animats

There are mainland and estate rental row houses, if that's what you want.

You could do the whole spinning job with a custom animation. Animations which walk characters in a circle work fine. That's the cleanest solution if you can edit an animation file. If you use actual prim motion, stick to one system. There's keyframe motion, physical motion, pathfinding motion, and position-set motion. They are not interlocked. If you use more than one on the same object, there may be some interference. Keyframe motion, followed by a check on the final position and an adjustment for the next cycle, is useful.

The Zindra Help Vortex ("Vortex Adult Sandbox") Run by the Zindra Vortex Group, created by Viale Linden. Are they still a LL employee? This is Linden Lab's official introduction to its adult communities. "Out of Order" signs, broken teleporters, and a dispenser offering the Zindra Vortex News from 2012. A major overhaul is in order.

I go away for two days and now this mess. How about this? The community exhibition should have a gateway to an adult region that has an adult community exhibition. All sex-oriented stuff moves to the adult side. (Maybe re-purpose and overhaul the useless Zindra Help Vortex, which is supposed to be an adult community exhibition but is mostly broken exhibits and a sandbox.)

Nice. Discarded Xmas tree in Bellesaria. I put this out for a week or so each year. If BelliBins were being emptied on a regular basis, it would be fun to have a "big trash" script you could put into unwanted objects. When the BelliBin is emptied, nearby big trash would delete itself.

I put my BelliBin and dead Xmas tree out at the curb, and neither of them was picked up. Where's the Bellessaria Department of Solid Waste when you need them?

Yes. This is a point I've made before. I even submitted a GDC paper on it, but it was rejected when the "metaverse" track was dropped. SL got metaverse governance right. LL acts like a municipal government. They handle streets and roads, zoning, land ownership records, and miscellaneous public works. LL runs a small governance department to deal with stuff at the level cops deal with in the real world, plus little stuff like land encroachment issues. In RL, you'd talk to your city hall about such things. Everybody else in social seems to need an army of outsourced minimum-wage moderators armed with ban hammers. This has everybody living in fear of inept low-level goons. The reason this works: Land owners have enough power to deal with most problems. Club bouncers, not LL, deal with jerks. The world is the size of LA, and it's hard to be annoying beyond 100 meters, the "shout" distance. Somewhere in SL, someone is probably being a jerk right now. Either they'll give up because nobody is paying attention, or they will eventually become visibly annoying enough that someone will complain to Governance and they will be dealt with. There's no broadcast medium. There is no way in SL to get the attention of everyone in world. Even if you try to spam, your audience is limited by distance and interest. There's a sizable adult continent and many private adult estates. Doing adult stuff in other areas will get someone told by other users to take it to an adult area. This is an accepted social convention in SL. Rarely does LL have to intervene. SL is not ad-supported. So nobody cares what "brands" want. This is a real achievement. It's a system with both freedom and stability. It is, however, somewhat niche. Nobody else gets this, because the other metaverse wannabees are trying to add 3D to Facebook-type social media, not emulate the real world.

We're supposed to get automatic tone-mapping in SL, which is like auto-exposure. Then ambient lighting can be turned way down. That should help SL's long-standing dimness problem. Maybe we'll get a brighter sun, so high dynamic range does something useful. Here's what that looks like in Cyberpunk 2077. In a dark place, looking out at daylight. The bright outdoors is washed out. Just like reality. Out in daylight, at dawn. Not washed out any more. SL is already doing most of this, but it's not fully enabled yet. I'm looking forward to this working properly. Eventually, PBR lights should have real-world lumen values, not 0..100. The whole point of PBR is to do what light really does, not what you think it does.

As Meta Horizon demonstrated, by expending somewhere in the US$20 billion range to produce a dud metaverse. Yes. That's non-trivial. I wonder how the LL mobile viewer team is getting along. In Sharpview, my curved prims are still slightly off in length. There are some bugs in SL sculpt rendering which were exploited by sculpt creators to get more triangles, and my emulation of those bugs fails in a few cases. I know of about four sculpt objects in world that I can't quite get right - a flying submarine in Clockhaven, a glare shield in a railroad control tower in Cretopia, some sculpted railroad ties in Lexicolo... And for some strange reason, there's one gas station sign in NTBI that Sharpview renders upside down. Just that one sign. LL has a collection of troublesome sculpts at Bug Island, and I've got all those right. All the prims at the Ivory Tower of Prims are fine. But that last 0.1% of cleverly constructed objects are tough. LL has run into similar problems. Once they changed the physics engine, and some breedables had trouble reaching their food and died. Some residents were very upset. This applies very strongly to avatars and clothing. That badly needs a redesign, with automatic layering and removal of triangles hidden by clothing, so "alphas", alpha HUDs, and dividing everything into a huge number of faces becomes unnecessary. But making legacy avatar content work with a new system would be really tough. What we have now is three systems - classic avatars, mesh avatars, and animesh. Animesh are the most efficient; they're close to game models. If we could automatically bake avatars down to animesh type models when a resident changed outfits, and generate levels of detail at that time, avatars would look the same but render much faster. It's probably possible to make such baking work well for 90%+ of avatar content, but there will be people screaming "you broke my best dress". (And strippers complaining that when they take something off, there's a delay of several seconds for re-baking.)

I know of a few, too. But it's a difficult niche to crack, both technically and as a business. SL's real asset is its user base, not its technology. Sansar made that very, very clear. Second Life is a "cash machine", one of the owners has said publicly. That's good; it will stick around. Most of the other metaverse players are losing money. Meta's Horizon lost billions. Improbable's system costs too much to operate and the indy games that used it all went broke. Roblox is huge but losing money; they went for growth after the IPO and overexpanded. They are still stuck in the 13 year old demographic. (During their glory years, they developed some nice technology. They have a solution to making layered clothing fit.) The NFT crowd has produced little, if anything, that anybody wants to visit. Go visit Decentraland; it's free to visit. It's worth an hour. You won't need to go back. So who else is there? Dual Universe? RP1? M2? There's a cost problem. If you require a gamer-grade GPU, which Sansar did, you're restricting the market to serious gamers. That's a big niche; there are 90 million active Steam users, and their average GPU is above a 6GB NVidia 1080. But it's not the Walmart $99 laptop, and it's not a phone. This is a big problem in the post-desktop era. Most laptop GPUs are too weak. If you allow user-created content, there's a penalty, but it's not speed. It's GPU memory. You need about 3x the GPU memory, because there's not much instancing. SL has over 50,000 different chairs on Marketplace. The entry-level NVidia desktop GPU is now 8GB, which is enough to overcome that problem. Laptops, even "gamer laptops", rarely have that much GPU memory, and everybody is on a laptop now. Unreal Engine probably won't help. Unreal Engine relies on extensive preprocessing of content in Unreal Engine's editor. Creating Nanite meshes (multiple LODs in one mesh, in a cleverly packed way) is done in the editor. The editor does automatic LOD creation. In a dynamic world, much of that has to be done on servers somewhere. That's not impossible. Back before Epic started layoffs, I was expecting Unreal Engine 6, Metaverse in a Box, to do all that, with all that preprocessing available on servers. Sweeney' public statements in 2022 indicated that was his direction for Epic. Not hearing that any more. You can do more server side. There's "cloud gaming", where you rent a GPU in a data center. Most of the cloud gaming companies went out of business, because you have to charge about $30-$50 a month. Google gave up on Stadia. NVidia is still running GeForce Now, but they have increased the price several times, and they make GPUs. Amazon and Sony cloud gaming is limited to games that don't need a serious GPU. That seems to be a non-starter until cheap GPUs start shipping from China. Those are the current constraints. SL's performance problems are mostly viewer side. The server side problems are mostly known bugs. The main server side performance problems involve freezes when avatars enter a region. The mere presence of a large number of avatars isn't a serious problem server side. There's a lot of headroom for improving things viewer side, which is why I keep plugging away at my Sharpview viewer.

Now that's a good idea. Ease people into it. Has anything happened there since it opened? There was a heavily promoted opening with over a hundred avatars, then not much. That happens with many of the outside promotions. Remember Zenescope? They built phase I, which dead ends at a gate to Phase II, "coming soon". Is that still up? (If Zenescope had made some of their characters into avatars, it might have been successful. That would take work. They mostly sold T-shirts.)

Exactly. SL does adult content well. There are G, M, and A areas, and you can't get into an A area by accident. If SL prohibited sex, we'd have the problems that Horizons and Roblox have, where people do it anyway and the platform has to hire an army of moderators armed with ban hammers. How to introduce new users to adult content - that's tough. There are are a few places in-world that try to do that. However it is done, it should be on Adult land, not General land. This is mainly to keep LL out of trouble. I wish SL were not banned from Twitch. A sizable fraction of the US population gets wound up about sexual content. US state laws requiring age verification for adult content seem to be coming. Florida is in the lead here. That's something for LL's lawyers to think about.

Should "Boystown" be in a G-rated region? See policy on "advertises or publicly promotes" adult activity.

Been visiting Siren's Isle on the Blake Sea?

There are stores that have parking spaces, but instantly auto-return parked vehicles. That's lame. If you build a parking lot, make it usable. There's a weak convention in SL that gas stations should have a rez zone. Some do, some don't. If you have a gas station, it's there for vehicles, so why not? GTFO hubs almost always have a rez zone and allow parking.

Turns out I can set an environment variable and the Rust crate "ureq" will log the headers it sends. Looks like this: [2024-01-28T19:47:58Z DEBUG ureq::unit] writing prelude: POST /cap/129b91db-ada6-194a-6852-94007e56de4c HTTP/1.1 Host: simhost-0a383acea59d4be55.aditi.secondlife.io:12043 User-Agent: Animats.com experimental viewer. Contact info@animats.com for problems. Accept: */* Content-Type: application/llsd+xml accept-encoding: gzip Content-Length: 143 Looks standard, but maybe SL wants something else. Sent the whole log to Monty Linden. That's how I started out on Sharpview. The earliest versions just captured Ethernet traffic from Firestorm into a .pcap file, then parsed and dumped the packets. That was later hooked up to graphics so one static region could be replayed. That's how I debugged meshes, prims, and sculpts. Spent lots of time looking very closely at the Ivory Tower of Prims. Only after replay was working did Sharpview start logging in and talking to the simulators directly. In replay mode it looked like this. (Sadly, the two places in that video, the Polish Embassy and Ying Industries, are gone now.) Replay mode was strictly UDP - didn't trace anything that went over HTTP. No capabilities, materials, events, etc. So that tool won't help here.

Asked for a full set of caps, and it did change simulator behavior slightly. I started getting GenericStreamingMessage messages with PBR material override info. That makes sense. Those are new, and are only in the message template on the "DRTVWR-600-maint-A" branch. Some viewers can't handle them yet, so the simulator needs to know (guess) whether it should send them. But the one minute delay remains. Looking into getting more detail on what's happening down at the HTTPS level.

I see SL traffic event poller replies with no traffic in two forms - zero length body with status 200, and HTTP error 500. The spec says a no-traffic reply should be a 502 status, which I never see from SL sim servers. (The Other Simulator does send 502 items) Something that might be worth a try: send an empty event poll reply every 10 seconds or so. Like this. <llsd><map><key>events</key><array></array><key>id</key><integer>28</integer></map></llsd> That's a valid zero-length array of events, something all viewers should be able to process and ignore. That would keep the event poller on the happy path, without HTTPS level timeouts. Apache and Curl timeout and retry logic would no longer be involved. That may be easier than struggling with the error cases in those libraries. Hm. Possible, although difficult. What are you looking for. At the moment, the event poller should be using non-persistent connections, I think. The connection is dropped after each request. I've tried persistent mode, and that does exactly the same thing. Yes. Haven't implemented avatar appearance, editing, voice, etc. yet. So those caps are the ones that the Sharpview viewer is using. I could fetch more, of course. Shouldn't affect this issues, since cap fetching comes after receiving the seed cap.

Thanks. Just ran a test. "animatsalt" in Bonifacio on the beta grid, near Bonifacio/240/5, looking towards Morris. Close to the edge, far from the center of the 4-corner area. Draw distance 120m. So only two regions should come up. Bonifacio comes up fine, Morris goes live one minute later. Avatar never moves; just stands there. (Moving the avatar within the region doesn't Login succeeded at 07:57:32 UTC, 11:57:32 SLT. 2024-01-27 Logout started at 07:58:46 UTC. Detailed log from Sharpview is available. Will send link in IM.

The nice-looking tile floor, or the strange glowy shiny thing?

Thanks. The new message template for that branch is here. It hasn't landed on trunk yet, so I didn't notice the change. I saw this on the beta grid, which makes sense. It's in test on a branch. Relevant change Template change history.

Message: "ff ff 00 9e 72 cc 6b 0a f4 2c 44 71 a1 bd 46 61 fb cf d8 4a 00 3f 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 80 3f 00 00 00 80 3f 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 01 01 32 09 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 ce f7 3e 0a d4 7e fb 35 35 64 1d 07 f7 1f b4 cb af a8 b7 ca 2f e0 a9 66 b3 de 64 fe 56 48 f2 2b dd f5 30 ad d9 02 77 b5 25 3a 13 0c 28 b3 57 93 9e a2 24 33 ee 61 28 ae bc e2 f3 cb 7d 03 51 f7 83 8c e0 d0 15 f0 e8 02 99 1a 5c 50 2c 27 39 e8 d5 18 9d 38 8b aa af e1 13 c8 8a ff 4e 10 7f bb 95 30 d3 50 20 bd f1 48 fe 0f f7 9d e5 5d 5a c3 b6 ac 56 87 b3 27 f0 fe 8b 8c 0c 13 dd d4 4f 97 0a ca 93 ab 8c 5e 57 c3 b1 5b a6 06 99 91 12 4d c4 11 5f a7 68 e7 06 e4 e8 42 3a 24 06 4e bc 35 45 6b 95 50 e0 9e 33 cc 75 ec 2d 6d 94 06" Decoded by hand. ff ff 00 9e // Message number 72 cc 6b 0a f4 2c 44 71 // UUID - 16 bytes a1 bd 46 61 fb cf d8 4a 00 // isTrial - 1 byte 3f 00 // ObjectData -- Texture entry length - 63 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 // 8 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 // 16 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 // 24 80 3f 00 00 00 80 3f 00 // 32 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 // 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 // 48 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 // 56 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 // 63 01 00 // VisualParam 1 each of 1 byte 01 // AppearanceData 1 each 01 // AppearanceVersion 32 09 00 00 // CofVersion 00 00 00 00 // Flags 01 // AppearanceHover 1 each 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 ce f7 3e // More stuff? 0a d4 7e fb 35 35 64 1d 07 f7 1f b4 cb af a8 b7 ca 2f e0 a9 66 b3 de 64 fe 56 48 f2 2b dd f5 30 ad d9 02 77 b5 25 3a 13 0c 28 b3 57 93 9e a2 24 33 ee 61 28 ae bc e2 f3 cb 7d 03 51 f7 83 8c e0 d0 15 f0 e8 02 99 1a 5c 50 2c 27 39 e8 d5 18 9d 38 8b aa af e1 13 c8 8a ff 4e 10 7f bb 95 30 d3 50 20 bd f1 48 fe 0f f7 9d e5 5d 5a c3 b6 ac 56 87 b3 27 f0 fe 8b 8c 0c 13 dd d4 4f 97 0a ca 93 ab 8c 5e 57 c3 b1 5b a6 06 99 91 12 4d c4 11 5f a7 68 e7 06 e4 e8 42 3a 24 06 4e bc 35 45 6b 95 50 e0 9e 33 cc 75 ec 2d 6d 94 06" It all looks valid, but with new stuff on the end. So I was thinking this was some new kind of PBR material info. Beta grid, Morris. So it might be test code.

It's not permanently broken. Walking into either of those regions makes them appear.

Anybody else seeing this sort of thing? Standard Firestorm, on Linux.

I'm seeing AvatarAppearance UDP messages which have all the fields listed in https://github.com/secondlife/master-message-template/blob/master/message_template.msg followed by some new data, about a hundred bytes or so. This is new and only appeared recently. Is this part of PBR conversion? Am I using the correct template file? Thanks. (The C++ viewers are OK with extra stuff at the end, but it's something I log as an error as a check on my own stuff.)