animats
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Posts posted by animats
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4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
Oh, the book covers surveys? I missed that in your thoughtful posts about it! Now I'm more curious.
He spent much time in world and talked to many people, rather than running surveys.
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13 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
Usually, the Surveys are stated as being for some College / University project.
As is this. "OMINA" is a publication of the University of Pennsylvania.
17 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:Please understand, we Forumites see a LOT of posts about Surveys.
Yes.
There are people who did this right. Read "Making a Metaverse that Matters", by Au.
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Few new users read these forums.
if you want to interview new users, try going to London City, a popular new user area, and talking to people. Or, better yet, rent a storefront in London City and put up a sign saying you will pay new users L$250 (which is about US$1) for an interview. That's enough to bring in most new users.
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5 hours ago, belindacarson said:
yeah personally I'd avoid using anything you scripted given when you created rlvxtrem.
?
Whatever that is, it's not something I did.
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19 hours ago, belindacarson said:
They'd have to redo some of the oldest Sims (and roads) as part of this.
One of my back-burner ideas was a road repair machine for moles.
Pothole patching machine, real world version. SL needs something like this.
It would examine old prim road sections, and compute the small position, tilt, twist and slice adjustments to make them join perfectly. At region boundaries, it would add support prims as needed to prevent fall-through. Have a mole with appropriate privileges drive it around the older parts of mainland. Western Sansara could use this.
For SLRR railroad tracks, something like this would help.
Rail geometry inspection vehicle, real world version. Checks for bumps, rails out of gauge, rail defects, etc.
This would be useful for SLRR inspection. Breaks in the guide rail, misaligned switches, rails out of spec, etc.would be detected and logged. Find all those places where your train gets stuck or derails.
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4 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:
However, as soon as you switch to pbr, the placement parameters grey out and aren't available for edit any longer.
That's how the UI works now, with the RC candidate materials viewer. Tried yesterday.
Internally, I'm trying to find where that info gets sent to the viewer. It can't be in regular texture info; there aren't slots for more than one scale/rotation/offset there. It seems like it should be in old materials info, but I looked at the code in the -559 branch and can't find it. Github search only searches the main branch. I'm going to have to download the code and search locally.
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9 hours ago, Marigold Devin said:
I'd say they were bots too, programmed to relog if kicked from another region that might be restarting, so they get relocated then to a safe region and just happen to have landed there, even though one is only a few days old and there was a one day old one when I just had a sneaky peek.
Yeah. More and more I think this is a side effect of a bot control program with poor error handling. Like the bot control programs that let their bots pile up at safe hubs after sim restarts.
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12 hours ago, Jaylinbridges said:
There are not really things to do in the WelcomeHub other than quickly wander through the regions. Shopping is retail over-priced system clothing and 1500L AO/dance huds.
I noticed. London City, with that huge Freebie Galaxy store, does this much better. Most of the stuff there is dated, but it gives new users a chance to stock up and try things. They can get comfortable with the clothing system and all the options.
I just watched the presentations at the Welcome Hub on "avatars". There's a video by Strawberry Linden on how to change your shape. It's part of a YouTube series Strawberry made some time back, and mentions previous and following videos you can't watch there. It's clear that you're coming in in the middle.There's are some signs with notecard dispensers, on shopping, saving, and such. No indication of the fact that different bodies use different clothes and what to do about that.
A clothing tutorial for SL is really hard. New Resident Island used to have a good one, but it gave you Ruth or Roth, the open source avatars. Once the new user avatars come out, maybe there will be a good tutorial.
It's hard to do a clothing tutorial now. Starting out with "What you're wearing is an obsolete classic avatar. Nobody uses those any more. Here are some expensive alternatives that look much better." is not going to fly.
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I'd thought that it was possible to mix, say, a diffuse old texture and a PBR metallic value. But apparently not. I've been trying over at Materials1 on Aditi.
It looks like the presence of any PBR material overrides all textures and scale/offset/rotation info from the old system. Is that correct?
Internally, does anyone know where the scale, offset, and rotation info is stored for PBR materials? Those aren't in the glTF spec.
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It's like pictures for "Outfits". You have to take them. They're not generated from the content.
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14 hours ago, animats said:
Not sure. Here are some more.
WelcomeHub, 3 avis stuck in cloud mode for at least 10 minutes.
Today's stuck-in-cloud-mode avatars.
They don't move, they don't respond to IMs, but they're in Nearby, they're solid, and other users see the same ones stuck.
They also tend to be near the landing point, although not always.
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This is commonly done for better garage doors in SL. They move upward and the upper edge disappears. It's usually done by building the object maximum length, and then updating PRIM_SLICE and PRIM_POS on every update. Then the effect looks right, with the texture moving, rather than shrinking. If you shorten the object, the texture will compress. There are low-end garage doors in SL which do that, and they look bad.
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2 hours ago, Jaylinbridges said:
There are not really things to do in the WelcomeHub other than quickly wander through the regions.
That's a problem. The Firestorm welcome hub has gateways to other places. The WelcomeHub is a dead end.
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10 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:
could they be routed to special Bot Lounge hubs so they won't scare the children?
Now there's a thought. I saw a flock of new bots appear at Welcome Hub, with names such as "grn00020", "grn00021" ... They immediately teleported out.
More could be done to manage bot traffic. I have a little experience demo at my place in Vallone for dealing with avatars that just stand around forever. If an avatar stands around near a park bench and does nothing for a while, it's told "please have a seat" and is seated on the bench. This is just a demo, because you have to accept the land scope experience, which a bot will not do. If LL did that with one of their built-in experiences, with a one-hour timer, it would de-clutter the hubs. It's not ejection or banning, just seating. If someone was AFK, when they come back they'll just find themself seated out of the way. Automation which affects users should have a light touch.
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4 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:
Could they just be new bots? I've noticed those don't always render correctly probably depending on which bot program they're using?
Not sure. Here are some more.
WelcomeHub, 3 avis stuck in cloud mode for at least 10 minutes.
One had previously replied to messages from a mentor. The other two would not respond to chat. I saw another one stuck earlier today for six hours.
The mentors are noticing this, but don't have any answer.
I'm not sure if this is a new user creation problem, a bot problem, or a general problem. But seeing three new users stuck like this is not good.
These avatars are solid, listed as nearby, have readable profiles, and can be sent IMs without message errors. This isn't the old ghost image left behind after a disconnect problem. Those don't show in the nearby list, and you can walk through them.
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Some quotes from the book:
Page 298: "Every metaverse platform that has been launched without game mechanics has failed to gain mass adoption".
From a business perspective, he's probably right. We need games to get new users through the first week. LL needs to fix the pain points for games within SL.
Page 298: "Something magical was lost when our focus on metaverse platforms moved away from live, immersive social creation, and we resigned ourselves to offline editing in 3D software programs."
There's something to be said for that. In the early days of New Babbage, I'm told, people stood around and watched others build. Maybe SL should have a building construction system and a clothing design system in world. Ones with lots of templates to work from. Ones where you make walls or shirts, not pull vertices around. Much less general than Blender or Clo/Marvelous Designer and easier to use. Those are hard problems and there's not much open source software to mooch.A good start would be to provide a set of standard blanks (T-shirt, dress, pants, etc.) and a texture editor comparable to those ones for ordering T-shirts on line. (Yes, you can start with Robin Wood's old templates and use Photoshop or GIMP. That's still too hard for at least 80% of the potential user base.) My clothing skills are only good enough to make T-shirts and leggings for SL. Anyone from the SL clothing industry want to comment?
Page 301: "We have explored how ultrarealistic human avatars can negatively shape the culture of a metaverse platform, arguably shifting Second Life in its later years from a highly imaginative creative platform to a heavily materialistic, often-toxic consumer driven experience (with some creativity still persisting on the sidelines.). This variety of avatar definitely did not grow Second Life's user base."
That's an interesting subject. Roblox has been moving towards more realistic avatars, and they're now about up to pre-mesh SL avatars in look. (There's some parent opposition to this, their average user is age 13.) VRchat uses reasonably realistic avatars, although they keep the complexity down to keep the VR frame rate up. Fortnite is deliberately cartoony, but that's because it's a very violent game that would not be a kids game at the realism levels of, say, Red Dead Redemption or one of the Tom Clancy games. I tend to think that SL's problem is that it's in the uncanny valley - avatars are just good enough that we realize how bad they are. That's where Hollywood was about 20 years ago. Go watch the Polar Express trailer. Hollywood is totally past that, and so is much of gaming. SL is stuck just before subsurface scattering, which means skin is in the dead to plastic range. I suspect this drives the trend towards excessive tattooing.
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1 hour ago, Paul Hexem said:
If anyone needs an example of "LL can't be bothered to fix quit moments", this is it. I can't even wrap my head around "essential assets getting corrupted and making you unable to load" is expected behavior.
That reply was a bit of a surprise. I'm still trying to figure out why I'm seeing new users stuck at pink/white cloud mode forever. There's one at WelcomeHub now who's been stuck there for at least six hours. There was one on a street in Charlesville last night. When I've seen avatars in this state, they show up in the nearby avatar list, don't move or reply to chat, and stay there for hours. This may be some failed login/logout/teleport state. Something is broken, and it seems to hit new users.
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A new pain point: I've been seeing some new users stuck in pink/white cloud mode forever. Reported this in the JIRA. Got back the reply "If one of that avatar's 4 required wearables (eyes, hair, shape, skin) is missing or corrupt, then all viewers will see the avatar as a cloud. This is expected behavior."
That shouldn't be happening to new users. But I've seen it three times in the last two days, for users with age 3 days or less. I wonder if one of the starter avatars is damaged.
(Confusing the issue is that it takes way too long to get out of pink cloud mode in busy regions. I think this is the BOM baking server falling behind, but I'm not sure.)
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In "A Complaint is a Gift", a book for retailers, it says that for each customer who complains, there are ten that said nothing and will never come back.
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3 hours ago, Orwar said:
Mainland routes going through region corners.
I haven't said much about region crossings in a while.
Server side is still broken. One of the senior Lindens was annoyed at me for bringing it up at Server User Group so often. He said they were working on it.
That was in 2022.
It's still broken.
I'm tired of the excuses from LL on this. I've heard five years of excuses for failure now.
In the context of new users, if driving worked reliably, we could have mainland tours for new users. But vehicles with multiple passengers work very badly. Sometimes I try to get people interested in driving. I can't put them in a vehicle and drive around with me without going through a checklist. Low-complexity avatar? Check. Good ping time? Check. Enough network bandwidth? Check. Enough graphics power? Check. Good vehicle? Check. OK, we're good to drive around mainland.
I've started people driving with free cars from one of the shops on Robin Loop. I've seen them hit the region crossing at Neumogen, have the avatar get stuck, and the car kept going, running off the road and into a building. I had someone on the back of my bike recently, and their high-complexity avatar came off at the second region crossing.
LL people, this is pathetic.
If you don't get this fixed before mobile goes live, you will be laughed at by major reviewers. You cannot launch into the mass market/gamer space like this. You only get one chance to make a bad first impression. You don't think so? Go watch and read game reviews. The tolerance for immersion-breaking failures is zero.
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I've been over there twice, and haven't seen problems. Just the usual curse of SL - a group of people standing around, not moving or talking.
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1 hour ago, elleevelyn said:
on this
there is a thing called "Escape From Freedom vs Escape To Freedom" which a number of people have written about. ...most online multi-player games are modeled on Escape From Freedom. ... i think present-day Linden is well aware that Escape From Freedom is where Second Life has to go if resident numbers are to grow, beyond the limited number of Escape To Freedom people in the real world
Yes. That's very much a theme of the book, repeated at least four times. It's something Rosedale disagreed with, but the book author thinks he's coming around. The author points out that all the virtual worlds with ongoing growth have a sizable game component.
LL is trying. "WelcomeHub" (no space, and I'd love to know if that's a typo or a design decision) has a laser tag area. So, at last, new users have something to shoot at. I'd suggest a racetrack in the welcome regions as the next game.
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Hm. I'm not sure why all those Chromium/Dullihan processes are so big on my system. It may be a problem with running under Wine emulation. Looks like you get as many as I do, but they're smaller. Or maybe the size listed under Windows doesn't count the DLLs.
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I've been running the materials viewer release candidate. Right now, I'm stationary, in London City, just watching the crowd. Memory use keeps climbing, at about 1 GB/minute. I previously reached the point where memory was thrashing on a 32 GB computer.
The problem is the Chrome browser for media content. Each media stream launches its very own copy. I was getting eight copies each of CRGpuMain, CRBrowserMain, CRUtilityMain, and CrRendererMain. Each full set is about 0.7GB. There are no visible prims playing media, just audio.
Turning off media playing caused about half of those to exit and reduced memory usage to a sane level. Unclear why it keeps four spare copies around.
This is the default mode for the LL viewer. Uh oh.
(I'm running the LL viewer in the Wine emulator, emulating Windows under Linux. Someone please try this on an authentic Microsoft Windows system. Thanks.)
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Premium Plus, why can't I have 2 Bellisseria homes?
in Land
Posted
There are some very elaborate houses in SL on private estates. But you have to know where they are.
One that's an official SL destination is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. This is an architect's own house and occupies an entire region. Parts of it are open to the public. That's adjacent to a group of estates which have professional management and architects. You can drive through, but most of the houses are behind high walls.
Or you can buy some mainland, plop down a McMansion from Marketplace, and put non-functional expensive cars in the driveway.