuff. The general policy of LL management is rather hands-off. This is much of why SL works as a society. It's subtle, and I've seldom if ever seen it described in a published article. It's really quite amazing, when you think about it, that a virtual world anyone can enter for free works so well. Now, there are other ways to manage a virtual world, and they're worse. Meta's Horizon and Roblox have a huge number of low-paid "moderators" armed with ban hammers. Roblox is trying AI moderators, so Big Brother is always watching and listening. Users live in fear. LL has managed to avoid that mistake. Comments?

There's been some indication at Creator User Group that there are plans for better land textures after PBR gets deployed. Skies have been modernized and look good, and so has water, but terrain needs an upgrade. Terrain doesn't even have old materials, let alone new ones. It's just flat base color. So suggest things in that area. Maybe upgrade Linden trees and grass, which are also just flat base color. Then use them on abandoned land. It would be amusing if there was a slow, automatic process for abandoned land. After abandonment, harsh edges gradually smooth out. Then some Linden weeds appear. Then more weeds and grasses. Then small trees. Gradually, the trees become larger. Eventually, after a year or two, it looks lightly forested.

There's a trouble spot on Robin Loop in Heterocera something like that. It's a road that crosses a region corner. One quadrant of the corner happens to be in a region that has no other Linden land ownership other than a tiny chunk of road. So there's not enough land impact capacity to drive through there. If you drive through it, you get an "insufficient resources" popup and are stuck. Some years back I got the Moles to put up traffic cones around the trouble spot. That warns people to stay clear. There are other spots where roads and jagged-edge parcels result in ban lines atop a Linden road. If you find one, bug LL into putting up guard rails or traffic cones or something by submitting a support ticket. This is a routine road maintenance task, done by the Linden Department of Public Works. There are at least half a dozen places on mainland with such fixes.

Dore still seems to be broken.

You should not be allowed to sit while camming if there is not line of sight between avatar and sit target. Then you couldn't cam and sit through a locked door.

Yes. That's the whole point of all this. Sharpview uses Vulkan. It helps rendering speed considerably, which is why Sharpview consistently gets 60FPS on SL content on a reasonably good GPU. It's not magic. It doesn't help with GPU memory space, for example. I could go into more detail, but it gets boring. IM me if you really want to talk Vulkan. The general idea is that you don't want to use most of your graphics resources rendering stuff so far away it can barely be seen. Hence levels of detail. Most of what I'm talking about here involves coping strategies for bad lower LOD models. That's the right way to do it. The region impostor images I've been talking about here are one example of that sort of thing. That's the simplest form and easy to do. The next step up is automatically making low-poly models of large areas. Or of avatars, a subject I've discussed elsewhere. That's harder.

"Bounce" is not the default for vehicles. It can be done by scripting in vehicles, but it's not common. My motorcycles do it. I have a cheap full perm "Beach Ball Ban Line Tester" on Marketplace, if you want to know how to script this. Throw it at a ban line and it will bounce off. It's hard to do this perfectly for a vehicle with avatars on board. If the avatar root hits the ban line before the vehicle root does, or object entry is allowed but avatar entry is not, the avatar gets ejected. This is a problem if you sideswipe a ban line. In the narrow waterways from in north central Sansara, where jaggy ban lines extend into what looks like a public waterway, it's easy to lose a boat against a ban line. "Bounce" ought to be the default. There's an accepted JIRA to improve vehicle vs ban line behavior, but LL has not acted on it. Then people would not have to understand the previous paragraph.

Skip Twitter and go direct to Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-04/second-life-s-20th-birthday-reminds-world-the-metaverse-can-work It's not bad. The video of SL is of good quality, and it's recent. The new WelcomeHub is shown. The comments are quite positive. The speaker uses Second Life. At the end, he says he only responds to furries with a tail. Really.

Cool VL Viewer is doing very well here. I can't get Firestorm much above 10 FPS with comparable settings, even with shadows off. I should download Cool VL Viewer and try that, too. Here's the same scene in Sharpview. One region only. This discussion is all about what to do about distant regions, and I haven't implemented that yet. New Babbage in Sharpview, single region only. 60 FPS. Shadows on. GPU is 43% busy. About 200m to the region boundary from this point. (Note funny things sticking upwards out of flying submarine atop central tower. That's an old sculpt object, and it does something strange with sculpt coordinates that Sharpview doesn't emulate properly. I know of three such objects in world, all from the pre-mesh past of SL.) So that's where I am now. Resolution for near objects is fine. This discussion is all about what to draw in the distance that won't slow things down much. The goal is to be able to see distant landmarks so you have a sense of place. Nice for sailing, flying, and to a lesser extent driving. Or just walking around a city. It's possible to use more resources drawing the stuff that's barely visible than the close-up stuff. That's no good; you sacrifice local detail and responsiveness for a minor improvement in distant stuff. I've commented on GTA V's backgrounds. Turns out they are not flat images. There are custom-built low poly models of each large area in that game. This is something that would be hard to do for SL, although not impossible. You can generate simplified meshes of entire regions. Someone had some of those on display at SB 20. I've made some myself. Those are just the SL map projected onto an elevation map. It's possible to do much better, but it comes close to copy-botting if it gets too good. So I'm been planning on using flat images, which are permitted per the SL terms of service.

SL has its own special problems, of course. Some comments on those. That's a problem. One reason I use New Babbage and Bellesaria as examples is that both prohibit low-altitude sky junk. I posted a long draw range image a few weeks ago taken from SL's highest mountain, and what ought to be a beautiful vista looks awful. So I'm considering a sky junk filter. If it's not attached to the ground, it doesn't appear in impostor images. (Technical definition: "Attached to the ground" means that its bounding sphere does not intersect with some other bounding sphere that is attached to the ground. This is a recursive definition. If there's a chain of objects down to the ground, it's not sky junk.) Tall towers will still show, but stuff just floating, no. Yes. A "crap LOD" detector is needed. A first cut is just to look at the triangle counts. If they look like High=2000, Lowest=2, that's a crap LOD item. I'm tempted to have Sharpview replace those with a single-color cube if distant, or push them up to High LOD if close. It's not a great solution, but it's something. (In Firestorm, you can set "LOD factor" to 0, which shows everything at lowest LOD. Most large objects hold up OK. Some don't. Large buildings and trees are the worst offenders, because they blight a whole area. Try that, at least with your own stuff. Look for trees that turn into a bare trunk, and see-through buildings with loose triangles. If it's yours, please fix it. If you're a landlord, talk to your tenants. Thank you.)

Let's look at some options for improving this: Throw hardware at the problem. There are better GPUs. If you have to ask how much they cost, you can't afford them. Also, most of that compute power is going into drawing background objects you can barely see. This is not cost-effective. Pre-render impostor images. This works if you can keep the viewpoint from getting too close to a flat image. That's what I've discussed above. We don't have to blur the impostor images. I've been doing that to keep image size down, but it's not essential. "Too close" is an issue. 256m looks pretty good. 128m is pushing it. Identify distant hero objects and give them more graphics resources. This is common in games. The distant castle on the hill that's important to gameplay may be manually assigned more resources. In SL, the viewer has no idea what's important, but it can at least tell what's big. So the viewer might pick 5 to 10 distant but large linksets and do them at a higher LOD than usual. Identify lesser objects and cut their resources down. If something is small and distant, it might just be rendered as a single-color mesh cube, scaled to the original dimensions. This works well for buildings. The color is the "1x1 texture", or what you get when you reduce the texture down to 1x1, which is a single color with an alpha value. The GPU can draw a huge number of little cubes without problems. I often use Grand Theft Auto V as an example, because it's a very successful big-world game and they use all kinds of cheats to cram a big chunk of Los Angeles into a fast-moving game. So here's a close-up from the GTA V scene I posted above. A very close look at a GTA V background. This is from the same image posted above. Now, this is definitely blurred. But notice the nice hard edges on the large buildings. Those are "hero objects" that received special handling. They get parallax effects against the background as the viewpoint moves, which distracts from the fact that the background is flat. This is all standard game technology.

Good comments. I'm writing this from the viewpoint of a third party viewer developer who has to deal with existing SL content. First, looking down from that tower in New Babbage is one of the hardest cases in Second Life. There's a whole city down there, with much detail, and you can see most of it from the Albatross's docking tower. At street level, most objects are hidden (occluded) by buildings. So let's look at what current viewers can do. LOD factor 3, NVidia 3070 with 8 GB, 32 GB RAM, gigabyte fiber networking. A good gamer PC, more than most SL users have. About US$2000. Where did everything go? Where's my glorious vista of the city? This is a 128m draw distance. 70 FPS. Looks bad from up here on the tower, but very playable. The standard New Babbage environment has been turned off for this test, so we see a rare sunny day in New Babbage. Let's try 256m. That's better. But we can't' see City Hall, the big tower. 256m. 20 FPS. Frame rate has dropped to a barely acceptable level. We can see about two blocks. At ground level, 256m looks pretty good. Let's see the whole city. 1024m draw distance. 4 FPS. Minutes of loading time. This is unplayable, but looks great. The usual problem of staged SL photography. So these are the options we have right now. Can we do better?

I'm toying with some schemes to compensate for bad lower levels of detail. Maybe push the LOD up for a small number of large distant objects, so if there's some big hero object that you really should see in the distance, it will show up. Draw medium-sized distant objects as their bounding cube with their average color, then blur a bit. The goal is to never have the world drop off into nothingness when there's more world out there. These are just ideas at this point, not code in Sharpview. Comments?

More tests of what this approach might look like. This is just manual editing of SL screenshots from Firestorm. Bellesaria, a street of Traditionals. 256m draw distance. Same picture, but everything beyond 128m has been blurred. If you didn't have the other picture to compare with, would you notice? This is the worst case for those region impostor images I described above. The idea is that the viewer would show the four nearest regions, then show flat images of areas further away. If you have enough GPU, you might get 9 regions, with real stuff drawn out to at least 256m. Next, an extreme case. New Babbage, from the clacks tower in Babbage Palisade. Draw distance 1024m, LOD factor 3, two minutes to load and 5 FPS on a powerful computer. We just can't draw that much at full speed. Midday lighting so we can see the place. The default environment in New Babbage is smoky, and you can't see this far. Same image, but everything further than 128m has been blurred. This is what I'm shooting for as a goal. See entire cities, a bit blurred in the distance. Compare with the GTA V pictures above. Same concept.

Excellent point. I'm curious to see how that plays out.

I think we're seeing a cultural difference here. People who buy games are rather intolerant of bugs. Read some game reviews. New games only get one chance to succeed, and if they make a bad first impression, they die an early death. Metaverses start slowly and grow over time. Not just SL; look at Roblox's user history. Roblox is almost as old as SL, and it grew very slowly. It just didn't stop growing. SL is getting more users from the gamer community. They're applying game quality standards to SL. This leads to angry postings here, and a huge number of new users who just give up. Linden Lab is used to having a very patient user base, tolerant of bugs. But they've already acquired the user base who will put up with the immersion-breaking bugs and the lag. Users with game experience expect those problems to be fixed before release. A typical pro reviewer comment on Cyberpunk 2077's initial release, from Gamerant: It is fair to say that Cyberpunk 2077 promised much, and it was sadly unable to deliver on all of those promises. ... Amidst the problematic graphics, game-breaking glitches, and occasionally unreliable gameplay, Cyberpunk 2077 lost the goodwill of a lot of fans. The launch was considered so disastrous by some that Sony even pulled the PlayStation version from its stores and offered full refunds for unhappy customers shortly after Cyberpunk 2077's launch - although it has since returned. CD Projekt Red certainly had a lot of work to do to ensure that the game was up to scratch, but in fairness to the studio, it has been willing to put in the time and effort to deliver the kind of game fans were expecting in the first place. From Polygon: The game landed with a dull thud, the stark reality of which could be blamed on any number of factors called out by reviewers and players: plodding cyberpunk gameplay, the general emptiness of the world, and a lack of compelling narrative. Over all of this loomed a series of technical problems that quickly transformed Cyberpunk 2077 into a generator of glitchy memes and exposed a rushed game produced under distressing crunch conditions. Substantial performance errors prompted its removal from Sony’s PlayStation Store, and the intervening months have been a slow crawl of CD Projekt fixing, adding, and tweaking the game in incremental updates — an extensive bid to bring it in line with its marketing promises. That's what it's like in the cold, hard world of game reviews. When SL launches on mobile, Linden Lab will start hearing from a community like that. Loudly. This will be a learning experience for Linden Lab management.

Not sure. Server User Group is cancelled this week, so I wasn't able to bring it up there. Keep trying to figure out what's wrong. Right now it's too vague to file a JIRA. I suspect that debugging this properly would require LL to send a hundred well-dressed bots to a region on the beta grid for load testing. Still, that's the price of success. At last, SL is getting crowds, and they almost work. This is a major win for SL.

And to flexible/rigged mesh, says one source. I should try it out. I don't use UE; I just installed it once and ran some of the demos to see what it was like. I really like their vehicle system.

Note that REALTOR® is a trademark. Best to use a generic term, such as real estate agent.

After watching memory usage pass 17GB in a club with 90 avatars, it looks like in this new era where SL has crowds, you need 32GB to go to the busy places.

Now that makes sense if it's an interest list startup problem. If you're there first, or you gradually increase your draw distance, that seems to be something the interest list system can handle. It's that sudden jump on arrival that breaks the interest list. This doesn't look like a UDP overload or packet drop problem. It's too repeatable. The same avatars show up broken on successive logins. I don't normally get any lost packets from SL. I have gigabit fiber from Sonic, which is far more bandwidth than SL needs. Even if UDP packets are lost, the important ones are supposed to be re-transmitted unless the server gets way behind. Child prims not appearing on the interest list is a known bug. I've demonstrated that at Hyperion a few times. There's one big building which is a huge linkset. Parts of it frequently fail to appear. The same parts.

I've noticed that, too. I can usually fly over Satori, Zindra, and Corsica. Central Sansara, the oldest part of Second Life, remains a security orb headache. Especially on waterways.

That's a good map. If you haven't driven much in SL, I recommend Robin Loop for practice. There are several car dealers towards the southeast end of Robin Loop, in Burns and Neumogen. They all have free demo rezzers. Rez something and drive around Robin Loop. (Avoid the track cars and drift cars; they're tuned all wrong for Linden roads.) Once you've mastered Robin Loop, you can go anywhere.