animats
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Posts posted by animats
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Anna Erotica sells a low-prim set of screening trees. My neighbor put those up on both sides of her property, and that worked out fine. She has a rural-looking setting in an urban area, and I have a view of trees outside the windows of my industrial workshop.
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Does it have tides?
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50 million chat messages sent daily? That's over a thousand messages per day per online user. Is LL counting messages received, including group messages, or are there a lot of spambots I'm not seeing?
(The number I'd really like to see is active daily users. "Active" meaning they did something - move, chat, or voice - and aren't a known bot.)
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I seem to have forced this in a sandbox.
View from a height
Note the strange cut-out sections from two sims.
We both saw the same thing here.
If either of us entered a region, it rendered for them, but not for the other.
The disc is at (255.990, 255.990). I use this object to mark sim crossings for testing. It's just a cylinder and two rectangular prims, all phantoms.
Note how the grass area is partially missing. That cutout lines up exactly with the end of the rectangular prims.
When I deleted this object, the sims went back to normal.
Lesson: objects really close to the edge of a sim can break something.
I can see why this happens in Kama City. Every intersection has objects that overlap the four regions.
Is it worth updating https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-8130 from 2012?
(You know, just because I know how to do bug isolation doesn't mean I like spending time on this. I'd be happier if the big world Just Worked.)
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35 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:
Ah well, they banned the author of Lumiya for some unknown reason... as for writing their own, I can't see that happening when they struggle to keep Linux operating.
It's clear that LL has very limited technical resources available. But unless usage and revenue increases, or at least stops decreasing, SL will die.
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The replies from Linden Lab management seem so unambitious. Last names. Some repricing. Minor tweaks to the experience permission system. Big deal.
First and foremost, SL needs a mobile strategy. Since that's technically hard, they should buy one. Either Lumiya or Mobile Grid. That might be a perk of having a premium account. Mobile Grid requires server support; the client is running on a server somewhere, which sends video to the phone. Lumiya charges about US$17 a year for that. Offer 30 days free; then you have to sign up for a premium account. Mobile Grid is tied to a specific mobile device, so you can only use the freebie version once per phone.
This goes with a stronger marketing strategy. Facebook is looking vulnerable. SL wouldn't scale up that far, but taking a few nibbles out of the 10% of Facebook users who just quit has potential. We have chat! We have voice! We don't sell your info to everybody! Plus, there's a whole virtual world out there!
The graphics need to get better, up to the level of video games of a few years ago. This is mostly a problem with crappy low level of detail models. Those need to be generated automatically, something most of the video game toolkits already do. Automatic impostor generation is needed, with not just object impostors, but impostors for entire parcels and sims. No more "draw distance" and water in the distance.
Come on, people. Show some drive!
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Second Life was created before fat acceptance. This shows in the avatars. Compare Sansar, where all the avatars are slightly overweight.
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There's no LSL function to obtain parcel autoreturn time, is there?
llGetParcelFlags will give you the flags to tell if you can enter, but llGetParcelDetails does not have an option for autoreturn time.
I'd like to put a feature in vehicles so that when you park them on a place that might autoreturn them, it tells you how much time you have left, and IMs you with a reminder as the autoreturn time approaches.
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a
Bay City Sewerage Pumping Station #1
Busily pumping away inside.
Bay City has quite a bit of infrastructure you can visit. Touring it on a vehicle is fun. It's too big to walk. There's some retail, and lots of buildings to explore. You can even take a small boat through the canals. There are buttons to operate the lift bridges.
Parking is a problem. Object entry and autoreturn time for Linden lands seems to be completely random. Some places will let you park for half an hour. Some for 2 minutes. Some not at all. Some private areas, forever. There is a parking structure in which you cannot park. LL should set roads and plausible parking spots to at least 15 minutes. Marked parking structures and spaces, 2 hours.
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The Smooth Rider
All the technology I've been talking about here has now been put into a bike you can buy. It's for sale at Cute but Fast at the 2RAW EXTREME racetrack sim. It's priced low to get the technology out there. We've developed workarounds for most of the region-crossing bugs in SL. It's a good bike for long trips. You can usually ride for an hour or more without trouble. We tell people "Just get on and ride". Don't worry about region crossings. Don't bother slowing down. Go tour SL. I've circled all the major continents myself, over 500km of driving in SL.
We've now done all we can with vehicle scripts. The sim side still needs fixes. We're beating on LL to fix some specific bugs. The big one is BUG-214653, the "half-unsit" problem. We can make it less likely through scripts, and less damaging when it happens, but sometimes, possibly due to a lost packet that doesn't get retransmitted, it fails hard. We've created a test case which can trigger that bug reliably, and at LL's request, even duplicated the test case on the beta grid. Now they have no excuse for not fixing it, and a Linden has been assigned to work on it. Whenever you get a half-unsit in any vehicle, go to that bug in the JIRA, make a comment, and upvote it. We need to keep the pressure on LL.
Meanwhile, if you do get into that situation, you have to log out and log back in again. Our bike will detect the problem, stop, and park, not run away. So it's waiting for you when you get back.
More could be done in the viewer. Our fix for bogus movement at region crossings is in the development version of Firestorm. Camera control needs some attention, too. There are moments when the coordinates relative to one region seem to being used with the location of another region, resulting in region-sized jumps and snap-backs in the viewer.
(I have some respect for LL's problems with these longstanding bugs. Linden Labs isn't big, and, 15 years on, they have heavy technical debt. It takes substantial developer time by senior developers to fix something like this properly. Sometimes you have to do it in stages - put in logging to detect when it happens and capture data, wait for it to recur, analyze the data, and perhaps add more logging to focus on the trouble spot.
That doesn't fit well with modern "agile" methodology, which favors quick changes and shipping a product which sort of works, knowing it will be replaced by a new version soon. "Agile" works on the Web, which doesn't have much persistent state or time constraints. It is a poor fit to LL's big. persistent, multi-user synchronized world.)
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Still there 22 hours later.
Rhodenwald is blacked out. This shows in the world map above. Anything within draw distance of Rhodenwald is affected. The giant planes extend far beyond Rhodenwald, but you have to get into draw distance at least once before they become visible. I'm over in Vallone, and if I avoid going east of Vallone into Clarksville, I can still use my property. The 9 sims around Rhodenwald are essentially down right now. Higher level skyboxes beyond draw distance to the ground are unaffected.
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It's not so bad. We finished and tested the product version of the region crossing bike,, and it's now for sale at the 2RAW EXTREME racetrack/store, on a private sim far from the trouble sport. I don't have to do anything at my workshop in Kama City for a while. So I went out in RL, went to the ocean and had a fish dinner at a place on the coast south of San Francisco.
Since my part of SL is still broken, I'm trying SineSpace. Notes:
- SineSpace is so empty it makes Metropolis Metaversium look busy. There are about 10 people in world right now.
- It's disconnected sims about 1-2km on a side, like Sansar. There are about 30 of them, and none of them have much in them. I'm in a steampunk city. It's completely static. Nothing does anything. Can't even open doors. The buildings I can enter are empty rooms.
- Nothing to click on unless someone sets up a button. No sitting. No objects that do much.
- Walking up stairs works; the feet go on the steps properly.
- Level of detail handling is sometimes really good. You can see out to the horizon in the desert and you don't see the changes in level of detail unless you look hard. But in crowded areas, they seem to overuse fog, like Sansar does.
- Each area has its own visual style. Too many of them look like My First Indy Game.
- Overall, it feels like a collection of unrelated games. They share an inventory, but that's about it.
It's not a serious competitor to Second Life, and it doesn't seem likely to become one.
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It's still going on, over 8 hours later. Where's the abuse team when you need them?
I think the problem is coming from this vacant parcel: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Rhodenwald/16/183/36
That parcel is set to infinite auto-return time. Object entry, but not building, is allowed. The adjacent parcel allows building but has a 2 minute auto return. So someone can rez a nuisance on the parcel that allows building and move it to the no-autoreturn parcel. I can't find the object center, but it's playing loud J-Pop music and that's coming from there or very near.
Notified parcel owner.
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The griefing is still going on as of about 5 minutes ago. I went over to Heterocera for bike testing, and when I came back, Kama City was still having problems. Areas within about 500m of Rhodenwald are affected. I saw a Linden in world a hour ago, and I sent them the object UUID and some other info, but the problem didn't get fixed.
Two days ago there was a problem in the same area which was causing strange region crossing failures. Not just a half-unsit; the bike disappeared and was never seen again, not even in Lost+Found. The regions were restarted and that went away. Today, I hit a temporary "region full" error on a region that's normally nowhere near full. The "region disappears across a diagonal" problem keeps coming back. And Vallone still has a huge spike in lag every 10 seconds. As a property owner in Zindra, I'm not happy about all this.
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This is affecting a large area in Zindra, maybe 10 sims, all the way to Horizons. I'm about 2 sims away from the center of it. For most of the big flat planes, clicking on returns says "no object selected". But in Rhodenwald, it's selectable.
Object: "Bullet"
UUID: e7e339c0-d528-20d3-539f-e3f7d7dce0ce
Owner: "Kiss my ...." (full name in abuse report.) Payment info used.
Land impact: 1 Display weight: 404.
Contents: 3 anime dance animations, "Homing Script", music, and a texture animation.
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Yes, got an owner, filed an abuse report.
Kama City is unusable until this is fixed.
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Thanks. Someone is playing J-Pop, too.
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I just started having giant angled planes appear in world in Kama City. I thought it was a viewer problem, but it's happening on both a Linux machine running Firestorm and a Windows 7 machine running the LL viewer.
Current LL viewer, Windows 7 64-bit
Firestorm 5.1.3, Linux 64-bit
Is this a bug, or some kind of griefing? In Rhodenwald and other places in Kama City.
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How do you get items copied to the beta grid? At one time it was automatic and happened daily. Then that broke, and you had to ask support. Now I got this from land support:
Q: Request inventory recopy from main grid to Aditi. Thanks.
A: Thank you for contacting us about this issue! In order to get this done, I am escalating your request to another group. They should be in touch with you shortly.
Thank you for your patience.That was 8 days ago. Looks like support forgot how to do this. Is there some specific way you're supposed to ask?
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Some parts of Kama City have double prims, and some don't. Is there some rationale for that?
The result is large, hollow buildings in the single prim area. Someone just put up a nice looking skyscraper, in Empire State Building style, but above the first floor, it's a hollow shell. The place feels sparse.
In the double prim area, someone just built a nice diner, convenience store, and gas station, and those have enough objects to look properly detailed.
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Oh, I'll have to try an upload with a non self compiled Firestorm.
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6 hours ago, Beq Janus said:
Why would it be meaningless in Firestorm? Unless you are using an outdated version of the viewer there should be no limitations to what you can see.
Because physics convex hulls are recomputed in the viewer for display, not sent from the server. The convex hull generation is done in the LL viewer with a copy of the Havok code used server side. Firestorm does not have that code, because they don't have a Havok license. You get a message about this every time you upload a mesh object from Firestorm.
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Just to see what would happen, I tried generating a Collada file in FreeCAD and uploading it. Uploading a simple cube and sphere worked. Uploading an entire architectural model of a real world house produced "Error: element is invalid" from Firestorm upload, without more useful information on screen or in the error log.
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SL usage statistics
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
The usage statistics for Second Life seem inconsistent. Supposedly SL gets about 11,000 new signups each day. Yet there are never more than about 50,000 people in world. Either the numbers are wrong, new users get fed up really quickly, or SL's login system is under attack by bots.
The number I'd really like to see is the number of active users - active meaning "moved or communicated". AFKs and bots should not count.